Читать книгу The Swimmer - Roma Tearne - Страница 9

TUESDAY, AUGUST 23RD. ON THE MORNING that Jack and Miranda left for the Broads I awoke to them having breakfast noisily in the garden. I was exhausted. They had now been here for three days. Last night I had again waited up until midnight hoping to catch sight of the swimmer, but the garden had remained undisturbed. Then, just as I dozed off, the outside light came on and woke me. It was him! But by the time I crept downstairs he had vanished. There were damp marks on the kitchen floor.

‘There’s no bread,’ Jack informed me, his mouth full of muesli.

Miranda handed me a cup of tea.

‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘Of course she is!’ my brother said, waving an empty cup in her face. ‘Workaholics usually are!’

He laughed a braying laugh and I wondered how Miranda could bear living with him.

‘More tea, more tea!’ he shouted childishly. Obviously he was in a good mood. I looked at him over the rim of my mug. Ant always maintained that Jack had a touch of Asperger’s Syndrome. It was the only way he could explain my brother’s sudden mood swings. Eric thought otherwise. Jack, he had once said, was disturbed for other reasons. Sunlight glinted through the trees. We had not had such an astonishing summer as this for years and it was going to be another hot day.

‘You need a wash, Miranda,’ Jack said. ‘You’re sweating, already.’

And he laughed.

‘I’ve got seven mosquito bites,’ Sophie complained.

‘Aunty Ria, have you seen how weird the spiders are in this house?’ Zach asked. ‘They’re enormous, like in the Caribbean!’

‘That’s global warming for you,’ Jack said.

He was eating and drinking with an odd, manic speed. Miranda seemed not to notice.

‘I read somewhere that the insects in Britain will become more like Mediterranean ones as the place hots up.’

‘Ugh, how will they get here? By swimming the channel?’

‘No, Sophie, I think they’ll just evolve differently. Like your Aunty Ria has!’

‘Mum!’ wailed Sophie. ‘I hate spiders.’

Go, I thought. Just go. We’ll never get on.

‘Stop winding her up, Jack,’ Miranda said. ‘There was some bacon in the fridge, Ria. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve used it.’

I nodded, not wanting the subject of bread to be brought up again.

‘Of course, help yourself.’

In all, my swimmer had appeared three times. Last night the images of him had played themselves over and over again. His visits were a puzzle, I was becoming mildly obsessed by them. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to write a poem about the mysterious way in which he visited and then vanished. I yawned. I had meant to wake at six, begin working, but not having managed this all I wanted to do now was sit in the sun. Miranda was probably right and I needed a holiday. The coffee was lukewarm. Could it be, I frowned, returning to my earlier train of thought, that I had imagined some of it? The facts were few. At some point in the night the outside light had come on and the bread was missing. That was all. I had no proof the swimmer had taken it. I had no proof that he had come into the house, even. I glanced at Jack, but he was concentrating on the map spread out in front of him. My baby brother has a round, slightly chubby face. Curiously unlined. Empty, Eric always said. Like a man who could not comprehend what was lost. I yawned, again, distracted. Hmm, I thought, but had I actually seen the swimmer?

Miranda was looking at me, quizzically.

‘You’re out of it, aren’t you!’ she said. ‘Would you like me to do the shopping before we go?’

‘Oh no, I shall go into town a bit later on.’

Tonight I would try a small experiment.

‘We could go through Bury,’ Jack was saying. ‘On the A14, that’s probably the quickest way.’

‘Are you sure you won’t come with us, Ria?’ Miranda asked.

I felt a certain desperation on her part. Fleetingly, I was sorry for her. Neither of us understood the preoccupations of the other.

‘My sister lives in a time warp,’ Jack declared, to no one in particular.

I ignored him. There was an electronic beeping and he started searching his pockets wildly. Miranda watched, expressionless. When he finally located his phone it had stopped. The air was filled with transparent light.

‘Damn,’ he said.

I laughed. He was frantically searching through his numbers.

‘Damn!’ he said, once more.

In his pixelated, globally driven life every eventuality depended on electronic devices. His iPhone, his iPod, his chargers, his cables; modern-day worry beads, all of them. Poor Jack. Was this the only way to survive what had happened to us as children? So no, I didn’t want to spend a few days with them on a river.

‘What time are you leaving?’ I asked, instead.

‘We have to pick the boat up by four at the latest, and we’ve got to find moorings before dark…so let’s say we leave around eleven?’

I would go shopping, I decided. A delicious sense of freedom brought on by their imminent departure spread over me. And I would buy bread.

By midday the house was mine again. The silence settled slowly like dust on the sunlit surface of the furniture. I tidied the detritus of the last few days in a desultory, half-hearted way, and went out. Orford is much smaller than Aldeburgh, a village really, with one main street. In reality it is an island, surrounded by marshland and the estuary running into the sea. For the past two years the heavy rains have brought extensive flooding to the area and house prices were going into a decline. Those who could had begun to move away. Others, like me, who chose to live close to the river, kept a supply of sandbags at the ready for the next deluge. As Orford has no tourist attractions it seldom gets crowded even at the height of summer. The smart London visitors come for the festivals and are interested only in Aldeburgh. They hardly ever venture as far as us. Which suits the xenophobic residents of Orford perfectly.

I went to the fishmonger’s and picked up the fresh crab I had ordered. The greengrocer was selling samphire and watercress, so I bought some. Next I went to the bakery. I bought a loaf of bread, hesitated for only a moment and bought some scones.

‘Your family’s arrived, I see,’ Eileen said.

I nodded.

‘How’s the politics?’ she asked.

I frowned. Jack’s semi-right-wing political party was of no interest to me. Eileen’s face was studiedly blank.

‘He thinks we should stop campaigning against the developers building the marina.’

If the marina and the proposed block of flats alongside the riverbank were built, apart from the flood risk they would face, the lanes in Orford would become completely clogged with cars.

‘Oh, does he!’ I said.

So Jack was talking to the locals now, was he? Poking his nose into things that were nothing to do with him.

‘Don’t worry. The builders won’t get permission,’ I said.

I didn’t tell Eileen, but I had written a piece for the local newspaper on the subject. So far, it didn’t look as though they would run it. The circus and the assault that had followed used up all available column inches.

Eileen packed up my scones. She nodded a little grimly, I thought. Then she slipped a pot of cream into the bag. I knew she would talk about me later. Everyone in Orford is like that. The landscape collects conversations as effectively as a bucket. I have known most of the people here since I was a child. They all know what happened to us. They know about our fight over the ownership of the house, and that I had come back to bury my secrets. I knew there were those who thought of me as the woman who had everything; there were others who felt sorry for me, but in either case I no longer encouraged friendship. In my experience, those who extended the hand of friendliness usually gave out private information at the drop of a hat and I trusted no one.

‘The children have grown a lot,’ she ventured, and I agreed, they had.

It was one o’clock. I bought some apples and a small pork pie and drove across the bridge to the other side of the riverbank in the direction of Orford Ness. When I was a teenager I used to sit for hours staring at this shingle desert of military ruin. The horizon remains the same through one hundred and eighty degrees. I used to love its other-worldliness. From here it is possible to catch a glimpse of Eel House as a faint smudge in the distance. Over time, the National Trust volunteers had grown used to seeing me sitting on the edge of its desert-like landscape, lost in thought.

The sun had become very hot while I walked and, because of the lack of rain, the marshland had taken on a brittle aspect. The smell of rotting vegetation in the dykes mingled with a drift of sea-air. All around me the reeds gave off a dry, hollow sound. By now I was lightheaded with hunger and something else. There was a strange suppressed anticipation in the air. At the edge of the marshes, there was a small hollow in the ground where I always sat and slipping into it now I ate my lunch. Silence stretched in every direction across the cloudless East Anglian sky. I watched a couple of waders fishing in the stagnant pools that had spread out from the river. Overhead a few gulls sailed confidently on the air. A fly buzzed in my ear and I could hear the faint sounds of crickets. Slowly, hardly aware of what I was doing, I closed my eyes.

I must have been asleep for ages, for when I woke the sun had moved lower in the sky. My face felt burnt and I suddenly remembered the food in the hot boot of the car. It was three o’clock. Hastily I retraced my steps and drove back. I was beginning to feel slightly sick and hoped I had not got sunstroke. At home I made myself a large mug of tea. Then I went into my study and worked with a solid concentration and an enormous sense of relief. For two years I had been working on a collection of poems. Working and re-working, trying to find the clear stanza that stands for a lorry-load of elaborate prose. The collection was about water and the way memory travels through it. I had wanted a high, pure sound, an elegiac note, of life poised between two states. My past and all it represented was what interested me most, but I had been stuck for months and the collection had got nowhere. This afternoon, as I rewrote some of the clumsier passages, a sense of calm began to break over me. I worked solidly for nearly three hours. When I finished, my headache had gone and it was seven o’clock. Going downstairs I made a salad. At seven thirty Miranda rang. They had arrived to find the boat was as enormous as a double-decker bus.

‘Jack can hardly steer it,’ she laughed. ‘And he’s in a terrible mood, but the kids are pleased because they each have their own bathroom!’

‘How large is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, the only boat available was one that sleeps twelve. So what could we do, having got here!’

‘We’ve only just managed to find a mooring,’ Jack said, taking the phone off her. ‘Miranda is hopeless. What…shut up, Zach, I’m speaking.’

His voice broke up slightly.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I shouted, wanting to laugh with relief that he was so far away.

‘…but unfortunately it’s on the furthest bank with no access to the towpath. So we can’t get off and go to any of the restaurants on the other side. If Eel House wasn’t so uninhabitable we wouldn’t have had to come to this bloody place.’

Suddenly I lost it.

‘What d’you mean, Jack? You didn’t have to come, you know what it’s like here. Why didn’t you have a holiday somewhere else, instead?’

‘Fine,’ Jack said, very clearly. ‘We won’t bother, next year.’

‘Stop it, you two,’ Miranda shouted. ‘We’ve frozen chips, beef burgers, Coke and a bottle of whisky. We could have some fun, if we tried, you know?’

Outside, a spectacular sunset was unfolding and I felt the satisfied tiredness of having done a good day’s work. Miranda’s voice came over faintly.

‘We’ve got the boat for an extra week, if we want it.’

I heard Jack say something in the background. Something in me snapped. I was fed up with his rudeness. He talked to me in the same way my mother used to.

They rang off, with Miranda still trying to smooth things over, and I went back to preparing my supper. In the years since my mother’s death I had become a different kind of person. There had been a time when my mother’s constant stream of boyfriends invading my privacy, and Jack’s pushiness, would have reduced me to a state of desperation. I had wanted a life of my own, then, away from them both. I had wanted someone to share things with, as only my father had done. Now that was all over. I no longer had anything to share and I was relieved to discover that the desire for belonging had finally gone.

The last rays of the sun caught the windowpanes as I cooked my pasta and dressed it lightly with olive oil. A sentence was threading through my head. It ran like music, rising and falling. Suddenly I needed to write it down. Covering the pasta, I quickly went upstairs and sat at my desk. In the last-nights-of-summer darkness that arrived more swiftly each evening, hardly daring to breathe lest I lose it, I sat absorbed for another two hours. The effortless ease with which I worked told me that this poem was going to be perfect, and as I wrote I smelt the drift of roses coming in through the window. A blackbird sang and sang again, the sun set and night descended while I remained absorbed.

When I had finished the rough draft I put on a CD. Then, sitting by the window, listening to Verdi, I fell asleep for the second time that day. I had completely forgotten about my swimmer of course and my plan to catch him in the act of stealing. Once again it was after midnight when I woke. The Verdi had long finished. The garden was completely silent, there was no moon tonight as I opened the window and breathed in the scent of newly opened jasmine flowers. The river glinted now and then. The starless sky made it impossible to distinguish water from garden. Nothing moved, there was no sound. I felt a small nudge of disappointment as the church clock struck one. The house next door was closed. Either the renters were asleep or they were out again. Well, that was that, I thought ruefully, aware of some disappointment. It was a simple enough explanation. A passing youth had decided to cool off by swimming upstream and then had discovered the house. Perhaps he had been on his way back from the pub, perhaps someone had even dared him, so that, in a moment of bravado, he had wandered in and stolen a loaf of bread. As I was the subject of some curiosity in Orford, what could I expect? Lucky he didn’t take anything valuable, I thought, pulling a face. Better lock the back door. The bare skeleton of the poem still glowed inside me. At least the swimmer’s appearance had given me the kick-start I needed. Reaching for the catch, I was about to close the window when I froze in my tracks. Someone was playing the piano downstairs with the soft pedal down.

The back of my neck went cold. I stood confused, staring into the darkness. Jack, the only person I knew who could play the piano, was miles away, moored up on the Broads. And Jack didn’t play jazz. The music went on and on, faint and familiar, jauntily inviting me to move in time to it. There was a small delicious run of notes and then it came to an abrupt end. I heard the lid come down, followed by footsteps going out into the hall. The kitchen door opened and shut gently. Moments later the outside light came on. Instantly I was galvanised and rushed downstairs. But when I reached the back door the garden was in darkness once more. I switched on the light. The kitchen was exactly as I left it, the pasta was still covered, the bread was in the bin and the forgotten bag of scones stood untouched on the work surface. Exasperated I went into the sitting room but the piano remained as it always had and it was then, at that moment, staring at the music on the stand, that I remembered there had been a piece of sheet music on the floor two days before. Without another thought I rushed to the front door and opened it, going swiftly around to the back of the garden. All was silent. No footprints on the grass, no rose petals fallen off the bushes, nothing had been disturbed. I felt sure the swimmer had not used the river path tonight. I waited, uncertain. Suddenly, realising how vulnerable I was, and with my fearlessness now tinged with a vague dissatisfaction, I went indoors. The rest of the night stretched ahead of me. I knew I would not sleep so, making a pot of tea, I sat down to make a plan.

My plans were all in vain. The following evening there was a thunder-storm of spectacular proportions. I suppose it had been building up to this with all the heat. Lightning flashed and rain fell heavily. It went on for hours. Miranda rang during the worst of it.

‘Can you hear it?’ I asked.

‘Sort of. It’s lovely here. We’ve had a busy day. Zach has got the hang of steering and won’t let anyone take a turn! So he and Jack argue all the time.’

She sounded a little drunk.

‘Did you manage to buy food?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said vaguely.

I could hear her sipping her wine.

She rang off and I wandered restlessly around the house, unable to settle to any work. I found myself going towards the piano and staring at the closed lid.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I muttered.

Maybe I had overworked myself last night. The draft of the poem I had written in an alcoholic haze wasn’t quite right yet. What had seemed luminous and neat in the darkness was a little clumsy. I would have to work on it much more. Perfection did not come without pain, but I wasn’t in the mood tonight.

After about an hour the rain began to ease off and the air cooled slightly. I shivered and threw on a cardigan. It was not the weather for swimming. Pouring myself a generous glass of wine I went back up to my study where force of habit made me drift towards the window. I was still struggling with an idea. This long overdue collection of poems was turning out to be about the absence of parental love. I stared towards the dark point where the water flowed. Bitterness had stopped me from writing objectively, I thought. Then, perhaps because of the peculiar mood I was in, for the first time in many years I began to go over what had happened in that single most significant moment of my life.

I was ten years old and the school summer holidays had arrived. My father was due to have a small operation. Six-year-old Jack and I were sent to Eel House. This very room had been my bedroom, then. In those days, when the farm was at the height of its productivity, an extra pair of hands at harvest was always welcome. We kissed our parents goodbye. My father was going to the hospital the following morning and with us away my mother would be free to nurse him back to health. I remember them standing on the step waving.

‘Look after Jack,’ my mother called, anxious as always about her darling son.

‘Don’t forget to write, Ria,’ my father said, his smile going all the way up to his eyes.

He had the bluest of eyes, like a shimmer of cornflowers. The sunlight on them seemed to sharpen their colour. I have inherited their brightness. Jack has brown eyes like my mother. At Saxmundham station, Uncle Clifford was there to meet us. He was older than Dad, more serious, quieter. Both Jack and I were very fond of him.

All through that long holiday my brother and I played by the river and helped out in the fields. I wrote home twice but was told there was a postal strike so no letter came back. My mother rang several times, but on each occasion we were either out playing or at Eric’s farm for supper. Several times during those weeks he took us out in his boat to set the eel-traps and once or twice, very early in the morning before the sun was up, we went to check the baskets.

There came a night, one that remains very clearly in my memory, when for some unknown reason my uncle and aunt insisted we stay over with Eric and his wife Peggy. They seemed upset. Eric had looked a little subdued too. We could go with him on another early jaunt upriver, he said. Jack was excited but I remember I didn’t want to go, and the next morning I caught a glimpse of our uncle and aunt driving off in the direction of town.

‘Where are they going?’ I asked, puzzled, but Eric had his face turned away and didn’t hear me.

The weather continued to hold, the land grew rosy and then golden in the heat. Jack and I lost our pasty look and turned a gentle nutbrown. We had taken to running around in our bare feet and even Aunt Elsa didn’t try to stop us. Preoccupied with worries of their own, both our uncle and aunt left us to our own devices. From time to time, in the weeks that followed, as we loitered in the overgrown country lanes in search of treasures, or took our kites to the beach, I wondered vaguely what was the matter with them, but then forgot about it. Suddenly one morning my aunt woke me with a grim look on her face.

‘Your mother wants you back,’ she said shortly.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Why?’ was Jack’s predictable reaction.

Uncle Clifford had brought the car round already. Our aunt, I saw with surprise, had even packed our bags in the night.

‘But I don’t want to go,’ Jack wailed. ‘I don’t want to go back to school.’

I knew school wasn’t for a few more weeks. Something about my aunt’s mood alarmed me.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, but she shook her head and looked away.

I knew she didn’t like my mother. Probably they had had a row, I decided. We rushed to wash and have some breakfast. By now I was a little uneasy and Jack was in a bad mood. We had arranged to go to Orford that day and have a kite-flying competition with my friend Heather. I remember Jack howling and refusing to put his shoes on. He loved Heather and was bitterly disappointed.

‘Be a good boy, darling,’ my aunt said, bending to do them up.

She mumbled something about growing up, but wouldn’t say more. Then, just as we were getting into the car, she ran out and gave us each a fierce hug, after which she held me at arm’s length and peered hard at me. She looked as if she had been crying.

‘Come back, Ria,’ she told me softly. ‘Whenever you want. This place belongs to you.’

That I hadn’t said goodbye to Eric was all I could think as my uncle drove us to the station to board the train bound for London. Our aunt had packed us sandwiches and some of the delicious home-made lemonade we had been drinking all summer long.

The journey home was tedious and we had to change trains twice. The views from our carriage window went slowly from the flat landscape I loved to a grimy build-up of houses and factories. After what seemed like ages we arrived at Liverpool Street and saw our mother waiting for us on the platform.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Jack asked.

‘Is he still in hospital?’

‘Come on,’ Mum said. ‘The car is in a twenty-minute space.’

‘How’s Dad?’ I asked when we were in the car, but she was busy negotiating the traffic and didn’t answer.

We were home in fifteen minutes.

‘I feel sick,’ Jack said.

‘I told you not to drink all that lemonade,’ I scolded, rushing up to the house.

But once in the front door we both came to an abrupt halt for the sitting room was filled with flowers.

‘Why are there so many flowers?’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Mum?’ I asked, suddenly frightened, seeing the look on my mother’s face.

She sat down heavily and looked at us both helplessly. Then she grabbed Jack, who squirmed but allowed her to draw him towards her. She was looking at me, fixing me with a look I took to mean that I was in trouble.

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ I asked.

The pit of my stomach seemed to be falling away. My legs had begun to shake.

‘Mum?’ I asked again, my voice rising with panic.

There was a fraction of a pause as she drew Jack to her more closely so that he made a small noise of protest.

‘Children,’ she said, ‘I have some bad news. There was a complication with your father’s operation. He got peritonitis.’

She stopped and seemed to choke.

‘Where is he?’ I shouted. ‘Mum? Mum?’

‘He’s dead, Ria,’ she said in a small voice. ‘We had the funeral last week.’ And then she began to cry.

It was how I heard the news of what had happened to my beloved father; on the day that my childhood ended.

The air had become warmer and the scent of stirred-up earth and grass, and dust after rain, filled it. The sky was rosy once more and in the early twilight a sharp fork of geese flew clacking between the trees, silhouetted now by a watery light. Tomorrow the sun would be high in the sky again, the heat would return for a week or two longer, even though a few autumnal minutes were already wiping away the summer. What lingered was a softness of light. I was just about to reach out for the switch of my table lamp when I saw him. My swimmer! He was much earlier than before, moving slowly across the surface of the water. I stood open-mouthed and astonished. Then I turned silently and let myself out of the kitchen door, rounding the corner of the house before I stopped. The swimmer had reached the bank and was clambering up it. He had his back to me as once again he began to dry himself with his shirt. I stood waiting. Under the darkening summer sky I could see that he was not a local boy. I watched as he shook his dark curly hair and water sprayed out. He had been swimming in his trousers again and now he reached for the shoes he had thrown down in the long grass. He was putting them on when something made him turn slightly. I stood rooted to the spot and watched as, lifting his head, he listened. Then slowly he moved his head and saw me. For a whole minute we stared at each other without speaking. Both of us shocked. He was the first to break the silence, surprising me by holding up his hand, one foot in a shoe. He looked ready to run.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, in perfect, though accented, English. ‘I’m very sorry. Please. I won’t do it again.’

I saw he was terrified and in the light fading from the sky I saw that he was also very young.

‘It’s all right.’

There was a silence. The boy, he was surely no older than eighteen, stood waiting as though he had been stunned.

‘I don’t mind you using this stretch of river. It isn’t private or anything,’ I said. ‘Just filthy, that’s all. And your mother might not be so happy with you swimming in it.’

I was talking to keep him from doing a runner. He continued to stare at me and then he smiled with sudden force and I saw he wasn’t so young after all.

‘Are you from around here?’ I asked.

He shook his head and in one swift movement pulled his wet T-shirt on. I hesitated.

‘Did you come into my house last night and play the piano?’

‘No…I…no!’

‘I think you did,’ I said.

My voice sounded unfamiliar, as if I couldn’t breathe properly. I was stalling for time.

‘I might have called the police, you know,’ I said, conscious of trying to sound amused. ‘You might have got into a lot of trouble. Were you going to steal anything?’

What a ridiculous thing to have said! The swimmer shivered. He stood with his head slightly bowed. Silent, reminding me again of the image of the Roman swimmer I had seen in Naples. I hesitated.

‘You play the piano well.’

He didn’t move.

‘Would you like to come in and play it again?’

He said nothing.

‘You can, if you like.’

He looked at me full in the face. In the growing twilight I could not see the expression in his eyes but I had the distinct feeling he was sizing me up.

‘Are you going to ring for the police?’ he asked.

He sounded Indian.

‘No,’ I said. I looked at him in what I hoped was a stern but friendly and motherly manner. ‘Not if you promise you won’t steal anything. Where are you from?’

One part of my mind was amazed at the ridiculous nature of this conversation. The swimmer hesitated as if he too were thinking something along these lines. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

‘I’m not from here. I’m from Jaffna in Sri Lanka,’ he said, and now I could see he was shivering violently and I thought, he’s frightened. ‘You know where that is?’

A single blackbird trilled a long note into the rain-dampened air.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Where the tea comes from. Are you on a visit or a holiday?’

‘Neither, miss,’ he answered gravely. ‘I am a refugee.’

Sitting in my kitchen he told me his story in perfect but halting English. He had come to Russia by plane and then overland in a lorry that had been waiting at a pick-up point along an empty stretch of coast road. The conditions had been cramped, the driver had demanded more money than he had and the journey had been terrible. His name was Ben and he was twenty-five years old. He told me this much while he ate the cold chicken I gave him and drank a glass of beer. The driver of the lorry was an aggressive man. Having taken the last of their money he began dropping people off randomly. It had been Ben’s turn halfway along the Unthank Road. It was how he became separated from the people with whom he had travelled from Moscow. Not that they were his friends, but at least he had spent some of the worst hours of the journey with them. Left by the roadside he had walked in circles for five days with no money and no documents, sleeping rough, eating when he could, trying to keep clean. He had been petrified of being picked up by the police. He had heard stories that, if that happened, he would simply be deported. And if he returned to Sri Lanka, he feared he would be killed.

Then he had found a farm and burrowed down in one of the outbuildings. The farmer discovered him one night, but instead of calling the police had offered him the chance to pick sweetcorn. In exchange for a bed and food and, the farmer promised, a work permit. Ben could not believe his luck. This was where he lived for the moment. The work permit hadn’t materialised and he had yet to make contact with his mother to tell her that he was safe.

He finished speaking and drained the glass of beer. He had eaten the small amount of food I had put in front of him with ravenous haste. I wondered when he had last had a proper meal. Under the electric light he looked terribly young and vulnerable. It crossed my mind that he might be lying about his age.

‘I want to get to London,’ he said. ‘I want to find proper work.’

‘What sort of work?’

‘I am a doctor, but because of government restrictions I have never practised…well, hardly at all.’

He moved his head rapidly from side to side. I felt he was withholding something.

‘I began working as a nurse in the hospital in Batticlore. Then an opportunity came for me to leave. It was becoming dangerous for Tamil men of my age to stay. The insurgents were rounding them up for their army.’

He paused, looked around the room, taking in his surroundings for the first time.

‘So I left.’

The light flickered, distracting him.

‘You have a loose connection in your switch,’ he said, finally. ‘I can fix it for you, if you like.’

I had been listening to him, spellbound, and didn’t know what to say.

‘I would like to do that…as payment for this meal.’

I waved my hand.

‘There is no need to pay, it isn’t anything, just a little chicken.’

He stood and picked up his plate awkwardly. I had a feeling he was thinking about the stolen bread. In that moment there was within me a stirring of something exciting, something undefined and exotic. Before he could open his mouth to protest, I took the plate from him and put it in the sink.

‘But if you want to pay me,’ I told him, smiling faintly, ‘you could play a little of the jazz you played last night. Without the soft pedal!’

Instantly he lowered his eyes, embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry!’

‘No, no. I really mean I’d like to hear the piano being played.’

I spoke briskly, turning and leading the way into the sitting room.

When I relive that moment now I am always reminded of a story I once read by Jean Rhys. My swimmer sat gingerly down at the piano. He opened the lid and stared at the notes. Then he placed his hands gently on the keys. I noticed his fingers were long and thin. Confused, there grew in me again the conviction that he was younger than twenty-five. He sat with head bowed, then suddenly he was galvanised into action and he began to play. I am no judge of music, nor have I ever learnt to play the piano, but I was struck by his velvet touch. The piano had not been tuned for years. Apart from the odd occasion when Jack played it, it hadn’t been touched.

For nearly an hour I sat listening, spellbound. Ben played as though he was a blind man who had found sight. He played with no music. I suspected he was going through a memorised repertoire and it made me wonder what journey he had passed through to go from someone who knew this kind of music to become a refugee who carried his trainers on his back. He played on and on, gaining confidence, never looking at me, hardly aware of my presence. Some of the pieces were familiar; pieces like ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Maybe’, others were clearly music from his own country. Then, just when I was beginning to think his supply of jazz was inexhaustible, he turned to something else entirely. A piece of music I was familiar with. Schubert, I thought, uncertainly. I remembered Aunt Elsa used to play it. The melody ran on, hesitant and haunting. He was playing differently. In the light from the lamp I could see his face as he stared across the room and now I had the distinct feeling he was playing for someone beyond me, some invisible presence I knew nothing of. The next moment he bent his head and the music came to an abrupt stop.

‘What was that?’ I asked, breaking the silence.

He looked at me as though from a great distance.

‘Schubert’s last sonata,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Your piano needs tuning. I can tune it for you, if you will let me.’

‘In payment!’ I teased and unexpectedly he smiled for the second time.

‘Yes, in payment. For all the times I used your river and your garden, and…I stole a loaf of bread one night.’

I thought of Jack’s family, his children who had everything they wanted. I thought of my own comfortable life. It was not the last time I was to think this way.

‘You are welcome,’ I told him, quietly.

Neither of us knew what to say after that. He stood up and I saw his T-shirt had dried.

‘You know the river is polluted, don’t you? It isn’t what it used to be, years ago.’

‘I can dredge it for you, if you like,’ he said.

‘For payment!’ I teased, and now we were both laughing.

He nodded.

‘I’d better make sure I cook something really good in that case,’ I said.

‘There is no need,’ he said, perfectly seriously.

We were both assuming he would come back tomorrow. And that was when I noticed he was becoming anxious to be gone.

‘I’ll start early,’ he said. ‘Do you have a lawn mower? I could cut the grass by the bank.’

He seemed relieved.

‘I can come while it is light,’ he said and I understood that he had dreaded sneaking into the garden.

He went swiftly after that, the outside light coming on as he left. I watched from the door. At the top of the drive he turned and I saw him raise his hand in a gesture of farewell. I saw his white T-shirt fluttering through the trees and the next instant he was gone. I stood watching a moment longer before I let out the breath that I had not known I had been holding. The garden was still, the outside light went off and once again I smelt the fragrance of honeysuckle and roses. Summer seemed to linger, the storm might never have occurred. Overhead, the Milky Way stretched like an endless satin ribbon across the darkening sky. For no reason at all, I felt inexplicably, deliriously happy.