Читать книгу Behind the Mountain: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Evie Wyld - Страница 7

BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN

EVIE WYLD

ONE OF HER DREAMS involves being at the crest of a large wave about to break on a steep sea wall. It is the beach at Deal, flat and grey with a long stretch of pebbles leading up to the promenade. The shoreline is a jumble of barbed wire and the rusting skeletons of beach defences. The concrete is sheer, enormous. The wave, though huge, will break only halfway up the wall, and then she will be dropped by it and churned again into a new wave, beaten against the wall until she is broken into pieces. She thinks of her son, and how he’ll take the news, his housemaster calling him out of class, the necessity of his bravery. Her husband will be fine – relieved, perhaps. The part of blameless widower will suit him.

She wakes and is still in Canada and the war is over. And there is her husband next to her, flannel pyjamas against the chill that never quite leaves the house, despite the assurances of the bank that everything is top of the range. Her husband always appears to be wearing a suit, even in sleep. On the boat over, he’d sat out on deck in the sun, wearing cufflinks, shoes shining, sweating. She makes herself touch his back so that he turns, and she smiles and says, “Good morning, darling,” to break the spell of sleep, and she watches him reach for a response, roll over and touch her hair, one of his four necessary shows of intimacy for the day.

“How did you sleep?” he asks. The both of them, she thinks, are trying and only failing on the inside.

She runs through the day’s errands. Collect the rib roast from the butcher for lunch at the weekend, contact an upholsterer – there is an old mouse hole in the sofa that has split and stretched open so it displays the innards, and if one of their Saturday lunchtime guests moves the magazine stand, it will be exposed. The mouse hole is really the bank’s problem – the house came fully furnished, and her husband has told her, Anything you don’t like, we can change. She will not say, Take me home to my son. She will not say, Reverse time and let me make a different decision about everything. She must decide on a dessert for Saturday. Send out one of the fortnightly care boxes to Sherborne, and try not to think of the twitching canes of the housemasters.