The Crossing Read online

  ‘Old guitars,’ he says, ‘don’t necessarily improve with age. Most of them lose tone. But this one’s exceptional.’ He runs his fingers over the strings, sounds a chord, adjusts the tuning. He plays the beginning of something, fifteen, twenty bars of a dance. ‘The acoustic here is shit,’ he says. ‘But you get the idea.’

  In her own house—her parents’ house—there was a laminating machine, the television, her mother’s wedding ring. Some painted plates on the wall in the living room. Paperbacks.

  ‘Why do you keep it in here?’ she says. ‘It’s like having a boat you never sail.’

  ‘It costs about the same as a boat,’ he says. ‘And it’s a lot easier to steal.’ He puts it back in its case, lifts the case back onto the shelf, turns to find Maud looking at the African mask as if the mask were looking back at her. He has not seen anything quite like that before. He decides not to think about it.

  When the treasure room is locked again, sealed, the alarm reset to active, they move together, quietly, through the part-lit house. It’s late. There’s no one around. He opens doors for her, invites her to peer into the empty rooms. Each room has its particular smell. The drawing room is leather and flowers; the little drawing room is last winter’s last fire. The study stinks of sleeping dogs. The music room smells of the beeswax worked into the black wood of the piano. Everywhere, on every surface, there are pictures of children and dogs. Upstairs, it seems they must be the last ones to bed, the last awake, but when Maud with her wash bag finds her way to the nearest bathroom the light is on and the shower running. She sits on the step opposite the door and waits. The shower stops and a minute later Magnus comes out with a towel round his waist. At supper, while topping up her glass with good wine he told her, in a voice he might, in other circumstances, have used to pass on sensitive financial information, ‘This is an all-or-nothing family. We tend not to take prisoners.’ Now, seeing Maud on the step, he grins at her, whips off his towel, slowly wraps himself again and plods away along the corridor. ‘Goodnight,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘Funny girl.’

  In the blue room, the Chinese room, one o’clock in the morning, Tim hunches over Maud like a man who has stumbled, a man preparing to be flogged. Every few seconds he makes a quivering, doggish thrust, sinks into her, slides out a little. They have been lovers for five weeks. Each time they do it he wants to drive her mad but each time it’s himself he drives mad. The gasps, the hushed exclamations, are all his. With Maud there’s just a subtle thickening of the breath. Has she been louder with other men? He frets over whether he is doing it right; if he should, for example, be crashing into her frenziedly rather than this slow stop-start fucking that, at twenty-six, appears to be his sexual character, his sexual fate.

  He has not told her what Professor Kimber said in the hospital about the flitting moths. He is not sure how much he wants to know. If she didn’t encourage them, does that mean she didn’t go with them? Or does it mean they didn’t need encouragement, that Maud as Maud was encouragement enough? That quality in her he has not yet found the word for but that seems located in her gaze, something undesigned, vulnerable, subtly immodest, that might suggest to all manner of people who approached directly enough, boldly enough, she would simply lie down and let them do it.

  What has he found? Who has he found? Is this a wise love?

  The room is not entirely dark. Electric light seeps under the door from the corridor, and there’s a scattered light in the air itself, the light of summer nights, like phosphorescence at sea. Her eyes are shut, her arms loosely by her head, Sauve Qui Peut a block of shadow on one palely gleaming forearm.

  He changes the rhythm. The old bed jangles. It is, in some curious way, like a children’s game. He kisses her throat and she lifts her hips to him. It’s too much. He has a condom on but feels he is flooding her, has access to her blood and is flooding her. He buries his face in her shoulder, is briefly blind, erased. For a few joyful seconds the whole world rests on the peeping of a nightbird in the trees by the stream. Then the room reassembles itself. She reaches between them, touches the end of the condom. It means—for they have learnt this last month to read each other’s sexual dumb-show—that he should come out of her and carefully. He kneels up. She shifts off her back and swings herself to the side of the bed. For a while she sits there looking towards the uncurtained window, then wipes the sweat from under her breasts with the blades of her hands.

  5

  A night sail to the Île-de-Bréhat in the university boat. Twenty-four hours if the wind is fair, the course as south as they can sail it, cut the shipping lanes at right angles, raise the La Peon lighthouse or Les Heux, pick their way in through the currents.

  There are six of them—three young men, three young women. In experience there is little to choose between them though some, like Maud, know more about dinghies than yachts, are more at ease working purely with sail and wind than passage planning and tidal curves. As a matter of club policy they have (in the pub in Bristol) appointed a captain. The choice was made by ballot, the names written on Rizla papers, the papers folded and dropped into a clean ashtray. Tim won by a single vote and promised to flog them all for the merest indiscipline. Maud received two votes, one of them from Tim. As for whether Maud voted for him, he knew there were two who did not and prefers to assume she was not one of them.

  They leave on the morning tide. The wind is from the west, force three to four, the boat moving in stately rhythm and heeling just enough to make a pencil on the chart table roll slowly to the leeward side. As they come clear of the shelter of the bay there are cross-currents, fields of green water stubbled with short choppy waves that make the hull jitter and send wisps of spray to darken the wood of the deck. But this is sailing at its easiest, its most pleasant. Summer air, the boat’s shadow like black silk hauled just beneath the water’s surface, the crew fresh, fresh-faced, the forecast excellent. In the afternoon the wind backs towards the south. There’s a rain squall they watch arriving from miles off that leaves the boat’s hundred surfaces shining and dripping. England disappears in the murk astern then appears again in uncanny green detail as the weather blows through.

  In the last good hour of daylight they prepare a supper of chilli con carne (chilli sin carne for the one vegetarian), have a single glass of wine each, mugs of coffee. They switch on the navigation lights and begin the watches. In another hour they will be up in the shipping lanes with vessels of fifty thousand tonnes, a hundred thousand tonnes, some moving so fast that a light on the far horizon could be on top of them inside of fifteen minutes. Ships that by rumour and repute travel blind or nearly so, some man or other dozing on a part-lit bridge sixty metres above the water.

  At ten to three in the morning, Tim and Maud are woken for their watch and move from thin sleep into the life of the boat, the tilted world. The off-going watch has made hot drinks for them. A voice, amused, calls Tim ‘skipper’. On the chart table under a red lamp the English Channel is pinned by weights of lead wrapped in leather. Soft lines show their progress. The last fix places them thirty miles west of Jersey. In the cockpit Maud takes the tiller. Tim goes forward to look for shipping. Off the starboard bow are the heaped lights of a Ro-Ro ferry; something much smaller off the other bow—a trawler, perhaps, from the odd way she’s lit up. He watches for a while, sees how her bearing changes, then makes his way back to the cockpit.

  ‘O.K.?’ he says.

  ‘O.K.,’ she says.

  She has a blue Helly Hansen jacket on, jeans, sea boots.

  ‘You should have a hat,’ he says and points to his own.

  The light of the binnacle on her face, the eeriness of that light. She’s peering up at the mainsail, the dove-grey ghost of it under the masthead light. She lets the boat fall away from the wind then brings it up a point and settles it. Tim puts half a turn on the headsail winch. The ferry is already passing them. He thinks he hears its engines. Perhaps he does.

  ‘Turn right,’ he says, ‘and we could sail for America.’

  She nods. She’s concentrating.

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘I’ll pop below and cut their throats.’

  ‘O.K.,’ she says.

  ‘You may have to help me heave them over the side.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Or would you like to cut their throats?’

  ‘Are you keeping watch?’

  He reaches across, touches the cold cloth of her jeans. ‘O.K.,’ he says. ‘I’ll behave.’

  At twenty-minute intervals they swap roles, one to the tiller, one to the slatted bench on the leeward side to keep watch under the foot of the sails. The urge to keep talking to her, to keep her attention, is disturbingly strong. Love is making him slightly foolish. Here they are, crossing the English Channel at night, and he, the nominal captain, is thinking of the chocolate in his pocket and whether she would let him feed it to her so that he could feel for a moment the slight damp heat of her mouth on his fingertips. He should shake this off. He should assume his responsibilities. Come on, Rathbone! But beyond all admonition is his belief that the world is secretly powered by people in exactly the condition he is now, melodic, lit up, the nerve-trees of their brains like cities seen from the air at night . . .

  Over the eastern horizon, the morning star. At twenty to six the sun is rising. Briefly, sea and air appear as things new made and they are Adam and Eve drifting on a vine leaf, a morning in Eden. Then fog comes down as fog can, long fingers of it winding shyly around the things of the boat and thickening until visibility is down to thirty yards, then ten. Tim fetches the horn, shouts up the rest of the crew. They stand by to start the engine, to drop the sails. The sea rustles at the side of them. The fog is theatrical, impenetrable. Tim sounds the horn—one long blast and two short. There’s someone below watching the radar, everyone else is on deck, leaning into the fog. They begin to hear the horns of shipping. They speak in whispers, see shapes, imaginary headlands, vessels of smoke. On the VHF, the open channel, comes a sudden voice in a language none of them recognize. The cadence is unusual. It may be a warning of some sort but it sounds more like a recitation or a call to prayer.

  6

  In her pigeon-hole in the biology department she finds an advertisement for a job. It‘s been cut out of the New Scientist, and in the margin, in Professor Kimber’s handwriting—Interested?

  The job is for a project study-manager leading, in a year or two, to a position as clinical research associate. The company is called Fenniman Laboratories, American-owned but with a UK base in Reading. She applies and is called for an interview. She takes the train from Bristol. The journey takes her through Swindon, and as the train slows she looks up from the papers in her lap (the glossy folder of information about the company) and takes in the utter familiarity of the view—the car parks, the billboards, the old engine sheds and workshops, converted or derelict. The station is a bare half-mile from where she grew up and where her parents still live. Further off is the school she went to (not one her parents ever taught at) and beyond that, at the not-quite-visible edge of the town, the house on the estate where, at fifteen, she lost her virginity to the father of the children she babysat for. Twenty minutes on his marriage bed, the satiny counterpane, late-afternoon light on the wall and strict instructions about which towel she could use when it was over.

  There is no one she knows on the platform, no girl from school with a pushchair, no one she remembers from the terraces of the football ground, the narrow turnstiles she used to push through to watch the team slide down through the divisions, the players steaming like cattle on the muddy pitch, the manager in his big coat tearing pieces of air to shreds. Then they are off again, past posters advertising days out by the sea, past warehouses, a trading estate (‘Swindon Vehicle Solutions’), the rind of meanly windowed new-builds, the first fields . . .

  She goes back to the folder. There are headings such as ‘You and Fenniman Laboratories’, ‘Our Philosophy’, ‘Into the Future’. There are charts of company performance, market share. There is an open letter from Josh Fenniman, CEO (I have a passion for excellence in all fields . . . ). At the back of the folder is a list, with short descriptions, of the company’s current research areas—diabetic neuropathy, post-herpetic neuralgia, nerve blocks, kappa-opioids. One study in particular catches her eye, a project involving a chemical called epibatidine discovered on the skin of an Ecuadorian frog, a type of toxic sweat that has also turned out to be powerfully analgesic. Fenniman’s has produced a derivative called Fennidine and is starting a phase two trial at a hospital in Croydon. If she gets the job, the study might, conceivably, become one of those she monitors.

  The next time she looks up—alerted by some alteration in the quality of the light—they are passing beside water. It‘s the gravel ponds where she first went sailing in the Mirror Ten dinghy she and Grandfather Ray built from a kit in his garage. On the water they had nothing to guide them other than the how-to book that came with the kit. Grandfather Ray was a railwayman. He sat in the boat wearing his yellow fluorescent jacket with British Rail Western Region on the back. They had a tartan thermos, sandwiches, no life jackets. They spent an hour crashing softly into the reeds that grew by the banks before they worked out how the boat was turned. She was two weeks short of her eleventh birthday.

  At the interview she recounts something of this story. Professor Kimber, who has learnt, through patient questioning, much of Maud‘s past, has encouraged her to (‘They’ll like it,’ she said. ‘They’ll like that side of you.’) The interview is conducted by a woman from Human Resources and a man called Henderson, a South African, who is himself a keen sailor and grew up sailing out of Port Elizabeth with his father. He thinks it’s delightful that Maud learnt to sail with a railwayman, that they sat on the bank of a pond with a how-to book.

  The woman, however, has no interest in sailing. She is tall, impeccably turned out, has a small silver cross showing at the opening of her blouse. From the beginning, she seems suspicious of Maud, ill at ease with her, this candidate who shows no interview nerves, who makes eye-contact, who maintains eye-contact, in a way that is, frankly, not quite right.

  For twenty minutes Maud and Henderson talk about the pathology of healing. Henderson uses the phrase ‘the wound’s journey’. They talk about methodology, health outcomes, trial protocols; about the pharmaceutical marketplace, the industrial angle. Maud is strong on the science, less so on commerce.

  When the talk has lulled and Henderson has leant back in his chair, the woman from Human Resources says, ‘If you were a drink, what would you be?’

  After a moment Maud answers, ‘Water.’

  ‘With ice and lemon?’ asks Henderson.

  ‘No,’ says Maud.

  ‘Just plain old water? Straight up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Henderson grins. The woman jots something onto her pad. ‘Any questions for us, Maud?’ asks Henderson.

  She asks him about the trial in Croydon.

  ‘Ah, yeah,’ says Henderson. ‘The little frog. Epipedobates. That‘s beautiful, isn’t it? The chemical has a profile similar to nicotine. So maybe smoking will turn out to be good for us after all.’ He smiles at her. ‘I don’t think I’m giving any secrets away if I tell you this is one of Josh Fenniman’s pet projects. If there’s a breakthrough, the consequences, human and financial, would obviously be pretty significant.’

  From somewhere, someone’s bag or pocket, there comes a faint electronic chime. Henderson looks over to the woman. The woman is looking at Maud.

  ‘We don’t,’ she says, ‘have an official policy, but do you mind if I ask what’s written on your arm?’

  She gestures to the half-word visible below the cuff of Maud’s jacket. Maud undoes a button and pulls up her sleeve. She offers her arm, lays it on the table as if Henderson or the woman were going to take blood. The woman leans forward but keeps her hands in her lap. She has attended half-day seminars on appropriate and inappropriate contact. Henderson moves a finger in the air about an inch above the black ink, the white skin. He sounds out the words. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I get it.’

  After a second interview a fortnight later and a reference from Professor Kimber (Maud is dependable, deeply resourceful and notable for the determined way in which she sees all projects through to conclusion), and despite the reservations expressed by the woman from Human Resources (‘I thought she was arrogant. Is she going to get on with people?’), Maud is offered the job. She accepts.

  7

  Six weeks before Christmas, seven months into the relationship, Maud and Tim begin to live together. Tim finds a first-floor flat in a small, half-hidden crescent on the hill above his old place. It‘s hidden from the main road by three plane trees that have grown as tall as the buildings. The houses (that must once have belonged to wealthy and perhaps fashionable families) have been converted into flats by someone more interested in rent than architecture, bur the big sash windows are unspoilt and admit a tree-filtered light that shimmers when the sun is low and throws shadows of branches onto the back walls of the rooms. Tim puts down the deposit, rents a van. The van is almost entirely taken up with his own stuff; Maud’s few boxes are squeezed in by the rear doors. All of it—the relationship, the move—feels inevitable to Tim and several times, as they carry their things up the common stairs he says, ‘Doesn’t this feel inevitable?’ After the first time, she’s quick enough to agree with him.

  They have a flat-warming party. Tim plays flamenco (not on the Lacôte or the Lacôte copy but on a guitar of highly polished cypress from the workshop of Andrés Dominguez in Seville). Among the guests are Tim’s former flatmate, Ernesto, and his girlfriend with the blue-black hair. While Tim plays, she dances some private version of flamenco then sits on a table and looks at Maud, studies her, before leaning over to Ernesto and whispering, ‘Ella, la novia. Una bruja.’