This was the very heart, as Darius saw it, of all his difficulties. Chris had got pregnant when they were barely more than children themselves, and had needed her parents’ support. He’d not felt able to leave her and take up the opportunity he’d been offered, because he’d seen how important it was to her to have her mum round the corner, and her sister a few streets away, and it just wouldn’t have been fair to ask her to give that up. And he couldn’t walk out on his own child.
But Chris lacked his ambition.
‘A home, some kids, a reasonable job, a night out once in a while with her friends, an annual holiday, that’s all she asks of life.’
His friends frowned down at their drinks. It was all they asked of life as well. All that most people asked of life, in their experience. What was wrong with that?
Darius sighed, and knocked back the last of his beer.
‘It’s far too late to worry about it now, I know. I’ve made my bed and I must lie in it. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not such a bad bed as these things go. Chris is a good woman and I’ve had it easy in all kinds of ways. But if I could have my life again…’
He looked round at their faces and saw that he hadn’t brought them with him.
‘Sorry, lads. I’m really sorry. I’ve been a bit of a downer tonight, haven’t I? I’m tired, I guess. Haven’t been sleeping well. I think maybe I should love you and leave you, if you don’t mind. Get an early night. I’ll be fine in the morning, and better company next time we meet, but you’ll have more fun without me tonight.’
‘The weird thing,’ said Roger, after Darius had gone, ‘is that Chris tells a completely different story. It was Darius who suggested the baby in the first place, and it was Darius, not Chris, who was determined they shouldn’t move.’
The night was charged with superhuman energy. Countless billions of tons of air were moving rapidly over the town, making pub signs clank and creak and burglar alarms go off in cars. Darius buttoned his coat up to the neck as he strode off across the park. The big trees jived and roared. He felt like some tiny crawling thing at the bottom of the sea, with the waves crashing about above him in the world outside.
And as he walked beneath those great dark crashing waves, a shadow crossed the moon, unseen by him, unseen by anyone at all. It was the Angel of Death, riding the blast on its papery wings as it looked down on the town beneath it with its ancient, empty eyes. It didn’t notice the park or the folk museum. It didn’t see the trees or the roofs of the houses. All it saw was the souls that were its prey, like little lights in a void.
‘You’re home early, sweetheart,’ murmured Chris sleepily as Darius climbed into the warm space beside her.
‘Yeah, a bit tired. Thought I’d call it a night.’
‘Nice evening?’
‘Oh, you know, bit samey, but they’re good blokes, every one of them. Hearts in the right place and all of that.’
‘You are tired aren’t you, poor pet,’ she said, cuddling up against him in the darkness.
It was a long time before he slept. He lay with his eyes open for an hour or more, while the wind blew across the chimneys and rattled the front gate, thinking about all the places he could once have gone, that were now beyond his reach.
Two days later, Darius came back to an empty house. Chris was a teaching assistant in a local school and was normally home before he was, but he remembered now that she’d had some sort of social event to go to after work. One of the teachers was retiring, she’d said, or something like that.
‘I won’t be very late,’ she’d said, ‘but I will have eaten. I’ll leave you to fix something for yourself.’
It always unsettled him, coming home to an empty house, and he could never quite help himself from feeling a certain childish resentment towards Chris for not being there, and towards whoever she was with for keeping her from him. Of course he knew quite well that this was silly and unfair.
He took a bottle of beer from the fridge and went to sit by the fishpond in his garden. The windy weather had passed. It was a calm evening and, as the light faded, the dragonflies came like they sometimes did, dry and papery, buzzing and droning around the water on some mysterious business of their own.
What were they doing, he wondered, these strange archaic creatures that had been here before the dinosaurs, here when the first fish wriggled out onto the land?
He dozed off for a bit. When he woke it was dark, and the doorbell was ringing inside the house.
Cycling home from the retirement do at work, Chris had been hit by a car. She lost consciousness instantly.
People gathered round her. Somebody made a call. The police arrived and an ambulance came whooping through the streets. She was taken to the hospital and laid out on a bed in a special room of her own, surrounded by humming machines. The room had a view of those chestnut trees on the far side of the park. They were hardly moving at all.
When Darius arrived, her doctor told him that they wanted to disconnect her from life support.
‘I’m so sorry but I’m afraid she’s gone,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s absolutely no brain activity at all.’
Darius, with his lion’s mane, began to rage and roar.
‘No way!’ he bellowed. ‘You’ll have to kill me first!’ He shoved doctors and nurses away from where his wife lay like Sleeping Beauty, her chest peacefully rising and falling. He stood guard in front of her, daring them to come near. ‘Look at her, for Christ’s sake! Just bloody look at her! She’s obviously alive!’
It was his three daughters, all of them in their twenties, who finally persuaded him that Chris was no longer present. Her body was just ticking over by itself, they explained to him over and over. It was like an idling vehicle with no one behind the wheel. The driver would never return.
In the early hours of morning, Darius’s girls walked their father home across the park. Fresh air will be good for us, they said, trying their best to be grown-up. Two of them supported Darius, as if he was an old man who couldn’t stand by himself. And actually he couldn’t. It was as if some kind of malignant leech had sucked all the life and blood from him, all the muscle, all the roar.
As they passed under the chestnut trees, the clumps of foliage rustled slightly and sighed above their heads. Entangled among them was the bright blue kite. It had pulled so hard and long towards the sky that its string had finally snapped. And without the tension that had held it firm against the wind, it no longer knew how to fly.
8
The Steps
1.
‘He is your father, Isola,’ says Nanny B. ‘He is your own papa. We know you haven’t seen much of him. But men have business to attend to. He has ten thousand Africans working for him, or so they say.’
‘I know he’s my father,’ scoffs Lady Isola. ‘I’ve seen him lots of times.’
2.
His Lordship sits enthroned in the nursery armchair to receive his kiss. He is grinning like a schoolboy. In a semicircle round him stand the nursery staff, wringing their hands. Isola edges towards the stranger.
‘My, but she’s a pretty thing, eh?’ says Lord Robert. ‘We’ll have to fight the men off this one.’
There are black pits all over his nose and his eyes have yellow bits in them. His hands clamp tightly onto her legs.
‘I have a surprise for you, Isola, but you must come with me to find it.’
3.
Up the stairs, across the landing, along a corridor. They pass faded tapestries of hunters, wild beasts, a screaming horse being savaged by a lion. There is a brown smell of mould and honey.