Chemistry and Other Stories Page 3

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I don’t think he would stay in the same place, Mum,’ she said. ‘Forever. But will he come nearer, or move further away?’

  Was that really it? Sarah wondered. The end of it. How could that possibly be, that a solid man, wide feet planted four-square on the earth, the big man in whose body she had sheltered, the reticent lover who adored her, could in one shattering moment have all consciousness erased?

  Become a memory, fading.

  It seemed monumentally unfair to be so bereaved. Her man had gone from the modern world to be murdered in an ancient one, leaving her to grieve without the comfort of an old faith. An infuriating injustice.

  And with this further maternal dilemma: what consolation could a mother offer her children beyond that which she finds for herself?

  ‘Where is he?’ her daughter demanded. It was such a simple question. The simple, unconsoling answer was truthful and insufficient.

  How often had he touched her? Had she caressed every pinch of his skin? How many skins had he shed in the years they’d been together? How many cells of his body, his soul, had rubbed off on her?

  It was a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of July that she lifted their first early potatoes. The prongs of her fork speared easily through the soil. She levered the fork back towards her. The flowered stem of the plant rose and she knelt down, plunged her hands into the earth and brought up a clutch of smooth white tubers, none larger than a hen’s egg. They snagged on the spindly roots of the original, a rotting old seed potato she’d planted barely two months earlier, now shrivelling from its improbable parentage.

  Had she carried him on her hands, and planted him here too, in this soil deposited epochs past? Were there traces of his DNA, then, drawn back up from the mud in the vegetables’ substantiation? To nourish this coming evening herself and their children?

  Sarah bowed to the earth, ache in her back and in her belly. She fell towards the soil, to the carbon of plants and animals, to the infinite remnants of all the people burned and buried before them; the gardeners and the farmers, old people who’d died in their sleep, soldiers, martyrs, unborn children. All the random, untraceable DNA transforming itself, communicating unknown signals to the future, in the clay and in the sand.

  ***

  Inside, she rubbed the soil off under the tap and boiled the new potatoes, and she and the children ate them with butter and mint.

  ‘They’re delicious, Mummy,’ her daughter said. ‘They really are.’

  Fidelity

  The white sheets, and the pillowcases, are freshly laundered. Hung to dry on the line out in the garden, they have brought the optimism of the open air to the bed. He is naked.

  Ruth wanders between rooms. Remembering things, chores to be done. Toys are picked up from a floor; small clothes chosen, laid out for the morning. She removes her trousers, hangs them on the towel rail beside the chest of drawers, then remembers something else; roams from one room to another in states of undress. Her still-black hair. He watches his wife from the bed: the tasks, combined with her memory, its lapses and recalls, create an erotic display for him.

  In the bathroom her body. Nails clipped, cream applied, hairs pulled; she is in there tending herself, with the calm of a gardener. The toilet flushes. Taps run.

  There on her bedside table: half-filled crosswords and sudokus; a digital alarm clock; the mug of water he brought upstairs. Outside, the whoosh of traffic noise on Woodstock Road: the sound of waves approaching, breaking on sand, receding. The sky is a darkening blue. Naked, he waits for her.

  The girl, the student, he did not notice at first. Beauty was not enough in itself to distract him. Nor was youth. He wasn’t sure. It was only when her intelligence became apparent that he fell.

  There were certain points to ram home. Show, don’t tell. Detail. What moves you, really? Use all your senses. Again: detail.

  Then at the same moment, in the fifth or sixth week, almost every member of the class produced similar, competent, touching stories. Often they involved grandparents. The difference between the talented one or two and the rest, evident from day one, became blurred. Only the really obtuse or confused student fell back, marooned, unaware of being so: one short story set during the English Civil War, the death of a Roundhead volunteer. His life passed in front of his eyes like a film.

  Strange, though, how he could grade her, her work, with dispassion. If there was any shift of perspective he could not detect it. He was proud of himself for this.

  A new term, a new year, will start soon.

  Ruth arrives in time at this space, five feet wide, six and a half feet long, their home within their home. He pulls her to him and he tells her with his voice and with his body that he needs her, wants her, must have her. He makes his bodily strength apparent, his assertion the reassurance she requires that she is wanted.

  She is tired. He kisses her. Strokes skin; caresses flesh. Feels in Ruth’s kiss the decision taken, to proceed.

  She was gifted, the student, that was certain. He thought of the dross he’d produced at her age, and shuddered. Perhaps her ability stirred a vampiric element to his desire: he imagined vanquishing her, taking unto himself her power as right of conquest.

  Her rapture a surrender, of her talent to him.

  The opposite was also true: she would squeeze him dry, suck the last dregs of his talent from him, render him obsolete. Succeed him.

  Talent was important, it was the only thing that mattered. Rare and precious. Actually, it was two a penny; weren’t there any number of talented writers, most of whom failed to flourish? Talent was worthless without persistence. If she lacked either will or stamina to carry on through inevitable rejection, and periods of dullness, and despair, then her talent would come to be seen as misleading: something others had wrongfully encouraged, or an inexplicable self-deception.

  Ruth’s September tan. The pale soft areas of her body neglected, uninvited, but private, theirs alone now.

  She will shower in the morning. The smell now and the taste of her. She brings her lived-in body to him. The remnants of her day, its exertions, are in the crevices, the folds, of her skin.

  The student had wide shoulders. Pert nose, hooded eyes, suspicious, shy, arrogant. Self-absorbed in a way that talent, intelligence, youth assumed forgiveness of. She rarely smiled, even or especially at other people’s wit. Gave little of herself away. Gave little. She was reserved, aloof, inscrutable. So young; age might do anything to her, it was impossible to speculate.

  Because of his attention, his desire, aching towards her, he could not help but see her gestures, her attention, as directed towards him. A provocative languidity.

  He wants to make it new. He tries with inarticulate tongue, with clumsy, inadequate hands, to fashion a sentence addressed to his wife alone, a sentence that will make her senses bloom. It is beyond him. He both cleaves to and abandons her. She is on her own. When at last Ruth tenses, groaning, pushing him away, she is transformed. Muscles asserting themselves, rippling up through soft flesh to the surface.

  The girl’s wide shoulders he came to see as exemplary. Wide-shouldered women had style, didn’t they? Class. Swagger, almost. She could have stepped out of a photograph of the Côte d’Azur in 1925, bronzed, newly married, smoking on the esplanade. Young and hard. The world was hers for the taking.

  He rises up Ruth’s body, they kiss. Her face is flushed. He delivers the taste of her from his mouth to hers, his lips to her tongue, as if she desired to know the taste but needed him to circumvent her ambivalence.

  His desire quickens.

  They become one now. Again. The familiarity of their fit. The bedstead complains. Ruth’s eyes are closed, she could be anywhere, he doesn’t know. He bends towards her neck, grasps her head, hides.

  The girl was naked, but still she was proud. She knew, somehow, that she possessed riches which had been his, but were leaching from him. Time was dragging him, spiralling his energies away from he
r. He knelt, clutched her legs, pulled her down, and she fell, laughing, laughing at him.

  Ruth opens her eyes, they are narrowed, does she see him?

  He is hers. The world is irresistible. Barriers crumble.

  He is gasping.

  He rolls off her. They lie asunder. His lungs crave equilibrium; silence. He hears their son, in his room across the landing, yawn in his sleep.

  What did he hope for from his students? That they would become more involved readers, of course. That they would enjoy writing as they might enjoy playing the piano. They all expected publication, though; money, fame. She too, yes of course, why not?

  Clothes pulled back on. Outside, he rolls a cigarette. The nights are not yet cold. The sun has set behind Wytham Woods and their garden is bathed in a yellow light. He has poured into this glass what was left in the bottle, the last of the wine brought back from Cahors. The long night drive to the ferry.

  On the crossing over, on the way to their holiday, he had taken their daughter out on deck: sea-bright sun, foam and spray and salt air, dazzle and power, the huge boat throbbing through deep water. What would her imagination make of this? he wondered. Would it provide her with material for the rest of her life? She spent the first days in the Dordogne saying, ‘When are we going on the ship, Daddy? I want to go on the ship.’

  The light in the garden fades, from yellow to grey. There is sound. No, not sound, movement. Is there? Perhaps not. He smokes, an occasional cigarette. She smoked on the Côte d’Azur. No, on the bench outside the college chapel, the student, alone, aloof from her fellows, he glimpsed her back in June. Talent and loneliness. She sent out an invitation, spun from her pen into the air, offering him nothing, inviting him only to see her and be glad and make of her what he might.

  He realises suddenly that the movement is on the lawn, a few feet away from him. A small animal, it’s a hedgehog. What is it doing? Strange motion. Is it sweeping the grass, looking for insects? What a shame his son and daughter are asleep. His mother once woke his sisters and himself and took them to watch badgers, in a sett in the woods behind their home. Recollected wonder. Yes! He will go and wake the boy now. He stands. The hedgehog scuttles off into the gloom.

  Should you write what you know? they asked.

  What’s important is what you know while you’re writing. He told them the story of Maxim Gorky, whose scream brought his wife rushing to his study. She found him on the floor, clutching his stomach. He’d been writing a story in which a man stabs his wife.

  Love all your characters, he said. He saw their scepticism. Identify with them, every one.

  He admitted once telling Louis de Bernières how he must have enjoyed the research into hallucinogenic drugs for his South American trilogy. De Bernières looked at him with pity, perhaps contempt, and said that we were blessed with imagination, were we not?

  ‘I’ll bet he did,’ the girl said, unsmiling. ‘Never believe a writer.’

  Be true to yourself, he said to them, opening his hands. Your way of seeing.

  ‘Be true.’ How easy it was to say.

  He spits out toothpaste. It is red with blood. No, not blood, wine. He stares at himself. He thinks he has come up now, on to some plateau of contentment. A place that is and will continue to be ridiculous. He will reach the far side of this plateau if he is lucky, that is all. There will be no more progress, only children, growing.

  He lowers the seat and the lid of the toilet before flushing it in the silent house. Closes the bathroom door.

  His daughter is sleeping. She looks exhausted, as if sleep itself is tiring her. Floating, dreams swell in her vacant head, the ocean in all its surging immensity surrounds her.

  His wife too seems to be asleep now. She has left his light on. He slides into bed. As he settles his body on the firm mattress, Ruth murmurs. He stretches out an arm, and switches off the light.

  Invisible Children

  ‘You need to tell her, soldier,’ Bill said. We lay on a slope, surrounded by hundreds of people. It was like some vast nocturnal picnic, except for the music thumping out of the big tents. Sara and the others were down there, still dancing. The night was black above our heads. Lights fizzled and splashed up the hill.

  I said, ‘I’ll never tell her. I shouldn’t have told you.’

  Bill smiled. ‘I always knew,’ he said.

  We’d been dancing three solid hours. The racket of beats reverberated around our skulls. I can’t think how loudly we must have been speaking in order to hear each other.

  ‘Some things are better left unsaid.’ I tried to roll a cigarette. The drug was making my fingers tremble. Bill shook his head and lay back on the hard earth. I said, ‘People need space.’ I licked the paper, rolled it more or less tight, lit the cigarette. The drug made it feel like you’d chosen to inhale something more complex, more substantial, than smoke. I exhaled. ‘It’s good for friends,’ I said, ‘when there’s something unspoken between them.’

  Guy came out of the tent and, dressed in his pork pie hat and shirt and tie, headed up the slope towards us, weaving to the beat through pairs and clusters of people. When he reached us he stood, gazing beyond us, dancing on the spot, unable to shake all of the rhythm out of his limbs.

  ‘Biblical,’ Guy pronounced at length, nodding his head. Then he flourished two fruit bars and passed us one each.

  I’d ummed and ahed about coming for weeks. My wife, Jen, teased my indecision. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Get it out of your head.’

  Bill and the others left London on Friday morning, to get there in good time. I drove down from Oxford after work, alone, listening to Bach’s Art of Fugue on the car cassette player, and I called Bill as I walked in across the fields of parked cars. Early evening sunshine reflected off bonnets and windscreens. Bill met me at the security barrier, an official beckoned me through. The ticket was scanned by a barcode reader. The official attached a band to my wrist, on which were printed the words 12 Stages. 3 Days. Open Air. Belter.

  From where we lay on the slope we could see four or five of the big tents. Some cute new sound system in operation kept the sound fields from overlapping. We could only hear the psy-trance we’d been dancing to. Breakbeats were over there, a chill tent beyond.

  ‘When are you going to tell her?’ Bill asked.

  I took a last drag of my cigarette, and stubbed it out on the hard ground. ‘Why would I tell her now?’ I said. ‘It’s ten years too late. It wouldn’t do anyone any good.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ he said.

  I didn’t want to talk. The drug was in me and I was ready to dance again. ‘He’s my oldest friend,’ I said. ‘I knew him before I knew you. I’d have to tell him first, and what good would that do?’

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ said Bill.

  Cal sauntered up the slope, saluting when he saw us. He was holding Sara’s hand; she was a pace behind him. A stranger could enjoy interpreting their relationship from observing the way they ascended the cracked earth. Was he dragging her up the hill or forcing her back behind him? Was she being towed reluctantly away from the music, or grateful to be given some assistance?

  Cal was tall, he’d always been the one to follow through the crowd or regain your bearings by if you’d strayed, and he was well built, but soft. You could still tell how handsome he used to be. Cal possessed the assurance of a man who informs company executives what they’re doing wrong in the way they run their operations, and how to put it right, a privilege for which they pay him charming amounts of money. He’d received approval from birth, had Cal Simmons. He expected it. I doubted whether anyone had ever taken a pop at him, and whenever I imagined doing so myself I was sure he’d fail to see it coming. If I could just land one good swing on his lantern jaw that’d be all it would take, I suspected: Cal’s knees would buckle, and he had a lovely long way to fall.

  It was odd, really, this fantasy only occurred to me when I was actually in Cal’s benevolent presence, so that I’d not entertained it in years, but se
eing the two of them again brought it right back. They sat in front of us. Cal let out a long, breathy sigh. ‘Jesus, it’s going off, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Who’s playing?’ Bill asked him.

  ‘Give me that map, will you, babe?’

  Sara passed Cal a piece of thin cardboard which he unfolded and held in front of him. I gave him my lighter. He lit it, and as he raised it up I imagined others across the hill copying him, holding their lighters up too, the way those fans at rock gigs used to do.

  ‘Liquid Elf,’ Cal declared.

  I offered Sara my water bottle. She took a glug. What’s sad, I thought, is the way you lose touch by degrees. It wasn’t easy for Sara when we had our first child; she and Cal had been trying awhile, Jen made no effort at all; and then we moved out of London. ‘How are you doing?’ I asked her.

  Sara kind of blinked in that self-deprecating way she always had, and smiled. ‘I’m a bit spangled,’ she said.

  Sara’s beauty was something people tended not to notice at first. She didn’t turn men’s heads. She hid behind large framed spectacles, the brown hair which fell either side of her face and her posture: Sara hunched her shoulders and hid herself from strangers. You had to get to know her to be able to see her. And then you thought about what you had to do about what you saw. I thought I had, long ago.

  ‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said. ‘Family life must suit you.’

  ‘I eat the children’s leftover food,’ I said. ‘Fathers do.’ I was lying on my side.

  ‘Can I roll one?’ Sara asked, seeing the tobacco on the ground behind me. She leaned over my torso. ‘I don’t want to smoke it,’ she said, wincing, as if I had suggested she should. ‘I just want to roll one for you.’ It took her awhile, draped lazily across me, deep in concentration, her tactility like a child’s.

  We rested on our elbows, watching the multitude below milling to and fro between music tents and food counters, and the stalls selling fluoro clothes or drug paraphernalia, or an odd one I’d noticed, doing no business, which featured nothing but multicoloured wellies. I could just make out a fire-eater on the circus stage; earlier, we’d watched a juggler there, and girls gyrating hula hoops. On the open ground the crowds passed beneath banners, streamers, statues shaped like undreamed-of mushrooms. Some were lit from within, others illuminated by the lights spilling and flashing from the marquees.