‘I just wish you hadn’t gone and told her about Aurelie,’ Farley says. ‘You could have done it without telling her that.’
‘It wouldn’t be fair, just giving her half the story.’
‘You’ve burned your bridges now, though. She won’t take you back.’
Howard sighs. ‘What could I do, Farley? If your hand’s in the fire, you know?’
‘How’s that?’
‘Something my dad used to say. If your hand’s in the fire, eventually you have to accept that the only solution is to take it out. Aurelie was the catalyst, that’s all. It would have happened sooner or later.’
But he’s not sure this is true. If he hadn’t met Aurelie, maybe it would never have happened; maybe he would never have found the courage to leave Halley; maybe he’d have stayed with her, got married and lived the rest of his life without ever knowing what real love could feel like – how singular, how incandescent, how complete. Aurelie changed everything, and the truth is that when he confessed to Halley, he did it in part for her – as a kind of prayer to her, a declaration of faith on which to found a different kind of life.
An attempt, as well, to conjure her back from whatever cloud she’d vanished behind. She never came back after mid-term break; according to the Automator, ‘unforeseen circumstances’ had forced her to extend her holiday. Every day Howard sees her classes trooping despondently from the Geography Room to the study hall, or carrying votive bundles of cardboard and paper to the recycling bins, their faces anxious, hopeful, like Indians doing a rain dance. He knows how they feel. Since mid-term he’s existed in a constant state of tension, braced against every moment as the one that might finally restore her. Even out of school, even on his own, shopping in the supermarket, sitting at the traffic lights, he finds himself holding his breath. But the days are a series of ghost pregnancies, delivering nothing.
‘Unforeseen circumstances.’ He can imagine what – who – that means. Seabrook was supposed to be a career break for her, a transitional phase; she hadn’t intended to get mixed up with anyone, especially not someone already mixed up with someone else. Now she’s wondering what she’s got herself into, and whether there’s still time to get herself out. If only he could talk to her! If only he could let her know that this is real to him, more real than anything that has happened before! Or better yet, magically transport the two of them to the time in the future when they’ve started out on a life together, the chaos and agony of these interim weeks already faded, the blizzard of flyaway moments that is the past replaced by something exhilarating, serene, lit from within…
As for Halley, except for Farley he tells no one that she’s gone. Remembering what happened to Jim Slattery all those years ago, he’s haunted by the thought that somehow the boys will find out. But so far the news appears not to have reached them. In fact, he finds his classes going unusually well. The second-years in particular: thanks to his mid-term reading on the First World War, which having nothing better to do he’d continued after Halley left, Howard finds himself able to speak about his subject from a rare position of authority, and to his surprise, the boys listen. Listen, speak, formulate theories: in the limbo days after mid-term, while he waits for Aurelie to return and his new life to begin, these classes – which have so often resembled trench warfare themselves, a huge amount of labour and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain – become something he actually looks forward to.
This weekend is his first as a single man for almost three years. He has neglected to make plans and spends most of it in his house. It feels, at the start, a lot like the times his parents left him home alone as a teenager. He is free to stay up as late as he wants, listen to music as loud as he wants, eat what he wants, drink what he wants, download porn, belch, walk around in his boxer shorts. By seven o’clock he is drunk; by eight, the novelty has worn off and he finds himself slumped over the kitchen table, watching the microwave defrost a frozen spring roll. Then he hears the key turn in the door and Halley walks in.
Both of them freeze, she by the light switch, he at the table. It is a moment quite electrifying in its cold, untempered immediacy – not quite like seeing a ghost, more like discovering, in the face of another, that you have become a ghost yourself.
‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ Halley says.
‘Yeah,’ is all Howard can think to say. He wishes he was wearing trousers. ‘Can I get you something? Tea?’
He doesn’t know quite what tack he should take with her – chastened? Solicitous? Tender? Stoic? The question is moot: ‘Someone’s waiting,’ she says, gesturing towards the road where an indistinct figure sits inside a car. She goes to their bedroom and begins to throw things in a box. He waits in the kitchen for her to finish, which she does in fifteen or twenty minutes – whisking back through the house and bidding him goodnight with all the warmth of a solicitor’s letter. Then she is gone, and he is left with the hum of the electricity, to go into the bedroom, if he so desires, and see what she has taken.
He drinks the rest of the beer and goes to bed early, but he can’t sleep. The bereaved dog across the road has taken to howling into the small hours of the night, long ululations laden with rage and grief for its lost companion. Howard lies there for an hour or two, listening to the howls and watching the ceiling; then, with a sigh, he throws back the sheets and goes down to the kitchen to sit at the bar with one of his library books (now overdue, and subject to a fine, the borrowing sheet pasted to the fly-leaf informs him sternly, of one penny a week).
He’s read so many books about the war at this point that he’s in danger of becoming a buff; he’s even started to develop Ideas. At some point in his reading, he realized the conflict had coalesced into two separate wars. The first, the war of the generals and the dons as well as the dull school textbook, proliferates with causes, strategies, notable battles, and is fought in the moral light of the so-called ‘Big Words’ – Tradition, Honour, Duty, Patriotism. In the other war, however, the one the soldiers actually experienced, these features are nowhere to be found. In this war, any kind of overarching meaning, even straight enmity between the two sides, seems to dissolve into nothing, and the only constants are chaos, destruction and the sense of being lost in a machinery too huge and powerful to be understood. The very battlefields of this war – so clearly delineated on the arrow-strewn relief maps of the first – are deracinated, volatile, pitching themselves up without warning into the sky, to make landmarks, place names, measurements meaningless. The two disparate accounts remind Howard strangely of what Farley said in the Ferry that night about the differing explanations of the universe – the relativistic and the quantum, or the very large and very small. The generals during and the dons after it wanted more than anything else for the war to make sense, to embody the classical concept of conflict, to look, in short, like a war, just as Einstein tried to fit all of creation into his one perfect geometric scheme; but in the same way that the subatomic particles defied any attempt at explaining them, rebelled towards an evermore violent schemelessness and disorder, so the war, the more its leaders insisted on the contrary, spiralled into incomprehensibility, the more soldiers in their tens and hundreds of thousands were wiped out. From those soldiers’ perspective, meanwhile, the war was one sprawling, senseless confusion, a four-year horror story with no discernible point, other than to belie not only the generals’ causes and big words but the very idea of a comprehensible and God-sanctioned world – which seems to Howard nicely quantum, if nothing else.