The Lighthouse

CHAPTER FIVE. Sun Cream

In the small, low-ceilinged bathroom, Futh fills his tooth glass at the sink and takes big gulps before realising that he is drinking water from the hot tap. He has heard the stories about people finding dead pigeons in hot water tanks. He pours away what is left and refills his glass with cold water, which he still does not much like the taste of. He goes back to the bedroom. It is very early — he woke, thirsty, long before his alarm — but it is light and he could do with an early start anyway.

The night before, his supper miraculously appeared in his room while he was taking a shower. He ate in his pyjamas, standing at the window, looking out at the river.

He has got into the habit of always determining an escape route from a room in which he is staying, imagining emergency scenarios in which his exit is blocked by fire or a psychopath. This began, he thinks, when he was in his twenties and living in an attic flat. His Aunt Frieda, worrying about stair fires and burglars, gave him a rope ladder. It seems important that he should always know a way out.

Putting down his supper plate, he opened the window — looking, in the dark, for a roof to climb on to, a pipe to hold on to, a soft landing — and a moth flew in. Underneath the window, there was pavement, and it looked a long way down. He wondered if it was possible to jump from such a height without breaking anything.

Having finished his meal, he brushed and flossed his teeth and went straight to bed. Finding a mint on his pillow, he heard his Aunt Frieda in his head warning him about tooth decay, the dangers of sweets, but he ate it anyway, sucking it down to nothing.

He opened a book and tried to read but could not concentrate, kept reading the same lines over and over and reaching the bottom of the first page without having taken it in. He was distracted by the moth flying at his lamp. He got out of bed again and opened the curtains and the window to let it out, knowing that this disoriented moth was really after the moon, its navigational aid, although Futh could not see the moon from where he was standing. Getting back into bed, he turned over his pillow to get the cool side and noticed the stain of a stranger’s mascara like a spider on his pillowcase. He resumed his reading and the moth flew away from the lamplight, the artificial light, towards the open window.

Still his thoughts drifted, towards home and Angela and where he had gone wrong. She had always been irritated by his awkwardness around people, around women in particular. He knew her mother found him strange. He was introspective, insufficiently aware, Angela often said, of other people and how they might see things.

The moth flew out of a fold in the curtains and back towards the lamplight, bumping and fluttering against the hot bulb. Futh shut his book and put it down on the bedside table. He got up to find the map he would need for the next day’s walk and lay down again to study his route. But he could not stop thinking about all the ways in which he had annoyed his wife during their marriage.

He was a bad listener, apparently, bewilderingly incapable sometimes of following simple instructions. He was always late leaving the house, late arriving anywhere, even when he had to meet Angela. And he never apologised, even when he was clearly in the wrong. These were small things but he supposed they built up, amounted to something. He imagined things being different. He had a reverie in which he said and did the right thing and Angela did not leave him. But it was too late, it had already happened.

Having nodded off with the light on, and having slept deeply before waking early with the map creased under his cheek, Futh now stands once more at the window looking down at the quiet street below. There is not yet anybody about and nothing is open. It is, he realises, not only early, it is also a Sunday.

He turns away from the window and in the early morning light he notices the colour of the bedroom walls, which are painted a deep pink — the colour of rare meat, the colour of his sunburnt arm.

He dresses for the day’s hiking, strapping his watch onto his unburnt wrist and putting the silver lighthouse in the pocket of his shorts. He goes downstairs, taking his supper plate with him. The landlady is sitting on her stool at the bar with her back to him, drinking a cup of coffee and eating an orange. He approaches her, putting his dirty plate down on the bar in front of her, thanking her in German. She turns, and he sees the new bruise on her face, despite the make-up she has applied. He thanks her again and she nods. He stands for a moment just smiling. He thinks to ask her about breakfast but before he has put the sentence together in his head she has climbed down from her stool and is walking away with the empty plate. He stands there watching her go. He can smell the zest of her orange, and good coffee, and an undernote of disinfectant.

Futh looks around, taking in the various bare tables and vacant chairs, the bar stools and the padded window seats, wondering where he should sit. There is a man standing behind the bar and Futh walks over to him. On the wall, there is an oversized clock. Futh did not see it last night when he arrived and he can’t believe he missed it. It is enormous. The bar reeks of furniture polish and Futh detects a note of camphor. The man has his hands flat on the bar, his fingers splayed, his manicured nails like the display of eyes on a peacock’s tail. He is well-dressed, although there is a fly, Futh notices, on the collar of his shirt. Futh recognises him as the man he saw in the corridor the night before. He took him for another guest but clearly he is a member of the hotel staff. Futh, speaking carefully in German, asks about breakfast.

Bernard shakes his head.

‘What time is breakfast?’ persists Futh.

Bernard looks him silently in the eye for a moment and says, ‘You should go.’

Futh does not understand. He is not certain what the man has just said, does not know his tenses. He thinks he might know what was said but it makes no sense. He has paid the bed and breakfast rate but there appears to be some problem which he can’t comprehend. He tries again to get an answer to his query, but the man only stares at him, saying nothing more.

Futh gives up, returns to his room and packs.

His suitcase will be collected from his room after he has left. It will — unless there is some problem with this service too — be taken to the next hotel on his circuit and be waiting for him when he arrives this afternoon.

Although good weather is forecast, Futh packs his waterproofs in his rucksack. He has maps and a compass, a guidebook and an English-German dictionary; he has drinks and snacks; he has a spare pair of walking socks and first-aid supplies; he even has cutlery and an emergency sewing kit. He already has his silver lighthouse in his pocket and can think of nothing else he needs. At the last moment, he remembers his book which is still lying on the bedside table underneath the lamp. Fetching it, he finds, lying on the cover, last night’s moth.

He puts his rucksack on his back and begins to leave the room but, having lost out on breakfast, does not make it past the coffee-making facilities. He fills the kettle from the bathroom tap and, while he is waiting for the kettle to boil, empties the sachet of coffee granules and the little pot of UHT milk into a cup. He thinks about Carl’s mother, about the breakfast she might have made for Carl, with cafetiere coffee and home baking. He wonders if he might have made a mistake.

The kettle boils. He fills up his cup and brings his coffee briefly to his lips, testing its heat, before setting it down on the windowsill to cool. He puts the packet of complimentary biscuits in his pocket and then idly checks inside the drawers and the wardrobe. He does not recall putting anything in them — he has not unpacked — but, he thinks, he always manages to leave something behind. Invariably, he overlooks a coat still hanging in a wardrobe, his passport at the back of a drawer or in the pocket of the coat in the wardrobe, pyjamas tangled up in the bedding, something plugged into the wall, or a toothbrush, countless toothbrushes, although they are easy to replace.

Getting down on his knees, he looks under the bed, just in case he has lost anything under there. There is something unidentifiable right in the middle. He reaches under and fishes it out. It is soft, some small piece of balled-up clothing, covered in dust and fluff and stray pillow feathers. Standing, shaking out and dusting off and looking at what he has retrieved, he finds in his hand a pair of knickers. He wonders how long they have been there.

Remembering his coffee, he turns back to the window and picks up his cup. While he drinks, he watches the few people now passing in the street below. He thinks about all the dust which he has just shaken from the knickers now being in the air which he is breathing, and most of that dust, he thinks, is strangers’ dead skin.

He finishes his coffee, puts the empty cup back by the kettle and leaves the room.

In the lift, he realises that he is still holding the knickers. They are clenched in his closed hand, slivers of pink satin showing between his fingers. He does not know what to do with them, who to give them to. Entering the bar, he hesitates before putting them down — very carefully, as if they were fragile — on the landlady’s check-in desk, next to her ledger. Embarrassed, glancing around, he finds himself observed by the barman who refused him breakfast.

Futh, making his way to the door to the street and stepping out into the sunshine, is aware of the barman watching him go.

The east-facing frontage of the hotel is bathed in sunlight. Walking away, turning back to see, he has to squint, it is so bright.

He walks alongside the Rhine to the ferry point. Waiting on the slip for the boat to come across from the far side, he takes his packet of biscuits out of his pocket and eats one. He is bewildered by the lack of breakfast, and by the man behind the bar who said, ‘You should go.’

The little ferry arrives and Futh embarks. He leans against the side and eats the other biscuit, gazing back at Hellhaus and its backdrop of green hills and rocky outcrops.

The boat pulls away from the shore and the broad, grey-green river flows fast around and beneath it.

Futh, who is wearing shorts for the first time in years, takes the sun cream out of his rucksack and applies it to the exposed parts of his white legs, his forearms, the small triangle of bare chest where he has left his top two buttons undone. The crossing is short and he has barely finished rubbing the cream into the back of his neck before they reach the other side.

Futh sets off, following his printed directions, walking briskly, relishing the exercise, the doing of something physical, enjoying the clean, fresh air and the sound of twigs cracking beneath his feet. He follows his route along the river, which curves initially towards the west. He walks with the heat of the sun on his back, his hiking boots gathering dust from the dry path.

His last pair of hiking boots was bought especially for the trip he took with his father. The two of them were not used to hiking together. He had never seen his father wearing hiking boots before. Futh’s boots were a bit big, even with two pairs of thick socks, as if they were expected to last for many years, but he probably never wore them again and has not had another pair until now.

These new boots are only a few days old. The lady in the shop said, ‘Wear them in at home first, just around the house, and then take them out for little walks, building up the distance gradually.’ But Futh did not do that. He packed them in his suitcase with the price tag still attached.

‘You have to be careful,’ his father had said, as they picked their way slowly down a steep embankment, ‘of women, or before you know it you’re married, and there are children, and then you’re ruined.’

Twelve-year-old Futh, on the slope, trying to descend steadily, held on to the grass and low branches and found that they came away in his hands, coming with him as he stumbled and slid to the bottom.

‘We can do without her,’ his father said as they walked on. But Futh knew that every woman his father brought into the hotel room was a substitute for her. Some of them even looked like her. And Futh, seeing the women going into the bathroom, watching them in the mirror in the middle of the night, desired them himself.

It would be some years before Futh went to bed with a girl, and more before he met Angela, and even then it was often these women he found himself thinking about as he came.

He met Angela at a motorway service station. It was a Sunday and he had been to his father’s place for lunch. His father had, by then, moved out of his sister’s house and into a flat. It was less than an hour’s drive down the motorway from where Futh lived, but at the time Futh still could not drive. He had hitchhiked there, and then his father had driven him half the way back, dropping him off at the service station so that Futh could find someone else to take him the rest of the way home.

Futh got himself a cup of coffee from a vending machine and then stood outside, beside the slip road, with his thumb out, waiting for a lift. It was not late but it was winter and already getting dark, and it was raining. Vehicle after vehicle drove by while the rain got heavier, but finally a little car slowed and stopped just past him. He hurried to the passenger door and looked in through the window. The driver had put the light on and was leaning across the seat to open the door, but Futh did not yet recognise her.

‘How far are you going?’ she asked. He told her and she said, ‘That’s not far from me. I can drop you there.’ With relief, Futh clambered in and closed the door.

He was aware of the smell of his own rain-wet coat mixing with the smell of cigarette smoke which filled the inside of her car. Futh did not smoke himself but sometimes he found the smell of cigarette smoke almost painfully pleasant.

She said, ‘My name’s Angela.’

‘That’s my mother’s name,’ said Futh, buckling up.

Angela switched off the light, turned the blower on the misting windscreen and set off. While she negotiated her way onto the dark motorway, Futh was looking at her closely, struck by something about her which seemed familiar, trying to think what it was.

His wet hair was dripping onto his face and down the back of his neck. Spotting a towel in the footwell, he reached for it, saying, ‘Do you mind if I…’ and when she looked, opening her mouth to reply, he was already using it, rubbing his face and his hair and the back of his neck and his throat with it.

As she turned away again, he realised where he knew her from. On his first day of secondary school, he had developed a crush on a girl in his year. She had never noticed him and they had never spoken, except for the very first time he saw her, when he got in her way on the stairs and she said, pushing past him, ‘Fuck’ or ‘Fucking’ something. With her irritated face an inch or two from his, she had looked right at him and said through lightly glossed lips, ‘Fuck’ or ‘Fucking’. He had noted the incident in his diary along with her sugary scent. She had not been in any of his classes but he used to catch sight of her at the school gates, in assembly, in the corridor, and sometimes — through a classroom window — on the sports field.

He had discovered her first name. Sometimes he walked home behind her, mentally composing his diary entry for the evening: Angela was wearing a red jumper and a grey skirt and had her hair in a ponytail. Or, Angela was wearing a white blouse and grey trousers and her hair was shorter.

Kenny — who had always had girlfriends, sometimes more than one at a time, even in junior school — would have whistled to make her look round, to make her smile or at least notice him. He would have spoken to her, made her laugh. But Futh was not Kenny. He kept her in sight but kept his distance, as if he were a private eye. He was so focused on her, blinkered, that he did not pay attention to where he was going. When Angela disappeared into her house, he stopped and looked around, finding himself on a strange estate, wondering where he was. Keen to get back and update his diary, he turned around and tried to retrace his steps, succeeding only in straying further and wishing he had gone straight home from school.

In the sixth form, Futh attended an open day in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the local university. He was in the lecture theatre, gazing at the back of Angela’s neck instead of at the person giving the welcome and introduction, when a movement beside him caught his eye. Turning, he found Kenny sitting down next to him. Kenny, whom Futh had not seen for years, had changed in some ways — he had a chipped front tooth and a stud in his nose; he said that he had pierced it himself. But in other ways he was just the same — he had a bit of a gut, and bike oil on his hands.

‘So there you are,’ said Kenny, as if Futh were the one who had gone away. ‘My mum said you’d be here. And she said you’ve got my old compass. Do you know her?’ Futh was confused and then realised that Kenny had seen him staring at Angela. He sensed that he was about to be teased.

‘I know her from school,’ said Futh.

Now Kenny was looking at her too. Angela, as if she had a feeling that she was being observed, turned around and saw Kenny watching her while Futh glanced away.

The welcome came to an end and everyone left the lecture theatre and gathered in the foyer in little groups. Futh saw Angela leaving her friends and coming over. Standing next to Futh, looking at Kenny, she said, ‘Do I know you?’

‘He knows you,’ said Kenny, indicating Futh.

Angela glanced at Futh and then turned back to Kenny and said, ‘I don’t know him.’

‘We go to the same school,’ said Futh.

‘Do we?’ said Angela.

Futh nodded. ‘We’re in the same year.’

‘I don’t recognise you,’ she said.

This wasn’t surprising, thought Futh. Shortly afterwards, Angela wandered away and Futh looked down at his schedule to see what he should do next. Kenny said, ‘You can keep my compass. I got a new one anyway,’ and when Futh looked up again he found that Kenny had drifted off too.

Kenny did not in the end go to university, and when Futh started his chemistry course that autumn, he discovered that Angela was not there either. He did not see her again until she picked him up at the motorway service station.

In the car, he reminded her of their encounter at the open day.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

‘Do you remember me from school?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Angela.

‘We were in the same year.’

‘I don’t remember you,’ she said.

‘You might remember my dad,’ he said, ‘Mr Futh, the chemistry teacher.’

But no, she said, shaking her head, she did not remember him either.

‘He’s retired now anyway.’

By now the rain was falling so heavily that Futh could barely see where they were going. Angela, squinting through the windscreen, speeded up the wipers and turned up the blower. She was going a bit too fast for Futh’s liking.

He asked her, ‘Have you been away for the weekend? Have you come far?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I just drove out to the service station to meet my boyfriend.’ After a moment, she added, ‘It’s in between his house and mine. We meet in the middle. He’s married so we can’t meet at his, and I live with my mother and she doesn’t like me seeing him so we can’t go there.’

They drove for about a mile without either of them speaking and then Angela pulled over and stopped on the hard shoulder and Futh realised that she was crying. She was doing it rather quietly and he wondered when that had started. He did not know what to do. He said, ‘Are you all right?’

She kept trying to talk but Futh could not understand her because she was crying at the same time. There were no tissues in the car, but there was the towel, although it was a bit damp. He offered it to her and she hesitated briefly before taking it and pressing her face into it and crying harder.

Futh watched the windscreen — the wipers struggling to keep up with the hammering rain — and eventually she said, ‘I think he’s seeing someone else.’ When Futh said nothing for a moment she added, ‘I don’t mean his wife. I mean, I don’t think I’m the only other one. I’m just waiting for him to turn around one day and say he’s done with me.’

Futh sat awkwardly beside her. Kenny, he thought, would do the right thing. Kenny would put his arm around her, say something which helped. But what, he thought, did one say? It’s going to be fine. Maybe it’s for the best. You’ll find someone else. But Futh was not Kenny.

After a minute, Futh looked in his bag and found a packet of mints which he opened and offered to her. She shook her head without really looking. He went back into his bag and found an orange and offered her that. She looked at the orange and then at him and she laughed. ‘Go on then,’ she said.

Futh peeled the orange and Angela took the half he passed to her and she said, ‘You know, I do remember Mr Futh. He was OK,’ and she put an orange segment in her mouth. ‘A bit boring,’ she added.

When the orange was all gone, Futh wiped his fingers on the towel and Angela started the car again and they went on their way.

As they approached a junction, Angela began to indicate and Futh said, ‘It’s the next one.’

‘There’s been an accident there,’ said Angela. ‘If we go that way we’ll be stuck in a jam for hours. I’m taking the back roads.’

They took the back roads, but later, after she had dropped him off and driven away, Futh, sitting alone at his kitchen table, wished that they had taken the other route, longed for the traffic jam in which he would still be sitting with Angela in her small, warm car.

After a few hours of walking, Futh’s new boots begin to rub. The same thing happened on the trip with his father, who sat down at the end of the first day and said, ‘I’m done in. No more walking,’ and Futh had not complained. Instead, apart from one day spent visiting, they spent the rest of the week killing time until, at the end of each day, Futh’s father went out and Futh went to bed, earlier every evening.

Futh, sitting down now on a bench, the hot slats griddling the backs of his thighs, reaches into his rucksack for a drink and finds that he has already finished what he brought. At the same time, it occurs to him that he has neglected to put any sun cream on his face, and that he ought to be wearing a hat. He administers some factor fifty, smearing it over the scalp exposed by his thinning hair, his skin already salmon pink and tender. Rubbing the residue into his hands, he sees on his palm the inch-long scar, now thin and pale.

He got the scar in Cornwall. He was up on the cliffs with his parents. It was the start of the holidays, the summer between primary and secondary school, the summer of the heatwave. They were spending the week in a caravan and someone had told them that the way to stop it turning into an oven was to keep the windows closed and the blinds down. They would come out of the midday sun into the relative cool of the darkened caravan and then there might be lunch and a siesta before Futh could escape again into the blazing day.

Despite the incredible heat, up on the cliffs there was a breeze and one could burn unexpectedly. They had eaten a picnic. His mother had made sandwiches and he and his father had shared a savoury pasty in a paper bag. His father had opened a bottle of Pomagne but no one else wanted any. There were oranges but only his mother had bothered with one. Afterwards, she lay on her back on the grass and closed her eyes. Her port-wine stain was visible beneath the strap of her bikini top. She smelt of sun cream.

His father was holding forth on the subject of the lighthouse and eighteenth-century shipwrecks. ‘Of course,’ his father said, ‘there were still shipwrecks after the lighthouse was built.’ He talked about the plundering of the wrecks, and the bodies which were washed ashore and buried, he said, until the early nineteenth century, namelessly in the dunes, in unconsecrated land.

He talked about flash patterns. ‘The light,’ he said, gazing fixedly at the hazy horizon, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’ And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen — how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage.

His father went on.

Futh, standing, stretching his legs, wandered away over the bone-dry grass, searching for shade although there was none, hoping for more of a breeze, and wanting just to keep moving. In his hand was his mother’s perfume case, a silver-plated lighthouse, which he had taken out of her handbag. It was an antique, an heirloom acquired from his father’s German grandmother.

Futh took the glass vial out of its case. He wanted to smell the contents, his mother’s scent, but he was not allowed to remove the stopper.

He remembered the visit to his widower granddad’s flat in London, during which the lighthouse had been given to Futh’s father. The whole time they were there, his granddad had been toying with it, this little silver novelty, occasionally putting it away in the pocket of his pyjama top only to get it straight out again. He seemed to be dwelling on something. Finally he said, ‘You’ve never met Ernst, my brother, have you?’ He was speaking really to his son.

‘No,’ said Futh’s father, ‘I haven’t.’

‘He might still be alive, I suppose.’

‘He could be.’

Futh’s granddad held out his hand, this exquisite silver lighthouse lying across his palm. ‘This was my mother’s,’ he said. ‘You need to return it to Ernst.’ He held it out until Futh’s father took it from him, and then, seeming exhausted, Futh’s granddad closed his eyes.

Outside, in the car, Futh’s father gave the lighthouse to Futh’s mother, who admired the case and the vial inside, approved the scent and put some on her wrists and her throat. The car, not yet out of sight of the house, filled with the smell of violets.

Futh, up on the cliffs in Cornwall with the silver lighthouse in one hand and the stoppered glass vial in the other, wandered back to his parents. His mother was still lying with her eyes closed, her face turned to the sun. His father was looking out to sea and then Futh heard him say, ‘The foghorn blasts every thirty seconds.’

‘Do you know,’ said his mother, ‘how much you bore me?’

There was a pause and then his father quietly packed away the picnic. Snapping shut the cool-box lid, he stood and looked at his wife. Futh watched the gulls fighting over the remains of their lunch, and then he looked down at his hand and saw the glass vial broken in his palm, the fleshy pad beneath his thumb cut open. The volatile contents of the lighthouse soaked into his wound, stinging, and ran between his fingers, soaking his boots, and the scent of it rose from him like millions of tiny balloons escaping towards the sky.

For a long time afterwards, he would lift the palm of his hand to his nose, searching for that scent of violets.

He wakes on the bench with his chin on his chest, his neck aching as he lifts his head and looks around him. He stares for a while at the cloudless sky and then checks his watch and consults the route details and the map. Finally getting to his feet, he presses on towards a village. He is fiercely thirsty.

The outlying houses are quiet. He pictures couples and families inside eating lunch together or slumbering afterwards while they wait for the heat of the day to subside. He envies them their dinners, their sofas, their cool interiors. He thinks about knocking on a door and asking for a glass of water, imagines being invited to step inside and sit down at a table on which lunch is still out. He chooses a garden gate which has been left ajar. He walks up the path to the door and knocks and waits, but nobody answers.

Just beyond the houses is a shop, through whose windows he can see refrigerated drinks for sale. But the door is locked and there is no one behind the counter, and the sign on the door, he realises, says ‘CLOSED’.

Further along, there is a pub, which is open, or at least the door is. He wanders inside. There is nobody in the place — no customers at the tables, no one behind the bar. There are drinks behind the bar — pumps full of cool beer, fridges full of cold bottles, ice buckets with chilled wine bottles in them. He stands there looking at the drinks he wants, calling out, ‘Hello?’ He calls in both English and German, ‘Hello? Hello?’ But nobody hears him, or at least they don’t come. He considers helping himself, leaving some money, but when he gets closer he sees that there is a dog in between himself and the bar, a big dog which Futh had not noticed at first, or perhaps he had, perhaps he just thought it was something else, a rug. The dog opens one eye.

Futh leaves, going back out into the street, into the sun, walking on past the houses, and there is a man, he sees now, one man labouring in his garden. Futh stops and asks him for a glass of water. The man, seeing the map in Futh’s hand, asks him in English where he has come from and where he is going. Futh opens out his map and shows him. ‘Well,’ says the man, ‘you’re going in the right direction.’ Futh’s finger continues up and up on one side of the Rhine, and then, crossing the river, it slides back down over the squares of the map, to Hellhaus.

‘You’re staying at the hotel?’ asks the man.

Futh says that he is. ‘It’s all right,’ he adds, ‘although my bedroom wasn’t entirely clean, and the bathroom was a bit poky, and I didn’t get my breakfast.’

‘Stay here,’ says the man. He takes off his gardening gloves and disappears into his house, coming out again with a child’s plastic cup half-full of tepid water which he hands to Futh. Futh drinks it and thanks the man, lingers a little longer and then walks on.

In the middle of the afternoon, the heat begins to give a little. Futh, with his route details in his hand, pauses for a view of the river at its narrowest and deepest point where the currents are strong, looking for the siren, a vast nude cast in bronze. It is only then, when he is standing still, that he notices how much his feet hurt.

He takes the last mile slowly. Reaching the town and that night’s hotel, he sits down on the doorstep to unlace his dusty boots. As he eases them off his feet, the smell of hot socks escapes like a groan. Underneath the bloodied wool, his heels are tender, his smaller toes too.

He goes inside, finds the owner and is given the key to his room which is on the ground floor with French windows overlooking a little rose garden. He limps into the bathroom and washes his feet in the sink, dabbing at the sore bits with a sponge. There is an inviting bath but he is too tired. He puts on his pyjamas and gets into bed, not even trying to read, just turning off the light.

Another thing which he knows always irritated Angela was the look on his face whenever she came home smelling of cigarette smoke. In the early days, he had not objected in the slightest when he thought that Angela had been smoking. He even liked the smell. But by the time they began trying for a baby, he did indeed mind when she came home smelling of cigarettes, when Angela — who claimed not to smoke and who would always mention a stinky staff room or some pub she had been to or a friend who had smoked in her car — tasted of smoke when he kissed her. He wished that she would at least suck mints before coming home to him. He noticed it more towards the end of their marriage. He supposed that she was unhappy and this was her crutch.

And their trying for a baby was a source of tension in itself. There were many pregnancies but each time she lost the child. She accused him, in each aftermath, of rushing her into another attempt, however much time had gone by. He reminded her of her age. ‘Time is running out,’ he said to her. She was thirty when they met but forty-four when she became pregnant for the final time, some months before they separated.

He turns onto one side and then the other, worrying about intruders hiding in the garden, behind the rose bushes, coming in through the French windows while he is asleep. He wonders how fast he could run. He is already regretting not having that bath. He can feel his muscles stiffening.