‘I don’t want this to be the end.’ She mouths her confession, barely whispering. ‘I can’t just start again. You can’t tell me to start again.’
The repercussions that Dan has already traced out during long, painful meditations, that he was determined to avoid and thought he had, catch up with him in a sickening rush. A child. A child whom, at the rate he’s quite literally going, he will never hold or kiss; a mystery he will never unravel, a priceless treasure he will have to let go: hello, goodbye. And a chain fixing Natalie to the past, making impossible that renewal, that reinvention he’s imagined for her in the nobler corners of his mind.
And yet at the same time he perceives the wonder of it, the miracle, like a faint, cold, dawn light falling across this tangled web of sorrows. And he recognises the tribute, the act of devotion: binding the future to the past.
But sharper and closer than either the sorrow or the wonder is the acute sting of misapprehension, of his blithe failure to comprehend the only person he can ever hope to comprehend. Would you call it a betrayal? (Stupidly, Dan’s memory snatches at the only available comparator — the time Mike nabbed the ’92 science prize after stealing Dan’s idea for his project — then flings it away in despair.)
‘I can’t believe what you’ve done,’ he murmurs, at last. ‘I just can’t believe you’ve done it.’
Natalie’s face has recovered itself, become a grown woman’s again — his wife’s again — though still streaked with tears. She wipes them away with precise fingers.
‘Well, I have, so let’s make the best of it.’
James has almost finished packing, the Boatman drawling softly from the tape player, when Mrs Peacock’s doorbell rattles his Anglo-Irish-Portuguese bones. She doesn’t seem to be home, so he traipses down the stairs himself and finds Trudy standing in the road, looking pained, with her hands resting on Hugo’s narrow shoulders. Could James look after Hugo for an hour or so, just this once? The wounded look on her face is not, in fact, embarrassment at having to go back on Rob’s angry vow, but actual physical pain — she has a cracked tooth. Hugo, who has made his mouth as small as possible in an effort not to smile, looks like a solemn, pinched little wizard.
Upstairs, the boy’s triumphant grin crumples into a frown.
‘Why are all your things packed up?’
‘I’m moving to Whitters. Whitby. I’ll miss you.’ Hugo’s frown deepens to its full tectonic grandeur.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve found a job there.’
‘You already have a job. You’re a—’
‘I know, but I thought I’d try something different.’
Hugo perches on the edge of the bed, still frowning, legs kicking to further express his agitation.
‘Can we go and sit on the fish and chips bench?’
‘We can try. Last time I went up there, about twelve hikers were trying to squeeze on at once. I’ll just skip to the loo.’
After James has left the room, Hugo’s eyes wander dolefully over the empty shelves and gaping wardrobe. He recognises a small rectangular shadow on one door as the former site of James’ faded cut-out picture of the staring man with glasses, moustache and brimmed hat, now gone. His gaze finds its way to the rubbish bin, which is crammed with papers. Yes, the picture is in there, and beneath it what looks like an unfinished letter. There’s an addressed envelope, too.
Hugo lifts these items out — then, hearing James’ tread on the stairs, stuffs them into the writer’s notebook that he proudly keeps in the pocket of his shorts.
The latch on the Mocks’ front door has been changed and lowered, after Dan found himself unable to admit his physiotherapist last week. Even his customised litter-picker failed him, and the consultation took place through the letter slot.
He hooks his weak fingers over the new latch and reverses the chair so the door can swing into the hall. There they are: his mother and father, laden with bags. There is still something unsettling about looking up at them rather than down, a familial ache so tangled in all the other sadness that he doesn’t examine it too closely.
Age is making of them something slightly comical, but no less lovable. His mother was fine-looking, an auburn warmth in the dark hair that she has always — except a brief bob-stint in the eighties — worn long. She probably dyes it now, but he doesn’t know for sure. He has a theory that the moment she stopped believing in her physical impact, it disappeared like a broken spell.
Physical impact is not a concept anyone would associate with Dan’s father, who, though an ingenious, energetic and honourable man, has always had the bearing and features of a squirrel. His shoulders are stooped and narrow, and his face has a puckered look as though not quite finished, not fully inflated — a trait visible but mercifully diluted in the faces of Dan and his sister. Dan remembers painfully acknowledging to himself his father’s shortcomings, sometime in his mid-teens while watching Mr Mock and Big Vince Vickers in conversation after a school function: mouse and man.
Of course, the physical ageing process seems laughably benign beside his own degeneration. It’s the behavioural changes that Dan really notices — the bickering of new retirees with time on their hands, the fussing, the stories told or questions asked twice over, the missed cues, the odd habits, the pullovers worn on warm days.
He and his father discuss modifications that might be made to his wheelchair — an ongoing project that brings both pleasure — and everyone teams up to move him to the sofa while the old man sets to work. Each time Dan leaves the chair, marooned now wherever he’s put, he recognises its transformative powers — powers not unlike those of the much-missed Yamaha, but with a different frame of reference. He calls the chair Shadowfax.
With Natalie, who has been promised and fully deserves a day to herself, he exchanges a nod of understanding, that she is to relax and not worry about him, and that their bombshell of a secret is safe, as agreed. She leaves the house briskly, carrying, for once, nothing but a small handbag. Mr Mock then steps out to buy some parts from the electrical shop, leaving Dan alone with his mother. She offers him more cushions; offers him tea; offers him a shoulder rub.
‘Mum, you don’t have to nurse me.’
‘I’m not nursing you,’ she retorts, straightening his pile of science magazines. ‘I’m mothering you. Deal with it.’
The sliding doors snub Natalie for just long enough to break her step and slop a scalding dribble of coffee over her thumb, then grudgingly part. She enters the busy station and selects one of the intersecting queues for the various banks of ticket machines. It’s a jolly, Saturday-morning crowd, bound for early-season football matches, open-air concerts and days out with the kids. In front of her: a silent young couple carrying huge rucksacks, holding hands, destined for adventure. Natalie feels a flash of envy, but she too is free today. A day off. Dan-free. Time, at last, to reflect on the damage she has caused.
Dan said he could never have done what she did. He’s right — both because he is not a schemer (his intended meaning) and (more to the point) because he wouldn’t have got away with it. In his place, she would have recognised that the matter of babies wasn’t closed. His observation echoes the subtext of most of their quarrels: the moral gradient between thoughtlessness (Dan) and meanness (Nat) — which way does it tilt? Most people, in Natalie’s experience, tend towards one fault or the other, probably because in the face of sporadic thoughtlessness — the box of chocolates finished off accidentally, the forgotten favour, the mood cues missed — the considerate must occasionally resort to calculated meanness to even the score.