“He registered the car in whose name?”
Neither of them seemed to know.
“We parked it outside.”
“We washed it, but it rained.”
“You are very sweet, but I can’t drive.” This was not really true.
“You could learn,” said Angus. “It’s surprisingly easy.”
“I could teach you,” Noah said. “I did an advanced driving course, skid pans, everything.”
I could say nothing in response. I was too moved, too sad, too furious. My young protectors somehow saw I was about to cry. They quickly agreed they would keep the Mini somewhere safe for me and that we would meet to talk about the driving lessons. I signed the lease and gave them both a peppercorn and in minutes we were in the library where I was held in a musty smelly sort of rugger hug. Matthew, in their bones.
When they had gone I lay on my bed and thought about the breeze brushing our naked skin in the summer, the storms rocking us in winter, the German Sea gnawing at the bottom of the cliff.
AT THE ANNEXE, at this early hour, I delete you, my darling, my beloved, with your wide soft mouth against my neck. I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labour at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells. There on your secret triangle of land I would be your most submissive tenant, would lie beside you until rain, wind, storms raced, threaded like shoelaces through our missing eyes.
Such thoughts as these are mine, at the moment Amanda enters from her world where the Gulf of Mexico has become a lake of oil. Does she have a mythology or cosmology for this?
“Hello,” she says when she has dumped her backpack.
“Hello,” I say. Delete, I think.
Looking up, it is clear to me that she has a new lover. She has baggy indigo trousers and a sleeveless top like silverfish. Inside these loose coverings is a body so young as to make one weep. Her attention is on the swan. Please, please, I need no more fantastical nonsense. Please learn to see what is before you here and now.
She says, “What I am about to say is none of my business.”
The hair rises on my neck. I delete a letter I have not even read.
“I only want to help.”
I read, archive, spam, delete.
“It is so painful watching you,” she says.
“It is just a swan, Amanda. A machine.”
“Miss Gehrig, this does not have to take weeks. It could be done in minutes. You do not have to torture yourself like this.”
She is offering me a small plastic object which, in my fear and rage, I mistake for a cigarette lighter. It has one of those crude non-words in white type on its side. A part emerges from the black sheath, steel, like lipstick.
“You just create a new folder for your email, archive it, and export the archive to a flash drive.”
“What’s a flash drive?”
“This.” She sort of
“I could download it for you. In a second.”
“I’m fine, thank you.” She works for me, she reports to me, but even as I refuse her help she attempts to get around me.
“Amanda, what is it that you imagine I am up to?”
But she will not answer. “All I’m saying is—you don’t have to spend hours and hours like this. It must be hell.”
“Who told you?”
But she is intent on controlling my computer.
“It was Mr. Croft who told you?”
Her doll-like eyes are wet with unwanted sympathy. At the same time her irises are very wide, like a creature living in the dark.
“Please, please let me just …” And she has slid between me and the machine, typing as she speaks. “You can take it home and load it on your own computer. Is it a Mac?”
“No. It’s a PC. So, obviously it will not work.”
She looks over her shoulder, appraising me as if I am a dangerous beast, holding my eye all the while. Up close, she smells strangely musty. Then I see her fingernails are dirty.
“You know who these emails are from?” I ask her.
“They’re loading now.”
“Who told you, Amanda?”
“We both know who told me.” She places the tiny object in my hands. She wraps my fingers around it. Some subtle shift of power has been effected.
“Miss Gehrig, he worries about you.”
“No.”
“All he can think about is that you be looked after.”
“But we can’t say who he actually is.”
“No.”
“Although we already have.”
“The swan is terribly important to the museum, you know that. He has a frightful difficulty getting money as you know. He has to go around sucking up and being charming. How awful to have to beg from all those city yobs.”
Thus I am taught to suck eggs by my child assistant. But what really stings is that the sweet, pretty, clever Courtauld girl has forcibly removed Matthew from my cache. She has made me hold him like ashes in a vial.
Henry
SUMPER AND I DEPARTED the village with the heavy brass drum strapped between two poles. Such was the weight we were in a hurry to reach our destination, speeding through the fog across the square, down the lanes to the brook, across the footbridge to the fields, stumbling dangerously in furrows at whose furthest extent the sawmill awaited us. Now the leaves had fallen and nature was revealed, like an old man whose beard has been shaved off to show what cruel tricks time had played on him. Dear Pater.
Such was our speed and so uneven was the field that I feared Frau Helga, charging from the flank, would cause a spill. She passed me at a gallop and rounded on Herr Sumper while somehow trotting backwards, bravely waving letters in the air.
“On,” cried Sumper. “On.”
“No, it is from England.”
“On.”
I thought, Percy! But I was tied to Herr Sumper in every sense, so “on” I must and “on” I did, although together we almost ran the woman down.
I thought, it is from Binns. My boy could not endure the wait. Dead and lonely and I did not kiss his lips. Then we reached the river path, and the Holy Child burst from the bushes with a savage yell. His eyes were bright, his cry too high. He shook a murdered rabbit before his mother’s face before setting off ahead, gambolling and hobbling, shaking his keys in his left hand.
We sped onwards. Dear God, I am a mighty fool, please let him live. In the freezing summer workshop above the river, we laid our burden down.
I took the letter and saw my brother’s hand.
“What news?” asked Helga.
Carl was also waiting, dripping rabbit blood onto his feet.
