The Boat House

SIXTEEN

He was in the bathroom that night when he heard her go. He was waiting for a couple of soluble aspirin to break up in a glass of water as he stood before the opened mirror cabinet. He looked up sharply at the sound of the door — Again? he thought disbelievingly, and he winced as the movement aggravated the mild headache that he'd brought home with him.

He listened for a while, and the silence of the house told him yes, again. Still carrying the glass, he went out into the hallway.

This time she'd closed the door behind her. He opened it, and looked out. She'd gone. Tonight there was a moon, starlight even, and he knew that after a few minutes away from the house it would be possible for her to see with surprising clarity; but moon or no moon, it seemed to make little difference to her and she'd been spending hours abroad at even the deepest, darkest point in the cycle.

This was the part that troubled him, that he found difficult to understand. He could remember how, after moving out here and having been a city dweller all of his life, he'd come to realise that he'd never known what true darkness was; even away from houses and street lighting there had always been a faint, reflected amber cast to the sky, but here there was nothing. He could remember the first time that he'd stepped outside into country darkness and closed the door behind him; it was as if he'd been struck blind with the click of the latch, and he'd begun to panic at his inability even to tell which way was up.

Alina said she'd been raised in the country. Maybe that was it, you grew up with a knack that you otherwise couldn't acquire, like the owls and the bats and the creatures of the lake. She had it, he didn't. Could it be that what he was feeling was a kind of envy, in the sense that he'd brought her here, to a place that he felt he'd made his own, and in a matter of weeks she'd already grown closer to it than he could ever hope to be?

No, he tried to tell himself, that wasn't it; nothing so mean, nothing so unreasonable. Even though he was looking forward to the day when she moved on, he was already beginning to sense that her leaving would be something of a wrench. As they'd agreed, there was nothing between them… but he knew that he'd miss her.

Without even realising that he'd moved, he found himself standing by the door to her room.

He put his hand on the handle.

Hesitated a while longer.

Took a sip of the aspirin.

And then, with a guilty look over his shoulder, he opened her door and stepped inside.

She kept the room neat, her bed made and her work clothes carefully preserved on a hanger on the front of the wardrobe. Her party dress was alongside, bagged in polythene to protect it from dust. Over on the dressing table, one of her notebooks lay alongside the photograph album. He went across to it, still thinking that it wasn't too late to back out and close the door behind him and pretend that he'd never even been in here.

But instead, he opened the book of photographs.

The pictures were strange. Not all of them, but some. A number were of the same place, some old village with nobody in it, the first a shot down a dusty road and the rest of individual buildings or, in some cases, of open fields enclosed by split rail fencing. The houses were all of dilapidated wood, with the tallest building a spired church right in the middle of everything. Fir trees grew in amongst the roofs, and weeds and flowers grew everywhere else. The village stood next to a lake.

A fast flick through some of the other pages showed images of a more easily recognisable kind — strange faces, old friends, scenes from a life. He closed the album carefully, making sure that none of the loosened pages could fall out and give him away.

Then, quietly, he left the room.