River Scene with Children Playing

‘You have always thought I was just a mask, Catherine,’ said Peter. ‘You never searched deeper. I have only served you up a thinner version of myself, like convalescent soup. It was as much as you could take.’

His voice sounded so affectless that Catherine hoped she need not listen. He was standing at some distance from her in their large sitting room, looking out the window. Long barges, pushed by black tugs, headed upriver into London, carrying something that looked like snow.

‘Can we do this tonight?’

‘Forgive me, but I won’t be here later.’

‘Same person?’

‘Of course.’

She so wanted it to be an ordinary Saturday morning, with the traffic passing on the water and the children out in yellow oilskins with Lubica, searching the shore after the night storm. She looked at his reflection in the window. Still thin. Always in a suit. Even at weekends he wore cufflinks, though of braided cotton rather than shiny metal, as if that relaxed his approach to the day. But that was the whole point, for Catherine, about Peter, his incorrigible formality. He always looked like the barrister he was.

‘What is it about her? I still don’t get it.’

’It’s the things that - make her rather different.’ He spoke haltingly and noncommittally. He hated doing this, and she enjoyed making him feel cruel.

‘You mean her hardly ever reading?’

‘I wish I hadn’t told you that.’ The other woman was a professional photographer and sculptor who had, for some mystifying reason, no time for literature.

At university Catherine had been one of the most beautiful women in the three years of her studies, which meant that she had outshone many contemporaries over a six year span, those leaving, those arriving, coming up and going down. She was exciting and fragile, a combination that enticed many into perplexity and defeat. Out of all the men, the brilliant, the bonkers, and the blokeish chancers, she had chosen Peter the Good, confident he would be stunned for the rest of his life by his luck, and let her write.

To lose him to a woman who did not read was absurd. Even her child-overrun Aunt Madge in her terraced house in Newcastle devoured print. Books do for central heating, she said. Books of every sort barricaded the walls. When Catherine visited she would lovingly touch the spines of the books as though they were sentient. She did this sometimes now with the children, let her nail trickle over their vertebrae when she came to say hello to them at bath-time. As a teenager she had promised herself, as one reassures a worried child about adult life, she would have as many books, though also more time, fewer children, a bigger home, and a richer husband, not just a teacher like Uncle Jim. The worthy couple took wet camping holidays with their four kids, who made a spontaneous mini-commando outfit and dashed across muddy fields looking for something to capture.

‘I think I’ll go out for a walk,’ she said, hoping that this, like many of their conversations, would end without beginning.

‘Catherine. Sorry. What I want to say is that I am rethinking the open marriage. I’m not sure it’s really working. I also think you will leave if I don’t. But maybe that’s because you have never really arrived.’

‘We agreed to keep it together for the kids.’

‘’Catherine, the children’s lives would be more affected if Lubica got married and went back to Russia than if you and I got divorced.’

Catherine looked out at the thick waves. She had not expected to feel panicked like this. The tide nudged against the shore, rising and brutish, she felt, and resentful of walls, bridges and flats.

‘But I do feel they are closer to me, Catherine.’

You would have thought Sarah, their daughter of six, would be his and Aidan, who was four, would be hers, but it was not so. She felt winded.

’Sally says she will take them if you want.’

’I would not like to abuse her generosity.’

She found it frightening to hear the name of her husband’s lover. It was like a corrupt, alien object, very frightening. He must have known this, because he had spared her till now. He revealed in this careless introduction of her name that he had forgotten Catherine, and no longer respected the fine points of their difficulties, as he now had an ordinary life elsewhere, and had been overrun by the sensual exchanges that established him and Sally as conjoined, of one flesh.

‘It’s Slovakia, by the way,’

‘What is?’

‘Lubica comes from Slovakia.’

He said nothing.

‘I must get out,’ she said.

‘I have to go out too, ‘ he said, though he did not, as she did, mean in order to be alone.

She gathered up her coat and keys and fled. He shouted after her down the stairwell something about the time and the children and she threw back over her shoulder Lubica’s name, twice.

As she stepped around the corner of the building where they lived and out onto the river path hailstones whipped at her face like gravel. She walked into the wind, seaward. She passed a beach, a tablecloth of sand heaped with seaweed. The buildings had the barren deserted air of barracks. She walked beside fences with claws of wire decorating their tops, opened her mouth to catch her breath and drank a spoonful of hail. The river made a bend and she took shelter at a large slipway, sat on a part of a tree that had washed up, and wondered how it had been felled and drowned and thrown into London.

She had walked faster than usual. After the panic she felt sad and still, like a holed submarine bumping and settling on the grey seabed, its infinite fall at an end after all.

She watched a young girl come out of a small shop. It was boarded up and had a camera like an enlarged ant’s head on the wall glaring down at the entrance. The girl carried a blue plastic bag and walked along the street and went into one of the new council houses built behind the waterside apartments. She looked, to Catherine, enviably unconscious of herself, serene as a bird content in its nature. But the rich and poor always thought that of each other. There was no one to envy.

The winter tide had left behind a trove of yellow, spongy looking bricks, flaky pieces of iron, plastic bottles and broken toys. She picked up a doll’s arm, a red car, and a half of Darth Vadar, with no legs and a single arm; he gesticulated with his remaining fist at his miniature catastrophe.

She put the toys in her pocket. The children liked collecting broken toys after storms. She went back to her tree and sat down and smoked. The wind whipped a few bits of a burst bottle tinkling across the concrete slipway.

Was this a disaster, or was it merely change? Could you just settle in your mind which, and make it so? She had believed she would be able to decide what marriage would be, and had been wrong. She had even thought she could pull the strings on an open marriage, manage a contradiction in terms. At least her mind no longer hurt through carrying the ill-fitting thought.

The children would always keep them married. She had seen this after effect, this after life, between divorced couples who hardly spoke to each other, who would love to forget each other, but who have to convene for major birthdays and graduations, at weddings and at hospital beds. She thought she always saw such couples exchange a glance of surprise to think they had once been so alive together as to have made the child that was now in front of them.

The children’s lives were about to change and she could not protect them. She mourned for their future and imagined them pushed out on a long and exposed path.

She watched a cormorant try to rise from the water and fail and rise again and beat seawards barely above the waves. She followed the arc of the path, and stopped at the preposterous sight of the Millennium Dome, yellow and monstrous in the winter light, like a stabbed pudding.

She turned her face back towards the bend in the river. Hailstones melted on the back of her neck. As she neared the neat little napkin of beach she saw her children playing with Lubica.

Aidan had scraped up a small pile of flotsam toys around his ankles and sat contentedly on a sandy wet step, leaning forward, hands clasped like a sage, speaking to his congregation of broken plastic. She had watched him helplessly for years, hoping he would survive the impressions he received through his lonely periscope on life.

Lubica was lying on the sand, her hair actually in the seaweed. Catherine picked out for the first time, seeing Lubica’s tresses fall on the small black blooms of bladder wrack, their famed strawberry tint. Her coat was pulled from her shoulders, and although she wore a T-shirt beneath, she seemed half unclothed. Her nipples stood up in the cold. Her manner was full of erotic laziness, as though at any moment she was prepared to fold into an embrace with man, woman or child.

Sarah straddled Lubica, sitting on her breasts, wrestling her arms to push them back above her head, as if to fall and smother her. Lubica allowed her to succeed, and Sarah licked her face. It was a long, insolent, besmirching kiss. Lubica eased the child’s shoulders upwards once more, laughing. Sarah gazed into her face like a purposeful lover and bit her hand, and the girl let out a delicious scream.

Aidan jumped up and drew his sword and rode on his horse to the rescue. He went a long way round, as the path to the castle wound this way and that. The two children fell on Lubica, stabbing her with their fists and uttering cries of death until she rolled effortlessly over and embraced them both and held them captive.

Catherine looked on in desperate admiration at all this joyous destructiveness. She could have wept for what she had lost and what they had missed. But how lucky they all were to have for a time a lease on Lubica’s nature.

It was true the children were not really Catherine’s, they were more Peter’s. But even then, there was a sad blankness at times, a yawning emptiness of instruction or instinct. Still, she would learn. Perhaps the children would show her.

She threw away her cigarette and pushed herself from the wall and brought herself into their view. She would replace with a happy lie an unhappy truth. She called and waved and began to pick her way across the debris-strewn sand. The three stopped their game and disentangled themselves to watch her approach, sitting up still and alert, as though they were animals.