Bread and Chocolate Page 8

  ‘Oh,’ she said, absorbing that information. She climbed into her bed and he tucked her in, feeling as if he were acting a part in some idealised nursery scene. She looked very angelic. When she raised her little face for a goodnight kiss she smelled of soap. He touched the soft petal of her cheek with his lips, feeling as if he were too old and self-indulgent to approach such pellucid innocence.

  ‘Can we go to the sea again tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘We didn’t get to the sea today,’ he pointed out.

  She smiled contentedly. ‘Can we try again tomorrow?’

  ‘All right.’

  Downstairs, he poured himself a large Scotch with a splash of water. Normally he would drink half a bottle but tonight he thought he would have only one glass. There were things to put away: toys and her shoes, which were sandy. Her little socks were discarded on the stairs. To his surprise he did not resent the chores. He felt rather contented. He tidied up and then dropped into his chair and switched on the television. He had a warm sense of having a home, rather than merely somewhere to live. He had a little girl sleeping peacefully under his roof; a nestling in the stone nest.

  The telephone rang. ‘It’s me,’ said Zoë. ‘I can come down on Friday night. I thought I’d take the train and you could meet me in Plymouth. I’ll leave Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘There’s a complication,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ She was instantly suspicious. ‘What sort of complication?’

  ‘My niece is staying with me for the summer. She’s four.’

  ‘Poor little sod,’ she said rudely. ‘Does she drink whisky?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘No trouble, and you’re welcome to come. Take a taxi from the station, I can’t get out to collect you.’

  ‘I had a rather …’ She dropped her voice into a husky drone which someone had once told her was seductive. ‘… I had a rather adult weekend in mind. Can’t you farm her out for two days? Get her back when I’ve gone?’

  He thought it odd that in one day his views had changed so completely. ‘She’s not a puppy, I can’t put her in kennels,’ he said abruptly. ‘If you want to see me, you see her too. This is her home for the summer. I’m not throwing her out just because you’ve got a spare weekend.’

  ‘Oh, screw you then!’ she shouted and slammed down the phone.

  He waited a moment and then quietly replaced the receiver. He sounded out his own mind for regret and found none. He took up his sketch pad and started to work on the sharp wicked robot face of his planned statue. Nothing came. Instead he doodled a set of attractively rounded and speckled pebbles.

  Next day they set out for the sea again, and once again they were waylaid by the extraordinary variety of pebbles. This time they decided to amass all of the white pebbles on the beach and built them into a dangerously unstable pyramid. They played until sunset and then he lured her up the steps to the cottage, by counting them. It was an unsuccessful exercise since Katie could count no more than three. He taught her the numbers up to ten, and felt a pleasing sense of virtue.

  It was more than a week before they exhausted the pleasures of the pebble strand and finally arrived at the sea’s edge. The tide was high and Katie stood beside him solemnly watching the waves wash in and out. He knew her well enough now to see that something was puzzling her. After nearly half an hour of silent contemplation she turned to him:

  ‘Where’s the machine?’

  ‘Machine?’ He was startled. He had been thinking of his proposed statue, which was not progressing at all. He had a plan for it now: pincer arms and a sharp dead face, but he could feel no enthusiasm for it. He would never start sculpting until he could feel powerfully that it was the right thing, the only thing to do. This time the surge of energy was slow in coming. He wondered if the even routine of Katie’s days were sapping his spontaneity. He wondered if he were becoming boring: a child-bound housewife.

  ‘Where’s the machine?’ she repeated. ‘The wave machine.’

  For a moment he could not think what she meant and then he laughed aloud. She had been brought up in a town, she had only ever seen waves made in a swimming pool with a wave machine. She was too small to understood that the machine was trying to reproduce the real movement of the sea. She had mistaken the mechanical copy for the real thing. When she met the reality – the gently shushing waves of the calm sea – she looked for a synthetic explanation.

  ‘There isn’t a machine,’ he said, smiling. ‘The sea moves like this all on its own.’

  She had a delightful chuckle. Her eyes narrowed and her smile, with the endearing gap at the top teeth, widened. ‘Silly Mike,’ she said confidently. ‘Of course there’s a machine. I’ll find it for you.’

  She took him by the hand and pulled him to his feet and they set off along the beach looking at the red stone cliffs and under the larger pebbles, inspecting cave entrances and rock pools. ‘It’s somewhere here,’ she said certainly. ‘It’s got to be. To make the waves.’

  For the rest of that summer that was her project. They still collected stones, and when the tide was so low that the small sandbar was exposed they built ornate and beautiful sand castles. He enjoyed working with sand so much that he started to puzzle out a way of using it in his art. But every day Katie searched for the machine which made the waves.

  The phone call, at the end of August, came as a shock. ‘Tom’s coming out at the weekend,’ Veronica said. ‘They think it was a virus, after all, not an allergy. He’s miles better anyway, thank God. I’ll collect her tomorrow.’

  Dismay clutched at him. ‘No hurry.’

  ‘Darling, she has to start school!’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘You can have her again in the holidays, if it’s been such a success,’ she offered sarcastically.

  He thought for a moment. ‘D’you know, I would like that.’

  Veronica laughed. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  They took a last ceremonial walk on the beach together.

  ‘You don’t mind going to school, do you, Katie?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said confidently. ‘Not now I can count.’

  She slipped her hand from his grasp and ran ahead. It had been a high tide in the night and there were new and interesting beachcombings. He gathered up driftwood as he walked behind her; the driftwood, the pebbles, the fluid complex movements of sand sculpture – he could not think how he had missed it before.

  ‘Mike!’ she suddenly screamed. ‘Mike!’

  His heart missed a horror-struck beat. ‘Katie!’ he yelled and raced towards her.

  She was dancing with excitement. Half-embedded in the sand, with rust spotting the chrome, was the thrown-away grille of a car radiator.

  ‘Here it is! Here it is!’ she shrieked.

  For a moment he could not think what she meant and then he realised that it did indeed look very like the vents for a wave machine set into the edge of the sea.

  ‘To make the waves! To make the waves!’ she crowed. ‘I knew it was here!’

  He crouched down beside her so that her bright eyes were level with his own. ‘But isn’t it rather small, Katie? To move the whole sea? To shift the whole of the ocean?’

  She shook her head solemnly. ‘Something doesn’t have to be very big to make a lot of difference,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Katie,’ he said lovingly. ‘That’s very true.’

  The Magic Box

  I awoke in the half-light of morning, a moody monochrome as if it had been carefully lit by an expert. I raised myself on one arm and looked at Mark fast asleep, his perfect profile, his tousled hair. The bed dipped beneath my pregnant heaviness and he stirred and said something in his sleep. I felt a moment of utter dread, in case it was her name, in case he was dreaming of her. I froze, hardly daring to breathe, in that painful tension which I had learned in the past hard year when he had told me that he loved her, and that he would leave me.

  He had not gone. I had won. I screamed and then cried
– great floods of tears that poured from my rage and my hurt. I barricaded myself in my studio and smashed up my equipment: my precious lights, my screens, my cameras. I swung a tripod like an axe in an orgy of destruction to show him, in a shower of glass, metal, and paper, that I needed him even more than I needed the tools of my trade. That I needed him more than I needed my profession, more than my lifestyle. More than my life itself.

  He was stony-faced, a cupid in marble, while I wept and begged, and then he went to her. She was as peaceful as a weekday church. The more I raged, the more quietly emphatic was the calm she wove around him. He told me that she grieved for the pain I was suffering. He told me that he had seen her weep for me. I pictured the two of them, their faces very close at a candle-lit table, saying softly what a shame it was I could not accept that his love for me had ended; what a shame it was that I was so blind not to see that he had to move on.

  I would not accept it. He had given me no warning, nothing had changed between us. We made love, we planned to move house, we wanted a baby, we went out to work during the week and we lazed around together at weekends. How was I supposed to know that he had changed? I didn’t believe he had changed. What I thought then, and still believe now, was that she gave him the idea that he could do better.

  She made him think that he could do better than marriage with me. She is rich. She has a beautiful flat by the river. She set aside a room for him to write in and called it his study. She ordered her Filipino housekeeper to take him coffee and make him small delicious lunches. She never let anyone touch his papers. She told him that she wanted to nurture his talent. She told him he should give up his job editing the magazine, that she would keep him while he wrote. She told him he was a great writer and he should not be troubled with a boring little job and an hysterical wife.

  He didn’t return for my passion, nor for my anger, nor for my grief. I telephoned him one night, the final night, at her flat, and told him that I consented. That I surrendered. That I would let him go, if he would let me go. I offered him his release and my release in those words. I meant him to wonder what I meant by ‘let me go’.

  He didn’t pause to think. I heard the relief in his voice. Eight miles across London I sensed her secret triumph. I went to the bathroom and took one of his old razor blades and washed it carefully – as if I should fear blood poisoning! – then stretched my hands into the bath. I drew a smooth line along the blue vein on one wrist, and then on the other.

  It didn’t hurt. The skin opened, I could see a pinker layer beneath it, opening like a zip fastener. I could see the blue membrane of the vein sliced as neat as the stem of a violet. Then the blood welled up in copious warmth out of my wrists and down into my cupped hands, and overflowed into the bath. I watched it, smiling. Even when the pain started and my tears dripped off my cheeks into the bath, I was still smiling.

  It was Maggie who broke down the door. She phoned the ambulance, remembered my blood group for an emergency transfusion. It was Maggie who went around to Helen’s flat and leaned on the doorbell until Helen’s voice spoke sharply over the intercom. It was Maggie who kept her finger on the bell until Mark came. It was Maggie who threw him in her car and drove him to the hospital where he saw me, drugged into smiling calm, limp in bed. It was Maggie who cursed him with all the richness of her backstreet childhood language, and Maggie who forced him into tears and into the weeping confession that he didn’t know what he was doing. That he didn’t know which of us he wanted.

  When I came out of hospital he was at home. He never told me how he had parted from Helen and I never found again the bold courage of a confident lover which would have allowed me to ask. Since that day, as the aching scars on my wrists slowly healed, as we sold the town house, and bought a lovely old ramshackle vicarage in the Cotswolds, as I conceived our child, I never found again the careless certainty that I had known before Helen.

  I lay back in bed and watched the light brighten on the ceiling. I didn’t wake Mark. It was a Saturday and he could sleep until noon if he wished, then we were going to a furniture auction at a country house. Our things were spread very thin in this rambling house, a six-bedroomed vicarage, and besides, I wanted old furniture around me. I wanted to give Mark a walnut-wood desk with one of those slatted rolling lids, and a special room where he could write. I wanted a rocking cradle and one of those high old fire guards with the padded tops for the nursery. I wanted to create a house that looked as if we had lived there forever. A house that no man would leave.

  I was disappointed by the sale. I had a romantic idea of an auction at a country house, but much of the furniture had been bought in and most of it was frankly shabby. The nice pieces were snapped up by dealers at prices that we couldn’t afford. Mark and I watched the bidding, and then wandered outside to where they were serving teas on the terrace. There was a table, on the corner of the terrace, piled high with junk: chipped china, bent silver-plate trays, some stained and rather smelly shawls … and a most beautiful rosewood box.

  I recognised it at once. It was a carrying case for one of the earliest cameras. Lying beside it was a long matching chest. I bent down awkwardly, allowing for the bulge at my waist, and clicked back the brass clips. It was lined inside with red plush velvet, motheaten and worn now. In the lid, the craftsman – a scientific instrument maker from Glasgow – had engraved his name. Inside were stacked thick pieces of glass.

  ‘What are they?’ Mark asked casually.

  ‘Glass photographic plates,’ I whispered in awe. ‘And this should be …’ I opened the lid of the nearby case. Gleaming on the padded cushions was the heavy wooden box of an old camera with the leathery snout of the bellows compressed into a velvet pocket beside it.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Help me get it out!’

  Mark glanced around, hesitated. ‘Come on, Mark!’ I said. ‘It’s for sale. I want to see it.’

  He shrugged and helped me drag the box from under the table. It was deliciously heavy, with the weight of solid wood and hand-turned brass.

  The black hood for the cameraman was packed in one of the pockets, the black metal slide and glass plate were in the back of the camera, ready for use. I touched the wood of the top of the camera, and gently twisted the focus puller. The lens cap on the front was made of wood. It came off with a gentle half-turn.

  ‘I see you’re interested in the camera,’ said a voice behind me. I straightened up awkwardly. He was a man in his fifties, his cheeks crimsoned with broken veins, and a nose to match. ‘Belonged to my grandfather. He took the pictures. The plates are in the other box.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Clive Cozens,’ the man said. He put out his hand. ‘I’m George Cozens.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m Clare Banford,’ I said. ‘This is my husband, Mark.’

  George Cozens narrowed his eyes. ‘Clare Banford the photographer?’ he asked.

  I nodded. I was surprised he knew my name. I specialise in nature photography, especially birds and rare plants. Not many people see my pictures, even fewer remember the names of photographers.

  ‘I’ve got a first edition of Hall which you illustrated,’ he said. ‘Bought it for the pictures alone.’

  I beamed at him. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You still working?’ he demanded with a glance at my maternity smock and the swelling curve underneath.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually I’ve sold my studio in London. We’ve moved out to Clayhall Rectory, just near here. But I’ll get back to work again as soon as the baby’s born.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Is this for sale?’ I asked, gesturing to the camera, gleaming in its nest of velvet.

  ‘Are you interested?’ he asked.

  I heard Mark give a little ‘ttssk’ of indignation.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of money to spend,’ I said cautiously. ‘We were supposed to be buying furniture.’

  George Cozens nodded. ‘Would you use it?’ he as
ked. ‘Or just keep it?’

  ‘I’d use it,’ I said honestly. ‘I’m going to set up my own darkroom at home, and I’ve been experimenting with older equipment. It’s not often you get the glass plates with the camera like this.’

  ‘And they’re developed,’ he said. He bent down and pulled out one of the thick glass plates. ‘See?’

  Very faintly I could just make out the shape of some tribesman. He was half-naked, his body painted, feathers in his hair, beads slung around his neck and waist. He carried a spear and glared at the camera.

  ‘My God,’ I said wonderingly. ‘How old is this?’

  ‘Taken in 1890,’ George Cozens said. ‘My grandfather’s last expedition. He went up the Orinoco and took pictures of everything that he could make stand still for long enough! It’s a vanished world. The rain forest before white men came. The tribes. All dead now. All gone.’

  ‘He took pictures of people?’

  ‘Not many,’ he said. He slid the glass back into its padded slot. ‘Most of them thought it would steal their souls and refused. They called it the magic box. That chappie must have been a plucky one,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Look here,’ he continued with sudden generosity. ‘You can have this. It was given to my grandfather as a gift by an established Scots photographer. I’d like to hand it on. I’ll ask you for one favour.’

  I gaped in astonishment. ‘Anything!’

  ‘If you get some pictures from it, print me a spare copy and let me have it, signed by you. I’ll have a Banford collection. Might frame them.’

  I put my hand out. ‘It’s a deal,’ I said. ‘And I promise also I’ll not sell it. If I can’t make it work, I’ll let you have it back.’

  He took my hand in his. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’

  Mark grumbled when I set up a darkroom even before we had finished painting the nursery.

  ‘I want to take pictures of the baby with the camera,’ I said. ‘And I can’t wait to get a good look at these glass plates.’