The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Earth

The Nettle Pit

‘“Cheating” is an interesting concept, don’t you think?’ said Chris.

‘How do you mean?’ said Max.

Caroline stood against the kitchen sink and watched the two men talking. Even from this seemingly insignificant exchange, she felt that she could detect a world of difference between them. Chris was a skilled and attractive conversationalist: however small the subject, he would approach it enquiringly, quizzically, endeavouring always to penetrate to the truth and confident that he would get there. Max was perpetually nervous and uncertain – nervous even now, in conversation with the man who was (or so he liked to tell everyone, including himself) his oldest and closest friend. It made her wonder – not for the first time, on this holiday – exactly why the fondness between these two men had endured for so long.

‘What I mean is, as adults, we don’t talk about cheating much, do we?’

‘You can cheat on your wife,’ said Max, perhaps a touch too wistfully.

‘That’s the obvious exception,’ Chris conceded. ‘But otherwise – the concept seems to disappear, doesn’t it, some time around teenagerhood? I mean, in football, you talk of players fouling each other, but not cheating. Athletes take performance-enhancing drugs but when it’s reported on the news the newsreader doesn’t say that so and so’s been caught cheating. And yet, for little kids, it’s an incredibly important concept.’

‘Look, I’m sorry –’ Max began.

‘No, I’m not talking about today,’ said Chris. ‘Forget about it. It’s no big deal.’

Earlier that afternoon Max’s daughter, Lucy, had been involved in a fierce and tearful argument with Chris’s youngest, Sara, over alleged cheating during a game of French cricket. They had been playing on the huge expanse of lawn at the front of the house and their screams of reprimand and denial had been heard all over the farm, bringing members of both families running from every direction. The two girls had not spoken to each other since. Even now they were sitting at opposite ends of the farmhouse, one of them frowning over her Nintendo DS, the other flicking through the TV channels, struggling to find anything acceptable to watch on Irish television.

Chris continued: ‘Is Lucy curious about money yet?’

‘Not really. We give her a pound every week. She puts it in a piggy bank.’

‘Yes, but does she ever ask you where the money comes from in the first place? How banks work, and that sort of thing.’

‘She’s only seven,’ said Max.

‘Mm. Well, Joe’s getting pretty interested in all that stuff. He was asking me for a crash course in economics today.’

Yes, he would be, Max thought. At the age of eight and a half, Joe was already starting to manifest his father’s omnivorous, bright-eyed curiosity, while Lucy, only one year younger, seemed content to exist in a world of her own, composed almost entirely of fantasy elements: a world of dolls and pixies, kittens and hamsters, cuddly toys and benign enchantments. He was trying not to worry about it too much, or to feel resentment.

‘So I told him a little bit about investment banking. You know, just the basics. I told him that these days, when you said that someone was a banker, it doesn’t mean that he sits behind a counter and cashes cheques for customers all day. I told him that a real banker never comes into contact with money at all. I told him that most of the money in the world nowadays doesn’t exist in any tangible form anyway, not even as bits of paper with promises written on them. So he said to me, “But what does a banker do, Dad?” So I explained that a lot of modern banking is based on physics. That’s where the concept of leverage comes from. Gears, ratchets and so on – you find terms like this coming up in modern theories of banking all the time. Anyway, you must know all about that.’

Max nodded, even though he didn’t, in fact, know any such thing. Caroline, who knew her husband well (too well) after all this time, saw the nod and recognized it for the bluff that it was. The little private smile she offered to the kitchen floor was tinged with sadness.

‘I told him that a lot of modern banking consists of borrowing money – money that isn’t your own – and finding somewhere to reinvest it at a higher rate of return than you’re giving to the person you’re borrowing it from. And when I told him that, Joe thought about it for a while, and said this very interesting thing: “So bankers,” he said, “are really just people who make a lot of money by cheating.”’

Max smiled appraisingly. ‘Not a bad definition.’

‘It isn’t, is it? Because it brings a different moral perspective to bear on things. A child’s perspective. What the banking community does isn’t illegal – at least most of the time. But it does stick in people’s throats, and that’s why. At the back of our minds we still have unspoken rules about what’s fair and what isn’t. And what they do isn’t fair. It’s what children would call cheating.’

Max was still thinking about this conversation later that night, when he and Caroline were lying in bed together, up in the attic bedroom, both on the point of falling asleep.

‘I didn’t think Chris would have gone for all that “out of the mouths of babes” stuff,’ he said. ‘Bit too cute for him, I would have thought.’

‘Maybe,’ said Caroline, non-commitally.

Max waited for her to say more, but there was only silence between them; part of a larger, magical near-silence which hung over the whole of this coastline. If he listened closely, he could just about hear the noise of waves breaking gently on the strand, about half a mile away.

‘Close, aren’t they?’ he prompted.

‘Who?’ Caroline murmured through her encroaching cloud of sleep.

‘Chris and Joe. They spend a lot of time together.’

‘Mmm. Well, I suppose that’s what fathers and sons do.’

She rolled over slowly and lay flat on her back. Max knew this meant that she was almost asleep now, and conversation was over. He reached out and took her hand. He held on to her hand and looked up at the restless clouds through the bedroom skylight until he heard her breathing become slower and more regular. When she was fully asleep he gently let go and turned away from her. They had not made love since Lucy was conceived, almost eight years ago.

When they prepared for their walk the next morning, the skies were grey and the estuary tide was low.

The two wives would be staying behind to prepare lunch. Pointedly sporting a plastic apron as her badge of domestic drudgery, Caroline came out on to the lawn to wave the party off; but before they all struck off through the fields and down the path towards the water’s edge, Lucy took her parents to one side.

‘Come and see this,’ she said.

She clasped Max’s hand and led him across the wide expanse of lawn towards the hedgerow which marked the boundary of the farmland. Out of the hedge grew a young yew tree, with a single, gnarled branch stretching out back towards the lawn. A piece of knotted rope hung from the branch, and underneath it, the earth had been scooped out to form a deep basin, now choked and brimming with a dense thicket of stinging nettles.

‘Wow,’ said Max. ‘That looks nasty.’

‘If you fell in there,’ said Lucy, ‘would you have to be taken to hospital?’

‘Probably not,’ said Max. ‘But it would really hurt.’

Caroline said: ‘Not a very good place to put a rope, really. I don’t think you’d better do any swinging on that.’

‘But that’s our game,’ said a boy’s breathless voice behind them.

They turned round to see that Joe had run over to join them. His father was following.

‘What game would that be?’ Caroline asked.

‘It’s a dare game,’ Lucy explained. ‘You have to get on the rope and then the others push you and then you have to swing across like ten times.’

‘I see,’ said Chris, in a tone of resigned understanding. ‘Somehow this sounds like one of your ideas, Joe.’

‘It was, but everybody wants to do it,’ his son insisted.

‘Well, I don’t think you’d better.’

‘What would you do,’ Caroline asked, ‘if one of you fell in there? The stinging would be terrible. It would be all over your body.’

‘That’s the point of the game,’ said Joe, with the triumph of one stating the obvious.

‘There are lots of dock leaves,’ said Lucy. ‘So if you fell in, you could make yourself better.’

‘Five words,’ said Caroline. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

Joe let out a sigh of resignation and turned away. But he was not given to brooding on life’s disappointments, and his enquiring mind was never at rest for long. As they headed down towards the estuary path, Caroline could hear him asking his father why it was that dock leaves always grew in proximity to stinging nettles, and she could hear his father replying – as always – with a concise, informed explanation. Her eyes followed them as their figures receded, and as Joe’s two sisters ran and caught up with them: the bodies of father and son, so alike already in shape and bearing despite the years between them, and the eager, thronging daughters – the three children clustered around their father, drawn together into an inseparable group by blood and mutual affection and above all their unflinching regard for him. And she watched Max and Lucy following them down the same path: hand in hand, yes, but somehow sundered – some force intervening, holding them apart – and sundered in a way that she herself recognized, from personal experience. For an instant, in the odd paradox of their closeness and separation, she saw an emblem of her own relationship with Max. A shaft of keen, indefinable regret pierced her.

Now she could hear the two of them talking as they walked away.

‘So why do dock leaves always grow next to stinging nettles?’ Lucy was asking.

‘Well,’ Max answered. ‘Nature is very clever …’

But whether he managed to tell her any more than that she couldn’t say, their voices being carried off by the sea breeze.

How did he do it, Max found himself wondering on that walk. Just how did Chris get to be so bloody knowledgeable?

He could have understood it if he was just talking about things which fell within his own area of academic expertise. But it wasn’t only that. The fact was that he knew everything. Not in an offensive, I’m-cleverer-than-you sort of way. It was merely that he had been alive for forty-three years and in that time he had taken notice of the world around him, absorbed a lot of information and retained it. But why couldn’t Max have done that? Why couldn’t he remember the simplest things about physics, biology or geography? How could he have lived for so long in the physical world and not learned anything about its laws and principles? It was embarrassing. It made him realize that he was drifting through life in a dream: a dream from which he would maybe awaken one day (probably in about thirty years’ time) only to realize that his time on this earth was almost over, before he had even got the slightest handle on it.

Max looked up from these gloomy reflections as he felt Lucy’s hand slip out from his grasp, and saw her run away to catch up with Chris and his three children. The genial, ramshackle, ivy-covered outline of Ballycarberry Castle rose up before them, and she was running towards the point where the river curved, where it was sometimes possible to cross at low tide. Chris was explaining to Joe and his daughters about the tides and the gravitational pull of the moon, a subject (like so many others) of which Max had never achieved anything approaching mastery. He began to half-listen, but then started to feel self-conscious and, by way of distraction, picked up a flat stone which he attempted to skim across the river’s surface. It sank after a couple of bounces. Turning to catch up with the others, he found that Chris had now gathered all four of the children around him beside an exposed cross-section of the river bank. Even Lucy seemed to be paying attention.

‘Now, when a great chunk of the earth is exposed like this,’ Chris was saying, ‘the brilliant thing is that it tells you all sorts of stuff about the history of the area. Can anyone remember what these different layers of soil are called?’

‘Horizons!’ said Joe, keenly.

‘That’s right. They’re called soil horizons. Now, normally the top layer – this thin, dark layer here – is known as the “O” horizon, but this one would be classified as a “P” horizon, because this part of the countryside is so watery. Do you know what “P” stands for – something that you find a lot in Ireland?’

‘Peat?’

‘Peat, exactly! Then we have the topsoil, and the subsoil. Notice how the different horizons get lighter and lighter as you get further down. Even here, though, the subsoil is still quite dark. That’s because Ireland has a very rainy climate and rain is very effective in breaking down rock to form soil, and also in distributing nutrients through the soil. But the soil here is also quite sandy, because we’re at the mouth of an estuary.’

‘What is an estuary, Dad?’

‘An estuary is any coastal area where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with saltwater from the ocean. So, estuaries form the boundaries between terrestrial systems and marine systems. They tend to have very rich soil because it’s full of decaying plants and animals. Look here in the subsoil, for instance …’

Oh, it was impressive stuff, Max had to admit. But then, you would expect Chris to know about soil. He had been teaching geology at university level for twenty years, and now he was a senior lecturer. Max wondered if his daughter realized this. Probably not. She was starting to stare at him with the same starry-eyed adoration as his own children.

Soon Chris, his daughters and Joe moved on, chatting away happily, making for the three stone steps which had been cut roughly into the wall, allowing people to climb up onto the walkway and thence along the grassy path to the castle itself. Lucy, meanwhile, lingered uncertainly. She took her father’s hand again and looked up into his eyes. It wasn’t at all clear that she had understood the finer points of that little lecture, but she had definitely understood something: she had understood the bonds of faith and admiration that connected Chris’s children to their father; she had understood the cheerful reverence with which they had listened to him. She had understood all of this; and Max knew, now, that she was wondering why the same feelings did not bind her to her own father. Or rather, she was now groping for those feelings, with a kind of forlorn hope. She wanted to be talked to in that way. She wanted her father to explain the world to her, with the same confidence and authority that Chris beamed out to his children with every word. As they, too, began to walk on, she looked around her, and Max knew that she was taking in her surroundings with a new kind of curiosity; knew that she was going to have questions of her own to ask him, soon, and that he would be expected to have the answers.

It happened sooner than he had been anticipating.

‘Daddy,’ she began, innocently enough.

‘Mmm?’ said Max, stiffening himself for the impending curve ball.

‘Daddy, why is the grass green?’

Max laughed, as though this was the simplest and most innocuous question in the world; opened his mouth to allow the answer to fall almost carelessly from his lips; then stopped, as he realized that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say.

Why is the grass green? What kind of question was that? It just was green. Everybody knew that. It was one of those things you took for granted. Had anybody ever explained to him why the grass was green? At school, maybe? What would that have come under – biology, geography? That was ages ago. Of course Chris would know, yes. He had been to a posh school, and he would know that it was something to do with … was it chromosomething, some word like that? Didn’t chromo mean colour in Greek, or Latin? Chromosomes, was it something to do with chromosomes? Or that other thing that sunlight did to plants … photo … photo … photosynthesis. Was that what made things go green … ?

He glanced down at Lucy. She was looking up at him patiently, trustingly. She seemed very young, for a moment, younger even than her seven years.

It was no use. Silence would be the worst response of all. He was going to have to tell her something.

‘Well …’ he began. ‘Well, every night, the fairies come out, with their little paint brushes and their pots of green paint …’

God, he hated himself sometimes.

Caroline and Miranda had finished preparing lunch some time ago, and were relaxing at the kitchen table, a bottle of red wine sitting between them, already half-emptied.

‘You see,’ Caroline was saying, ‘the trouble with Max is …’

But there lay the problem. What was the trouble with Max? And even if she knew, should she really be confiding it in this woman, the wife of her husband’s best friend, a woman she barely knew? (Although she was already getting to know – and like – her pretty well on this holiday.) Wouldn’t that in itself be a kind of betrayal?

She sighed, giving up – as usual – the struggle to put her finger on it. ‘I don’t know … He just doesn’t seem very happy, that’s all. There’s something about his life … about himself … Something that he doesn’t like.’

‘He’s very quiet,’ Miranda conceded. ‘But I assumed he was always like that.’

‘He’s always been quiet,’ said Caroline. ‘But it’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I can’t seem to get a word out of him. I suppose he talks all day at work.’ Changing tack, she said: ‘I wonder what he and Chris have in common. They’re such different people, and yet they’ve been friends for so long.’

‘Well, that counts for a lot in itself, doesn’t it? Shared history, and so on.’ Miranda could sense something bearing down upon Caroline, some weight of apprehension. ‘Lots of couples go through difficult times,’ she said. ‘And Lucy seems very close to her father.’

‘You think so?’ Caroline shook her head. ‘They want to be close. But they don’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know how to do it.’ Attempting to drain off her wine glass, but finding it empty, she said: ‘What Lucy would really like is a brother or sister. Your Joe looks in seventh heaven, with a big sister and a little sister to play with. It’s so great, seeing the three of them like that. How families should be …’

‘It’s not too late, is it?’

Caroline smiled. ‘I’m not too old, if that’s what you mean. But it’s probably too late in other ways.’ She reached for the bottle, refilled their glasses, and took what was more than a sip. ‘Ah well. Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. The most painful words in the language.’

How much further this conversation would have progressed, how much more dangerously confiding Caroline might have become, they would never know. At that moment the back door of the farmhouse was flung open. They could hear the distressed voices of children and adults from the garden, and now Chris rushed purposefully into the kitchen, looking harrassed and short of breath.

‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Where’s the First Aid box?’

Miranda jumped to her feet.

‘What’s happened? Who’s hurt?’

‘It’s Joe, mainly. Lucy a bit as well. Baking soda – that’s what we need. Do we have any baking soda?’

‘But what happened?’

Without waiting to hear the answer, Caroline ran outside on to the lawn, where a scene of chaos was awaiting her. Joe lay stretched out on the grass, motionless: at first she thought that he was unconscious. Max was kneeling beside him, a hand laid tenderly on his brow. Lucy came running to meet her mother, and flung herself at her, clasping her fiercely with bare arms which, she could not help noticing, were mottled and livid with angry crimson blotches.

‘What have you done to yourself, love? What happened?’

‘It was the nettle game,’ Lucy told her, between sobs. ‘The dare. We came back from the castle and then started playing it and Daddy was pushing Joe on the rope. He was swinging really hard and then he fell off and landed right in the middle of the pit. I climbed in and tried to help him out.’

‘That was brave of you.’

‘It really, really hurts.’

‘I bet it does. Don’t worry. Chris and Miranda will be out here, any second now. They’re finding some stuff to put on it.’

‘What about Joe? He was wearing shorts and everything. His legs …’

Caroline turned to look at the figures of Joe, stretched out on the lawn, and her husband at his side. In just a few seconds Joe’s father and mother would have reached their son, tending to him, ministering to his needs. But in years to come, it would not be those next few minutes’ confusion and frantic activity that Caroline would remember. It would be this one moment of stillness: the tableau (as she would always recall it) she saw laid out before her as she turned. The prostrate body of Joe, lying so still, and so reposeful, that one might even imagine him to have died. And kneeling beside him – crying, too, unless Caroline was mistaken – her husband, fixated by the pain and distress not of his own daughter, but of another man’s child. And the strange thing about it was that, after watching Max so closely, and with so much bewilderment, during the last few days, after tormenting herself with the riddle of his unhappiness, his maladjustment, his sense of being forever ill at ease in the world, at that moment she saw him – or imagined that she saw him – in an attitude that for once suited him, and made perfect sense: she saw him as a man surrendering to a feeling that must have come so naturally, with such a healing inevitability, that it might almost have felt like a release; a man in mourning over the death of the son he had always wanted.