Double Vision

Twenty-three

And so, that Thursday, after driving Robert and Beth to the airport, Stephen moved some of his things up to the farmhouse and started playing house with Justine. That’s what it felt like — a holiday from adult life. The mere fact that the house was not his gave him an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling. He seemed to be wandering around between the chair legs while items of furniture loomed above him, mysterious with withheld significance. They made him feel insubstantial, these rooms with their carefully selected antiques, the fruits of years of settled, successful endeavour, and yet the feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, he had a sense of danger and transgression. He and Justine cooked meals for themselves and Adam, and sat down at the long table in the kitchen to eat them, and there was always this feeling of innocence and danger combined.

It was a happy time. He felt as irresponsible and carefree as Adam, or rather as Adam would have felt if he’d been a different sort of child. But even Adam seemed to feel liberated. He flew Archie, and Stephen took photographs of the moment when the eagle owl landed on his glove. Adam’s face was screwed up in fear, braced to take the weight, then amazed, as the great wings settled and folded and the golden eyes turned on him, that the bird was so light.

Stephen had the photos developed in Sainsbury’s, bought frames and hung them on the wall of Adam’s room.

They lived an old-fashioned circa 1950s family life, playing Monopoly in the evenings, going for walks in the forest, feeding the deer, running Adam to the point of exhaustion on the sands. His ambition, he told Stephen, was to have a dog.

‘Well, why not?’ Stephen said.

‘Because there’s nobody here in the day. It’d be cruel.’

‘What’s cruel,’ Stephen said, as he and Justine sat by the fire that evening, after Adam had gone to bed, ‘is the entire situation. I mean, if Beth was desperate to be a hospital administrator, fine, but she isn’t. She’d far rather be at home with the garden. That’s what she really wants to do, and if she did that, Adam could have his dog.’

‘Yes,’ Justine said. ‘But there’s no status in it.’

‘There is. I’d respect her for it.’

‘Robert’s friends wouldn’t. Or anyway she thinks they wouldn’t.’

‘It shouldn’t matter what they think.’

‘But it does. She’s terrified of being a stay-at-home mum, that’s all.’

‘So what’s your solution?’

‘Don’t have kids.’

‘It’s a bit late for that — he’s ten. Seriously.’

She shrugged. ‘If I ever had one, I’d like to think I could stay at home and take care of it myself and not feel I was making some kind of inferior choice. It’s quite old-fashioned, that idea that all your status comes from work.’

Oh, the joys of being nineteen. Everything’s so easy.

‘It’s about sex, though, isn’t it? She thinks if she’s not out there, she’ll lose him.’

‘She’s lost him anyway. Sexually.’

Stephen wanted to press her for more information — he felt she knew more than she was saying — but he didn’t think he should. Her outburst in the kitchen after Sunday lunch had been driven by her own unhappiness and he knew she regretted it. He wondered how she knew, but then remembered she had a friend in the medical school where Robert taught. It might be no more than student gossip. The private lives of lecturers never lose anything in the telling. But he couldn’t ask. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Bed had become the place they went to sleep. Partly he felt inhibited having sex in his brother’s house — almost as if Robert had taken on the role of parent — but also, his relationship with Justine was changing in ways he didn’t understand. Whatever the reason, during that long weekend, there was no attempt at love-making until the final night.

Beth had just rung to confirm that she and Robert would be back home late the following morning. She sounded eager to be back, though whether that meant the break had been a failure or a brilliant success wasn’t clear. Justine put down the phone and said, ‘That’s it, then.’

He felt both relieved and sad. The smell of logs burning in the grate brought an autumnal melancholy into the spring evening. They went on talking for a while, but they were both tired. She started getting ready for bed. He stood on the steps for a minute before locking the door, looking up at the clear, brilliant stars, and then, awed and dismayed, scuttled back inside, turned the keys and rattled the chain into place.

She was waiting for him in the bedroom, beside the big double bed, reflected in the mirror on the wall behind her. ‘Better close the curtains,’ he said, though there was nobody to see except the owls, who seemed to hoot less on these spring nights, that, or the leaves muffled the sound. She went to the window and leant out. He followed, put his arms around her from behind, cradling her breasts in his hands, burying his face in the sweet-smelling hair at the nape of her neck.

A sound made him look up. He stood listening for any sound of movement from Adam’s room. This is what it’s like to be a parent, he thought. It amazed him there weren’t more only children in the world. He couldn’t rest until he’d put on his dressing-gown and looked in on Adam, who was curled up under the covers, only the top of his head visible. ‘Fast asleep,’ he said, coming back into the bedroom, but the mood had been broken. Justine closed the curtains and got into bed. He slipped off the dressing-gown and lay beside her.

Moonlight made a pale oblong on the polished wood floor. Under the door was a line of yellow from Adam’s night light. Somewhere on the roof a bird’s feet scratched. Stephen was taking quick, shallow breaths as much from oppression as desire. He put his hand on her firm flat stomach, marvelling at the solidity of her, the warmth. All around them the house sighed and creaked. In the room next door moonlight flooded through the open curtains on to the white-lace counterpane of Robert and Beth’s bed, the hollows in the pillows where their heads had rested still visible though they were far away. He was thinking about Nerys, a vague memory of their early marriage when they’d been in love, happy and innocent, though perhaps they’d never been that. It was hard to remember now.

‘What’s the matter?’ Justine asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘You want this to end, don’t you?’

‘I’ll be glad when they’re back.’

‘No, I meant this. Us.’

‘No, that’s not true. I suppose I want to stop being in limbo. I want something to happen.’

‘What?’ A cool, almost hostile tone. She was looking deep into the pupil of one eye, the lover’s gaze, but there was nothing intimate in her expression. She looked like an entomologist who’s just found the wrong number of spots on an insect’s backside.

‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s too soon to think about it. I haven’t finished the book yet.’

He didn’t want to talk about this or to talk at all. He reached up and touched the side of her face, then pulled her head down towards him. Her nipples brushed his chest, and –

Adam stood in the door. ‘I want a drink of water.’

Justine lay back, trying not to laugh. ‘Go and get one, then. I’ll come and see you when you’re in bed.’

She was gone five minutes. When she returned, Stephen said, ‘Is he asleep?’

‘Is he hell.’

After a while she closed her eyes. He continued to lie as before, listening to her breathing until he was sure from its depth and steadiness that she must be asleep. He lay, tumescent and sleepless, feeling a stab of nostalgia for the cottage, which he missed, though it was only 200 yards away.

He’d just managed to erase the last sexual fantasy from his brain and was settling down to sleep, when, with an enormous whale-like heave of the bedclothes, Justine changed position and, still sleeping, thrust her cool, lordotic arse into his groin.

Oh, Justine. Justine. He turned, cautiously, the other way, thrusting his aching pole into space. Only after an uncomfortable hour spent clinging to the edge of the mattress, fantasies of riotous, Adam-free sex seething and bubbling in his brain, did he finally manage to get off to sleep.