Cathy had often gone out shooting with her father at Easton, but her attitude to the sport had changed after she spent a week with Paul at a big country house in Scotland. Each day the men had got up at the crack of dawn, while it was still dark, and vanished for most of the day. The women amused themselves at the house. Cathy had spent her time peacefully, a little bored, walking the family spaniels, playing with their hostess’s baby son, daydreaming about one day having a child of her own. Just holding the baby, warm and smelling of talc and milk, made her weak with tenderness.
On the final day, the women in the party had driven across the moors in a shooting brake to join the men, taking a picnic with them. It had been a raw autumn day, a herring-bone sky, silver, glistening, with lines of cloud feathering the distance, a chilly wind carrying the scent of heather and gorse, the panic cries of unseen birds, a smell of cordite. The women unpacked the picnic baskets, the wine, the baskets of sliced French bread, the smoked salmon and smoked ham, leaving the hot chicken and pasties in a bed of straw to hold the warmth as long as possible.
Through binoculars Cathy had hunted for Paul in a line of men all dressed alike, in tweed
jackets and trousers. Her heart had moved with tenderness, she had thought again about the baby they would one day have, and then he had lifted his gun and she had instinctively followed the line of it upwards, and seen the birds flying, their feathers bright amber, turquoise, black, shimmering with beauty and bright life.
She heard the crack, crack, crack of the guns. Birds stopped in mid-flight, with a jerk, their wings drooped, and they spiralled downwards into the heather. Cathy had felt sick; it had been a moment of terrible grief and pity for the bright life blown apart. It had changed her right down at her roots. She had known at that minute that she would never kill a living thing again.
That was what Sophie had done to her yesterday – she had been happy, excited about her father’s visit, her sky had been blue, her wings carrying her, when suddenly she had been shot out of the sky without warning and plummeted to earth.
In his bedroom Cathy’s husband lay listening to the soft, barely audible voices of the women at the other end of the corridor. What were they talking about? Cathy had been angry when he spoke to her, had claimed not to believe a word of Sophie’s story, yet he had seen something very different in her face and voice last night. Bewilderment, curiosity, a protectiveness that was purely instinctive – she half-believed it, whatever she might say.
Blood talks to blood, he thought, even if you aren’t aware of what is happening to you. You gave it other explanations, made up other reasons for what you felt – but it was that basic, blood calling to blood.
A shudder ran through him. Oh, Christ. Sweet Christ. He still couldn’t believe it had happened to him. To them. Blood calling to blood . . . yes, and the family face . . . features so alike, instantly familiar, making the heart ache without knowing why.
He hadn’t slept at all, he’d been far too shocked – yet he wasn’t tired. He was wide awake, his body so tense that he felt he was on wires, like one of those puppets in old TV programmes, jerking along in slow movement, not quite co-ordinating, hands moving, then feet, mouth clacking open and shut, eyes staring this way, then that, the rest of the face all wood, flat-painted, unreal.
That was just it, he wasn’t real, he was no longer living in real time, in a real place. He was out of it, in limbo, struggling to come to terms with what fate had done to him. What was he going to do? Every time he asked himself that question he felt the world spin dizzyingly around him and the words break up, sting like poisonous insects. What? What was he? What was he going to do? Over and over and over again. What was he? What was he going to do?
He heard Cathy leave the other girl’s bedroom, heard her quiet footsteps, then her breathing outside his door.
He had to tell her the truth – but how? How could he? He shut his eyes, his stomach cramped; agony bled inside him, as if he’d swallowed broken glass. He had locked the door, she couldn’t get in, but he couldn’t bear it if she even knocked, or spoke to him through the door. Pain invaded every part of his body. He felt her out there, listening; the pulse of her came to him through the door, her body-warmth beating into him, making his body leap as it had from the first second he saw her. Sickness began to well up inside him.
Never again. He had to stop feeling like that. He must forget how he had felt once. Somehow he had to find the strength to walk away from her. Their marriage was over. He couldn’t stay with her.
But his mind pulsated with images of them in bed, moving hotly, or in slow, sensuous delight . . . her mouth . . . her breasts . . . the hot, moist warmth between her thighs, into which he plunged again and again . . .
Christ, no! Don’t remember. Mustn’t remember. He had to leave her. But he could never tell her why. He could imagine how she would look at him if he tried to explain . . .
He couldn’t bear to hurt her like that.
But he was hurting her, wasn’t he? She was bewildered, unhappy, confused, and he was making it worse for her. But what else could he do? He was trapped; he couldn’t see any other way out. Could she hear his breathing? Did she guess that he was awake but pretending to be asleep? Of course she did. She wasn’t stupid. Oh, God, my love, Cathy . . . He hated knowing what he was doing to her, but . . . what could he say? It was over. Over.
After a long moment she walked away, and tears of ice formed behind his closed lids. They didn’t fall, they merely blinded him, reminding him of snow on his lashes and in his eyes when he walked through one of the blizzards which blew, most winters, across the snowy landscapes of the Ramsey family estate at Easton, making the familiar suddenly strange, unrecognizable, taking away all the landmarks you knew, so that you lost your bearings and had no idea where you were any more, or which way to go to get home.
That was how he felt now: lost, helpless, terrified. He didn’t know where he was, who he was, he didn’t know anything any more; where to go, what to do, what to think.
There was a fiery image in his head, one he had first seen many years ago and never forgotten.
When he first came to London, he had visited the Tate Gallery, a grey, ornate, formal building which reminded him of Paris, and stood like one of the great buildings of Paris, on the riverside – except that this was the Thames, not the Seine. Wandering through the high-ceilinged rooms within the gallery, he had gone to look at French paintings, Impressionists, Pointillistes with their bright, coloured dots of paint giving a hazy, summery look to what they painted, because they gave him a warming injection of Frenchness, made him feel at home for a while. Those first months in England he had felt lost and lonely, and although he had good English before he came it wasn’t always easy to understand what people said. Londoners had a cheerful laziness of tongue that baffled him, his first glimpse of how many varieties of English there were – from the twang of Liverpudlians to the slow brogue of country people.
Reaching a distant gallery, he came to a room full of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sat down on a leather bench to rest before he made his way back to the door. By sheer chance he had sat down in front of one vast canvas in which a towering archangel with glowing, spread wings dwarfed the guilty, shrinking human beings crouched in front of him. He knew at once what he was looking at – Adam and Eve being turned out of the Garden of Eden by an angel with a flaming sword. The colours were magnificent, the image unforgettable.
For ten minutes he had sat and stared. When he left he took the image with him, and he had gone back many times to stare at the painting, although if you had asked him what fascinated him so much about it he would have been hard put to find an answer.
He had thought, at the time, that maybe the painting represented for him his feelings about his past, his inability to go back to places and people he loved deeply, the feelings of loss that swamped him if he ever thought about his early life. You couldn’t go back; time went on, it didn’t stop or reverse. Paul Brougham had come into being as the product of hard-headed common sense, the ability to face facts, a drive to survive at any odds.
What had never occurred to him until now was the possibility that you might be able to foresee your future, recognize what was to come, know your own death. Second sight? Garbage, he would have said, until now. Time flows forward – you cannot see what lies ahead.
Now that he stood on quicksands and felt the ground shifting under him, knew how perilously weak his grasp on his whole life had always been, he was no longer so sure about anything. All he knew for certain was that the archangel with his fiery sword stood between him and Cathy now and would do forevermore, and, like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he had been made aware of his nakedness and weakness, and was hiding from the Voice of God.
He had always prided himself on being able to think on his feet, fast and confidently, come rapidly to the right decisions. But now, with disaster staring him in the face, he was paralysed, unable to think at all. He had run away, locked himself in this room, alone with his pain, a pain so bad it was crippling him; he couldn’t make a move in any direction, a checked king on the chessboard he had once thought he ruled.
The break
fast-room was at the side of the house with high, wide windows looking over a private walled garden which was bare of flowers at this time of year but in spring was full of purple crocus, golden daffodil, the white bells of lily of the valley. In a month or so the first green spears of the snowdrops would be pushing through the soil under the lilac trees, the buddleia, the azalea, which was already thick with tight buds.