“A few weeks from the end he stopped eating.” A memory returned to me, bright and fresh.  “A friend of mine, Rachel, who lives abroad now, came over to see her mother when her mother was dying.  I went down to see her, helped her sort through some stuff, and we caught up.  She said that when she went to the hospital to visit, her mother kept making these great attempts at dying…  She was the strangest person.  She had an ego the size of the planet.  Anyway, she’d do this big melodramatic thing. She’d say that this would be her last breath,

, and she’d take a great gulp of air, and Rachel and her sister would wait.  And just as they began to believe that she’d done it, she’d let out the breath in a great exhalation and the whole thing would start again.  I didn’t get to see Rachel’s mother again;  she died a day or so before I got down there.”

“Did you mind that?”

“Not at all.  I’d really only known her when I was a kid.  I did see her when she had the cancer diagnosed, and when she was going through the first of the chemo, but that was almost a decade back.  I didn’t need to see her, and she wouldn’t have expected to see me.  I went down for Rachel.”

“I’ve never understood people who want to hang on to life even when it’s clear that there’s no future.  But that’s just me:  my opinions on that are very hard and fast;  I go for the quality-of-life stuff.  The idea of hanging on and hanging on doesn’t appeal.”

“When TG was really ill, and there was only one hope left to try that they hadn’t tried, which wouldn’t have hurt her in any way, I told them to go ahead.  Had it worked - if she’d been sick with heart disease and not something else, as it turned out - she could have had another eight or so months.  Good months, without pain.  I wouldn’t have believed until then just how happy I would have been for her to have had another eight months.  With me.  And before you say it, I know that I sound unbalanced on the subject:  I would have gladly lost almost anyone in my life than TG.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “We don’t choose who we love - or what.  You never have struck me as the most balanced of people, just the most… patient.”

“I never thought of myself as patient.”

“Well, you are.  Of course, when you consider your relationship with HFH, you would have to be.  I suspect that TG really was the most important thing in your life.” 

I put down my coffee and said, “Yes.  I think she was.  And I don’t care how mad that sounds...” 

“Have you mourned for your father at all, or had things gone past that stage?”

“Well past.  I can’t imagine the necessity or the need to mourn him.  But you never know.  Maybe I’ll surprise us both, and in a day or so I’ll be sobbing my heart out to you again.”  I ran my hands through my hair, spiking it:  “Oh, fuck it, no.  I won’t.  I feel free now that he’s dead.  What about you?  Do you miss your father?”

“The death of fathers, siblings…  No.  I don’t miss him.  I never believed he would die; I thought he’d live forever.  But when Jon dies, that’s when life here stops for me.  The day he dies the world begins to end.  You’ll know the signs, if you’re here when it happens.  If we’re talking three things in a row, and TG is dead, and your father, then I guess Jon might be next.  All this year I’ve had the feeling that some vast change was imminent.”  He laughed, but without much humour in his voice.  “You’ve had a rough time of it anyway;  wouldn’t it be ironic if you made it through all that shit only to find that it was too late.”

“In what way too late?”

For a moment I didn’t think he’d tell me;  he looked as if he was surprised at having said that much.  After another hesitation he said, “I’m the second son.  Oh, I know that won’t mean anything to you.”  Oddly enough, it did, though I was damned if I knew why.  “You see, the family firm has always been far more far-reaching than I’ve let on.  And very wealthy.  And powerful.  One day, (and it might well be one day soon, as I’ve said), looking up toward the main road you’ll see a car coming down.  A massive car, and one that looks right out of place here, with the lousy, rutted roads.  This car’ll be chauffeur driven and it’ll come and stop outside the cottage.  You might see me come out.  You might see me lock the door, toss the key over my shoulder, and as I go toward the car the chauffeur will get out and open the car door for me.  I’ll climb in.  I’ll go back to the city and I’ll take over the company and that will mean the end of the world is at hand.  Nigh,” he amended, as if embarrassed by the word.  “The end of the world will be nigh.”

“The end of the world?”  I was dumb from sleeping tables and alcohol.  I had the sense I was participating in a conversation without knowing the language to use.  It all sounded like hyperbole, but he looked deadly serious.  I didn’t want to ask about the end of the world so I side-stepped:  “Your brother.  Jon?  What’s he like?”

“I try not to think about him, but for you and you alone, you can have the APB.  He’s the golden boy.  He’s the first-born, with all the kudos that that implies.  I’m the second son.”

“What’s he like as a person?”

“Everything I’m not.  I have all the vices.  He has all the virtues.  And all the blessings.  Sometimes I think our mother stole away my birthright so that he should have it.  It’s hard always to be the… last person.  Oh,” he shook his head.  “I can’t explain it any better than that.  All I can tell you is that he’d never come round here begging for smokes or booze.  However, knowing him, and all his many virtues, he’d probably have spares of both.  He wouldn’t mind if you smoked in front of him.  He doesn’t smoke, he never drinks.  I’m not sure he even sleeps.  I’m sure he’s never had sex.  With anyone.  And he never does anything even faintly wicked.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about wickedness these last few days.  I was wicked at the funeral.  Before I went inside to join the festivities I sat behind a tombstone and smoked a joint big enough to tide me through.” That had been - oddly - a good, weird moment.  The funeral took place in the south, in the summer;  there were still wildflowers blooming.  The sky overhead had been blue and the air had been warm.  A perfect day. 

Suddenly he stood up.  “Enough stories.  I have to go back and write down things about otters.  And finish a couple of sketches.  You, now, you finish your whisky and give me back the glass.  Take things easy, the rest of the day.  Have an early night.  And tomorrow, whatever the weather, we’ll do the north beach and the castle walk.  Don’t pull that face:  you’re fit enough to do it.   I’ll be waiting for you at the gate tomorrow morning at… ten.  Bring a waterproof.  Wear walking boots.  Bring matches.  Bring cigarettes.”

“Bring a flask.  Bring otters.”

“I’ll phone and tell them to be in.  What do you want in the flask, Katya?  Whisky?  Coffee?”

“Hell, I don’t know.  Bring both.”

IV

Insomniacs understand certain truths:  there are some battles you cannot win.  There were very bad nights when sleep didn’t come until three or four, and I knew that I was in for such a one even as I rolled into bed that night, early as promised.  The sheets didn’t feel too cold, and I was nicely wrapped up, in sweat pants and top and thick socks, but I knew it wasn’t going to work.  I closed my eyes and began to count sheep.  The morning after I had a strange recollection of reaching over five thousand, but had there been room enough in my head for that much farm stock?

V

I think that when I did finally sleep, somewhere between one and half past, and four and five, all I dreamed about was what Fenris had told me.  I had absorbed more information than I would have believed.  As I struggled with the incipient dementia of sleeplessness some of his phrases echoed and re-echoed in my head.  “The second son”;  “The end of the world”;  “The end of the world is nigh”.  Oh, great. 

My dreams modified his words, as dreams often do.  I was with Jude on the top storey of a vast building.  We stood at the window and I could see over the whole of London.  “He said that a car will come.”  Then I saw a blanket of nuclear fire drown London;  as it exploded over us I woke, but not before feeling an instant of cosmic, seismic heat.  I woke then, bathed in sweat and with my heart pounding.  Right then, if only for a moment, the thought of meeting Fenris later almost scared me.

VI

Fenris’s cottage was nicer than mine in every respect, except that mine possessed a space inside the front door which held a line of hooks for coats and a broad bench on which one could sit to put on or take off necessary clothing and boots.  Sometimes, coming back soaked through and bone-tired, this process made me think of a decompression chamber, a breath of space between one world and another.  This thought came to mind as I did up the intricate lacings of my walking boots. 

Both cottages were old crofts that had seen better days and probably better occupants.  As Fenris spent much more time there than I it seemed only appropriate that his should be the nicest.  He was the one who lived out in the wilds all through the season, through rain and snow that sometimes isolated him for weeks.  In addition to his cottage he had the boat house, and the slanted lean-to in which he stored and dried his wood, which I’d helped him to build two years previously. 

I never asked who - or what - funded him.  As his work was otters, I’d always assumed some kind of grant or subsidy.  Since arriving on the island he’d become the otter expert.  I’d seen a little of his work, illustrated records of the local otter population that lived in and around Loch Drago;  his drawings of them were magical, and the last word in simplicity.  It was an opus of the most ambitious and remarkable kind.  He said that it would never see publication - which surprised me - and on occasion, and for no reason than that, sometimes I wondered if his quiet and genial dedication hid some darker purpose.  But as time went by without Fenris being arrested for drug smuggling or serial killing, the thought faded until I was ashamed of having ever had it.

I had met Fenris for the first time when he came to the cottage door one Friday night a hour or so after I’d returned from the city, exhausted and stressed.  I had just made the discovery that the bottle of whisky I kept for emergencies was empty, and was grinding my teeth.  Dosed to the point of paranoia by caffeine poisoning and fatigue, I hardly made sense to myself, let alone this strange, unkempt young man who arrived at my front door. 

When I had answered the door, not really believing there could be anyone outside the cottage on that night of pouring rain and darkness that could eat you whole, there he stood.  Not so tall, but tall enough, and covered in oilskins.  He said, “Hullo.  I’m Fen.  Fenris.  I live in the croft by the loch-side, which makes me your nearest neighbour.  There’s nothing in this world I hate so much as having to impose on someone, and I can assure you that I’m really not your local psychopath, but I need a smoke like there’s no tomorrow, and I’m hoping you’re sufficiently rebellious to have a box of cigarettes in the croft.”

“And if I’ve not?”

“Then I shall have to go back and stick my head in the stove in an attempt at getting some smoke into my system that way.”

For a moment I stared at him, then I said, “Come into the porch.  I might have some.”  And as it happened, I did.  I produced a rather crumpled packet.  “I’m not supposed to smoke, but I had these hidden.  You’re welcome to half. Here.  Knock yourself out.”

I think he was startled by the gesture.  And I refused his offer of payment, which surprised us both.  I suppose I thought that this way I was reducing the evil by division. 

“I keep meaning to drop this off with you,” he said, producing from a deep poacher’s pocket a full and glorious-looking bottle of whisky.  My heart skipped a beat.  “Here you go.  A house-warming present.”

“And there was me thinking I’d do anything for a drink, short of selling my soul.  Thank you.  Will you have one yourself?”

“Only if you’re having one yourself.  But before that I need a dose of nicotine.  The rain’s stopping.  I’ll have one outside and then join you, if I may.”  I liked his manners.

“It’s pissing down.  Don’t be daft.  Come inside and have your smoke.  I’ll open up the stove door is all.”

He lit his cigarette and held it near to the open stove.  It struck me that I was being very trusting.  It struck me that if he was some kind of manic, I’d just invited him in.

When his monkey had been eased, I handed him a measure.  Then we touched glasses.  “To sin,” he said, and sipped.  Anathema as it doubtless was with a whisky that old and that fine, I had my own monkey, and I took the whole measure straight down.  I shuddered and then smiled.  He grinned. 

“To sin it is,” I said. “Ah, that’s a lovely malt.”

“Ain’t it?  Well, you know your malts but you forget to buy them.”

“And you your smokes.”

“I know.  There’s no help left for me.”  He finished his drink and drew a final time on his cigarette.  “Christ, but that’s good.”  He tossed the still-glowing stub into the stove and stood up.  “And now I’ll be gone.  Thank you for the cigarettes.  Please keep and enjoy the whisky.  I’m afraid I need to go home now and smoke myself stupid.”  He made for the door and I went with him, determined suddenly to repay such a degree of generosity in kind.  A light went on at the back of my brain and I headed for the box marked fishing tackle that never had and never would contain any such thing.

I’d hidden an entire supply of duty-frees in the box, unable to face Jude’s expressions of disapproval and concern.  Opening up the box I found that the 200 pack was intact.  I split the pack down the centre and took five boxes back with me.  “Here,” I said. “Have fun.”

He reached out two hands that shook and wrapped them around the gift.  The man really had a problem.  Then he grinned at me, a grin so wicked and fine that it almost stirred me, dedicated lesbian as I was.  I watched him divide up his haul between a myriad of pockets, and then he took my hand and kissed the palm.  “I am in debt to you for ever,” he said.

“You brought a bottle of the nicest whisky.  I really think we’re quits.”

He shook his head.  “No.  There’s generosity and then there’s something more.  I am in your debt.  I won’t forget the fact.  Have a good night.”

“Thanks,” I said.  Then he paused at the door and said, “You’re not usually up here on your own, are you?  I’ve seen her, and your fine cat.  Don’t worry about your girlfriend,  Katya:  I’m sure she’ll be back.”

He knew about Jude.  He knew about TG.  Fuck it, he even knew my name.  But the oddity of that faded when I thought of his:  Fenris. 

VII

The next morning, when I staggered to my feet after an uneven night I found a note he’d pushed underneath the front door.  The note said:  “I’ll be otter-watching tomorrow.  If you’d like to see them, call for me at eleven.  Bring a waterproof and binoculars and a flask.  Be prepared to sit still for a very long time.”

And so it began.  Since then I’d seen him regularly.  Once he was sure that I was capable of sitting on a beach - in sunshine or pouring rain - a pair of binoculars in my hand, watching out for otters that might or might not appear, I had an open invite to join him.  Sometimes we saw nothing, sometimes there were seals or eagles and sometimes there were otters.  His company was all that I might have wished for, easy, comfortable and undemanding.  He tended not to call if Jude had travelled up with me, but he was nice to her, too, and once or twice we’d eaten at the Beachcomber, when the weather was fine but the tourists had all gone.

VIII

There was no point in checking the mobile until I was a good mile north of the cottage, in the one of the few sites where a signal was possible, and if I was going to be out with Fenris I’d leave the phone behind me.  Sitting on the chair just outside the door, drinking coffee and looking out at the still, quiet day, I found myself not wanting to think about Jude.  I didn’t want to think about TG, either, and I wondered how and when, if ever, Jude would find out that she was dead. 

The cottage was not luxurious, and certainly not pretty, but it was well-constructed and designed.  The corrugated blue roof went well with the white-washed walls.  The bathroom was tiny, but it contained all the necessities.  The kitchen wasn’t large enough to eat in but it was neat and organised and the window over the sink looked due west:  you could watch the sun set as you did the dishes.  The living room was a joy, high-ceilinged, with windows to the south and north.  The bedroom I used was just behind the sitting room, but there was another on the far side of the famous miniature porch. 

While I’d spent as many as eight weeks at a time in the cottage, Jude had never stayed there for more than five days: holiday time was to be grabbed in-between roles.  She had told me that she loved the place, that its simplicity satisfied some need in her, but this was the woman who’d said as much about the luxurious suite we’d shared in one of Cairo’s finest hotels.  Room service was good at plugging needs.  But the cottage had all that I wanted:  loads of books (usually I brought a box each time to fill out the broad shelves Fenris had helped me construct), computer, mobile phone and charger and TG. So what if the cottage had no mobile signal.

I had not - before leaving - made any of my usual arrangements other than to leave out a note cancelling the milk.  I decided that the post could go fuck itself - nothing was that urgent - and left a message on Jo’s phone so that she wouldn’t think I’d been abducted by aliens or was dead.  Mrs Ivy said she’d keep an eye on the house, but when she offered to take TG for me, I had to explain, yet again, why not. 

A part of me wished that it had been Jo, and not her latest, who’d answered the phone when I called.  But Jo was out, and although I liked her (latest, newest, certainly youngest) girlfriend well enough (there had been better, but there had certainly been worse), I didn’t want to confide in someone I hardly knew.  It would have been hard enough - I knew - even to talk to Jo.

I know that Jo, whose initial worship of Jude had subsided to barely-concealed mistrust, would have advised me to shut up the house so tightly that Jude could never have gotten in.  But Jo forgot that the house had once been jointly owned, before one of Jude’s finest roles and worst betrayals, when she came back to me after an absence of almost six months, and a week later laid the transfer papers in my lap.  I wasn’t going to lock Jude out of what was still - perhaps - her home.  I didn’t want to hurt her.  Fuck it all:  she had her own key, for God’s sake. 

That thought stopped me in my tracks.  Was that really what I wanted?  There gnawed at my guts the desire to hurt somebody, no matter how pointless that might be.  But I wouldn’t deliberately harm Jude.  In retrospect, that manipulative mirror, I can see that what I wanted more than anything was for Jude to return to the house, to find me gone and to believe that finally I had had enough.  But if I was going to be honest, my sudden decision to leave home hadn’t been about Jude at all.

The first time she came back to me I’d been so steeped in misery that I could not have told you how long it was since she’d gone off to work and simply not come back.  I hadn’t expected to see her, though I had been told that she’d come back.  Liz, Jude’s manager and sometime friend (as well as unacknowledged go-between and one-time lover) had phoned to make me that promise the day after Jude had left me a cryptic, emotional message on the answer-phone.

I hadn’t been impressed by Liz when we first met; what contact we’d had over the years hadn’t improved matters.  Six or so months previously she’d phoned me, her telephone manner saccharine and slick, to tell me that although Jude had gone off with someone else, she knew that Jude really loved me, and would eventually come home. 

I believe in the concept of love at first sight only because it happened to me.  I’d been living out my own life without major highs or lows when I’d been round at Jo’s house, and the TV had been on.  Fifteen years of hearing my father’s television set roar through the house had put me off ever owning a set:  the only programmes I did see were at friends’.  Jo was fixed up with Connie, then.  Connie seemed nice, and apparently fond of Jo, but I knew she wouldn’t last, even if the two of them were talking marriage vows and civil ceremonies.  “I know how much you intellectual types hate the television,” Jo said, “but this is our favourite.  This you must see.  You won’t regret it.”

It irks me to say that Jo was right, but she was.  And the moment I saw Jude on screen I was lost.  I honestly believe I fell in love that night.  Jude was… What else can I say?  Jude was perfect.  She played a role that was made-to-measure for her, and when in later months I read the book on which the series had been based, she was all I could see in every scene;  it was her voice I heard in my head when I read the lines she’d spoken.  It was a good, spare script, most of the dialogue lifted direct.  I remember not looking up from the screen until the programme was over and Connie was off making tea.  Jo put a hand on my arm to bring me round;  when she saw that I was still conscious she smiled and sighed and said:  “Hurts, don’t it?  Welcome to the club.”

IX

We should never have met.  We didn’t meet normally at all.  I was branching out at that time, and I had had a second novel published, together with a collection of short stories.  To be honest, the stories had taken forever to revise and polish for publication, and by the time they were ready to go I was heartily sick of them all, and I began to regret having written them in the first place.  The publisher my agent had found for me asked if I had a full-length book in me, and I’d set to and emptied the box at the bed-end of the three or four novels I’d written and had had rejected.  But now I’d been approached by the studio with the suggestion that I draft them a screenplay.  I would have been more delighted by the whole process had it come at almost any other time, but my step-mother had had a stroke, and suddenly my life was on hold.  I told the studio that I’d carry on working on the script, all the same.

Ellie had made what they called a good recovery from the first stroke.  When the next one came, doing damage that could not be repaired, my step-mother killed herself.  Sufficient to say that I wasn’t entirely… uninvolved.  She and I had discussed euthanasia more than once over the years.  Ellie had told me that she could see the beginning of the end.  Not a woman fond of hospitals and nursing homes, my step-mum. She’d been separated from my father for years and years, and I didn’t phone him to say that Ellie was ill because she’d asked me not to.

I gave Jude my word, too, about all sorts of things.  The first time we met she had phoned first, having bullied - an impossible concept - my number from the station.  She explained that there were issues in the screenplay that she wanted to discuss, and no alarm bell rang.  I began to give her my address but she stopped me with:  “I’m afraid that I forced that out of Bennett, too.  I’m afraid that I’m going to be nothing but an imposition.  I’m sure you’ll hate me.”  Life with Ellie in it was very lonely;  I was half-dead inside.  I had never wanted an imposition more.

And yet when the bell rang and I went through and reached for the lock, I became aware that I was doing everything very slowly and carefully.  I suppose I’d wanted to anticipate the moment, hoping I wouldn’t make a monumental fool of myself.

The details of those first moments are still clear in my head.  I held out my hand and rather than just shake it she had taken both my hands in hers and was telling me how kind I was, how utterly kind, and then she was inside and the door was shut, and my future was all decided.

She was beautiful.  The first time I saw her face-to-face I was actually struck dumb.  I can’t describe her, but I can only say that when I first saw her, I knew that I had never seen - or would see - anyone quite as wonderful.

Shock made me silent and stupid, but she seemed happy enough to carry the full weight of the conversation.  I remember us drinking coffee together, but I had no memory of having actually brewed any.  Perhaps she had.  I was so intoxicated  I could not have helped myself.

She did not see the love-struck madness in my eyes because I could not bring myself to meet her gaze.  I’ve always been shy, but that day she must have thought me at first virtually catatonic.  But she talked on, rapidly and happily, and after a while I began to respond to her questions about the character she was to play, that figure’s inner workings and motivations, because I could manage that much on auto-pilot.

When she came to leave it was in another burst of apologies and thanks for all my help.  I helped her on with her jacket and I promised to do whatever it was she had asked of me - to provide her with a background to the character that she could build upon or to weave gold from straw, Christ, I don’t know - by the time we met again, in four or five days’ time.  But she would call me first, of course.  Then she said good-bye, kissed me lightly on the cheek, thanked me again, and left me on the doorstep, stupefied, enchanted, dizzy, …and lost.  I never stood a chance.

Any normal person would - on meeting a dream - surely want to share the miracle.  But not me.  It never even crossed my mind to phone Jo, tell her all, and then listen to her shrieks of disbelief, delight and amazement.  But what had happened - for all that hadn’t happened - had been too personal for that.  And besides, I’d probably never see her again:  the information I had promised to obtain she might simply ask me to email her.  I looked at the phone and didn’t use it, and then began the slow and painful process of living long enough to see her again.

The second time she phoned, she invited me over, and I crossed London in a dream.  The Underground worked hard to ground my dreams in simple grit and squalor: by the time I’d reached her flat I felt dirty, scruffy and so insignificant that I almost turned away from her door.  I stood there for some time before reaching out to press the buzzer, and before I made contact, she had opened the door to me.  “I saw you coming along the street,” she told me.  “I thought that maybe I’d given you the wrong number, so I thought I’d come to you.” 

She hustled me in and through the cool, orderly hallway and into her apartment.  It was a rental, she told me, that she’d taken for the year.  Her most recent long-term relationship - the second, third or fourth - had ended under the weight of her job demands and she was living alone and not disliking the peace.  “It’s sometimes lonely,” she said.  “When I get back here at night - fresh from the studio and still buzzing - it’s hard to settle down.  It’s hard not to be met.”  I nodded as if I understood, but I’d been on my own again for a while and I had decided I enjoyed the simplicity of the solitary and celibate life.  I had never been a very successful lover at the best of times, willing and happy to please but incapable of ever letting go.  Celibacy was probably the best thing for me in any case - an affair would require effort and energy, and I had little enough of either.  My most recent relationship had died not long before Ellie did.  I could blame all sorts of external reasons for that collapse, but the truth was that my lover had been patient, and she had waited, and then one day she was gone.

During Ellie’s final illness I had found myself communicating less and less to the outside world.  I did not put up walls, I erected cities.  Solitary and lost and slightly mad from grief, I’d returned, like someone adrift on an open sea, from seeing Ellie buried.  I couldn’t relate to anyone:  I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to talk.  The person who’d gotten closest to me, Jo, had been supportive, had tried to persuade me over my grief and back into the world, but I just couldn’t do it.  My own mother I could hardly remember, but I hadn’t expected to lose my stepmother before she hit fifty.  She’d been so much younger than my father, she’d been more like an older sister to me.

But for one notable exception, that second visit was the only time that Jude spoke of her previous lovers.  This time we drank wine, and she kept topping up my glass while I tried - with less and less success - to read from the sheets I’d typed out for her.  My voice must have wobbled and I certainly felt as if I was dreaming when she left her chair and came over, taking my glass away from me before climbing on the sofa so that she sat astride me (it was such a warm and welcome weight that I couldn’t have gotten away even if I’d wanted to) and put her hands up to my face to draw me to her.  She tasted like white grapes and her lips were satin.  My heart pumped so hard and so fiercely that it actually hurt, and seemed to strain against my ribs, but that hardly mattered.  She ran her fingers into my hair and held me in a grip that matched passion with ferocity, and the kiss went on and on.  To be honest, I had to remind myself to breathe but dying would have been welcome then.  Nothing could ever matter so much as that moment and that embrace, and yet there was more.  She kept her hands on me, holding me so tightly that I could hardly move.  She ran her hands down to my shirt and when her fingertips touched my breasts through the thin coating of cotton I nearly fainted.  She grinned then, before she began to undo the buttons, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.  The shirt buttons caught and she said, “Oh, this is insane,” and more or less ripped it open.  She  tugged my shirt free of my trousers and when I tried to help her she pushed my hands away.  “I’d like to do this my way,“ she said.  Then she reached into my bra and at that contact I must have made some kind of noise, something like a groan, because she laughed into my mouth, and kissed me again before leading me into her bedroom.

My poor shirt had had it.  I did wonder - briefly - what I’d wear on the trip home.  But then I was aware only of the sense of amazement when, having pushed me backwards on the bed, she flung the remnants of my clothes away and buried her face in my cunt, the fingers of one hand reaching inside me, while she held me to her with the other.  She had unexpectedly strong, long, fine fingers that left bruises.  A little later she freed herself, and me, and positioned me across the bed so that she could lie over me for an instant, her mouth again on mine and her hands everywhere, before rolling free enough to fuck me with those long, elegant fingers while her tongue slid over my lips and her own personal perfume rose up from the heat of the embrace to win me over once and for ever.  Her body covered mine entirely, and the texture of her skin made me dizzy.  I remember even that she hurt me with the force of her fingers - I may have made some noise but I never once tried to shift away from her touch - and her heard her almost laugh before becoming gentle for a moment.  But I saw an expression in her eyes that I’d never seen before but recognised, the fires of simple hunger, and I said, as one might think of saying but never should say (I had held up to that point the belief that in every sexual relationship there has to be some small area retained), “Do what you like.  It’s alright.  I trust you.  You can do anything.”  And she did.  She did everything, and then she fell asleep with her arms tightly round me, so that I would have had to fight to be free again.  It was an embrace too fierce to let me sleep, but I didn’t care:  all I wanted was to stay sleepless forever, letting the memories of that day run on and on.

But at some point I did sleep, and I think I dreamed.  At least, it felt like dreaming, to wake in those arms and hear her say, “Make love to me.”  She shifted in the bed so that she lay beside me, and now she seemed like another woman, the forceful passion gone and in its place a kind of hesitation and apprehension, as if she was really afraid that I might hurt her.  I hardly knew where to start, but as I began to touch her, my fingertips trailing so lightly over her skin that it made her shiver, she said, “Make me yours.  I want you to do everything to me.”  I looked into her eyes and was struck again by just how lovely she was.  And then I made love to her as if nothing else in my life mattered but the need to please her enough to make her want to keep me.  And she came, and cried out, she wrapped herself round me again so hard it hurt.  Just before she slept she said, “Now you’re mine for ever,” and kissed me once more, and bruised me.

A day or so later, maybe more, I was feeling my way around the nearest supermarket, trying to remember what I usually bought.  The prosaic list that I generally applied seemed pointless and ridiculous.  Why would anyone with her as a lover need anything so mundane as food?  I hadn’t eaten properly since leaving her.  I was unaware that I was getting second looks from people, but Jo had seen them on her approach to me.  Later I understood better, when Jo came up to me, stopped dead, and stared.  “What happened to you?  Are you sick? Are you dying?  You look like you’ve been mugged.  C’mon.  Pay up and come back with me, and you can eat with us and tell me what the hell happened to you.”

But I couldn’t tell her, even if I might have wanted to.  But she overruled me when I said I couldn’t go with her:  “Hell,” she said, “You’re clearly too sick to make sensible decisions:  you’re coming back with me.  We’ll feed you and you can have the spare bed for tonight.”  She waited while I bought my necessities and took me back to her flat.  There I saw what she meant when I saw the expression on Co’s face when she saw me, and then witnessed my own reflected in their bathroom mirror.  My face had a pallor I’d only ever seen in myself after a really bad bout of food-poisoning, and there were black half-circles below my eyes.  I looked like a raccoon, and my mouth… Jesus.  My mouth

looked for all the world as if someone had backhanded me real good.  The force of Jude’s kisses was a little too much for me in those early days, but I have always bruised easily.  It wouldn’t be for a very long time that I’d begin to worry about the bruises left behind.  I accepted Jo’s food and her hospitality, but how could I tell her the truth?

Jude was always passionate, but the intensity of her passion depended on the part she was rehearsing or playing at the time.  When I first met her she was in the early days of real success, and her face was slowly becoming a household name.  I’d seen her in virtually nothing because of the whole TV issue, and she tried to insist that I invested in one.  I would have held out on that issue, and she must have seen the light of battle in my eyes, but she ordered one and had it delivered when I was out.  At that time she had just begun to buy me things, smaller, acceptable gifts.  And the affair went on.  After two months I was so invested in her that I had stopped feeling real.  The few friends I had didn’t understand why I was coming apart as the result of a new relationship.  Only Jo had the sense to wait for an explanation.

I met Jo at the gym one day and when I came to undress for the showers I knew that there was something wrong.  I didn’t ask, and I didn’t look in the full-length mirror again (once bitten), but I felt the scratches sting afresh under the soap and warm water, and I understood that I needed to explain.  I managed to cover the new relationship in the most general terms before telling Jo just who was fucking me night after night.  At that time Jude instigated most of the sex, either in her apartment or mine.  She might meet me in the hallway and pin me up against the wall, kiss me and hold my face in her hands as she had that first time, and I was lost.  There was nothing else in the world that I wanted then but to be close enough - almost every day - to her.  When I’d finally said Jude’s name I looked at Jo and saw her face mirror some of the feelings I’d been experiencing.  The last expression was of doubt, but I said, “I know how it much sound, Jo, but I’m not making this up.”

Jude phoned and asked me if I could come over.  Sacrificing desire to all else I went, but I did say that I was teaching the next morning at ten and that I couldn’t be late.  I had spent almost enough time preparing for the classes.  When I’d finished telling Jude all this she said, “I want you to live with me.”  I blinked.  She said, “I need you more than anyone else.  I know that I’ll be away some of the time but that won’t matter.  Wherever I go, however long I’m gone, I’ll always come back to you.”   

X

If I hesitated in those long-distant days, I think I know why;  I had believed her when she’d said that she loved me, and I think I was right to do so.  But I knew there had been plenty of others before me, and I doubted my ability to provide her with adequate company for any length of time.  As they said in that movie: “Sooner or later you have to get out of bed,” and it was true.  It was just that in bed or out of it I loved her.  In bed or out of it I wanted to be with her for ever.  So Jude came to live with me, and three months later, she won a part she’d been fighting for.   Until the night of the party when I met Liz for the first time, I was only happy for Jude.  After that night I never felt quite the same about anything.  And I never did like Liz.

“She’s very lovely,” Liz said to me.  “And I know that she’s quite crazy about you.”  I could see in her eyes the rider:  Though I can’t for the life of me think why.  She topped off both our glasses.  “You don’t know much about actors, do you?  They’re… different.  They throw themselves in and out of roles with a passion that’s sometimes hard to take.  Being in love and loving, they’re very different things to Jude.  In a week’s time when filming starts, when she goes on location, she’ll tell you that she needs distance to achieve the part.  It’s absolutely true: she does.  But it’s not that simple.  The distance she requires demands a lover.  Have you seen her, the girl in white over by the door?  While the shoot is on, Jude will be with her. Possibly from tonight, although she brought you here so not that soon.  But soon enough.  And when the shoot finishes, there’ll be the wrap party and a big, tearful farewell, and then it’ll be over.”  

I must have looked as shocked as I felt because she found it necessary to continue rather briskly:  “She’s pretty enough, and she likes Jude, but it won’t last.  I’ve seen the two of you together and I know that she’s really serious about you.  There’s something in you that makes for permanency.  But she’ll have sex with other people, and she’ll leave you for other people, and she’ll never fully appreciate how hurt you’ll be.  And when she comes back to you, he, or she, or whoever it’s been will have ceased to matter.”  I wondered why she didn’t add “if she comes back to you”, because that seemed most likely.  But Liz was still speaking.  At least, her lips were moving and words were coming out, but they sounded like damp squibs to me.  “And she won’t talk about it, ever.”  She had finally shut up.  The last word emerged with an emphasis that could hardly be missed, and I began to wonder about Liz.  To this day I don’t know if she and Jude were ever lovers:  I never asked because I thought she might tell me, and I really didn’t want to know.

That was the first and only time Liz spoke to me at any length.  After that string of confidences she seemed to realise that I would have quite liked to hit her, and she kept her distance.  Liz I had heard about from Jude, who had had described her as a former mentor, now her agent.  I had been a bit disconcerted with the look of calm appraisal she gave me as we shook hands and she walked on.  Later in the evening she’d tracked me down, trapped me in a corner and began to talk at me.  There was nothing in her appearance to suggest incipient madness or blatant sadism.  What emotion showed in her face might have been anything from comradeship to regret.  “That’s if you don’t want to lose her.  If you’re wise you’ll wait.”  She gave me one final look of something like sympathy before repeating:  “If you can.  If you can bear it.”

Well, that pretty much finished the party for me.  Some old facet of common politeness overtook me before I left the extraordinary agent, and I believe I may even have thanked her for what she’d told me, just as you thank someone for the nice meal they’ve made you even when you suspect you’re going to spend the entire night vomiting.  Then I had far too much to drink and went back home.  I’d seen Jude on the far side of the room, deep in conversation with the young woman and quite oblivious to everyone else.  If I have a maxim of any sort, maybe it’s that I’ve never wanted anyone who didn’t want me.  I had had enough:  I was going home.  I called and cab and left.

But I was surprised to be woken - at an outrageous hour when the heart comes closer to stopping than slowing - by Jude.  She had put on the hall light and was pacing about like a panther in a cage, wired and clearly a bit drunk, and horribly intense.  “What the hell is wrong with you?  Why the hell did you walk off and leave me behind?  We’re a couple, for God’s sake.”  That was the first time she’d ever referred to us as anything but lovers, and I thought then that her agent had been wrong.  Then I saw an odd expression cross Jude’s face and I knew that Liz was right. 

When I didn’t respond, other than to say that she’d obviously been having a wonderful time and I’d been tired and had wanted to give her some space, she stormed around for a little while and then went off and washed. 

I heard the light click off and began to anticipate a slide into nothingness when Jude got into bed beside me.  But then in the darkness I felt her turn to me.  She smelled of herself and of the scent of the party and I felt her above me, felt the nice weight of her body before her mouth descended upon mine, and her hands reached out for me.  In too short a time she had pressed inside me, those long, slim fingers reaching inside so fiercely and so confidently that I was aware more of pain than pleasure.  But the movements became more gentle - she knew that she’d hurt me - and soon she was speaking, her voice pitched lower than usual, and the words that I heard came out so sweetly and so passionately that I had let go of my anger and grief before I had the chance to think.  “Sometimes I think that you feel you can step away from me, but I’ll always feel like this about you.  You’re mine.  I own your heart.  I can kiss you and I can fuck you and you can’t fight me.  You can’t ever fight me.  I want you to open up.  I want to feel every inch of you.  I want you to remember how I feel when I’m away from you.”  I felt my heart spasm with agony and emotion, and my mouth went dry from anticipation and fear.  I wasn’t going to fight her:  if she wanted to kill me I would just accept that. But whatever else, she wasn’t about to let me go.  No: she fucked me hard, reaching inside me with more and more fingers until it felt as if her whole hand was there, pushing in to blot out all conscious thought, and withdrawing, taking my heart with her.  I don’t think I’d ever known such passion in her since our first time together, and it made me hopeful, and simultaneously lost.  I don’t know how many hours went by before she fell asleep, her arms still around me, and I lay as quietly as I could until sleep finally took me, too.

XI

And at the beginning of the week she was off on location.  Liz had been only part right:  Jude called me, but always when she knew I’d be out, and the answer-phone picked up the brief but invariably affectionate messages that she left.

Apart from the messages, there was nothing in my world to make me believe she’d ever been with me at all.  A long week went by and I kept going, went out shopping and then couldn’t shop, went to the gym and ran on the moving track until someone suggested I stop before I actually died.  I stumbled off and tried to shower off the sense of misery I felt.  

Looking back, I think that had it not been for the presence of TG, I might have actually gone ahead and killed myself around then.  TG was never what I‘d call a cuddle cat, and she did disappear for days or hours, but she always came back.  If she wasn‘t around when I went to bed, she’d usually be there the next morning, lying at my side or across my feet.  Often, after I’d called her for ages, sworn, given up and gone upstairs, I would hear from the bathroom her greeting trill.  Moments later she would amble in, self-contained and inscrutable.  With Jude gone I was often lonely, but with TG around I was never wholly alone. 

Sometimes I’d be lying in bed, reading or crying, or thinking about sleep, and then the door would be gently pushed open and there she would be.  A moment later and there would be the plump of four feet meeting blankets.  She would glance briefly at me, lick my fingertips and then ignore me wholly until there was something she wanted.  I didn’t care:  I just loved her.

Liz phoned me when two weeks had passed.  By then I’d lost half a stone and much of my ability to sleep.  She didn’t ask how I was;  I assumed she knew.  She simply told me that the filming had run ahead of projected schedule and that I could always contact her in any case of emergency.  But I was too full up with the sense of loss, and all I did was listen, and then replace the phone when she’d stopped talking.  I had never said a word.

I saw Jo in that time.  I worked and I washed and ate and cleaned the house and did all the stuff I’d done before.  The TV was the only real casualty in that time:  one night I switched on and caught a few moments of a repeated programme in which I saw Jude embracing someone.  Then I put my foot through the fucking thing.

Jo understood, or if not, she accepted.  If she thought I was crazy and/or stupid, she never said so.  We talked on the phone more and more, and I got back into the habit of having Jo & Co to supper, or of meeting up with them for a meal out.  I worked very hard at preparing classes and equally hard at the gym.  For all that Liz had said, I knew that I was beaten.  It was just a question of time:  I knew I wouldn’t be seeing Jude ever again.  Unless of course I bought a new TV.

One Friday evening I was doing well.  For supper I’d chosen bread and cheese, with vodka to drink.  This choice because it involved minimal preparation time and because bread, cheese and vodka appeared to be all that I had in.  I had bought the vodka on the way home:  I’d heard nothing from Jude in a week.  No more polite messages on the answer-phone.  I looked at the bread and cheese and decided that food was overrated.  I’d go with the vodka.  I was aware that the vodka was expensive stuff, which in a way was a waste because all I intended to do was drink it neat and then probably throw it up…  Apart from that, the flat looked as if a bomb had hit it.  The dead TV still lay on the floor.  I’d unplugged it, but that was as far as I’d got.  On the table stood the bottle of vodka.  It neither sang to me nor flattered, but it was winning me over all the same.

Vodka is what I keep for emergencies, and when I need to be drunk.  I did that night:  the previous weekend Jo & Co had forced me to go clubbing with them, and while I had hated every minute of it, sitting at the crowded little table at the club, I knew what they were trying to do.  Sooner or later I’d have to accept that I was alone - again - and I’d have to rejoin that other world unless I wanted to embrace the solitary life in all respects.

I’d never been good at flirting, and I had no desire to dance or to talk to anyone that wasn’t Jo or Co.  They’d seen me home and then had gone on to party some more.  I wasn’t sure if I envied them their stamina or simply their having one another.  Enough of that, I thought, and poured myself a vodka.  After the throat-burning sensation had dwindled I felt the alcohol surge through my system.  Drinking on an empty stomach had never been good for me but I couldn’t take any more pain.  Grief had bottomed out:  I couldn’t go any lower.  I poured a tumbler half-full and forced it down.  Then the phone rang.  I picked up, wondering if there was anyone in the world I wanted to talk to, and knowing that there was only one.  But it was Liz on the fucking phone.  She may have said something coherent, but I was a little dizzy and not holding the phone right.  Nor did I listen or speak.  I simply replaced the receiver and yanked the phone cord free of its connection.  Then I turned off the lights and went to bed.

If the buzzer had sounded, I never heard it.  Nor did I care.  Childishly I twisted in the bed and pulled the quilt over my ears.  After a period of room spin and tears I finally slept, though my sleep was punctuated with dreams that hurt enough to wake me up.  At an ungodly hour I went through to the bathroom, washed my face and cleaned my teeth, drank three glasses of water and wandered back, like a sleep-walker, to my bed. 

When I finally did wake it was with a headache and a sense of dislocation.  I shuffled to the bathroom without bothering to put on my glasses, showered at great length to wash off the worst of the feeling, cleaned my teeth for an age and only then, feeling only vaguely human, did I make my uneven way to the kitchen.  I was too doped and stupid to notice the changes around me.

Jude was at the stove, and there was fresh coffee brewing.  On the table I saw a bag of croissants, and two deep glasses of juice poured.  When she turned to me I saw her take in the changes that her absence had wrought in me. All I could see was how lovely she looked, in a green shirt I didn’t remember, her hair longer than before and combed back from her face.  The shock of seeing her there nearly knocked me over. 

Everything that happened then would - I understood much later - dictate whether or not we had a future, and I understood that of all the decisions I might have to make, this was the most significant.  I looked at her and she wouldn’t quite meet my gaze.  Her eyes, the brown and green-flecked mysteries, were fixed on my shoulder.  I could see everything in her that I’d seen on that first meeting, but there were minute changes, too, and they all suited her.  She looked…  She looked wonderful.  And it felt as life inside me began to work again.  I felt around for something to say that would encapsulate all that I’d felt over the lonely weeks, so that I could voice the pain I’d felt.  And I couldn’t do it.  I said, “Hallo.  Is some of that coffee for me?”  At that remark I heard the air rush out of her lungs:  she’d been holding her breath so hard she looked dizzy.

She put down the cafetiere and came over to me.  She put her hands on my shoulders and drew me close.  The marks of neglect must have shown themselves to her:  the weight I’d dropped I hadn’t regained, and I hadn’t slept well in ages.  “You look terrible,” she said, very seriously and very kindly.  “And the flat looks like a bomb hit it.  Have you been ill?  You certainly don’t look well.  I can see that I’ll have to take very good care of you.”  Ill?  No, but my legs would no longer support me.  I stumbled into my seat - Jude helping me - and just sat and stared.

She put down the coffee and the jug of hot milk on the table and sat down.  And we breakfasted like two normal people.  In-between bites of croissant and sips of coffee she told me about the work on location and that she had said she wouldn’t be taking on any more work for at least two months, although her agent (she would never again use Liz’s name in my presence) was fiercely convinced that she should try out for this new thing…  Had I read the book?  How silly of her;  of course I had.  Was there anything I hadn’t read?  Would I give her my entirely honest opinion on whether or not she should?  God help me, I did, too.  I told her that I thought she’d be an excellent choice for the role  even though I’d miss her.  I saw the expression on her face move from compassion to doubt and then to a relieved certainty.

And after breakfast she took the dishes over to the sink, ran hot water over them and then turned to me, laying her hands on my shoulders.  No-one had touched me in weeks;  the sensation nearly undid me.  “Dearest,” she said, in a tone I could never replicate:  the way she said it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end;  it made my mouth go dry and it brought tears to my eyes.  No-one should ever have that much control after another.  “Dearest,” she said to me and then she kissed me.  God help me.  She held me terribly close and then she took me to bed.  At some inestimable time later, drifting on the edge of

sleep, I began to understand.  But it was all still new to me, and I really needed a beginner’s guide.  I was happy, though, and I didn’t want to question everything.

XII

Making love with Jude was not something I’d become accustomed to;  nor had I ever known what to expect, or what might be desired of me.  No two nights were ever the same;  every single time was different, but that insane intensity was always there.  Eventually I came to accept that sex was an area in which she needed badly to have all control.  I loved Jude: if control was what she wanted, she could have it.  I gave it up without another thought.  The thing about Jude that I never even tried to explain to anyone was that when she called to me, or reached out to me, or I simply remembered earlier caresses, I felt inside a pang inside, a shock of feeling so strong that it made my heart race and my mouth go dry.  That sensation was amazing, and I might have stayed with her for that alone, but doubtless that would be labelled as nothing more than lust.  It wasn’t.  The books were right in their rabid ramblings:  she really had a hold on my heart.  It wasn’t until the lonely nights, when I lay across the bed because I could, that I began to wonder if it was lust or love that compelled me.  It was always a comfort that on such nights TG, seeming to feel my isolation, came and shared the bed.  Her company was invariably warm, tactile and reassuring:  she would settle against me.  On more nights than I can remember I fell asleep listening to her purr.

If I stopped to think about the whole thing in honest terms, I had to admit that I loved being with Jude.  There was sometimes a sense of unlikelihood about the whole thing which made her affairs seem closer to inevitable than I liked to think.  But I knew that I loved her.  When she wasn’t off fucking her latest co-star she was more vividly present than anyone else I’d ever known.  She liked to read, although our taste in books was wildly different.  She was fascinated by film, and she was interested in the classes I sometimes taught.  The only part of me that I kept secret from her was the writing:  I know that she wanted to read what I was working on, and I could never show her.  That would have been more intimate even than sex.

XIII

We’d done the better part of the way out and had stopped before the ruined castle.  Some kindly soul had put up a picnic table and benches, and although I never saw anyone else use them but us, I appreciated it very much.  Fen poured us both tea and then laced the mugs with rum. 

The castle - collapsing as it was - had stood for nearly a thousand years.  The tide was low, so we could reach it easily enough.  At high tide there was nothing to do but wait.  Fen had taught me all about the best times to look for otters, which was why we’d broken our walk when we had.  The wind was getting up, and I was glad of the heavy sweater I’d tugged on over a tee-shirt.  Glad too of my hat.  The layers were gathering:  soon there’d be a jacket as well, and a scarf and gloves.  Bloody hell.  Give me a few weeks’ respite and I’d be sewing myself into my thermals and not coming out of them again until spring.  That was, of course, if I took up Fen’s suggestion, and rather than going back to life in London, stayed in the cottage for the winter.

The idea surprised me when he voiced it, because he tended never to give or seek advice.  He didn’t know what my initial plan was all about, and I wasn’t about to enlighten him;  he might have tried to make me change my mind.  For an instant I put aside the plan, and imagined a future there.  God knows I would be lonely, but I could be lonely anywhere.  It could be done - hell, if I wanted to I didn’t have to go back.  Well, not for long.  If I was prepared to sit out a long cold winter and a time of general abstemiousness, I could do it.  I could even - if I chose - go on-line at the local Tourist Information and start up the whole process within days.  Maybe Fen was thinking along similar lines because a moment later he said, “Please bear in mind that you’ve not done a full winter up here yet.  Think about how you’d be without electricity, and there’s a long walk up the road before you get any mobile signal.  Imagine a walk to the general store in the snow.” 

“Fen, I’ve been up here in all kinds of weather.  Once I couldn’t get out for four days;  I’m not that inexperienced.  Why the change of heart?  You know that if I was up here I’d no sooner get between you and your otters than I would try to shift the castle, stone by stone.  I thought earlier that you were recommending I stay.  I’m amazed:  this is twice in one day you’ve given me advice.  Fen.  You never give me advice.”

“I don’t if I can help it, nor do I take it myself unless absolutely essential.  It’s just that if you do it, I want it to be your choice.  And remember, that it’ll be very different without TG.  Oh, shit.  I’m sorry, that sounds so trite.  I know it’s very different for you being without her right now.  I‘m sorry.  I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I was glad he added the apology;  it saved me beating him to death with the thermos.  No, I didn’t need to be reminded;  I never forgot.  I might as well not notice I’d had a limb severed.  For a few minutes I kept my mouth shut because I knew that if I opened it, all the fury that was welling up - and which belonged elsewhere - was going to erupt all over him.  And we didn’t have that kind of a relationship. 

In my thoughts she was always with me, and I was always without her, and I could hardly bear it.  Whenever I got back to the cottage I looked out for her. I still called for her at home, in London.  Stopped, and called and then, more than once, just crashed down onto my knees, my head bowed.  There was no forgetting - there never would be.  I didn’t want there to be. 

“Does Jude know about TG?”

“Fen, I haven’t seen Jude in over six months.  Jude doesn’t even know that the bathroom’s been painted a different colour, or that I’ve trashed the TV.  And the phone.  And for all I know - which is fuck-all - she’s in America.  Or somewhere.  She doesn’t know that TG is dead;  she didn’t know that my father died.  She doesn’t know that I’m up here.  And even if I had wanted to contact her, to tell her what had been going on, what number could I possibly have called?  I don’t have one.  I never did.”

Jude had missed all of TG’s illness, and she hadn’t been there when TG died.  Although I couldn’t bear the thought of the veterinary surgery, their staff had been great, coming out at the last because I wanted TG to die at home, and as peacefully as was possible.  It didn’t matter one iota that Jude had been away when my father shuffled off this mortal coil, or that she hadn’t been around when I’d come back - still slightly stoned - from the funeral.  What mattered was that she’d missed TG.

If Jude went back to the flat would she see the little grave in the back garden, positioned just before the hedge, where TG had sat to sun herself?  And if she saw, what would she do then? 

“Of course, if you didn’t die of it, and there’s no reason why you should, you might really enjoy yourself.  It can be very cathartic.  I’ve had weeks when I’ve seen virtually no-one, when the castle’s deserted and the beaches are being blasted by the westerly winds.  It’s amazing then, so bleak that there’s nothing between you and the elements.  Sometimes it’s so cold you can’t even think.”  Then he added, “You and I should go out to the lighthouse.  I want to make some sketches;  you can bring your bird book and binoculars, and if it’s very cold I’ll let you camp out in the jeep.  I’ll even take blankets for you to hide under.”  We usually did take his jeep, which was dented but reliable.  An hour or so on single-track roads and then the walk down to the lighthouse and the vast, rocky, Atlantic-facing coast.  The last time we’d been there I’d spent an hour watching the progress of a seal as it struggled against the heavy tide.  After that we’d rewarded ourselves with coffee and scones.  Very civilised.

“Enough,” I said.  “Let’s go see the castle.”

XIV

It was late, and I was sitting on the floor in front of the stove, leaning back against the armchair.  We’d walked much further than usual and by the time I reached the cottage door it had been almost dark.  I said goodnight to Fen and unlocked the door, called out to TG and then remembered.  After that it seemed stupid to think of supper;  I’d just lost my appetite again.

Fen had called on me once before, when he’d seen the lights, and wanted to make sure I was okay.  Somehow then he’d known that I was on my own.  A day or so later I’d filled him in on a few details.  I wasn’t interested in the details myself, and nor, I think, was he.  He was just puzzled.  I’d said Jude always came back, and that seemed to make him stop and think.

“She always comes back?”

“Yes.”  I said it almost with surprise.  “I suppose she does.  I suppose she has done so far.  I never expect her to come back, though.”

But this time I was the one who’d gone.  Except of course that Jude was already absent. 

That afternoon he’d said, recalling the past.  “This is the first time that you’ve been the one to leave.  What do you think she’ll feel when she finds you’ve left the London house?”

“Relief?  Chagrin? I don’t know.”  He’d smiled at that.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m not sure I care.”

“Too angry?  Or too hurt?”

“No.”

“Or both?”

“No.  Up until TG got sick I missed her, wished she’d come back.  Now…  Now I’m not sure that I care.”  At that point I knew that I’d come too close to the truth again, and I swerved away.

XV

I reached for my laptop and started sifting through the pictures file.  Jude was there but I hardly saw her.  What I wanted was TG, and I stopped at every single shot of her.  After a while the tears made me almost blind and I had to stop.  I closed my aching eyes and put the laptop aside.

The laptop had been a present from Jude.  Top of the line, a stunning computer that did everything but sing.  The screen was crystal clear and the keys I hit sounded convincing and resonant, unlike the punky sound (and feel) of its predecessor.  I glanced at the most recent files, when I’d been trying to write, but there was nothing I had to say, and after another minute I turned it off, and closed the lid.

Jude had been generous always, and her gifts were invariably quality, even if they weren’t necessarily things I’d have bought for myself.  Of course, I had less money than she…  Jude’s presents fell into two major categories:  an ordinary event gift, or an apologetic will-this-make-it-up-to-you present.   No, there was a third category, an almost severe:  the you must have this present.  The first time I’d been to one of her parties I wore the clothes she’d bought me the previous week.  At least, in part.  The silk shirt she'd found for me I loved and would have worn regardless, but the trousers  made me feel uncomfortably like a child dressed up by adults for an adult occasion, and after regarding them with regret I hid them away at the back of the wardrobe.  As to the boots?  I looked at them, sighed, and hid them, too.  But the black coat she’d bought me, which I had put aside - too smart, too occasional, too something - I dug out and wore at my father’s funeral.

XVI

I wish I could have shaken the image - which came fresh to mind when the news of the old man’s death reached me - of his staggering alongside an empty grave before falling the fuck in.  The only surprise was that he hadn’t gone years before, but here was proof that, contrary to the view of nutritionists, it is possible to attain a respectable age on a diet of alcohol, cigarettes and black coffee.

At the house, after the funeral, I met my step-sister for the first time in years.  A lot of time had passed since Ellie’s death.  I think that Sonia might have liked to avoid me entirely, and I would have been happy for her to have done so, but someone must have pointed me out to her and after that she had little option other than to acknowledge me in some manner.

Sonia crossed the room toward me with an expression of irritation, duty and distance on her face.  It was hard for me to dislike her fully because she looked so like Ellie.  I waited for her to come up close, aware that I didn’t much mind what she’d say.  The barrier between us was not one of my making - I had not intended to nurse Ellie through her final weeks - things had just worked out that way.  I’d found myself wanting to care for her, and she’d let me do that.

For an instant I nearly embarrassed myself by making the first move, but I am bad at initial contact, and besides, what could I do?  Shake her hand?  Hug her?  Deck her?  Well, the last appealed.  I was beginning my hallo when she cut me off by saying, “I didn’t honestly think you’d come. Did you come to see if you’d be mentioned in his will?  You weren’t in the last one, and I’ll bet you won’t feature in Dad’s.”

I hadn’t thought about wills at all, and told her so.  “I assumed he’d live for ever.  He packed into his span sixty years of nicotine, caffeine abuse and alcohol.  I’m surprised he made it as far as he did.  And I’m very surprised that he remembered to make a will.”

My own mother had died when I was very young and it had been a few years before my father took up with Ellie.  And soon after they had Sonia.  And somehow Sonia had become his favourite and I…  I guess I became Ellie’s.  I certainly loved her a million times more than I did him.

Their divorce, when it came, was nasty and fast.  Once Ellie had made up her mind, the deal was as good as done.  I don’t think he was hopelessly profligate, but he had a tendency to sway, and eventually he swayed once too often.  I was about to start college then, and was pretty much out of the way.  Sonia stayed with the old man, and Ellie branched out alone.  What holidays I had I spent with her, and then I moved to London and we stayed in touch:  we talked on the phone and we both wrote;  I visited her, she came and stayed with me.  And then she got ill.  And then everything changed.

Soon after I’d started caring for Ellie she told me about the will she’d made in which she divided everything between Sonia and me.  I read it, and then I ripped that up and insisted she write a replacement.  She had no choice.  She wasn’t happy about it but she had no choice.

And so now another will had raised its head.  I was genuinely surprised, and I honestly didn’t care.

Jude had been away for months when I got the call that told me of Dad’s death and impending funeral.  I was miserably unhappy and it was hard for anything to penetrate that much misery:  I didn’t really care about Sonia, or the will or what Dad had or hadn’t thought about me.  I just wanted it over with so that I could get back home again.  TG was in the cattery, and I knew she’d be unhappy.  If I juggled my trains I could be back the next day, picking TG up on the way home.  Sonia could think what she liked:  I just wanted to get out.

The funeral itself was undemanding.  I should never have gotten stoned, but I had seldom felt a greater need.  I was doing less and less dope, so the joint I rolled that day had a more potent effect than I was used to.  After the funeral we all went back to the house.  I hadn’t stood inside that hall for years, and being there again shocked me as much as a blow would have done.  At the top of the stairs stood my old room, the room in which I’d done much of my growing up, and although it was redolent with potential memories, I did my best to stay away:  I wasn’t sure that I could cope.

I had no interest in what my father had done or had failed to do.  All I wanted was to step outside: the air inside the house was still rank; one more coating of nicotine and the ceilings would have crumbled and the walls come down.  “Look, if you want to talk some more, can we go outside?  I could really use some fresh air.”

Without waiting - she would follow me or not - I took my glass and went to sit on the edge of the terrace.

Looking down at the garden that I’d once known intimately, all I could see was chaos.  What had once been orderly now resembled the kind of landscape that Frodo and Sam might have traversed had they taken a left instead of a right.  Brambles like barbed wire had curved up and over what had once been a vegetable patch and the glass-framed greenhouse that had briefly been my pride and joy was now nothing but a white-bricked disaster site, with broken glass jutting out like old teeth.  Dandelions and other weeds proliferated:  the lawn was long-gone.  But I could still see traces of the stepping stones that he’d put in all those years ago, when he and Ellie were still an item and the world looked less forbidding.  Everything else had been overcome:  the trees loomed, and the pond, that had once contained goldfish, now held nothing but brackish water and rotting apples. 

I’d about finished my sweep when Sonia came and sat down beside me.  She looked very smart in a black suit, but then, she always was nicely turned out.  She said, “About Daddy’s will.  I’ve been asked to go along to the solicitor’s on Friday.  Perhaps you should be there.”

I shook my head, no.  “I’ve got commitments back home:  I’ll be away tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“So just the funeral and off?”

“Exactly.”  But then a faint guilt touched me and I said, “I hope there wasn’t a lot of nursing for you to do.  I know how hard that can be.”

Oh, did I ever say the wrong thing.  I’d forgotten how she felt about sick-beds and the whole palaver.  When Ellie had been ill Sonia had been unable to cope at all, apart from those fleeting, tear-stained hummingbird visits.  I hadn’t meant my words to mean an accusation, but judging by her face, that was how she interpreted me.

“It wasn’t like that.  It wasn’t like you and Mother.  It wasn’t like that at all.  When he was first ill he didn’t tell me, and then when he got really bad, they took him straight into hospital.  Not that there was much point by then.  He’d left it far too late.  No. After six months of virtually no single word from him I get a call from that cow next door telling me that I should get myself down here if I had any family feeling at all.  That was when I found out that he was in the hospital.  I only found that out because I came here first.  The place was… awful.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Sorry.  Somehow I thought he’d been in pretty regular contact with you.  You guys always got along so well together.”  I only stopped talking when I saw that all I was doing was throwing petrol onto flame.  “Thank you for letting me know that he’d died,” I said, and let it go at that.

She was furiously angry and I could see as much.  I thought at first she was simply angry with me, but I wasn’t alone when the blame was apportioned.  “He left it too late,” she said.  “His doctor told me that Dad could have done something about his condition if he’d done it sooner.  By the time he called the hospital it was far too late.”  I waited.  I thought the words:  Maybe he felt like her;  maybe he recognised the beginning of the end and didn’t want to fight it , only to find - surprisingly - that Sonia herself had said them.  She looked at me.  “I never did understand why she left everything to me.  Well, two thirds to me and one third to some weird charity I’d never even heard of.  At first I thought she left you out because she was angry with you.  But you were with her at the end, and I wasn’t.  Did you have something to do with that?”

“Ellie made all her own decisions.”

“I think that they wanted to put suicide on the death certificate.  The coroner  questioned that, but then, he did know her.  So they called it open or something.  She was on a lot of medication.  But that will of hers - I’m amazed that it stood - you could have questioned it.  I would, if I’d been cut out.  But you didn’t.  I’ve never really understood that.”

“I…  I guess I just respected her last wishes.”  How the hell she picked herself up the way she did was something I still find surprising.  She told me what to bring her, and then she asked me to get the car.  She’d even put on some make-up, and I remember that she actually joked with the pharmacist.  The woman should have been on the stage.

“I think it struck everyone as amazing that she managed to pick up the prescription, sick as she was.”

“Yes.” I said, cheerfully.  “Wasn’t it.”

I don’t think the doctor would have given Ellie that prescription had they not known one another so long.  I could still recall the day, remembering her telling me that I’d have to help her dress.  And drive her there.  And drive her back.  We had this surreal last supper.  I stopped off at the supermarket and got her everything she wanted.  She wanted Chinese Duck, with sauce and pancakes.  And ice-cream for afters.  And wine.  It was a good, weird meal.

She had become suddenly very tired and I was glad when the night nurse came in to settle her down for the night.  While the nurse did her thing I cleared away dishes and everything was neat - the way Ellie always liked - by the time the nurse was ready to say goodnight and go. 

Once the front door was closed and locked against our most recent guest we sat together in Ellie’s room, with her in the bed, and me in the armchair beside it.  I had a glass of whisky, she had a large glass of sherry.  I had another small whisky  and she had the morphine.  I toasted her.  She replied in kind.  For a little while we talked, and conversation was surprisingly easy.  We talked for I don’t know how long, but I remember her voice changing as the morphine took effect. 

I don’t know when I fell asleep;  I only know that I woke at past three, and went downstairs to phone the doctor to report Ellie’s death. While the doctor did her thing, and after I’d called the undertaker’s number, I went back to my own room, and tried to sleep.  At Ellie’s funeral I played a very subdued role:  Sonia was back by then.  If I wasn’t the main mourner that hardly bothered me.  Even the most judgmental of her friends and neighbours knew that I’d earned my place.

“Look,” I said, suddenly very tired, “Take care of yourself, Sonia.  You know my address:  if the solicitors want me, they can call.”  She started to say something that would have made us argue, but someone called out to her and the moment was defused.  I left.  I ran away.  I ran away and back to the city.  I collected TG from the cattery and went home.

It was a very warm afternoon, I remember that, and I was dog-tired.  I was sticky from the journey, so I took a bath, and then went to sleep on the double bed, with the sunshine falling in on me through the window.  TG, affronted by her time in the cattery played hard to get, and ignored the food I’d put out for her, but when I finally woke, she was lying where she always did, against my right leg, her head resting on my thigh.

XVII

“I seem to remember you once telling me that you’d gone through a civil ceremony of some sort.  And after that she still goes on the same way?  Fuck it, Katya, who puts up with that kind of shit?”  We’d been almost halfway back, and talking about going for a meal at the Beachcomber’s if it was open when we passed it, and we weren’t too entirely exhausted to eat.

“No-one really believed it,” I told him, “me least of all.” I still had questions about how anyone could arrange a secret civil ceremony, but Jude had done it.  It was one day when Jo had come round:  I’d been bemused by her smart clothes,  Jo who almost invariably dressed in baggy sweaters and too-tight jeans.  I hadn’t been up long and was still wearing just a dressing gown.  “Aren’t you going to put on something a bit more… suitable?” she asked me.  “You hardly look the part.”  Then to Jude, who’d opened the door and invited her in.  “She does know, doesn’t she?”

“I hardly look what part?”  I looked from one to the other, confused.

“The partner part,” said Jude.  She looked stunningly smart and everything about her looked… polished.  Clothes, skin, hair, the whole nine yards of simple perfection.  In her hands she had clothes for me, clothes that I didn’t recognise, although I could see that they were much smarter (and more expensive) than anything I usually wore.

Jude beamed at me but there was something hesitant in her manner.  Her voice trembled and for an instant I remembered how it had felt when she’d first whispered to me.  Jo looked at me again and I saw clarity dawn there.  “Put these on, will you?  The car will be here in ten minutes.

“The car?”  The world was passing me by again.  Then the penny dropped.  Jude reached out for my hands and held them tightly.

“To take us along to the hall.  It’s a civil ceremony.  I want to marry you, K.  More than anything in the world I want that.”

I stared back at her.  The first time it had been… what?  I could hardly remember, though each return had been accompanied with some wonderful present.  Jude put out her hands and held me as she had done that first time, and I looked into that face and was lost.  The doorbell rang but neither of us bothered about it.  “I want to marry you.  I want you to marry me.  I want us to be the most important thing in each other’s life, and I want that to last for ever.  I want to be with you, I want to love you through years and years.”

Much, much later, and in a tone not so different from Fen’s, I was listening to Jo saying, “The way she held you that day.  The way she is with you sometimes, when she’s not being a prize cow or fucking off on her own…  I know that Co loves me, in her own entirely Co fashion, and I’m happy enough with her.  But we lack any moments of great… I don’t know… intensity?  But that day when I saw you with Jude I understood.”

“Understood what?”

“Why you put up with all the shit she pulls so fucking often.  Why you never slammed the door in her face when she came back the first time, or the second, or the third, or the fourth.  She’s more flawed than anyone I’ve ever met, but she really does love you.”  Then she undid some of her good work by adding, “For all the good it’s ever going to do either of you. She’ll probably kill you in the end.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Come on, Kat.  You know that she’s bad for you.  She’ll tear your heart into little bits, over and over again.  I think that she’ll be taking other lovers up until the moment the sky turns black.  But she’ll always come back.  The question is,” and she looked at me, “if you’ll still be waiting.  And if you are, what shape you’ll be in.”

XVIII

When I finished telling Fen about the civil ceremony I saw an expression cross his face that I’d rather not have seen.  A blend of disgust and something else.  “If you’re about to tell me what a shitty person you think she is, Fen, then this is going to be our last conversation.”

“You really mean that, don’t you?  Even if I say what I do out of concern for you…”  I raised an eyebrow.  “Okay, so you’re serious.  I won’t say anything about Jude.  But I will say something about you.”

I suddenly didn’t want him saying anything.  Suddenly he wasn’t the same easy-going, taciturn naturalist I’d come to think of as good company.  His brow was creased and for the first time I couldn’t have said what colour his eyes were.  And when he opened his mouth again and started talking, even his voice had changed.

“Katya, sometimes I think you must be the least intuitive person I’ve ever met. Certainly the most naïve.  Has it never occurred to you to question things?  Did you really believe that Jude would want to be with you in a world that was normal?  No.  Don’t say anything;  just think about it.  You’re a nice enough person but you’re not remarkable in any way.  You look okay, and you’re pleasant to spend time with, but no-one would kill to be with you.  The earth didn’t shift on its axis when you came into being.  When she did?  Yes, I think it did shift a little;  she’s a lovely woman and I say that as someone who doesn’t really like women.  She’s beautiful in a way that very few women are, and she’s undoubtedly talented.  The only thing about Jude that’s in any way odd is you.  Basically, Kat, what the fuck is she doing with you?”

By this time we were back on the single track road.  We’d walked past the Beachcomber without either of us saying a thing.  Even if I’d noticed the fucking thing, I certainly wouldn’t have felt like eating.  Suddenly we were outside his cottage.  “Come in,” he said, “and let’s finish this.”  He took my arm in a vaguely proprietorial fashion and directed me inside.

He poured a drink for me;  took out a cigarette and lit it from a coal taken from the still-glowing stove.  He fed the stove with some of the dried wood we’d salvaged from the bay and left the door open.  I sat with my whisky and eventually I took a mouthful.  It tasted bitter and medicinal.

Often in rows I find myself at a loss for words that come to me much later.  Now with Fen I was equally stuck.  My silence didn’t bother him much;  he kept going.  “And, Katya, when I say that I don’t much like women, you’ve got to know that I don’t really like men either.  I am not a great fan of relationships:  I had a father and I have a brother, and I wish I’d never been born.”

He seemed to be winding himself up.  There was a horror in just watching him, let alone paying attention to the words spewing out of his mouth.  Spit gathered at the corners of his mouth and there were sparks in his eyes.  Real sparks:  red and blue.

“I had to decide what to do and there it was.  What activity would have absolutely no place in the world to come?  This.  All this.  I’ve fixed up this cottage and it’s as perfect as it ever can be.  The garden is a work of fucking art, and if I needed to add anything more to my virtuous existence then remember that I have spent years writing about the otters.  Years writing about them and producing diligent and exceptional sketches of them.  That is the sum of my parts.”  He picked up his thesis and dragged off the first pages, and fed them to the stove.  I jumped to my feet and made for the remaining papers but he simply held me off.  He pushed me back in the direction of my usual armchair.  “Sit the fuck down, Katya, and listen.

“You have to understand, Kat, just what a mess the world is in.  A world in which someone like you could end up with someone like Jude.  That must surely have kept you up nights, wondering.”  He fed the stove again.  I saw the most exquisite drawings transformed into black cobwebs and tried again to reach the papers.  This time he grabbed my wrists and as his fingers settled round my skin I smelled burning.  I stared at the stove until the pain in my wrists reached me.  He let me go and I stared in horror at the blistering skin.  “Sorry, Katya.  I guess the end is closer than even I thought.  I think I hear the engine revving.”

“What the fuck are you?”

He didn’t seem to have heard me.  “Once I’ve done with this the cottage will follow on.  I’ll let the fire do its natural work. I don’t need the cottage any more.  Or the work.  Or you.  By tomorrow morning I will have no need of anything.  Any by tomorrow night there won’t be anyone else to need - or not need - anything.”

All that work.  All that passion.  Except that I’d been wrong.  He hadn’t been passionate at all, about anything.  In some distant region of my head I realised how grateful I was that we’d neither of us ever wanted to try sex together.

He began to pace.  Now, as he moved, I saw how I had misjudged his appearance in the years of our friendship.  And it had been a friendship of kinds.  But what I didn’t understand was why the time spent in his presence hadn’t branded me.  Sparks rose up from where his boots clicked against the flagstones.  Perhaps there were hooves, not toes, beneath his fine leather walking boots.

“Things have been out of order for so long, you know.  Your relationship with Jude should have puzzled you both, but it only ever puzzled her friends and yours.  You never stopped to wonder how many coincidences had to line up in order that you should even meet her, let alone meet her and make her want to see you again.  You disbelieved your good luck for a little while, but although she kept making you doubt, she also kept coming back.  And she might still come back now, though I doubt it.  And in a sense it doesn’t matter to you because you’re not actually waiting for her any more.  You came here to kill yourself.  Jude’ll think it’s down to her, but only you and I know that you’re killing yourself because of TG. 

“If she does come now it’ll be too late.  And tomorrow morning, with the embers of my cottage still shining, I’ll be waiting for the car that comes to take me to my allotted place.  Jude will never know who mattered the most to you, and you won’t have to worry over the kind of madness you’ve demonstrated since you first met her. 

“The two of you needn’t worry.  In the seconds you know you have left you can if you like imagine a happy reconciliation.  Imagine the two of you falling into one another’s arms and going off to bed to fuck yourselves happy without ever having to worry about getting up again.  And hasn’t that always been your favourite daydream, since Ellie and your father split up:  that when you wake it won’t be a school day and you won’t need to get up.  Imagine if you like lying in Jude’s arms in the fantasy that nothing - and no-one - would come to take her from you?”

XIX

While the sun sank in the west I staggered up the road into the almost blinding wall of golden light.

When I got in, fumbling with the door handle, the pain was nearly blinding me.  I stuck my hands under the cold tap but even after almost half an hour I was still sobbing.  I’d head for the local doctor’s but how would I drive there?  I was too weak to walk.  And I didn’t want to watch the world end, if I’d fucked up.  Working desperately, frantically, I found my tools, my own personal first aid kit:  an emergency bottle of whisky and the rest of Jude’s sleeping tablets.

“Be honest.  Isn’t that the one thing you’ve dreamed of?  It’s the only happy ending possible for you, Katya.  That you would lie in her arms and nothing - nothing - would come to take her from you.”  Fuck you, Fenris.

“I am the second son.  I inherit the world.  But I have no desire to rule.  If they could only have forgotten me, but things have been set in motion and I can’t stop them now.  My part is prescribed.  When I step into that car tomorrow I take the first step toward ending the world.  I think the whole process will take little more than an hour.”

“You can end the world in just an hour?”

“I can depopulate most of it in ten minutes.  Mass murder takes time, though.  Give me an hour and a half.”

“If you… hit the button, or whatever else you have to do, will you go up with the world?”

“I don’t know.  That will be interesting to see.  Either way I win.  Either I’m alone, which will be perfect, or I will be dead, which would be ideal.”

All I could think was that I had gone driftwood collecting with the devil.  “Are you...?  Are you actually what I think..?”

“What do you think?  Do you doubt me?  And in response to your unspoken question, you never have seen my feet bare.  If you had, you might have believed sooner.” 

No, I never had.  Even when we’d been walking on the wettest days, days that had necessitated a change of footwear the moment we reached his cottage or mine.  “I’ve never seen your without socks.”

“Exactly.  Plus there’s the faintest hint of brimstone, although my aftershave generally conceals that.”  He grinned, and I saw how jagged his teeth were.  “And there’s everything else.”  He looked at me, and I saw that the pupils of his eyes were spinning.  Blue and red sparks exploded across the irises.  He stamped a foot on the flagstones and sparks flew up.  The ground beneath his feet moaned and the wooden floor splintered.  Wisps of sulphur rose into the air, making me cough and gag.

“I never thought…”  He was the devil, I could see that now.  My sight was being blasted.  I had to look away from those depthless, horror-filled eyes.  “Does it have to be that way?  I mean, does all that have to happen?”

“There’s no running away from the facts.  If I’m here then I inherit the world.  I can’t change that.  I can’t stop… myself.”  He picked up the poker, shoved it into the fire and shook up the burning matter;  ash flew.  Dust settled on the stones.  He fed in another sheaf of notes, another batch of lovingly constructed studies.  “I’m sorry,” he added.  “I wish I’d been able to say that of course you’re her equal.  In a right-thinking world she’d never have fallen for you.”

“Oh, as if that matters.  As if I care.  Everyone dies tomorrow.  Do you honestly think I’m going to waste my final hours feeling inadequate?” 

He laughed.  “Do you know, I’ll miss you, Katya.  Likeable fool that you are, you’re the

only one who’s ever amused me.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”  His eyes were burning again.

The stove was beginning to roar.  “If you’re not careful you’ll go up with that when it blows.”

“If it blows.  When it does.  Then there might be nothing left.”

“Would that kill you?”

“Probably.  Now, at least.  Now while I’m still essentially human.  By tomorrow I’ll be something else entirely.  Then it’ll be far too late for last minute rescues.  If you’ve ever believed in anything so unlikely.”  He sighed, and let go his hold on the poker, which clattered and bounced across the flagstones, landing near my feet.  Without thinking I reached for it and picked it up.  I was shocked by its weight. 

“What the hell is this?  Lead?”

“Iron.  Lead.  I don’t know.  It weighs heavy.  It feels reassuring.  Finite.”

He knelt before the stove, nearly touching me.  Put out his hand to the stove to feed in more pages.  The flames touched his fingertips but did not burn them the way he’d burned me.  I remembered my dream, and the flood of nuclear flame. 

I remembered Ellie’s insistence on independence but all the same I had to put my own hands round her fingers to ease the lid of the morphine.  I remembered how ethereal her hands had felt;  they were almost weightless.

At some point I had to stop;  I could no longer even lift the poker.  My fingers just uncurled and stopped working.  The poker fell onto the ground and the flames leapt to receive it.  The flames were all around his body now, but they seemed to shiver before me and clear my path.  I was halfway back toward the cottage when the stove exploded. 

XX

I slept through the end of the world.  At least, that was my first thought when I woke in a white bed in a white room.  I missed that day and the next.  When I awoke into the world, in an alien bed in a alien world, the first thing I saw was a nurse.  So I was in hospital.  Which meant that the world… was still there?  When she saw that I was awake she positively beamed at me.  “Hallo.  I’m glad you’re awake.  You’re our hospital heroine.  It was so brave of you to try and rescue that poor man.  The whole hospital’s talking about it.  Trying to drag him from the flames.  Your poor hands…”  She paused then added, “I’ll get you something to drink, and something for the pain.”

Something for the pain.  I managed to stay awake for both, and was then allowed to float gently back into unconsciousness.  It felt wonderful. I slept for I don’t know how long, and when I woke, it was to find a stranger in the room, sitting upright in a chair facing my bed.  A well-dressed man with an attaché case resting on his knees and a suit so well-cut I knew he couldn’t be from the police.  The police, it seemed, had gone on their way without requiring anything of me.  But the man smiled, and I took in  the strange colour of his eyes.  “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said.  “I haven’t much time but I wanted to speak to you before I left.  Wrapping up loose ends, so to speak.  Not that I see you as an end.”  His tone was borderline ironic.

I nodded.  I waited.

“My errand, which had never been one I anticipated with any kind of pleasure, has been made… unnecessary by your intervention.  You struggled valiantly in an attempt to rescue my poor previous employer.  The police are impressed. So am I.  The beams fell in on him in the end.  Old wood is often the heaviest. 

“I shall be leaving very soon, and we don’t meet again.  This stays with you.”  He gave me a half smile.  “It is a case containing among other things what few sketches of his survived the inferno:  they were found adhering to a beech hedge.”  Then he added, “I believe you earn your living as a writer.”

This was not a man I wished to bullshit.  “I used to think I was,” I said, “but I haven’t written anything in…  in the longest time.”

“Perhaps your stay here will give you time to think,” he said, “and perhaps inspiration will strike you.  You may find the block dissolves in warm sunshine.  But I imagine you won’t ever use as material the events of the past few days.  I see that you won’t.  A wise decision.”  As he stood he said, “This case that contains the sketches, also contains a very large sum of money, which had been earmarked for travelling expenses.  As it is no longer needed for that purpose, the management have requested that it be given to you.  I believe you will live to enjoy it.”  He raised an eyebrow, looking for an instant almost normal, and winked. 

“The sketches I’d love to keep.”  Even as I spoke the words I doubted them:  I wouldn’t want to be reminded.  “As to the money, well, it’s very kind of you but I…” 

“There will of course be a funeral.  If you are fit enough to stand then you have pride of place.  I understand that there has been another funeral recently in your past.  I am so sorry.  And I am afraid that I really will not accept your not accepting.  The money is yours.  Do what you like with it.  Now, as you may come to see, there are a great many of us in the Company who have benefited from recent events, and the Company would like to know if there is anything else that we could do to facilitate happiness for you in your world?  The Company is surprisingly far-reaching:  you never know how we might be able to help you.  Something… intangible, perhaps?  Some matter of the heart?  We would be only too pleased to… facilitate matters.”

Bloody hell, I thought.  He means Jude.  And he’s serious.  Say the word and Jude’ll be mine for ever and faithful.  What a thought.  Fen would know that I’d turn down that offer.  No, there’s only one thing in the world that I want and that really is impossible.  I wonder what he would have said if I’d told him that all I really wanted was to have my cat back.  I loved Jude once and I might love her again but that’s not really what matters to me now.  If I could have anything I wanted then it would be to wake up in the morning with the need to feed my cat the first thought that comes to mind.  I want to wake up feeling her soft weight as she lies across my feet, as she often did, so that I’d wake up thinking I’d been paralysed during the night.  I want her to live out her whole life and die, tired but happy, at twenty, after a miraculous and successful hunt, with rabbit blood warm in her mouth and a heart that had only recently stopped pounding beneath her own.

I want her to die on a single exhalation and never to know what was happening.  I want her never to feel the sting of the needle, the insertion of the drip.  Oh, and incidentally, I’d like to die at the same time.  Imagine the two of us walking across an evening-sunlit field into a middle distance we simply disappear into. 

He waited a little longer, and as I reined in my thoughts I was relieved that he couldn’t read my mind.  He probably already thought I was a bit deranged, and that last thought might have pushed him over the edge.  And so the closing moments of our conversation didn’t strike me as being in any way strange.  He allowed the silence of another few minutes to elapse, and then he picked up his hat and turned to go.  At the door he stopped and said, “What did TG stand for?”  And so I told him, and he nodded.  “And for the last time, there’s nothing simple, rational, that I can help you with before I leave?”

“Yes, there is.  Do you think… you could score me some painkillers on the way out? This is all hurting like hell.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Yes, quite sure.”  Now the pain was really bad.  Sweat broke out across my forehead.    “Thanks.”

A final nod.  A final smile, a wish for a rapid return to good health and he was gone.  Only the attaché case remained.  And soon some blessed creature came in with an injection for me, and in a very short time I was sleeping.

XXI

Through the waking and dreaming that was my lot for the next 24 hours I relived not simply that strange conversation, but also my time with Fen.  There were moments when, waking, I thought myself back in bed in London, with Jude.  Or without Jude.  Or with TG lying across my feet and making me think I’d been crippled.  In my more coherent moments I knew that later I’d go over what I should have asked for, if such a request had been within his power to bestow.  There were all sorts of things I could have asked for, intangibles I might jump at:  fidelity from Jude would be nice, if I ever got to see her again.  The ability to write again would be nice, but I had a sense that that would come in any case, provided I didn’t write about Fen, and I knew that I’d never want to. 

I woke with a  sense of clarity and knew that the pain was decreasing.  Another nurse came in and gave me water, and asked me if I’d like some food, and for the first time I was hungry. I was dreadfully thirsty, too, which was only to be expected.

 

XXII

I woke up and at the foot of my bed stood Jude.  I’d dreamed about her, so I assumed I was dreaming still.  Her face looked even more perfect than usual and I wondered, not for the first time, just how difficult life must be when your looks really do dictate your life.  Her hands were holding on tightly to the bottom rail and the knuckles were white.  She didn’t look pleased to see me;  she looked as if what she really wanted was the beat the shit out of me, something I’d never seen in her before.  When she spoke her voice went in all directions.  In another moment she was crying and shouting at the same time, and her fists came down hard on the bed by my feet.  I struggled to be upright but I had no strength and my hands still hurt.  “What’s wrong?” I asked, idiotically.

“What’s wrong?  Jesus Christ, Katya!  You weren’t there!  I came back home and you weren’t there!  The doors were all shut and there was post on the floor and there was no TG and I thought that you were dead, or that you’d been hurt, or that you’d…”  If she was going to say it, it was then or never.  I hardly heard the words cross the distance between us.  “Walked out on me.  Left me.”  Fen had told me that in no sane world…  I wondered just how soon she’d be leaving, if she hadn’t already.  “Then I saw… the mound in the garden.  Mrs Locus told me that you’d had to have TG put down.  Oh, Katya, I’m so sorry.  I know how much you loved her.  Why…  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Jude, how could I tell you?  How can I ever tell you anything if you never leave me a forwarding address, let alone a phone number.  Here, sit down.”

I think it was shock:  her legs gave way and she slumped into the seat Fen’s man had employed.   I said, “There were other things, Jude.  My father died.  He died and I went to the funeral.  That meant going back home.  I didn’t want to go but I went all the same.  Sonia called me, my step-sister.  After that I couldn’t not go, even if I can’t stomach her, and she doesn’t like me.”

She stared at me, her eyes wide and shocked.  “Your father died?  You never even told me he was still alive.  And a step-sister?  When did you…”

“I hadn’t seen her in a long time,” I said.  “Not since her mother’s funeral;  my stepmother’s funeral.”

It struck me that all I ever did was go to the funerals.  Dad’s wasn’t long gone by, and Fen’s was coming up.  Deranged as it might be the thought struck me hard and was suddenly funny.  Painfully, hopelessly funny.  And I couldn’t stop laughing.  This last was a mistake, because in a moment Jude was holding my upper arms.  When it became clear to both of us that I couldn’t stop laughing, when even I could hear the note of idiocy present, Jude slapped me round the face so hard my teeth crashed together and I bit my tongue.  This new pain took the collective ache up another notch or two, but the look on Jude’s face was the last thing I’d expected.  She looked horrified.  She looked at her hand as though it didn’t belong to her.  She put up that same hand to her mouth.  She stammered, “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  You’re bleeding!  Oh, God, K!  I didn’t mean to hurt you…”

“I know that.”  Perhaps my tongue had swelled, for already my words came out sounding all wrong and my mouth felt huge and clumsy.  Blood dripped down my chin. Jesus.  That hurt.  My, how that hurt.  Jude ran off, and came back with a loo roll in one hand.  She tore off a length of paper and dabbed at the blood that was now dripping down my chin, her face ashen, tears rushing down her cheeks.  The new injury hurt badly, but it ached less when I looked into her serious, loving face.  I wondered how I could have walked out without leaving so much as a note.

“You never told me about your family.  I didn’t know you had a family.”

Who did?  I’d kept the details to myself long enough.  I said: “It all fell apart long ago.  Ellie was the only one who mattered.  I stopped caring about the others after my stepmother died.  After that happened…  there was no home to go back to.”  For the first time in my life it struck me that I knew more people in the cemetery than out of it.  Tears I hadn’t known I was likely to shed started coming and wouldn’t stop.  Jude had stopped shaking, had stopped hitting, and put her arms around me.  For the time being, that was more than enough.  Tears mixed with blood:  I think we were both crying.  There was almost enough room on the bed for the two of us when she cuddled up to me, her arms round me, her head resting on my chest, her long legs bent at the knees.  For better or for worse she had come home.

XIII

There’s only one thing left to say:  when the nurse came into see me the following morning, while Jude was away down the corridor, washing up as best she could, she told me that I could go home, if I wanted to go home, if there was someone to look after me.  Then she said that the strangest thing had happened, and produced a small basket.  Someone had left this right outside my door, a card with my name written on it stuck into the woven slats.  Inside the basket lay curled a small white kitten.