Last Rites

Seventeen

Early evening. Hannah Campbell stood in her small front garden, looking out across the expanse of the recreation ground opposite, its grass no longer the peculiarly vibrant green of midday or even mid-afternoon, but calming now into the softer shade that reminded Hannah of a particular dress her mother used to wear, muted and warm. The shadows of the railings and the trees standing close alongside them were soft and slowly lengthening and, from the middle distance, the cries of children clambering over the playground swings were faint, even musical. Off and on, scenes from Hannah’s own childhood had been picking at the edges of her brain all day, and she knew the reason lay in the letter, French-postmarked, from her father: My dearest Hannah, I hope you will understand …

She stood a while longer outside the late-Victorian terraced house, with hanging baskets beside its blue door. She had bought the house several years ago, at a figure she could ill afford; but its position, traffic-free, so close to open space, yet near the center of the city, made it worth its price and more. Now she felt settled there, more so than anywhere since she had left her family home to go to university, not quite nineteen. At her next birthday she would be thirty-seven, nearing forty.

Preoccupied, she was startled to see Resnick, hands in pockets, turn into the path which led toward the front of the house. Was it two weeks since he had called round unannounced, or three?

They sat in the L-shaped kitchen-dining room at the back of the house, Resnick at the scrubbed pine table, his back toward the old range which Hannah never used, but kept for appearances. Hannah was moving between the table and the narrow strip of kitchen, washing greens for a salad, shaking lemon oil and vinegar together for a dressing, cutting cubes of cheese, spooning hummus into an earthenware bowl, heating ciabatta in the oven.

“Are you going to stick with beer, Charlie, or d’you fancy some of this wine?”

Resnick raised his glass. “Beer’s fine.”

Salad bowl in hand, Hannah paused before the table and smiled. “There’s some work I have to do later, I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, why should I mind?”

“I just didn’t want you to think …” She shrugged. “You know.”

“That I was going to stay the night?”

“Yes, I suppose …”

He had followed her from the table and when she turned it was almost into his arms.

“That wasn’t why I came, you know.”

“A bit of sex.”

“Yes.”

“Slip back into the old routine.”

“Is that what it was? Routine?”

She looked into his face. “Sometimes, yes, I think so. Don’t you?”

“Maybe that’s what happens.”

“This soon?”

Resnick shrugged. His shirt was crumpled and his tie had been pulled off and draped across the same chair back as his jacket. His hair was something of a mess.

Hannah touched his wrist and felt the veins running under the cuff of his sleeve. “Why did you come round?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you,” he said, but the pause before speaking was too long.

“The truth.” Smiling at him all the same.

“I don’t know. Does there have to be a reason? I don’t know.”

“Oh, Charlie …”

“What?”

Reaching up, she kissed him close to the corner of his mouth. “You had a bad day.”

“It wasn’t good.”

“You had a bad day and you didn’t want to sit with the rest of your team in the pub and you didn’t fancy going home to that barn of an empty house with nothing there but the cats, so you came here instead. You wanted company, comfort; someone, maybe, to hold your hand.” She was holding his hand. “Charlie, it’s okay. I understand. I just don’t want to go to bed with you, not tonight. I don’t want to make love. Is that all right?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

After they’d eaten, Resnick wandered into the front of the house and switched on the light by the shelf where Hannah kept her small stack of CDs. He toyed with the idea of Billie singing “This Year’s Kisses”-the ones which no longer meant the same; or the knowing irony with which she leaned back upon the beat and sang “Getting Some Fun Out of Life”; Lester Young’s tenor saxophone adding its dry commentary to “Foolin’ Myself.”

Was that what he was doing? What both he and Hannah had been guilty of? The simple truth-Resnick caught himself smiling-the simple truth rarely existed outside of fairy-tales and thirty-two bars of popular song. And even then … his mind went back to Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood. Nothing simple there.

He slipped the Billie Holiday back into place and pulled out the Cowboy Junkies. Not exactly cheery stuff, but somehow, he knew, Hannah seemed to find consolation in the almost forlorn, floating pessimism of their songs-”Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park”; “This Street, That Man, This Life.”

Sitting in the armchair, Hannah with her legs up on the settee, Resnick told her about his meeting with Norma Snape. Feeling sympathy for them both, Hannah listened: it was easy to understand why Resnick, acting out of all the best intentions, should feel hurt, rebuffed, misunderstood; but Norma-and she knew, from her work, many women whose situations, while less extreme, were not so far removed from Norma’s-Hannah could feel her helplessness and frustration, a life lived forever at the mercy of circumstance and patronizing authority.

“What will happen to her, Charlie? The girl.”

“Sheena? Maybe nothing much, not this time. But in the future …”

“I remember her, you know. She was in my class at school. Just for a year. And in all that time she barely spoke, other than to her mates. Did as little work as possible, enough to steer clear of trouble. And I don’t think we did anything-I did anything-in the whole three terms that engaged her imagination one scrap.” Leaning sideways, Hannah retrieved her glass of wine. “I didn’t do anything about it, Charlie. I didn’t even try. All my energies, they went on the dozen or so who could be real pains if you gave them half a chance, them and the few who were really good, genuinely interested, off writing poems in their spare time, plays, borrowing the tape-recorder to make a documentary about where they lived. Those were the kids I really bothered about. That’s what was rewarding, that kind of response. As long as Sheena showed up and shut up, I didn’t care.”

“What’s all this?” Resnick said, setting down his own glass and moving across to the settee to sit beside her. “Taking on my guilt to make me feel better?”

Hannah smiled and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Not really. Not consciously.”

“You’re not to blame for whatever’s going wrong in Sheena’s life.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No.” Resnick’s arm was resting on Hannah’s leg, his hand on her knee. “No more than we all are.”

“And we punish her for our mistakes.”

Resnick shook his head. “That’s too easy.”

“Why?”

“She may not be academically bright, but she’s not stupid. She has to take some responsibility for her own actions.”

“Yes. I know.”

There had been a moment, crossing the room, and later, when Resnick had thought he might kiss her, but now it had gone. He was looking at his watch.

“Busy day tomorrow,” Hannah said.

“You or me?”

“Both.”

At the door, she slipped her hand around his waist enjoying, however briefly, the solidity of his body, the inward curve of his back. She kissed him on the mouth, but before he could respond she had stepped away again and was wishing him goodnight. “Call me, Charlie.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Yes. I know.” Resnick walking, crablike, down the path.

At the railings, he raised a hand and in the failing light she smiled. Inside, she leaned back against the door, his footsteps faint and growing fainter till they disappeared. Some months before, happy, half-drunk, turned on, she had asked him to join in the fantasy that was playing, unbidden, through her mind; the man heavy on top of her as she struggled, pinning her arms to the bed with his knees; a voice she barely recognized as her own, shouting, “Hold me, Charlie! Hold me down!” For Resnick, it had been too close to the realities of his working life: power, force, aggression. Neither of them had talked about it since. But it had been the first wedge between them; nothing afterward had been quite the same.

Hannah carried the glasses through into the kitchen and rinsed them under the tap. Not so far short of eleven; too late, she reasoned, to phone her mother now. Her father’s letter was where she had left it, out of reach if not out of mind. She stood for a while at the upstairs window, gazing out into the dark. Denying the impulse to call Resnick, tell him she’d been stupid, jump in a cab, come on round. Her father’s writing was oddly small, squirrelly. She had needed to read the words twice before their meaning became clear. Robyn and I have decided … never imagined I’d want to get married again … important to both of us … writing to you before I say anything to your mother… easier coming from you … I hope you will understand. He had even tried for a joke: now Robyn’s reached the grand old age of thirty, I think she wants to settle down. And what, Hannah thought? Sell the place in the French countryside Robyn and her father had spent years doing up and buy somewhere larger? Move back to England? Write another best-selling novel? Have children? A child.

She didn’t realize until it was done that she had torn the letter into smaller and smaller pieces, which went fluttering like confetti down around her feet where she stood.