‘Footsteps,’ he said out loud, walking on towards the river, trying to concentrate only on the rhythmic click of his heels on stone. He thought of home, the boat at Barham’s Dock and the chill damp of the river, and a wave of self-pity made him feel physically sick, so he increased his pace and thought of nothing but the night around him.
Since the crash at Harrimere Drain five years earlier, Dryden’s emotions had been cauterized: all feeling burnt away where self-knowledge met the outside world. His love for Laura, which had stunned him with its intensity in the hours after the accident, had been transmuted by degrees into the dutiful attentions of a carer, a hospital visitor, a past husband, a future husband, but never today’s husband. It was like trying to love an old photograph, a black and white vision of what once had been.
But he felt an emotion now – anger – and he let it flow, feeling its strength and vitality. ‘Secrets,’ he said, slamming his heel into the pavement. He passed the town’s police station where a solitary drunk stood guard, supported by a bollard, swaying to a tune only he could hear.
Dryden walked on, letting his anger build, knowing that with it he could justify retaliation.
Every day since Laura’s coma had begun he had been at her bedside, even through those first months when she hadn’t made a single microscopic movement. And then every day, again, through the intermittent, half-senseless period in which she had begun to broadcast messages on the COMPASS. He had kept faith with her, and kept faith with their dream. He had dealt with the real world in the best way he could while she lived in her own world, about which he knew so little.
How could she have a secret? He felt his anger surge, displacing other stored emotions.
The problem was words, he knew that now. For all that his trade had taught him, and for all of Laura’s talent with a script, they were bad at words. When they’d married they’d almost stopped using them, retreating instead into a comfortable and intimate partnership where almost nothing needed to be said. Now everything needed to be said, their relationship reduced to a series of computer printouts, e-mails and text messages, and the strain was distorting his ability to feel anything, let alone love.
Which was why he could savour his anger now: how dare she keep a secret from him, how dare she refuse to share everything, as he felt he had done?
He reached the riverside, slumped on a bench and threw his head back to look at the sky. The smog of the day had again been swept away; stars jostled for position in a sky teeming with light.
A nearly full moon. He thought about Etterley, dancing beneath the moon, as he’d seen her the first night he’d met the Water Gypsies. There was something redolent of the harvest festival about her body: her full breasts, her ample figure, her opulent blonde hair. He imagined that body, swaying under the moonlight, sinking to her knees in the long grass gilded with the moon’s white light.
He stood, setting off for the water meadows.
He’d made the Faustian pact with the first step: if they were dancing, he’d join them, if not, he’d walk towards his boat and drink his anger away before the inevitable nightmare, the familiar one now, the claustrophobia of the sand in sharp contrast to this, the overarching vastness of the night sky. He walked along the old wharf, past the darkened gables of The Frog Hall, and out on to the fen.
He saw the fire first, flickering where the water meadows folded down a slope. Here, in the lee of the flood bank, the Water Gypsies were gathered in a half-circle around a burning pile of wood and cardboard. He stood on the edge of the pool of red light and saw her immediately, dancing on the far side of the flames, and when she saw him she stopped, holding her hand out for his.
Dryden could smell the dope on the breeze, and – closer – the heat on his face which made his blood race. He took a drink from Speedwing, who pressed his shoulder, and he looked down into the amber liquid in the tumbler and drank as he felt Etty’s arm loop itself around his waist and then rest at the base of his spine. Dryden felt her mouth, warm and moist on his neck, and he felt then the need to say something, so he held her close and as he kissed her said, ‘Secrets.’
The moon was overhead when the dancers fell to the ground. Dryden could feel the sweat running between his shoulder blades and across his chest, while his mouth hung open, drawing in the cool night air. He let Etty take his hand and lead him along the river bank, away from the light of the fire, but into a field of meadow grass which almost reached Dryden’s shoulders. Someone by the fire played a drum, a rhythmic beat which made him feel safe, even out by the water’s edge.
He reached out for her but she stood back, put a hand to her shoulder and unfastened her dress, which fell in a single slide into the grass. The moon, ample itself, revealed her nakedness, and Dryden drank her in. He took her then and pressed their bodies together as she tore at his buttons and belt, then they knelt, briefly kissing before tumbling together to the earth. Quickly inside her he felt warm, enveloped, and when he came he was looking at her eyes, the familiar aqueous brown reflecting perfectly two nearly full moons. She cried out, and the drumbeat stopped, and he knew then that he too had a secret.
He saw them through a keyhole, that first time. It dated his passion, the shape of that vision – the heavy Victorian lock on the old outbuilding, the clunky key removed, to leave this window into their world.
Summer: 1983.
It had been the dairy once, his mother had said, for the farm which had stood on the bank above. Marco used it for wood, delivered into this treeless landscape by the merchant’s barge. But his boys had oiled the lock, and kept the key between them, securing for themselves a secret place for their childhood games.
But this wasn’t a childhood game.
He’d lost them quickly that day, as he increasingly did, and knew with a sickening certainty that they had contrived an escape. Which meant only one thing, that they were what he hoped they would never be.
But he didn’t have the key, so he knew where they’d be. He’d crept to the woodstore and sat in the grass, soaked in sunshine. At first he’d heard only the whispers: lips pressed to ears, obscuring what meaning there was. Then the sound of clothes slipping to the floor, a zip, a shirt drawn over shoulders and hair. They were out of sight, on the floor and then he heard the sound of a cork, not freshly drawn, but twisted out by hand. But no sound of the wine pouring, just the drinking from the neck, and the smack of a hand passed across wet lips.
The jealousy made him dizzy, so he sank down on his knees and closed his eyes. When he looked again he could see them: and it was worse, their mouths locked and her long pale fingers searching over his dark naked body. Summer: so a single ribbon of sunlight from the missing tiles in the roof crossed their backs, from the muscles of his thigh to the cool curve of her breast. He watched the bodies, moving awkwardly at first, but then with the twin powers of lust and youth.
His own excitement rose, giving him something of his own from their betrayal of him. He touched himself, only briefly, but the release was almost immediate, and although he caught the cry before it broke free he knew he’d made a noise, a whimper for the loss of his self-respect.
Hidden in the stifled cry was a name: Louise.
But they were deaf to the world outside the foetal bundle they had made of each other, the human jigsaw puzzle without a gap. He saw her arch her back when he came, and the redness of her breast darkened amongst the shadows of the woodstore. The silence was luxurious and intense, and he heard his own heart beating within it.