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The radio, out of the early morning blue, stops as suddenly as if someone has hit the switch. It vacillates in and out of a sporadic stutter as she is ripping out a line of basting stitch and abruptly cuts out mid-sentence. Some monotonous, disembodied newscast-forecast voice saying today's chance of rain and tomorrow—
Silence. It is a silence that stitches back down her life.
To no avail she tries all the usual tricks, turning useless dials in the distorted quiet, but it remains implacable, vacuous, dead voltage and polished woodgrain and gilded grille. Soundless.
Before something breaks it's just ordinary. You think it's just a box, four corners, the corner of your eye, just another place for the eye to rest, noise and knobs, undifferentiated, just la la la la and the waltz. Then you open it, look down it's diverging wires, take apart the tabletop lines of its architecture and the unimaginable incommensurate constituent tangle of its mechanism and it becomes a new shape, it is in pieces and it is larger in silence than it ever was in sound. It's like absolutes that way, like wide country and wild weather. It makes you feel your smallness.
She is turning the edge of a glass in a dishcloth when she tells him. Coffee in the flask, mail on the table for you, don't forget your umbrella, and by the way the wireless is out and could you have a look.
He is sweeping in through the door, sweeping in out of the pale morning as though to outrun it. “Where's this mess of mine you always put away. One would think you're ashamed of it.” He catches her eye, flashes a bit of daylight. “Disorder trembles before you. Thank you as always.”
“Welcome as always. Stay a minute, won't you, you've only just got in. Get a bite of breakfast in you. This isn't a railway station.”
“Only passing through. You are the tour de force, Mrs. Hall, the rest of us can only but tour.” He has circled the room from one side to the other, picked things up and put them down. In the door he pauses with pad and paper, pencils something in, glancing in some distraction between her and his watch. “You've been at every cobweb this morning, is there something the matter? Seven, eight—What day is it?”
“Thursday. Don't like an empty house, I suppose.”
“Nor I. Our friends and colleagues will return from equine conference ere long, so much the better for my time. There's a sausage in that pocket there, before I forget. Some sort of heirloom, wouldn't you know. Friend of the family. It may have officiated a wedding. Damn.”
In a practiced economy of disaster he has fractured the pencil lead and she has, even before this, extended to him another, which he receives as efficiently.
“Here. Don't say you were up at Dobson's again.”
“So I was. You know what he's like. You mention it's time you got on and he just hands you things. Don't laugh, it's dreadful. God help me I didn't know what to do with it.”
“And I do?”
“You make use of all us scraps and wastrels. Sorry, behind schedule something fierce. Afraid I must love and leave. Good morning good afternoon.”
“And the wireless?”
She watches him go out saying yes, yes, straightaway, thank you. The backdoor shuts between them.
Sometimes it is like talking to two people at once: the one that crosses out of the room like it is a footchase without so much as looking at her, and the one that meets her eye and says all there is to say without so much as speaking. Often he walks like he is already somewhere else, never the same dance twice, rolling down the hill boundless, unstoppable, eyes anywhere but the road, one hand on the wheel because who needs brakes. Often he stands and looks at her so telegraphically she'd hear him anywhere.
In the unregarded silence she opens the cabinet and puts the cup to its place.
Well, she thinks, and then again: Well.
There are days when everything comes at her arms up, the clock, the curtains fists out. Somehow the action never completes. The fact does not finish. In a disconnected way it happens again and again. It happens in repeat, in repetition. Aerial and aerospatial. Halfway and partway, and miles and miles far into the air the air.
The fist coming at her, the phone. The ring, the ring.
Just that, nothing more. No contact.
It's like it was on the naval ships, violence in semaphore. It happens elsewhere. Cipher and smoke-signal. Sea depth and windspeed. Submerged and submarine. Nautical and underwater. Dot dot dash dash.
Edward writes to her in just that way, his clipped and worklike lettering, studious and steady, surprised-looking lines, all the alphabet tumbled about on the page and each envelope coming to her as if accidental, in sentences not quite approaching the word father.
Silence, silence.
All silence is ancient. It is the first thing there was. It is prehistoric. It is like the dark, like language, like meaning: what exists in it, undefined, unrefined and just beyond the senses, is the possible shape of everything we know. The innumerable expansive relative shape of ourselves, at once profound and monstrous.
Everything is so still. Before he comes back in from the rounds she is scrubbing corners. Before even that she has sorted bottles, counted pills, scoured every scum, picked up all the silver and all the brass, polished and replaced and reordered and reduced.
She can hear almost through the walls the day, even with her eyes closed, the people whistling to work, the peonies, the white peeling paint, and further, across the flags and the street, the wind and wet stone, streetlamps, the upland clover beneath the boots of the farmer whose foal comes tomorrow, all that seems to run together, the river working through it, the eyes of paintings and busts and the men that stand under them in their overcoats, tired, weathered, walking beyond the past that comes to us without color, the stairs they must climb to look out at it, out to the fields and the fell, to the peeling paint, to here, to one day blue as a marble and knocking into the next.
Now hearing the shut of drawers and doors she finds him back and forth in the sitting room at a rapid pace, lifting pages, lids, letters and envelopes, bent over a maelstrom of countertops and windowsills, upturned rugs, pages marked and unmarked, books read and unread, volumes and volume and still circling.
She stands in the door looking at it. Nearest to her are the open pages of some piece of philosophy, cracked binding, the word anamnesis, and on top of this and obscuring it an earmarked spread on pathology, axial, cross-sectional.
“Didn't hear you come in. I've been buried in it this morning; If I don't run the house, it runs me. Incidentally I believe you'll wear out the floor if you don't stop, not to mention yourself. Do I have reception?”
He looks at her only once, quickly, his eyes near and far. “What? Yes. Yes. I'm listening.”
“What's the problem with the clutter we had already? Let's have it, what have you lost. And put down that good crystal.”
“Lost—nothing. Please go.”
Without looking at it he hands it to her. He has put an hand out to the wall as if to hold up himself or the house. It is not a balanced gesture. It is a gesture that belongs to the disorder.
“You wouldn't like another set of eyes?”
“Why stop there—eyes, ears, arms, a whole other living person bearing my resemblance to whom you then may continue to speak. What I'd like most, in point of fact it can't be overstated that what I'd like the very most in this moment is to be left alone. Now, if it isn't much trouble.”
She looks at him fixedly. Fist and phone. Ring. Dials and dials, dead tone and stereo stutter and silence and silence.
She says, blinking once, “What's the matter?”
“Alone. Alone. Need I spell it.”
“Can you?”
“For God's sake let me be,” he says. Probably he does not mean to knock the mirror but he has brought down his hand hard from the wall and it drops and bursts. The room plunges into glass, shrapnel, head down, don't move. They stand looking at one another, then not looking. Dot dash.
Perhaps she should clean it. Perhaps she should clean any number of things. Perhaps, perhaps. She doesn't know what happens between the room and the door. The room is a suspension of every thing, perfect fixture, candlesticks and cabinets, collection, recollection.
She leaves a note but not a time. She will be back shortly although she does not write it down. Dinner. Don't wait. She has written this note before. Many of these missives, in the hours after she writes them, go unnoticed and after all the clean corners and all the edges and that imperious alone, alone she would, if she is entirely honest, yes, she would like for him to worry just a little, little bit. She leaves it on the counter, leaves her pinafore on its hook, leaves with her boots on and the iron weight her service revolver.
Breakages and bad days are not new to her and she knows better than to feel the barb of any intimate truth, but even she in all her quietude can be unprepared; when he looks for what is right he looks to her, and all the right things to say have left her. She walks out with all the wrong things, takes them out under the non-collateral sky.
The field is open, the wind, the noon falling all around her bright and brittle, absconding detail. Once in this spot the Luftwaffe dropped chaff, streams of silver foil like shooting stars to blind the radar, and it threw its confusion across the country, the limestone, the land and the grass in wild and windlashed shapes, directionless, metallized stripes floating down in soft silence.
She lines glass, cans, pine cones on the fence and shoots. They shatter from greater and greater distance. Each shot comes back to her a different sound than when it hit. Obscure upwind echoes crack and crack across, out from the circular bore-black opening and back. The sound of the shatter comes back to her in bits and pieces, blown to bits. It seems to happen twice, the first crack when it hits and the second when it reaches her.
The sound scatters birds to wing, a shock of flight into the air and out of sight. She watches them circle, flock and flicker, the details of pinions, pinfeathers, plumage thrilling through the air, wondering what truths he would see.
There is a moment in the hurtling present between sound and distance where there is a life apart from this one. There is a life where she makes every shot. There is a life where she misses. The crack where each bottle comes apart, and the crack where it comes together.
With the rise of scientific discovery quantum mechanics is, at the end of the war, inventing new understandings of not understanding. Somewhere in Switzerland reality is only just being invented. Electricity runs, promethean, from out of the sky and into atrocities, into uncertainties, into the radio, into the morning news. Here, there, everywhere. A farmer would say lighting never strikes the same place twice. This isn't true but one can picture it, the multiple pieces rising and dropping, different every time, all things existing in two ways. True or false. Dead or alive.
On the way back she does not intend to delay but she misses the turn. In the morning it has rained, the sky marbled, and there is mist abstracted to the pavement. The road is narrow enough that she must circle back a second time, and in that time there is a stretch of mud, the ground surging up and sinking down and retreating under the tread in ruts, the tyres spinning and at last, after what feels like a long time trying and trying again, released. She follows the stone walls and all their elusive edges home, and it is gone dark when she finds the drive.
Not often but sometimes the way he looks at her is unreadable, glazed glass and closed examination. There were nights alone in the house, fewer now than before. Some select nights now few and far, when he stumbled through the halls dropping keys and coat, dragging fork through food and drinking his dinner and dropping fully clothed to his bed.
The night Tristan takes the four twenty all the way to a minefield under the Dolomites.
The night she left.
Tonight.
She is southbound, halfway home. The silence presses a glass into his hand. Another. She knows the bend of the road as well as the bend of his arm. Four hours after she closes the door she opens it. On the floor there is no trace of glass. Dogs unfazed, bowls filled, the house a distribution of everything flung. She picks backwards through the mess to the man, finding him half-dressed half-awake and lying half across the bed, the room a haze, and his eyes.
He looks at her, that crystal-glass look, half proof half fortune. Illegible and unreadable. Dilute and watered-down.
“Come back,” he says.
“So I have. Heaven's sake.”
“My head,” he says.
“So I see.”
“Hot.”
“Yes. Shoes off, now, you poor man.”
“Left me.”
“Afraid not. Just a little late.”
She fills a glass and sets it to the side, the table cup-marked in circles of recent wet. Feels the heat on his face and the burn of his eyes that follow her.
“Saw a few fashionable gents today, little brown caps. Sparrow, or what do you think?”
He turns his face into her hand. Mutters she doesn't know what.
His lips move on the lines of her life, turned open-mouth to the future. Sound and distance. Just a little late.
She traces his temples, his tired eyes, feeling his breath, heavy, hot to the touch, on her palm. He is trying to say something, speak beyond the small and uncertain liquid syllable that touches her skin. Damp evaporating vowels. The word sorry. I'm so sorry. Or the word stay.
In no time he is moving toward her. He is late arriving. In the lift, with some difficulty, he plunges through the doors just before they shut. She is already inside, to the back, her form stark against the brushed metal. She comes forward as he stands looking at the display. She touches every button and the gaps between them.
There you are. Did you have a good time?
Yes. Did you?
In no time they are in the back of a car. The road reaches under them. They course down acres, branching woodland and winterwhite lanes, ponds and poles of telegraphs. She reaches for him in the passing light, tilted to him in the turn, and places a hand on the inside of his knee.
Which way to home?
Let's take the longer way.
In no time there is a dark room, the sky pressed in to the second storey against tall windows. From inside she watches it. The room behind her is wide, spacious, high ceilings and vaulting shadows. Outside the rain is rearranging the earth. Somewhere just behind the door there is music, high life, hearth and fire. He comes into the dark space behind her from out of the song and the crack of yellow light. He stands warming the cold air, and she leans back to him.
You could have come to find me.
I'll always come to find you.
In no time across the terminal there is a crowd queuing for a flight that will depart in fifteen minutes for Detroit. He is at the kiosk counting out currency of every kind, asking for exchange. Unfolding, the flick of money in his fingers, ten, twenty. She gives him exact change, climbs across the console and puts her mouth to his eyes.
Do you promise?
Yes. I promise.
In no time they stand in front of applause, the lights hot across their faces. They cross the stage to standing ovation. Hundreds of hands in deafening, obliterating noise and thunder, shake and tremble. She finds his hand, he takes her fingers and they take their bow.
No matter what?
Always.
In no time in the living room the sun is a slat of light across the couch, blanketing his repose. He lies book to face, an arm tipped behind his neck. The air moves dust on dust. She crosses into the light, lifts his ankles and sits. Without a glance he drops them back to her lap.
Even if I run? Even if I break your heart?
Even then. Especially then.
In no time he is lying across his bed with all the bedclothes thrown, she is sitting with a hand to his face, feeling the arterial heat and the movement of his lips, lifelines, lifetimes, her thumb on the corner of his moving mouth.
The house resumes, the same house, the same night reaching over them, the closed cabinetry, the layers of paint and paper against the wall, oak panels and plank floors, the tick of the clock joined first hand and second. Her body beside his and the heat coming off him. The planted pots and all the silverware resting each to each, inch to inch, length to length, side to side.
Stay.
“I won't be far,” she says quietly. I'm here. Hush. I'm here now and don't you worry.
She runs her fingers through his hairline and back, come back, down the curve of his face, feels the expression drop out of him, then she stands, she lies in her own bed and she watches the dawn. She puts her hand to her own mouth, still warm from his.
Breakfast is a matter of endurance, balanced over crumbs and crusts. The sun spreads across the table, across the toast. He is sallow, small bites, smaller sleep. A little jam. A little salt. A little uncertainty. Good morning, is all he says to her, not unkindly, more tonelessly, and what a morning it is.
The silence is neat in its simplicity, mappable to the known order of the world. Every edge comes at her twice and everything is as predictable, ordered, plain as print. Fist and ring. But in fact it only ever happened once. It only ever needed to happen once. But in fact there were roses. But in fact there was a knot of string. The details, at this point in rifling through the annals, are nebulous. But in fact there is no fact. Those roses could have been begonias. She has long since given up her ring with the salvage to be melted down into bullets.
At the table he reads the paper, the paper over his face so that to look at him is two pages, two pages black and white and front and back. Where there might be his eyes there are facts rolled down the page. Price two shillings.
She puts down her cup and watches him put his mouth to it by mistake. Then again.
Later when he returns dragging in the day he is windblown, damp, and she is unexpectedly relieved when he looks at her, briefly, faintly, not with a smile but something in the same temperature. A sort of washed-out rain-weather warmth. She is taking weight on her fingertips as he touches her arm and passes, coming off the black white page and into her life.
“Just a moment, got flour on my hands. Long day?”
“Miles long, you wouldn't believe. Half the streets closed, some appalling accident. Dreary day for it, mud as thick as that. And the clients. Talking nineteen to the dozen while I try to auscultate the rumen. Spent five hours calving, tried pituitrin, every matter of method and then she died. I'd believe she died out of spite. Today I'd believe anything. No, I'll see to it.” He is out of his shoes and hanging his coat.
“Take your hat?”
“Got it.”
“You could try sometimes to seem as if you need me. If the mood strikes.”
“Seem?” He looks fully around at her. “Seem?”
“Yesterday you rather didn't. Seems to me.”
“Oh, I've had enough of today, don't let's bring yesterday into it.” He presses a hand to his face, for a time, and in a depleted way he sighs. “My head is like it's made of metal.”
“Something on your mind.”
“More than you'd like.”
“I'd like all of it, if you don't mind.”
“All of it? Going at that rate I won't. You might leave me a little for myself.”
“You might say something. You might for instance summarize.”
“Summarize. Like a clinical history. Put it on the clipboard.”
“If you like.”
“I might if you'd allow me the blessed time. No. No, I don't mean that. God, I don't mean to be so uncivil.”
“Then what do you mean?”
In protracted movements he puts away his bag, reaching past shelf and rack, his arm surrendered to wool and cloth, the ends of his hair dark with rain.
Without speaking he crosses to the piano and sits. He begins to play. His fingers move, first tenuous, then at greater and greater speed, seeming to multiply until he is two people, three, playing pluralized into immensity, into infinity, tense against the controlled limits of time and tempo and between the lines. Boundaries waver, wane. Now in the room with them are movements written years before, repeating, unrecorded, rising physically through the wood and the bone. The shape of multitudes and every relative life. Then slow, legato, languid and lingering. Ivory, solemn note and inflection flickers, fleets, and fades. In the thin vaporous tapering interval, between wordless sound and silence split and split again, they look at one another.
“Something like that,” he says.
“Beautifully done. Very nice.”
“If only I were.”
“Don't make me compliment you. I'm too upset.”
“You only just did.”
“Beg your pardon. I'll be unpleasant right away. What on earth are you doing.”
“Visualizing. No, I can't imagine it. You'll simply have to be pleasant.”
“Oh, don't make me like you. If I do then so do you.” She is laughing.
“Well, if I must. Another tune? Something with more color?”
“Define color.”
“With you. Without you.”
She sits beside him, wordlessly, follows the time and turns the page. In synchronous melody they move note for note, their shoulders together, the storm passing over, the wind prevailing, the fresh cut smell of hay and the chase to the end of the page. When he is done he leans to her, without opening his eyes, touching at only their sleeves.
“Thanks always.”
“Welcome always.”
Slowly he stands and goes from her a piece at a time, shoulders then body then hand, his fingers stroking lightly down the keys. As he walks to the foot of the stairs she fits the pages away inside the bench. Afterwards she is whisking and washing, hearing water through the pipes and the tranquil sound of his steps above. The dough rises, meanwhile the street walks, the phone rings, the light leaves.
Upstairs in the washroom she leans in through the door, speaking over the drawn curtain. The air is diffuse with steam, shifting, velvet and hot.
“Hope you don't still feel peculiar. Tris is still held up in Brawton so it's just the two of us against this pie I've made.”
“Have courage, doubtless we shall put it to its paces. I've stopped feeling metallic anyway. Don't linger so, you're letting in the air.”
Without apparent reservation she slips inside and shuts the door. She slides through the close air as through the circles of her sleeves.
“You got hold of him, then. What did he have to say, has the place finally tossed him out on his ear?”
“Back tomorrow. I'm not to tell you how many games of cribbage he's lost, which is six.”
“He loves losing. He plays to lose.”
“Perhaps. He's missing you, I know that much. Did you eat last night?”
“You have an excellent habit of editorializing truths. Ostensibly, no. Did you?”
“ 'Ostensibly, no.' ”
Absently she picks up shirt and trousers from where he has dropped them and folds them each, one and two, taking care with billfold and brass lighter. She sets these aside. His pockets are crumpled papers, packets, tickets. Pensively she passes unreflected in the mirror, opaque with fog.
“I can't stand when he goes on these jaunts, I really can't. Proud as I am, it's like the whole bloody village looks at me sideways. You'd think I was made of glass. The devil with them all.”
“Is that why.”
“I value your credible insights, I do, but when that busybody Sharpe asks if I'd like to have a drink I believe we have reached last resorts. As if it's a favor. Don't look at me like that. It's insulting is what it is. I like it not a whit.”
“Oh yes, you might enjoy yourself. Wouldn't that be so terrible.”
“Enjoying myself plenty now, thanks all the same.”
“Glad to hear it.” She takes his pipe, the stem between two fingers, and with practiced efficiency she puts it to his smiling lips. She strikes the flint and he cups the flame.
“Thank you. You've raised my spirits and how dare you. There's only one thing I like better than having no complaint.”
“That would be having one.”
“Exactly so I thought, how did you know.” He breathes, blurred with smoke. Pleasantly he says, “I think I despise everyone but you.”
“Don't talk nonsense. You'll like everyone perfectly in an hour.”
“Yes, I'm sure you're right. That's why I like you; you don't let me be hateful. God knows I know how to be.” Eventually he says, “Was that you last night or was that another dream?”
“It was. Now just a minute. I'm interested in this word another.”
“Once more, again, in addition. It does repeat. Did I thank you?”
“I won't hear a word of it. Tell me how it goes.”
“I'm afraid I'll disappoint you. Different every time and I never know how it ends. Damn this ration stuff, it comes apart like sand.”
“Use mine. Friend up the hill makes her own.”
“Will wonders never cease. What other enviable secrets do you keep from me, I wonder.”
“Only fir oil.”
“Pish, there must be one thing I don't know about you.”
She gives this a stoic contemplation, looking at the line of his arm, the pale gleam, the slick ceramic reflection. She says, neutrally, “Perhaps just the one.”
For a time there is silence except for the water. The sound of immersion, saturation, watercolor and the color of heat. She sits looking at the simple squares of the tiles, black and white, their parallel lines and all their straights and narrows.
Sometimes she feels her whole life is like someone else's crime, lived in the linked space between one circled wrist and the other.
“Did I ever tell you I was shot,” he says suddenly.
She looks at him, partial in the overhead light, waist and arm.
“No, I don't think you mentioned.”
“In Ypres, I mean. Not gravely. They gave it to me after they took it out of me. Such a deceptively small thing, you know, for something so large. What I mean to say is—oh, I don't know what. I've lost it. God. I turned the house up all yesterday; twenty some years I've had it and now I don't know what I did with it.”
Over the rim she reaches for his hand, warm from the water, and turns it over in hers. He does not look at her but moves his thumb and holds her by it. With detached gravity he sinks slightly, his shoulders touching the edge, and shuts his eyes.
“Reason runs out on me. I feel I've survived myself. I've lived beyond myself. I know I can be unendurable at times. Perhaps most.”
“You're a fair bit durable.”
“There are all these things to say. I suppose you know what.”
“I do.”
For a moment in the lack of air, in the lack of space between their fingers she holds her breath, feeling the ring coming at her and the round piece of metal that finds them each.
“I'm sorry I weren't there,” she says, plainly.
“I daresay it would've been quite an abbreviated war if you had been.” A thin smile.
“Yesterday.”
He nods, tacitly, and does not let go.
She holds his hand twenty years ago or today, for five minutes, for ten years, and she leaves him to finish. At dinner they have the house to themselves, the table or the world or both, and he clicks his glass to hers. Unhurried, unpretending, natural as the turn of the earth, these soapbubble nights. He is helping her clear plates, telling her in roundabout fashion the details of the day, laughing in parenthetical. It doesn't matter what is said. The way they talk has surpassed the finite limitations of word order. There are countless conversations and only one thing to say. One of them is this: She leaves out a letter because she will be coming back to it. He takes out a song and plays it for her alone. It is an evening like any other, and an evening unlike anything.
Then she is in bed, she is vividly awake and it is three in the morning. Listless, she lifts her eyes to the ceiling and to the night, listening to the unlit absence. Silence, silence. When sleep does not find her she she rises, resolves herself to it and ties her dressing gown. In slippers she follows a moonlit stripe down the stairs, descending to the kitchen. There she stops. He has come down before her to the table, and on the table he has taken the radio to a piece, looking at her consciously, furtively, as she enters. All the mechanics and him, exposed.
She says, drily, “You hardly know what to serve with it.”
“I suppose your apple pudding never goes amiss. You did say to have a look.”
“Not at this hour I didn't. Not now, Dash, you silly hound. Well, and how does it look?”
“Frightful, I'm at sea. It's like charybdis. I think if I look at formulas and mathematics any longer I will begin seeing mathematic pathogens and mathematic hooves. I hope I didn't wake you.”
“You didn't. How about a mathematic cup of tea?”
“Hang on, just let me set the scene for you. Dramatis personae. Man, trying. Machine, more trying.” He lifts his eyes. “I'm sorry. You probably wanted a moment to yourself. Should I leave you?”
She is holding shut the lapels of her gown. “Woman, doubtful. Just talk to me, won't you. I don't care what about.”
“Shall I verbalize, extemporize, expound, or palaver?”
“Prattle, please.”
“Right away. I shan't spare a detail. Come put your feet on the floor, and lend me some authenticity.”
Without sitting she leans at the table. Between them the controlled and commonplace variables of their lives are infinite and bizarre, abstruse edges like so much earth and air. Somewhere there is futility, fallibility, fragility, frailty. Here, tomorrow she will put down the dishes as she has always done, and he will come to them, she will ask and he will answer, as they have done before, as they will do again, the same bookcases, the same broken clock, the same broken car.
For a long time they sit saying all the things one says—how was the day and how are the dogs, the price of butter, the dinner next Sunday, who sent a letter and from where, what's at the cinema, what's in the news, the sound the engine in the Vauxhall has begun to make and the state of rations, the world coming back in pieces. The paper kite for Jimmy, the donations raised to replace the church bell. Somehow the sink is in the way. The table is a problem. The cups and all the rooms. She is thinking—is this all? Here? My God, isn't there some other place, some other room where they can talk?
“There, that's better.” He has piled composite parts into an unlikely pile and covered it over with a portion of the tablecloth. “Well, are you going to congratulate me or shall we nobly salute it and sing 'I vow to thee my country'.”
“Give one of your speeches, that will finish the job. How many hours have you been here?”
“No more than a million, estimably three. I don't know if it's a seal or a transistor or a valve or what's the matter. There's something very wrong, with it or more likely with me. Just look at this diagram.” He touches a chair.
“I'll read over your shoulder. You should be in bed, is what's the matter.”
“Yes, and you, only I find the cure is often worse than the disease. We should be listening to the usual resolute sound of national character or what all counts for fruitful thinking along Downing Street. This is all very obscene—do you mind? You're casting a shadow.”
“Sorry. Anything in that manual about trouble sleeping?”
“Not so you'd notice. No, let me do that. Please.”
To canine escort he puts on the kettle and sets out the cups and pours. Then the milk, the moon glancing off it, moonlight by the spoonful, blur and blend.
She says, carefully, “If you're not going out this morning you might want to lend me your coat. There's a loose thread or two needs mending.”
“That's my grey hair you're thinking of. I can tell. Is this all the sugar we've got? No, if we count my loose threads we'd be at it the night through. Next you'd have me dine thrice a day and take a night off. You know, unreasonable things. You'll laugh, but all my best thoughts I think in your voice. It's collusion. Rather, no. It's—what's the word—”
“Inside the spare torch, but that's the last of it. Incorporation.”
“Yes, precisely, thank you. L'esprit de corps. Inside the torch, I don't believe it. Is this where you put by all your fetching mysteries? I am privileged to be in your confidences.”
He takes his place beside her, cups whispering steam. In two hands she lifts hers to her face and looks at him over it. “Nothing the matter with you,” she says warmly.
“On the contrary. Nothing stays where it I put it. I'd misplace my own life. It's on the dark side of the moon for all I know, it's byzantine, everything I touch vanishes.”
Everyone, he does not say.
“It turns up. Most of it.”
“By your invaluable intervention. Why in hell do you do it?”
She tries not to laugh. “What 'in hell' else would I do?”
“Anyplace would be the better to have you, if I may prevail upon you to consider your laudables. You could take on something closer to Sunderland.”
“I could.” Now the humor evaporates.
“Somewhere better provided, on the subject of my shortcomings. I don't mean to tell you your business. These days the options are less limited. You would have your choice.”
For a long while there is silence, remote and delicate in the undefined, undefended dark.
She says, slowly, “I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.”
“I'm saying I don't mean to stand in your way. I'm saying you're all I think of, I'm saying I can't think of you, you're a clean sight and a place to sit down, hells bells, I don't know what I'm saying. I could rise from death on the strength of your belief. I talk to hundred people in a day and you're the only one I speak with.”
She watches him watch her, the vivifying energy carving through her, and she sets aside her cup. In the low light, cast in grisaille shadow, she gives him a long look.
“Siegfried. If I wanted work I could get it anywhere. I could tomorrow. I'll tell you, you're ridiculous and impatient and stubborn and scattered, you're in the red, you don't listen, you can be insensitive, unapproachable, unreasonable, temperamental, you sulk—let me finish—you leave crumbs about, you shout, you scare clients half to death, you're a terrible cheat at cards, you don't remember half of what I tell you—honestly. I've never had so much trouble anywhere, every day is unpredictable. I never have a moment's silence.”
“Yes. Yes. I agree completely.” Delicately, as though it is a strength of effort, he sets aside his glasses.
She says, distinctly, meaningfully, “I don't want silence.”
He looks at her, doesn't look at her. “What do you want?”
“I want to do it all over again tomorrow. Very much.”
There is a pause. He can hardly speak.
“I haven't made you unhappy?”
“You haven't made me do anything a day in your life, and the last man that did I left. I don't know how many times I've got to tell you. You couldn't make me leave if you paid me. That and I know where the bodies are buried.”
He stares.
“You're serious.”
“Always, so long as you're not.”
Every fact in the room seems to freeze. True, false. Real, unreal. Boundless, bottomless, suspended seconds.
There in the twilit cups and cupboards he kisses her.
Reflexively, fiercely his mouth is on hers, speed of sound and point of entry, a kiss that is a solid object. A projectile. Crack and shatter. Apart and together. He is upon her tongue and teeth and she is making every shot, converging composite lifetimes and licking, leaning, holding him on her tongue. Lips to lips, rapid, cemented, immediate, solid with need.
Just as soon he draws back, stricken, a strand of wet extending between them. She has raised her hand in air. His voice is choked. “I'm so sorry.”
So sorry, as if he's only just stood in her way.
“Never mind. I'm sure we could forget it,” he says.
She drops her hand.
He rises, stepping carefully, taking the cups in their saucers and placing them in the sink. He rinses them. He dries his hands. He stays there with his back to her against its stainless edge. There is a tightness in his jaw, tautness in the shoulders.
Forget it. Drop it someplace between the cushions.
Watching him do this she puts her hands to the table. She sets aside the manual. Straightens the salt. Slowly she rises, tucks in her chair and comes to where he is straight-backed and still. She stands at his side.
She takes his hand and raises it in hers. She puts his fingers to her face. Cheek. Jaw. She feels them shake. Then to her lips. Says, on the prints of his fingers, “Listen to me. You do lose a lot of things, aye, but not this.”
He turns to her in parts, eyes then face. He is unmoving, looking at his hand in her hand, his hand on her face as though to move even a muscle would be to dispel it. He is immobile, unable to move forward nor back, bound in static. She guides his touch flat to her skin and to her mouth still wet from his. She watches his eyes fix rapt to the glimmer. She takes a finger into her mouth and puts it on her tongue, and the way he shivers stretches down through her like the dark of an x-ray, lifted to his eyes, invisible to bone and back. She gathers him where he stands and touches him with both hands, the physical vital aspect of him against her, front to side. Irradiated.
With the hand not on his she reaches down. She traces around the shape of him, two fingers and not very fast, watching him frozen except for the flutter of his eyes, and the stirring in her hand. The intolerable gentleness. Circles, circles as he stands in abstract affliction until, at last, there is the unthinking essential jolt of him to meet her.
Then he moves against her in earnest, kissing her outright, reckless and helpless and total. He turns with her so that she is against the table, pieces and parts, hip to hip and hope to hope. At the same time he lifts her to the edge, she with a knee hooked around him, ankles aloft and he plunging a hand between them. The pieces move in clamor beneath them, thrust aside. They shake and scatter, moving sound and steel with the flat of his palm.
One by one pieces cross and drop clattering, gasping to the floor, flung aslant and askew all together in percussion. The sound of sparks. Broadcast. Crosstalk. Transmission. Talk of the world. Nice and Norway. Normandy and Naples. Japan. Swing jazz. Joyride. Trainjumping. He kisses the corners of her mouth. He kisses the backs of her legs, the bones of her ankles, the hair at the base of her pelvis in damp curls glistening with the slide of his fingers, one and two.
In the surge and swell, the motion an upward pull, a hook, come back, she is rounding toward him and toward him. Feeling the fabric of the patterned tablecloth and the fabric of their lives moving under her, his touch leaned into her and through her, and the jagged way he breathes. He is watching her intently, his eyes depthless in semidarkness. His fingers are close inside her, held to her in steep and fervent strokes. She is coming apart in spite of that he is trembling or because of it, mindlessly, materially, his reach inside of her plunging depth-charged, slow motion, singleminded. Sparks, sparks. In one motion she reaches for the cord of his robe and draws it toward her, taut, untying the twist of silk ply. Watching the part of his robe, the part of his lips, she puts her hand over his, hard, and presses to it. She doesn't know what sound she makes, innumerable wide and wild, slick and thrown.
She is on her back across the table, loose, shade-tipped lashes, lush and leaking, hair stuck to skin. Sketched in figure, a textbook spread, her gown apart and her lips, framed in moon-dark blue, flight-pinned and pristine. An anatomy, gloss and glossary, she the predator, she the pollinator, colorized carbonized carnalized creature.
She meets his eye feeling consciously the shape of her body as if newly made. Bend of wrist and collarbone, base of neck and vertebra, beds of nails and arch of elbow. Surrounded by the radio in piecemeal planetary orbit. She turns her face to look at it all, burst outwards across the linoleum in tangent, trajectory, composition, decomposition.
She can see the way Tristan will step in through the next morning, who has stepped out from under his brother's shadow and into his own, who will burst into the room and burst out laughing.
Still with the heel of his hand against her he is searching her face like he searches the house. “I should be making you an offer, if that's the word, or a declaration, or whatever it is the decent broad-minded individual does in daylight. There should be dinners, poetry, plans—the usual things.”
“Is this a usual thing? I don't want a decent broad minded individual in daylight.” She raises a knee to him, the bare topside of foot and shin, and he is rolling into her, idly.
“Neither do I, especially. Did you know?”
“It's amazing what you'll get to know just by standing in a kitchen all day. But no.”
“How is it possible—you see everything.”
“Course I don't. What's seeing? You write a medical record with one hand and put on your shirt wrong with the other, I've seen you do it. What am I to think?”
“I haven't the slightest. You're driving me mad.”
Absently he runs his face across the skin of her upwards knee, the friction and texture of him one side and the other.
“Good it's you for a change. Are you cleaning this up or am I?”
“Fine as it is. Ars gratia artis.”
“So's yours.”
Then it is suddenly very funny, for no reason, for every reason, a kind of gas-leak levity carrying them to their feet. Under ether, or ethereal. She puts her arms over his neck. At the corner of the hall they turn and turn again. Up the stairs undressing, discarding, all her blues and all his reds. His hands are fast then slow, multiplied, irreducible, immeasurable. His body over hers, under hers, stepping through domestic duty day to day and mouth to mouth.
His ankles hit the top step and she holds him careful, careful to his footing. She leads him through his own door and throws herself back to the sheets, lies back to his duplicate dreams and disarray, all the pillows and the covers pitched to one side, made and unmade, she pulls him down to her, she brings him to her lips and down the width of her tongue, brings him to erratic pulse—and pause. She watches his widened eyes, sighing in parallel over her stomach and the slope of her ribs, furnaced, finite, fists in sheets, and she runs her hands over him, tips of fingers, backs of knuckles. She is holding his eyes, holding him firmly in her hand, the elegant livid line twitching in the turn of her wrist.
“What am I to do with you,” she says.
“It is my strictest belief that if there is something you can't do it can't be done. Never have I seen anyone solve a problem so well as you. Pains, stains, shortages, accounts, all manner of grievance and dispute, needles, darts—what else—”
“Wouldn't say a problem.”
“That's true. One must be careful. You give a consultation, people look to you for how to react—come here, come and make use of me. That's very nice. I remember a time I said take my warning, I said what's your complaint and it was a disaster, a shambles. My word.”
She has brought her hand to her mouth and licked, giving him the the downward slide of her dampened palm, top to bottom in tightening grasp. She paints her sight over him, undressed to the freckle, pale, softly contoured, rich dust of hair down to where it is damp from her mouth. His eyes, fixed and feverish.
“You've told me this before.”
“Well, I wouldn't like to bore you. To think we could have been doing this for ages. Do you know I've been making love to you in this moment for years. Your hand—”
“Just my hand?” She takes his face and brings it to her breasts. He takes them in his mouth, the tip of his tongue, the flick of pink points and undersides. “Let's have you there. Go on. Keep going.”
“I don't know. What was I saying?”
“The shambles.”
She gives him a little swiftness, a little silken speed under her thumb, methodically up and up. Applies some concentrated effort to the tip, pad of thumb to the sticky pearl and back. She can feel the sound he makes against her skin, a word that is an audible smear of some incoherence.
“Yes—yes. What should I tell you, it's like looking at a blank page, soon as I look at it everything in me flies back somewhere else. That's where you are.”
He kisses the calm line of her collarbone, the clean curve of her shoulder, the shadow in the tilt of her neck, the winter half-lit edge of her jaw. The contrast of the room across her moving pulse.
“Somewhere else?”
In false starts and between kisses he lays it out for her: Life is like a dissection, no, that doesn't work, that isn't it. Let me start over. Let me try again.
Everything that happens stays in you, all the good things that happen and all the bad things that happen. And they don't stay separate, discrete from one another. Memory, the psyche, the experience of life is a semaphore, a circle, a rainstorm, dots and dashes, it all goes back into itself. When you are hurt, when you are cut in half it doesn't happen only once. As you walk into town, as you wait at the intersection, as you take your coffee it happens over again in the mind. It is constantly happening. I'm talking about separation. About regeneration. Certain annelids, earthworms, when cut in half will grow out again. Each half regrows. The life comes back. It duplicates, it expands from the cut, because of it or in spite of it. What was once whole goes on separately, leads two separate lives, each with the knowledge that something has happened, some irreversible thing has changed.
You're with me? I haven't lost you?
I'm here. I'm with you.
But the opposite is true as well. To remember being hurt is to remember being whole. That too happens over again. That too is is constantly happening. This is what I mean. For my entire life I've remembered being here, right now, like this.
This, like this. The words drop open-mouthed against her lips. She aligns to him, framing him between the lean length her thighs with her head to his pillow, inksplash of hair, avian, aerated, and then he is in her in totality. She reaches, one hand to him and one braced to the bedframe, tilting into him and into him. Separated by only the time it takes to move back. First languid, inch by inch, then finding a rhythm, heavily, moving her hips in brisk and breathless strokes. With each she can hear his breath come short.
They move beyond speech, beyond reason. Here her touch, here her tongue, earthworms eating earthwords. As he moves over her she kisses him thoroughly, she presses her chest to his with a catch of the lower lip. Gives him a little lexical lightening: yesyesyes. In color, in saturation she watches the place their bodies connect while beneath them something deep and solid ticks, hardwood and plaster, something else clicks like glasswork, pale and bright and full as he is dropping his nose to the place behind her ear.
He is against her one second and apart the next, his mouth, his hands, sporadic and all over nerve-ends while she pulls him to her, flush, enlivened, and takes him concretely in one neat and decisive thrust. She is handfuls, patience, tolerance, full volume, every inch. She has shut her eyes and turned her face. Clenched and shivered to the very fact of him, life and limb. She runs nails down his scalp, his back and the back of his neck, and he falls forward as if struck, mortalized, mobilized, the boneless weight of him over her and his head dropped to her neck and the strangled, constricted sound, spilling dashing halting biting as she holds him, holds him.
After this he lies against her lengthwise and stays that way. It is apparent that he is blinking damply against her throat, and she presses her lips to his brow. Don't you start, she says, though he has, a little, and laughs. Just for the practice, he says, tearful and half-smiling. After an interval he subsides, kisses her at just the lips. She takes up the bedspread from where it has fallen and lies with him, his body that is her body, his bed that is her bed, embroidered. She pulls the sheet over them and it falls airy, billowing, and close to their outlines. Easily they breathe under it, all the unforeseeable world erased except for her hand on the bend of his arm, his voice saying stay, please stay, and she does. The bare contact of his palm against her face aimless, aimless.
“Tell me again how bothersome I am.”
“I never said bothersome. But true enough, I wasn't finished. I haven't started on what I like.”
“Remind me.”
“I'll warn you it'll take some time. Years. Rest of our lives.”
“I'm listening,” he says, and is asleep.
Their chests rise and fall, and the sun. They sleep, they wake, they do it over again. They do it slower. They do it better. They do it worse. They do it in color, in lights out, in daylight and overnight, in reprise, in encore, once more, one for the road, time and again, sworn to every second chance and hearing the return of footsteps and the life coming up from below. Hand in hand, sound after sound.