The Pre-War House and Other Stories

If There’s Anything Left

A queue has formed on the narrow staircase, a build-up of other hotel guests trying to get down to the breakfast room. James, waiting at the bottom, observing Kath’s steady progress, is reminded of a tractor or a learner driver tailed by an impatient push of rush-hour traffic.

Someone says to someone else, ‘There’ll be nothing left by the time we get there.’ They do not say this quietly.

Kath used to be so thin, too thin, James thought. He joked about losing her in the bed. His friends called her a catch and his father called her a keeper but even after they were married James often felt as if he were still trying to catch her. She was always so busy, forever dashing off somewhere or going on ahead.

Since the accident, though, she has slowed right down and she has put on weight. Now she always seems to be eating and her clothes are a size larger than his mother’s. James knows that even as they make their way down to breakfast, she will have in her jacket pocket an emergency bag of sweets to suck on.

When Kath finally reaches the bottom of the stairs, people overtake her on both sides like a school of fish parting around an obstacle or a potential predator, before coming together again. Kath stops and waits until they have all gone, and then she moves forward towards the dining room.

It is not an expensive hotel — it is small, smaller than he remembers, and a bit run-down — but it is right on the seafront. They came here last summer. It seems longer ago. After breakfast, they might sit outside on the bench, an uncomfortable ironwork two-seater. Kath wants to walk along the beach to the pier, from the end of which they watched last summer’s sunsets. She wants to take Zac there.

Yesterday, they had their lunchtime fish and chips on the bench, watching the seagulls going after the scraps. Afterwards, on the beach, Kath stripped off to her modest underwear, having come to the seaside without a bikini, and James turned away from her empty breasts. He supposes that the scar from her Caesarean is almost invisible now. Her other scars have healed well.

Kath wandered down to the edge of the sea, putting her feet in the water, while James sat on his towel fully clothed. Before he lay back, he saw her reach around and unhook her bra, slipping it off her shoulders and dropping it onto the stones behind her. He saw her removing her knickers and throwing them down too. He watched her walking out. When she was up to her waist — and still going deeper, even though, he thought, it had to be cold — he lay down and closed his eyes.

When he woke up, he had no idea how much time had passed. He felt as if he had been asleep for ages, but the sun was still high in the cloud-covered sky — he could see the blurry brightness of it trying to burn through. It had been a cool week. He wanted a heatwave, that melting feeling.

He sat up. He could see a distant figure in the sea. It was probably Kath. He could not tell whether she was still swimming out or heading in. He stood up and got back onto the prom, leaving his beach towel behind. He had not weighted it in any way. It occurred to him that he would have liked to look back and see it blowing away down the beach. He did not turn around.

He went back to the hotel room and then to the pub. This morning, he remembered standing at the bar with some man who said to him, ‘What’s in the bag?’

In the dining room, Kath goes straight to the hot buffet while James sees what fruit juice is left. Each morning, the proprietor puts out jugs filled to the brim, but he does not replenish them. When it is gone it is gone. The orange juice always goes first. James takes the last of the grapefruit juice to their table. Kath, sitting down with a full English breakfast, says to him, ‘Are you going to eat?’ James looks at the food on her plate but it turns his stomach; there is nothing there that he could face.

Kath never used to be very interested in food, or didn’t have time for it. These days she bakes; she makes big meals and James has to tell her that he is not hungry. He goes off to work without any breakfast and does not come home from the pub in time for dinner. She asks him what he has eaten and sometimes he makes something up, something nourishing and warming, because it’s what she wants to hear. He doesn’t always do this though; he doesn’t always tell her what she wants to hear.

It was Kath’s idea to come here. ‘Getting away’ she called it, but that depends on what you’re trying to get away from. What he wants is to be back at work. Kath is keen for him to look for a new job, something which would not entail such increasingly long hours, such a tiring drive. Then, she says, he wouldn’t have to leave the house almost as soon as they get up. ‘We’d have more time together in the mornings,’ she tells him. ‘We could meet up for lunch.’

James, though, does not want something closer to home. He does not want a job which starts later and finishes earlier and enables him to see Kath at lunchtime. He likes his job, he says.

They chose their house because of its convenience for Kath’s work. He remembers her telling people that all she had to do was zip down the A road, that she could be at work in ten minutes flat.

‘There’s a thirty zone in the middle, though,’ said James, ‘which slows you down.’

Someone said, ‘It won’t slow Kath down,’ and people laughed.

He remembers going to view their house when the estate was being built, when Kath was newly pregnant and waking up in the mornings feeling nauseous, with an ache in her breasts. The house was empty, all bare boards and bare walls and echo and the garden was a long stretch of bare, frozen mud. There was a show house which they went to see, so that they could imagine how theirs might look, with a dining table set for a family meal, and bunk beds in the second bedroom.

Even the baby didn’t slow her down. Soon bored of being at home, Kath got back to work as quickly as she could, whizzing first to the nursery with Zac and dropping him off before dashing to work, desperate for office life.

James wonders whether the barrier has been repaired yet. These things can take a long time. Kath told him that someone had left a bouquet of flowers next to the damaged post. ‘They still had the cellophane on,’ she said. ‘I think they’d look nicer without the cellophane, don’t you? When the flowers die it will just be litter.’

Kath clears her plate and struggles to her feet, going back to the buffet for more. The hot breakfast dishes are almost empty. She scrapes what she can from them. James looks over at the fruit juice table but there is only one jug left and it contains what looks like tomato juice, which he does not want; it would not be quenching.

When Kath is sitting down again, James says to her, ‘I walked along the beach last night.’ She picks up her cutlery. He says, ‘I went to the pier.’

From the look on her face, he knows she has realised what he is telling her, that it is sinking in. She is getting to her feet again. She is going to go all the way up those stairs to their bedroom to look on the dressing table, to see what is or isn’t there.

‘The urn’s empty,’ he says, but she is going anyway. She has to see for herself.

He remembers the man in the pub saying, ‘Most of the body becomes gas. It just goes. You don’t bring it home with you.’

James leaves the dining room too, but he turns away from the stairs and heads outside, his eyes watering as he emerges from the relative dinge into weak sunlight. Sitting down on the filigree loveseat, he puts his hand to his breast pocket, wanting his sunglasses, but they’re not there.