She was in the back garden when he returned home. It was Sunday. The apple trees had been showing signs of blight and she was on the path, cutting away the wilted blossoms. When she heard him she stopped what she was doing. She stood with her arms up among the branches, listening for the sound of his good left leg on the kitchen tiles, and the hard, delayed thud of the prosthesis.

In the kitchen, his steps approached and then receded. She guessed he had gotten a glass of water and gone upstairs, not noticing she was out there. He’d been away lecturing at a conference. It was the usual thing, a few days, a few overnight stays.

She put a hand inside her coat pocket, feeling for the diamond earring she had found in their bed the first morning he was absent. She’d been changing the sheets and there it was. She took it out, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. Even in the cold white of the October sun it glittered delicately. She turned it, slipped it back into her pocket. She had known already that he had been seeing another woman, other women, these past months. And she knew it only made him depressed. She wasn’t sure what difference the diamond made.

She had gone into town earlier, taking the soft dirt path shaded by oaks whose branches she had to push back or duck under or step over. She’d been wearing a thick cardigan beneath her coat and she was sweating. She stopped by a rock so she could remove the cardigan but instead she just sat, thinking of nothing, thinking of him. She missed him. She thought of things he had told her. If you sit in a perfect silence long enough, in a place where there are no echoes, no sound at all, you will most likely become disoriented, you might lose your balance, you might begin to hear your own blood flowing away from your heart, or the wind, or a song. And the same might happen if you are subjected to a single sustained chord at a loud, ear-splitting volume. If you’re patient, if you just wait, you might hear a symphony. He never said these things to inform or make conversation. They were just the things he was thinking about.

She made herself get up, walk. Soon she passed the line of shops that was the town and she went further along, to the supermarket that stood off by itself overlooking the sea. It was cool inside. She got milk, the coffee he liked, orange juice, bread. When she came out, the sun was hanging, enormous and white, above the sea and she stopped, because all along the shoreline green lights bounced and glimmered. The balls of light were tiny, pale, the whole scene otherworldly. She tried to describe it in her head the same way she imagined she would tell it to him when he asked her how her week had been, but she couldn’t get at it, so she just stood with her shopping and watched.

 

Returning downstairs, he said nothing about her sitting in the middle of the kitchen with her coat on. His hair was wet, his face freshly shaved. He had on a clean shirt. He kissed her quickly on the lips and then turned to light the fire. He was kneeling with his shoulders bent over the wood stove. She wished she could see his expression. When he was preoccupied his face was intensely alive, or else haggard.

‘How was the conference?’ she asked.

He worked at a piece of kindling that refused to catch.

‘Oh it was fine. It was hard, but it was fine.’

The wood caught. He got up. He glanced at her before getting a knife and board to cut thick slices of bread and cheese at the table. She could tell he knew she was watching his hands, that she was studying his knuckles that were crossed in some parts with light white scars. When he was done cutting the bread and cheese, he went into the garden to get salad things. She looked at the fire and the empty kitchen and the bread he had cut and she stood up. She went to the doorway, leaned against the frame. He was pressing experimentally at the flesh of a green tomato. He glanced over and then continued what he was doing, a tired, speculative look on his face.

Later, in the semi-dark of their bedroom with candles flickering by the bedside, he lay on the bed. Relaxing his leg, he depressed, then released, the button on the prosthesis and watched her remove it. She did it slowly. She felt his gaze on her shoulder and the base of her neck. He was reclined against the pillows, and maybe, she thought, he had that same tired look. He moved across, pushed up her skirt. His body covering hers felt achingly good: heavy, damp, the smell of his perspiration sharp in the air.

Afterwards she stood beside the darkened bedroom window, re-adjusting her skirt, and he sat on the bed, fixing his leg. The candles had gone out and the air swelled now with their waxy, oily scent. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was thinking about his musical scores, counter-fugues that had once stopped her in her tracks. She was thinking that she wanted to go to him. She wanted him to come to her. She waited and then she turned to the window and separated the horizontal slats of the blinds with her fingers. In the moonless evening she could just make out the spurs and blossoms she had cut, now piled in dark heaps around the trees.

‘I should make a fire,’ she said.

She heard him getting his clothes, and he was standing beside her.

‘I can do it,’ he said.

He moved about the garden while she sat on the low wall and smoked. Twice, he came up to take the cigarette from her. Their fingers touched briefly. He pulled on the cigarette, looking out into the garden. When the fire was lit they sat facing it on blankets he had put on the wet ground. She dragged a blanket over her knees. She thought they might talk now. There was the heaviness about his jowls that he had when he was into something, a new composition maybe. He would want to talk to her about that. He brushed a hand across his jaw – and she imagined a rented room, a slender arm reaching to turn out a bedside lamp. A girl’s voice: Shall I? His: Don’t. I want to see.

A breeze came up, and with it the sudden intense perfume of the orange-scented geraniums she had put in the ground that spring. She picked up a branch, made lines in the dirt.

‘Have you been working?’ she asked.

He raised his head and looked at her. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘I have a night shift tomorrow, but I can go out in the day,’ she said. When he was unsettled like this, it was easier for him to get somewhere with his work when she wasn’t in the house.

He nodded and she sat forward a little.

Shall I? Don’t—

He got up to get the blossoms. He heaped them on the fire. Once they were gone he let the fire die quickly. It was warm next to the embers with the blanket on her. She pulled her knees up and closed her eyes for a moment. His silence made her anxious. She put the branch on her lap, removed the diamond from her coat pocket and placed it on one of the stones around the fire. It flickered. Its edges caught the red of the embers.

‘I found this,’ she said quietly.

He glanced at it. She knew, now, that they would say what they had to say to one another. It would be tonight, in the bedroom, in the unmade bed. Or tomorrow morning. They would shower, him first, then her, and he would boil water and make a jug of coffee, and they would sit opposite one another at the kitchen table with their hands around their mugs and the sun pouring in and he would tell her. The first tender feelings. Something about the girl’s fragility. The mornings he left home early in the winter when it was still dark and the way the light came up while he was driving to her place. Weekend conferences. Daytime, in their bed, twice. The other girls. Don’t, she thought. I want to— His face would be pale, his voice subdued, and he would say he wanted her to know everything about it. He would keep his eyes on her. Afterwards, he would say it was nothing, that it was only proof of a deeper fault: in the past months, he had found things impossible, he hadn’t been able to work, nothing he wrote was as it should be. It was something inside him. And she’d say, No, it was her, too. And slowly, they would find the conversation slipping away from them. She had a peculiar feeling of déjà vu, but it wasn’t that they had been here before, it was that they would be here again.

He was turning over the embers. His face was lit a harsh, dark red.

‘I think we should go somewhere,’ he said.

When she didn’t answer, he added roughly, ‘We could go anywhere you like.’

 

He drove.

She had thought about how it would go. His telling her he couldn’t walk on that beach. Her replying: Then we’ll stand at the roadside and look.

But that wasn’t how it went.

He parked the car at the viewing point she had indicated, facing the sea.

She said, ‘I want to go to the shoreline,’ and got out. She leaned against the iron railing in front of the car. About her feet were leaves, gold and brown. The railing was icy cold. She kept her hands on it and didn’t turn around until he was beside her. The prosthesis was gone. He had his crutches, one under each arm.

‘You don’t have to go with me,’ she said.

He inhaled sharply and started walking, the right crutch going first into the sand. The crutch sank in, an inch, two inches, three. And then the left, the booted foot and then the left crutch, and then the right again, each time sinking in, pulling his shoulder down so that he had to haul away with his body, so that he looked like a great, hulking, rocking thing, moving slowly towards the water.

She knew that above them, on the low cliff to the east, was a line of trees.

Neither of them looked up.

She could taste the salt in the air. The sea ahead was grey and quiet; there was no miraculous green, no lights, nothing. They had come here for nothing. She looked at his face as though he might have noticed it too, but there was no expression there. He was looking straight ahead and his jaw was rigid, his face bloodless. The scars on his knuckles shone a sickly, glistening white and he kept walking and she understood that it was something terrible she was doing, making him walk here. She wanted to stop him, but it was too late. She put her hands inside her coat pockets and leaned into the sudden wind that had come up over the sea. It was a hard wind, full of sand. It made her hair whip and sting her face and the force of it slowed her. It wasn’t just sand. There were bits of shell and brownish seaweed.

And now the sea was no longer grey. The whole thing was churning, white. It was white and raging and loud. If she shouted at the top of her voice, he wouldn’t hear her above the sea’s violent detonations along the beach. He didn’t slow. He kept them moving towards the shoreline. By the time they reached it, her legs were soft and lumpish. She couldn’t understand how she didn’t fall.

A tide rushed in around her ankles. The icy water seeped into her boots. He had to dig his crutch deep into the sea-hardened sand. There was something wrong with his shoulders and his face. Her own face was wet and she could feel on it a long scratch from a shell or some other projectile. She turned, came toward him to shout at him to go, and when the wind almost took her he put out a hand, gripped her shoulder, and she knew he would not move without her. They both knew they had to walk back the same way they had come. They had to drive home, and continue.

In the car they didn’t look at one another. They didn’t start the engine. They stared into the windscreen that was flecked with dirt. Though in the distance the sea blasted the shoreline, they could hear nothing. He put his hands on the wheel and began talking about it, about the sea blowing up like that.

 

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