The Crossing Read online

  ‘How well do you know her?’ asks the professor.

  ‘We’ve sailed a couple of times on the university boat. And once she came to a concert I put on. A lunchtime thing at the church at the bottom of Park Street.’

  ‘You like her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want to help her.’

  ‘Help her?’

  ‘Rescue her. You’re not alone, I’m afraid. They flit around her like moths, though as far as I can tell she does nothing obvious to encourage it. Boys and girls. It’s her pheromones perhaps.’

  He nods. He is not sure what to say to this. She has started to remind him of his mother, though the professor is clearly sober. ‘On the phone,’ says the professor, ‘she told me she had fallen from the deck of a boat. Presumably not into the sea.’

  ‘The boat was in the yard. She fell onto brick. About twenty feet.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘You were there, weren’t you? What happened next?’

  Tim frowns. For some reason—for several reasons—he has failed to play it back to himself, the half-minute that followed. After a while, in which he seems to see pictures, like portraits hanging in a gallery—the welder under his shower of sparks, the man in the suit smoking, and some white bird, a gull or even an egret, wings spread in emblematic flight over the curled green heads of the trees—he says, ‘She got up. She started walking.’

  The professor smiles. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes. That sounds like our Maud.’

  For a second time he leads her from the doors of a hospital. He has a fresh set of guidance notes. She swings on her crutches at his side. The sky is tufted with small, perfectly white clouds.

  He goes shopping again then cooks her a herb omelette with a side salad of imported leaves. She finishes her food, wipes her plate clean with a slice of bread.

  He says he will play for her if she wants and when she agrees or does not tell him she does not want it, he drives the Lancia to his flat in one of the tall white houses overlooking the river, views of the suspension bridge on one side, the old bonded warehouses on the other. He rents the place with a Spaniard who works all hours at a restaurant, at two restaurants, at least two. Tim’s share is paid from the family money stream, those trusts, the echo of old work, set up by his grandparents, and which provide him with an income never much more than modest but enough for this, the flat in the white building, the airy views.

  The Spaniard’s Spanish girlfriend is asleep on the window seat. She has a nose like a shark’s fin and blue-black hair so thick you would have to cut it with gardening shears. He goes softly past her to his room, chooses a guitar, settles it into its case, clips the case shut and drives back to Maud.

  She has showered, changed. Her hair is still damp. He asks if she is feeling better and she says she is. They drink tea (he has bought some milk). She reads for half an hour a volume entitled Medical Physiology (2nd Edition), though her eyes are sometimes shut and the book teeters in her grip. As evening comes on he takes out the guitar and shows it to her. He tells her it’s a reproduction of a Rene Lacôte and that Lacôte was a celebrated nineteenth-century guitar-maker. This is maple, and on the top, this is spruce. He draws her attention to the abalone rosette, the diamonds and moons on the headstock. He says, in fact, he has an original Lacôte, one that he bought at auction a couple of years ago. He keeps it at his parents’ place. His parents have an elaborate security system. He laughs, then turns on the only lamp in the room and sits under its light.

  He plays, she listens. He might imagine this a model of their future together. One piece, a short study by Fernando Sor, she asks to hear again. The guitar has a light sound compared to a modern guitar. It is clear and sweet and seems an instrument designed to play children to sleep.

  At ten she rocks herself onto her good foot, readies herself for bed. When she comes out of the bathroom she has a nightshirt on and hangs between the crutches. He is thinking what to say to her—another quote from the hospital guidance notes perhaps—but it’s Maud who speaks first. ‘You can stay in my room,’ she says.

  ‘O.K.,’ he says. ‘With you?’

  ‘Not to have sex,’ she says.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. Then, more gravely, ‘Of course not.’

  In her bedroom the bed is not particularly large, not a full-size double. She gets under the covers, he quickly strips down to T-shirt and boxers. He gets in beside her. She smells— despite the shower—of the hospital, and when she reaches to put off the lamp he sees she still has the hospital ID bracelet on her wrist. She lies with her back to him. She has a small patch of shaved scalp around the wound on her head. They don’t talk. He has an erection he knows will not subside for hours and he keeps his hips back a little so she will not feel it press against her. He listens to her breathing, thinks he hears the moment it settles into the rhythm of her sleep. He wants to stay awake all night and imagines that he will, that he will have no choice, but her warmth enters him like a drug and when he opens his eyes again there’s a fine silt of dawn in the room. She is still there, the broken girl, the miraculous girl. All night they have lain like two stones in the road. He rests a hand on her shoulder. She stirs but sleeps on. In sleep, her nightshirt has ridden up a little and his right knee is touching the back of her left thigh, skin on skin. Under the window the occasional car drones past.

  This was their courtship.

  3

  Maud alone for a moment, sitting on the bed nude as an egg, her foot sunk in the cast, no watch or bracelet or jewel of any kind on her, her skin lit by the light of an ancient and implicated city.

  Her bedroom—as undecorated as the rest of the flat—is heated by a plug-in and possibly unsafe oil radiator that heats only a rose of air in the immediate vicinity of its grey fins. She has a good tolerance for the cold. All those hours of dinghy sailing in gravel ponds, on the Thames, the seaside. Wet shorts, wet feet. Then all the rest: the stubbed toes, rope-burn, your face slapped by a sail, a bruise on your thigh like a peony in full bloom from losing your footing among the weeds on the slipway.

  As a schoolgirl she belonged to the school judo club. The club was in a kind of Nissen hut in the grounds of the boys’ school across the road. It had no obvious ventilation and the small windows ran with condensation, summer and winter. The instructor was a middle-aged man called Rawlins, a one-time European champion but by Maud’s time a semi-cripple who chain-smoked throughout the classes and whose hands were huge and red and murderous. The smell of the place. The thump thump thump of bodies hitting the mat. How to grip up, how to point your feet. Your balance as a secret you carried and your opponent guessed at, reached for. Rawlins saw how she stood her ground, how she was not intimidated by bigger girls, never gave up even when giving up made sense. For a while he thought she might have the necessary oddness to do well in a fighting art. She reminded him of a dog he had once owned that had been killed by a car and that he still sometimes thought about. When she dislocated a finger throwing a girl with tai otoshi he asked if she wanted him to reset it, right there on the mat. This was one of his tests. With Rawlins everything was a test, a way of seeing who you were. She nodded. He took her white hand between his red ones, his gaze made crazy by the smoke drifting up from the cigarette between his teeth. You just keep looking at me, he said, you keep your eyes on old Rawlins, and she did, obediently, while his thumbs felt out the joint.

  Tim calls to her through the door. ‘You O.K. in there, Maud?’

  ‘Yes,’ she calls back.

  ‘Decent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He opens the door. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he says. ‘So sorry.’ He blushes but she doesn’t. Several seconds pass. ‘I’ll be in here,’ he says.

  4

  In July they drive down to his parents’ place. It turns out they grew up within a hundred miles of each other, in neighbouring counties, but while she was in a terraced house in a town, semi-industrial, a transport hub, he was among open fields, stables, copses, lawns. (The local hunt takes twenty minutes to cross his parents’ land, a line of black and scarlet riders, mud like shrapnel from the horses’ hooves.)

  They bump up the driveway. It is the Rathbone summer gathering and there are already four other cars parked casually in the yard of the house, big cars dappled with mud. All the way from Bristol he has talked about his family. As they came closer to the house he became more convinced she would not get on with them, would not like them, would find them strange, difficult. Unpleasant.

  ‘You won’t want to speak to me afterwards,’ he says. And then, ‘Please be as rude as you like.’ And then, definitively, ‘They wouldn’t even notice.’

  In the hallway—if that’s what it is, the room (with its own fireplace) that lies beyond the front door (if this is the front door)—a dog puts its snout in Maud’s crotch while other, smaller dogs, chew at her heels. There are old newspapers, dog leads, twenty hats from straw boaters to waxed caps. Waxed jackets, rows of boots upturned on the boot racks, a riding crop propped against a windowpane. In a crystal bowl a dozen brass-ended cartridges are like loose change from somebody’s pocket.

  Between the hall and the kitchen are other rooms that seem to have the freedom to simply be rooms. There are dog baskets, armchairs, a table that looks even older than the house. From one of the armchairs a dog, very old, tracks them with milky eyes. Tim’s mother is in the kitchen. She is doing something with flour and fat, her hands sunk in a glass bowl. She is tall with hennaed hair in a tight French plait. She has a floral dress on, laced patent leather boots, a butcher’s apron. She offers Tim her cheek, smiles at Maud. ‘I have cool hands,’ she says, ‘which is per
fect for making pastry.’

  Children come in—two boys and a girl, the eldest perhaps eight. They are chasing each other but, seeing Maud, become suddenly self-possessed. The girl holds out her hand.

  ‘I’m Molly,’ says the girl. ‘This is Ish and this is Billy. Are you Tim’s girlfriend?’

  The children’s parents arrive, Tim’s brother, Magnus, and his wife, the former model. ‘Is it gin o’clock?’ asks the brother. He and Tim slap shoulders. Magnus looks at Maud, welcomes her to the asylum. Through the kitchen window, on the shining lawn, two teenage girls, their hair in heavy plaits, are playing croquet. There is nothing dainty in the way they handle the mallets. The balls fizz over the mown grass.

  It turns out that it is gin o’clock. Magnus spends twenty minutes preparing the drinks, slicing limes, breaking ice in a clean tea-towel, measuring, stirring.

  The dog with the occluded eyes has got onto a bench and is eating a biscuit it has dragged from a plate. It has an expression on its face like a martyr in a religious painting.

  At the sound of an aeroplane, a thin buzzing in the air, the children all run outside. Tim leads Maud out behind them. They walk towards the stable block. The plane has disappeared but suddenly reappears thirty feet above the road, skims the treetops, then the hedges. Magnus’s wife calls to the children but her voice doesn’t carry. They are running towards the field behind the stables, waving. The plane falls delicately to the grass, bounces, settles, slows, turns and taxis towards the stables. It is a very small plane, silvery and trembling in its movements. It stops a short distance from where the adults and children are now gathered. A door swings up, a large man struggles from his seat. ‘Points for the landing?’ he calls.

  To Maud, Tim says, ‘Meet Daddy.’

  Lunch is long, noisy. The family has manners that are beyond manners. The food is delicious, clever. There is wine from a decanter; there are crystal glasses, none of which match. Maud has been sat next to Tim’s father. She calls him Mr. Rathbone and he says Peter will do or shall I call you Miss Stamp? He has red corduroys on, a thick wreath of grey hair, a weathered and immaculately shaved face, a voice that seems to have no back to it, that effortlessly subdues all others. He flew that morning over Salisbury Cathedral and felt proud to be of the race that built it. He says there was a queen called Maud, wasn’t there? Married one of the Plantagenets. He wants to know about her work at the university, her research. She explains, carefully though not at length. Pathological wound healing, tissue repair response, particularly in the elderly.

  ‘People like me, you mean?’

  ‘Older,’ she says.

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  When she speaks about defects in oestrogen signalling, he seems able to follow her. He tells her he was in the army and since then a dabbler—reads a lot, does stuff in the workshops, a seat-of-the-pants pilot. He asks about her accident. The story of her fall has already been recited three or four times. The children particularly like it. The cast came off last week.

  ‘Do you have any scars?’ asks the ex-model.

  ‘A couple,’ says Maud.

  ‘And tell me about this,’ says Tim’s father, taking hold of her left arm with hands utterly unlike Tim’s. He has glasses on a cord round his neck. He puts them on, reads the ink along her forearm (ink that took four hours over two sessions to put in place, her arm bloody on a padded rest).

  ‘Sauve . . . Qui . . . Peut. Sauve Qui Peut?’

  ‘Every man for himself,’ says Magnus, refilling his glass.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s quite that,’ says Tim. ‘Is it, Maud?’

  ‘Of course it bloody is,’ says his brother.

  ‘Better,’ says Mr. Rathbone, ‘than runes or some Maori nonsense. At least it means something.’

  ‘By that token,’ says Magnus, ‘she could have had Arbeit Macht Frei. That means something.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Mags,’ says his father.

  One of the twins says, ‘There’s a girl at school who’s going to have the Song of Songs tattooed in a spiral around her belly button.’

  ‘No she’s not,’ says the other twin.

  ‘But did you know what it meant, Maud,’ asks Tim’s mother, ‘when you had it done?’

  ‘Mum, please,’ says Tim.

  She smiles. ‘It was just a question, dear.’

  They are given the upstairs guest room at the western end of the house. This is sometimes called the blue room on account of the wallpaper, or the Chinese room on account of a framed scroll that hangs between the windows. They take their bags up there. The room is packed with afternoon sun. Tim frees a fly batting the glass of a window. ‘The children already love you,’ he says.

  ‘They don’t know me,’ she says.

  He puts his arms around her from behind. ‘How long do you have to know someone before you love them?’

  ‘More than a morning,’ she says.

  ‘Did you like any of them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Any in particular?’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘When I was a boy,’ says Tim, ‘I was completely in awe of him. Everyone talking about him like he was God. But you need to be careful. I can remember all of us hiding behind a sofa, Mum too, while Dad went from room to room looking for us. It wasn’t a game.’ He holds Maud more tightly, draws her against himself. ‘Anyway, they’ll all be drunk in an hour,’ he says.

  The long twilight, blue and violet, blue and purple. They stroll in and out of the French windows. They drink gin poured from a blue bottle. The children chase the dogs around the croquet hoops. Tim’s mother, speaking about the light, the loveliness of it, the way it seems to simply fold over everything, becomes incoherent and tearful and plucks at the material of her dress. To Maud, Tim’s father explains that there are three twilights. ‘This one,’ he says, sniffing it, ‘is civil. Later we will have nautical.’

  Blue and violet, blue and purple. The twins, their big backsides in pale jodhpurs, kneel on the lawn and dreamily tear at the trimmed grass. Magnus wears an expression of tragic boredom. His wife, in a dress she has sewn herself, drifts after the children.

  By the time they sit down to eat it’s nearly eleven and no one has much interest in the food. Tim’s mother has wept and recovered and is now elaborately precise in everything she says. When they have finished, the picked-at food is simply pushed aside. Someone is coming in in the morning. Everything will be taken care of.

  The family disperses. Tim takes Maud’s hand, leads her through a door into a passageway and along the passage to a short flight of steps. Here there is a door with a metal face, a keypad at the side of it. This, Tim tells her, is the treasure room. He laughs as he taps in the code and says it’s like the burial chamber in a pyramid. Inside, the room is noticeably cooler than the rest of the house. The walls are whitewashed, lined with shelves and cabinets. There is no window.

  He shows her things. ‘I don’t really know what any of this is worth,’ he says.

  There’s some heavy Victorian jewellery. A portrait, palm-sized, attributed to Ozias Humphry, of a young woman with red hair. There’s a first edition of J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (with a dedication to ‘pretty little Lilly Rathbone’). There’s a portfolio of watercolour sketches by Alfred Downing Fripp, mostly of children on the seashore. There’s a wind-up gramophone, a Webley revolver someone in the family carried at the second battle of Ypres. There’s a primal mask from somewhere in central Africa carved from a dark and oily wood, an artefact that seems to speak a dead or irrecoverable language but not itself to be dead, not at all. Tim poses with the mask over his face, the revolver in his hand. ‘My place or yours,’ he says, his voice muffled by the wood.

  On a low shelf, in a creased brown case, is the guitar. He lifts it out, and after a second of hesitation, puts it into Maud’s hands. Lacôte, Luthier, Paris 1842. Breveté Du Roi. It appears to be in almost immaculate condition. It is surprisingly light, buoyant. Around the sound hole is a pattern of tortoiseshell with gold and mother-of-pearl inlays. She hands it back. He sits on a stool and begins to tune by ear.