So Many Ways to Begin

Maybe I knew all along, he said. Maybe Mary did too. Maybe we were both just kidding ourselves, really. She leant towards him, her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees, waiting for him to go on. He looked at her, almost apologetically. I wanted it to be her, he said. I so much wanted it to be her. And I assumed Sarah was talking to her mother about it, checking things. I just didn't know. I thought it was worth taking the chance. He sat up straighter, sluicing handfuls of water across his body. I had all this stuff, he said, waving his hands as if to conjure the photos and scrapbooks out of thin air. I just wanted to hear what she would say, he said. He slipped back down into the water, closing his eyes and laying his hands across his face, and she stood up to leave.

But there was so much more I would have told her Eleanor, he said, his voice muffled by his hands. There was so much I wanted to be able to say. She looked at him.

I know, she said. He lowered his hands, and looked at her.

I know, she said again.

She closed the bathroom door and left him to it, turning on the television news, looking at the supper menu and the tourist leaflets in the folder by the bed, wondering what he thought he was going to do now. Later, she heard the water draining from the bath, and the rattle of it being refilled, and she looked up to see him coming out, avoiding her eyes, sitting on the edge of the bed with water trickling down his hunched back. She said nothing, but undressed quickly and quietly, slipping into the bathroom and closing the door behind her. She expected to find him asleep when she came back out, or watching television, or sitting blankly by the window, or even to have gone out walking and left her a note. So she was surprised, when she opened the bathroom door, to find him waiting for her, with his towel wrapped around his waist and a look in his eyes that she recognised at once.

Really? she said, arching an eyebrow and taking a towel to dry her hair, nodding over at the supper menu: aren't you hungry?

Really, he said, moving towards her, placing his shaking hands against her warm damp skin.

It was always almost the same. The unbuttoning of the back of the skirt. Half a smile at the corner of the mouth. Her hand, sooner or later, on the back of his head. Sometimes the smile would come first, sometimes the unbuttoning, and sometimes, catching him by surprise, the hand pressing lightly on the back of his head, making him kneel.

They would almost always be in the bedroom, and almost always on the bed, the curtains closed or half open, the window hauled up or bolted down, the lights on or off or lowered. Sometimes the rain would hurtle across the roof and against the window while he pulled her shirt or her sweater up over her head, pressing his mouth against her neck and her shoulder and her collarbone, kissing her throat until her familiar faint sighs brushed against the top of his head. Sometimes the evening's light seemed to last for hours, the warmth throbbing up from the hot dry streets and in through the open window while they lay naked together on the bed. Sometimes the sky would be flat and still and grey.

There would be the feel of her thighs beneath the stretched fingers of his hands, hot and red from the bath, still smelling of soap and towel, or cold from a long day outside. The skin gradually less smooth than it had once been, less soft, her waist a little fuller, her legs a little heavier, and what Kate had once called her creases becoming ever more pronounced beneath the touch of his own ageing hands.

Sometimes it would be snowing, and the room would be filled with a wavering white light, shadows and refractions falling across the walls.

She would step backwards, and sink on to the bed, and lie back with her legs trailing to the floor, both of her hands pushing against the back of his head, and he would follow her with his mouth.

Sometimes, when they were older, his knees would make a cracking sound as he lowered himself to the floor. I think I'm getting too old for this, he would say, and she would shush him as she worked her fingers into his hair. Sometimes his jaw would click, loudly, and they would both have to stop and laugh for a moment.

It would be in the morning, when neither of them were in a hurry to go out, or it would be in the afternoon when they both got home, or it would be last thing at night. It would almost always be the last thing at night.

She would shift on the edge of the bed, and make the sounds he liked to hear, and almost always reach that moment, the jerking forward of her head, the sudden lift of her legs around his ears, the look of someone bolting awake from a dream before settling gently down with a long slow sigh.

He would trail his fingers across her waist, her belly, her breasts. He would pinch her skin. He would stand up - and sometimes it would take him longer to stand than it might once have done, pushing himself up from the floor with a hand on the edge of the mattress, rubbing his knees - and he would look down at her, stretched out, lying across their bed in the bedroom they had shared for so long.

There were times when they went without these things for weeks at a time, months, a year. There were times when they undressed in the evenings with their backs to each other, or in another room, climbing into two halves of a silent bed and staring at opposite walls of the room in the near-darkness. There were times when they slept in different rooms, and woke a little colder than usual, blinking, trying to remember what was wrong.

Sometimes he would bring her a cup of tea in the morning and put it by the side of the bed and open the curtains a little. He would watch her, as fragile-looking in sleep still as she had always been, her eyelashes flickering, her clenched hands drawn comfortingly up against her face, and want nothing more than to climb into bed beside her, to curl up into her warmth. He would wake her, a hand resting on her shoulder and his voice low and steady, and tell her that he wanted her to take the pills before he went to work.

Sometimes she would bring him a cup of tea in the morning, and he would already be awake. Sitting up against the wall in the corner of Kate's old bed, reading, or watching the grey light brighten through the open curtains. Unable to sleep because he'd already slept through most of the previous day. Without his work, he told her once, the work he'd spent his whole life either doing or preparing for, he'd been lost for what to do with his time. I feel so tired all the time now, he would tell her, his voice flat and low. I feel uncomfortable, like I need a bath or like I need clean clothes. I feel like I'm letting you down and I can't do anything about it, he would say, his head lowered, his voice drained. I know, she would tell him, touching his hand. Really. I know.

The doctor told me I should find a new hobby, he said to her once, coming back from an appointment. They caught each other's eye in sudden recognition, and laughed for the first time in weeks.

She would almost always open her eyes after a few moments, propping herself up on her elbows and looking at him expectantly, or sitting forward and drawing him towards her, kissing and stroking and taking him into her mouth until he was ready to join with her on the bed. Sometimes it took him longer to be ready than it once had. It seemed to be one of the things t

hat happened, with the cracking knees, the thinning hair, the fatter waist; a slower response of the body to the prompting of the excited mind, or the mind simply slipping for a moment to something else altogether; to whose car alarm that was going off outside, to how Kate was getting on at school, to whether tomorrow was the day for putting out the bins.

Sometimes the phone would ring, and they would ignore it, letting its shrill little grab for attention go unanswered while they moved closer together in the familiar way. Sometimes the phone would ring and one or other of them would say sorry, hold on, but it might be, I was expecting, and leave the other one waiting, impatiently or patiently or finding their place in the book they were halfway through.

They tried to use the lounge again after Kate left home, when they had the house to themselves once more. They tried - after a slow stunned month of feeling lost in their own home, of not knowing quite what shape their days should take now that they didn't have a daughter to feed or provide for or watch growing up - to undress each other on the rug in front of the new sofa, and to kiss, and to relearn what it meant to be just the two of them in their world. But they would hear voices somewhere, footsteps, and turn to the door suddenly, or check for the third time that the curtains really were closed, or be distracted by the draught coming under the kitchen door, and they would almost always move back up the stairs to their bed.

Sometimes he would shape a hand around her breast, and hold it there, still, feeling its weight as they moved.

Sometimes he would reach behind her and trace his fingers up and down her spine until she shivered.

His sister's children had left home two years before Kate did, rushing off to university in London and in Leeds, and she'd warned them what it would be like. You spend so long fitting your life around theirs, she said, you forget what you used to do before they were born. You look forward to having all that time to yourself, and then you want to phone them every night to see how they're getting on. She came to visit them a lot after she and John were divorced, staying with Dorothy or, later, in Kate's old room. He was a very good man, she said to them once after a bottle of wine, a very good father, but I was just so bored. We had nothing to say to each other, she said.

They waited a moment, settling together on the bed, and she tilted his head up with one finger so that she could kiss his throat. He shifted her arm so that it stretched out across the pillow, and held it there with his fingers curled into her hand, and they began to move. The bed was smaller than theirs, and softer, and for a moment it felt strange. But the bath had woken them up a little, and they were both full of nervous energy from the way the afternoon had unfolded, and it felt good to be doing this thing that was almost but never quite the same. It was the first time they'd been away for the night together since before Kate had been born, and there was an excitement to being in an unfamiliar bed, and a comfort to being in each other's familiar arms. She reached around to the back of his legs, tracing a line from his thighs to the back of his neck.

Their bags were on the chest of drawers by the door, the envelope of reprinted photos Mary had given them as they left spread out to one side. His trousers, shirt and jumper were folded across the back of the dressing-table chair. Her skirt was heaped halfway between the bed and the en suite bathroom. The fan in the bathroom was still whirring, shakily. They could hear the voices of the kitchen staff echoing up from the courtyard below.

He shifted his weight a little, and slid one hand beneath the small of her back. She kissed him, hard, pulling his mouth down to hers with both hands on the back of his head. He caught his breath and hesitated. She tipped back her head, pushing her shoulders into the bed and lifting her back into a shallow arch. He kissed her throat, her cheeks, her eyes, her ears, quickly, holding her face between his hands. She lifted her legs a little higher, the rough soles of her feet scratching against the backs of his knees.