“Don’t you dare tell me you’re old enough to be my father. That’s absurd, unless you were a very precocious adolescent, and anyway, what would it matter?”
“But it’s been—” He found his tongue hung on the words
“It’s just like riding a bloody bike, Nathan, for heaven’s sake,” she managed to sputter. “You won’t have forgotten how.”
Her laughter died as suddenly as it had begun. He reached out and touched her cheek, and when she turned her face into his hand he felt her trembling.
“No,” he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his fingers, then the corner of her mouth. “I think it will all come back to me very, very quickly.”
CHAPTER
5
Is it the hour? We leave this resting place
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! The long road! and you so far away!
Oh, I’ll remember! but… each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.
RUPERT BROOKE,
from “The Wayfarers”
Morgan Ashby pulled his battered Volvo into the drive of the house on St. Barnabas Road. There was just enough light left for him to see that the hedges needed trimming, yet the lamps in the houses next door and opposite had come on, defense against the evening. No light shone through the stained glass transom above the door of number 37.
The door of the Volvo creaked as he swung it open, and he felt an answering ache in his knees as he stood. Rheumatism? The afflictions of age so soon in what he staunchly maintained was the prime of his life? Perhaps, he thought, but he knew the truth. It was dread.
The bequest of this house had been Lydia’s last malicious joke, perpetrated from beyond the grave, and he had cooperated, God rot both their souls. Taking the key from his pocket, he fumbled at the front door’s lock in the dusk of the porch. He should have sold the house. He’d known then that he should sell it as soon as the ink on the probate papers dried. Francesca had pleaded with him to sell it, to sever the last link, and yet some perversity in him had made him hold on. Had he thought some positive thing would come of the nagging discomfort, some pearl of good character form under his hide? He snorted derisively in the darkness and the tumblers clicked over.
In the end, he’d leased it to a married couple, both University dons, and their tribe of screaming children. They had stayed for five years, troubling him little but for the occasional request for a plumber or repairs to the roof, and had just last week decamped on the improvement in their financial fortunes.
He felt for the switch inside the door, then blinked as light flooded the entry. Leaves had crept over the sill and littered the black-and-white tile floor, their twisted brown shapes looking for a moment like small dead birds.
The pale pink striped wallpaper that lined the entry and climbed up the stairs looked even more dilapidated than he remembered. The seams curled, and in a few places near the ceiling it had come away entirely—Lydia would probably have said the drooping swags looked like stained petticoats, he thought with a grimace. At thigh level the children had scrawled across it with crayons.
It would mean keeping the tenants’ bloody deposit back, he supposed, but he was not sure he could be bothered. Moving towards the back of the house, Morgan steeled himself to assess the rest of the damage. First the sitting room, cold and empty, the carpet threadbare and spotted, the cushion on the window seat ripped with the stuffing spilling out. Lydia had liked to read here on fine mornings when the sun flooded through the bay window, warming the room. He remembered her choosing this wallpaper, with its intricate pattern in rose and green and dull gold. It had been years before the resurgence in popularity of William Morris, but Lydia had been determined to find something with the feel of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
They’d had a furious row over it, because even her innocent decorating enthusiasms had reeked to him of her involvement with her pretentious literary friends, and he had despised them.
He moved on, down the hall, bypassing the door to Lydia’s study. Whatever havoc the little monsters had wreaked in there would have to go unremarked, because he could not bring himself to enter the room where Lydia had died.
The kitchen was best, he thought as he opened the door at the end of the hall. First the little reception area with the space for the telephone, and the bookshelves for the cookery books. Then round the corner into the kitchen proper, and beyond that the dining area with its vaulted ceiling and windows overlooking the garden. This they had planned and built together, using part of his small inheritance, and it had been white and clean and untainted. His reflection stared back at him from the black mirror of the uncurtained garden window—a tall, thin shape, shoulders hunched, dark curling hair, a white blur of a face. He framed the shot in his mind, blinked.
They had shared thinking in images, he and Lydia. He had understood her need to write poetry, for he had gone about photography with the same dedication. It was the other things he hadn’t understood: her need for drama and atmosphere, her desire to exist within a group, her obsession with the past.
He looked upwards, towards the first-floor bedroom. For a long while, they had patched over their arguments with lovemaking so fierce it left them sobbing and exhausted. Destructive, yes, but he had never since known anything so intense, or so addictive. In his blackest moments, he wished he had killed her then, and himself, put them both out of their misery.
The sound of a door closing came from the front of the house. Morgan stopped his prowling about the empty room to listen. Some neighbor come to investigate lights in a vacant house, perhaps? God forbid he should have to
