Still Waters

Thirty-three

“You know, dear,” Hannah’s mother had said, head half turned from where she was attending to the salad dressing, “I wonder if I shouldn’t move after all.”

Surprised, Hannah had looked up from the book section of the Sunday Times, her mother bending forward slightly, squinting above her glasses as she measured the required amount of raspberry vinegar into a spoon. “I thought you’d gone over all that, decided it was a bad idea. This house, the garden, you love it here.”

“Yes, I know.” Margaret’s voice was flat and without conviction.

Hannah laid the paper aside. “It’s not the same, is it?”

“No.”

They were both thinking of Hannah’s father, out in France with Robyn, a girl when it had all started, a student, little more than a girl, younger than Hannah by far. Infatuation, intimations of mortality. One of those scarcely explicable affairs that flare up and just as suddenly burn down.

“Have you heard from him?” Hannah asked. “I mean, recently.”

It was the wrong question. Anger fought back the tears in her mother’s eyes. “He sent me … how could he have had the nerve? Why on earth he should ever think I was interested, I can’t imagine. He sent me a cutting from the paper, or perhaps it was a magazine, something about this wretched book she’s supposed to have written. Well, I don’t know what he was thinking of. As though somehow that makes it all right, as if she isn’t just some silly bit of skirt after all. As if I care what … what she is … the stupid, stupid …”

Hannah folded her arms around her, feeling the tension wound tight inside the brittle wiriness of her mother’s body, the hardness of small bones, softness of white, lightly freckled skin.

“I’m not going to cry.”

“No.”

“She isn’t worth it. They’re neither of them worth it.”

“That’s right.” Hannah was thinking of Andrew, her Irish poet lover, the way he had flung his final infidelity in her face like brackish water and expected her to be grateful for his openness, his honesty. How she had cried.

“He didn’t think,” Hannah said. “He wasn’t thinking.”

“Yes, he was. He was thinking of her. Not of me. Now, we could eat if you’re ready. I’m afraid I forgot to buy any cheese. I hope that’s all right. I …”

“Mother,” Hannah said, kissing the top of her head, “it’s fine. Everything’s fine.” Tears bright in her eyes.

He had come back twice after that, Andrew. The first time had been midway through the evening, cold, a fire burning in the open grate. Hannah had been marking folders, grading papers, rereading the Lydgate and Dorothea chapters from Middlemarch. The first Mary Chapin Carpenter album had been playing quietly; she had had-what? — two glasses of wine or was it three? At the door, Andrew’s breath had seesawed across the air; he had been wearing a thin coat, a scarf wrapped round his head as though he were suffering from toothache, gloves on his hands, a bottle of Bushmills clutched against his chest. Hannah had known from the first moment of seeing him that she should not let him in: known what would happen if she did.

She took his scarf and hung it in the hall, the coat he kept on, the gloves had somehow disappeared. “Have you glasses?” he said. And then, when they were sitting drinking, the smell of smoke faint from the fire, the shaded light dancing in his eyes, “So, Hannah, how’ve you been?”

He took her on the floor, the curtains only partly drawn across, touching her first with his tongue and then no time for niceties, Hannah’s skirt pushed up and knickers pulled aside, Andrew having her there, wedged somehow between floor and chair, his long coat trailing round them as she moaned and he bit her breast and thrust deeper inside, stopping only to turn her round and push her down again face first onto the chair, hands clutching her, himself, not gentle, never that, the quick deep strokes and his fingers, damp, so far inside her mouth Hannah thought, if think she did, that she must surely choke.

He sat across the fire from her afterwards, uncovered, his lissome cock folding slowly back against his balls, savoring the whiskey, the cigarette he’d lit from the fire.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

Hannah hunched there, legs drawn up, arms raised across her chest, feeling him slowly dribble out of her, for those moments immune to tears.

There was another woman, of course; well, there were two, one in Belfast, one here. He wondered if he might not marry one of them this time, put an end to all this wandering, settle down. He’d written a poem about it, this yearning after hearth and home, but then he would.

When next he came round unannounced she bolted the door against him and immediately broke out laughing, unable to think of anything save the wonderfully melodramatic scene at the end of The Heiress, a film she remembered watching with her mother one long Saturday afternoon, Olivia de Havilland locking Montgomery Clift outside her door. Who said art didn’t prepare you for life? She hoped Andrew could hear her laughter as he trudged away.

He had married, she heard, soon after; married and divorced and married again. His new book of poetry much acclaimed, he had given a reading at the university but she had not gone. She had glanced through the book once, displayed on the table in Water-stone’s, smiling quietly at a poem she thought most probably about her. She missed the way he would read to her at night, his work and others-Heaney, Longley, Yeats-but Andrew being Andrew, mostly his own. She surprised herself by missing sometimes the way he would arrive unexpectedly home after a lecture that had gone spectacularly well or badly, and reach for her no matter what she was doing, taking her, hungry and fast, pinned up against the sink or stretched along the stairs.

Jim, the peripatetic music teacher who eventually took Andrew’s place, had been far too sensitive and thoughtful to suggest anything so aggressive and uncaring. And Charlie … well, Charlie, bless him, was still a little hesitant and cautious at the best of times. A little lacking in that kind of fervor or imagination. Poets and policemen. Hannah smiled: at least she felt safe.

He was there when she finally arrived home, worn out after battling with the Sunday evening traffic on the motorway. A casserole of chicken and cured French sausage was in the oven, the kettle was simmering, ready to make coffee or tea. “You’d be So Nice to Come Home to.” Billie Holiday was playing on the stereo in the front room.

“Why don’t you let me run you a bath?” Resnick said. “Relax you. Then we can eat.” Arms around her, he had no idea why she was crying.

“Charlie, why is it?”

“What?”

“You’re forever trying to get me clean.”

Less than fifteen minutes hater, he carried mugs of tea upstairs and sat on the edge of the bath, telling her about what was happening with the investigation, the fact that he was now fully involved.

“Poor Jane,” Hannah said, “putting up with that for as long as she did. That bastard. That sanctimonious, know-it-all bastard. If he … if he …”

“If he did,” Resnick said, “we’ll catch him for it.”

She rested her head sideways against his leg and he soaped her back, rinsing it with warm water and then, when she climbed out of the bath, helping to towel her dry. When he kissed her, she felt him starting to harden against her.

“Charlie,” she said, “the casserole …”

“Isn’t that the thing about casseroles? They just sit there and wait till you’re ready.”

Bubbles of water speckled the small of her back and the length of her thigh as she lay on the bed. “Is that all right?” he asked. “Is this?”

She curled beside him, her legs around his, feeling his heart beating through his ribs.

“Why are you so good to me, Charlie?” she asked.

Later still, they sat propped up by pillows, dipping bread into Portuguese blue bowls and soaking up the juice.