Eight
IN THE EARLY evening, high-altitude clouds in the western sky formed a thin yellow wash which became richer over the hour, and then thickened until a filtered orange glow hung above the giant crests of parkland trees; the leaves became nutty brown, the branches glimpsed among the foliage oily black, and the desiccated grasses took on the colors of the sky. A Fauvist dedicated to improbable color might have imagined a landscape this way, especially once sky and ground took on a reddish bloom and the swollen trunks of elderly oaks became so black they began to look blue. Though the sun was weakening as it dropped, the temperature seemed to rise because the breeze that had brought faint relief all day had faded, and now the air was still and heavy.
The scene, or a tiny portion of it, was visible to Robbie Turner through a sealed skylight window if he cared to stand up from his bath, bend his knees and twist his neck. All day long his small bedroom, his bathroom and the cubicle wedged between them he called his study had baked under the southern slope of the bungalow’s roof. For over an hour after returning from work he lay in a tepid bath while his blood and, so it seemed, his thoughts warmed the water. Above him the framed rectangle of sky slowly shifted through its limited segment of the spectrum, yellow to orange, as he sifted unfamiliar feelings and returned to certain memories again and again. Nothing palled. Now and then, an inch below the water’s surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond, a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of her skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminishing toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf—a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.
He had known her since they were children, and he had never looked at her. At Cambridge she came to his rooms once with a New Zealand girl in glasses and someone from her school, when there was a friend of his from Downing there. They idled away an hour with nervous jokes, and handed cigarettes about. Occasionally, they passed in the street and smiled. She always seemed to find it awkward—That’s our cleaning lady’s son, she might have been whispering to her friends as she walked on. He liked people to know he didn’t care—There goes my mother’s employer’s daughter, he once said to a friend. He had his politics to protect him, and his scientifically based theories of class, and his own rather forced self-certainty. I am what I am. She was like a sister, almost invisible. That long, narrow face, the small mouth—if he had ever thought about her at all, he might have said she was a little horsey in appearance. Now he saw it was a strange beauty—something carved and still about the face, especially around the inclined planes of her cheekbones, with a wild flare to the nostrils, and a full, glistening rosebud mouth. Her eyes were dark and contemplative. It was a statuesque look, but her movements were quick and impatient—that vase would still be in one piece if she had not jerked it so suddenly from his hands. She was restless, that was clear, bored and confined by the Tallis household, and soon she would be gone.
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