Empty Space

TEN Down to the River

Anna Waterman got up early and walked through Wyndlesham village to the downs. She preferred the village empty. Just after dawn at that time of year a soft, grainy light warmed its pantile roofs, flint facings and herringbone brick garden paths; the only thing moving was a cat.

From behind Wyndlesham church she took a muddy lane, then steepening chalk paths up through hawthorns to where the remains of a second village, long abandoned, lay like a geographical feature, a series of intimate sunken bays floored with sheep-cropped turf. Stands of elder had overgrown the old walls. What presented itself at first as a chalk bank, cut deeply by the footpath, suddenly revealed ends of Georgian brick. Anna loved that sense of enclosure, and then, as you walked further up the hillside, the way everything opened again suddenly to wide grassy re-entrants, long ridges dotted with isolated hawthorns and patches of burnet rose. She loved the way the wind opened everything out and moved it along.

By the time she reached Western Brow, the sun had come out. Skylarks went up and down like elevators in the clear air; though the curve of the downs obscured it, she could smell the sea; northwards the Low Weald stretched away towards London, scattered with villages in the morning haze — Streat, Westmeston, St Johns Without, then Wyndlesham itself, built around a bend on the B2112 not far from the Lewes Road. The village would be awake by now. Sought after because it was close to the Downs but out of their shadow, Wyndlesham was the sort of place where, even in these harsh economic times, everyone kept a pedigree Australian cattle dog. On the walls of The Jolly Tinker you could examine tinted reprographs of Victorian farm labourers, their impressive facial hair and rural machinery; but at Sunday lunchtime, only brand managers, retired CEOs and bankers of every stripe, especially investment bankers who had made their money before 2008, could afford to drink there. Their SUVs saw only trophy mud; their wives, though they rode well, in tight little jodhpurs and shiny boots, did not come from riding families.

Light struck off an opened bedroom window; the man who owned Dainty Dot’s Café & Bookshop came to his door and shook out a mat. Two or three ponies, suddenly delighted by life, ran about in a paddock. Looking down on the cat-slide roofs and higgledy-piggledy main street at 8am on such a perfect morning, it was hard to find anything to dislike. Then a van drew up to deliver the impressive range of French fermiers — air-freighted in with the dew still on them twice a week — for which the cheese shop was justly renowned, and you saw that while it yearned for vanished values, Wyndlesham had long ago priced out any representative of them. Anna set her back to Ditchling Beacon and the upland wind and walked east, where, beside the broad, flinty, footworn reach of the South Downs Way between Western Brow and Plumpton Plain, she came upon a clump of the brown poppies that had colonised her garden.

Up here, they grew taller and more vigorous: rather than being defeated by the wind, they seemed to thrive on it. The stems rattled together. The flowers yearned upward into the streaming light. Anna got out her phone to take a picture of them for Marnie, but, becoming nervous, put it away again. She touched the coppery, foil-like petals in wonder and astonishment. Thinking that she could hear something, she knelt down and listened to them. Nothing; or nothing she could be sure of. Nevertheless she shivered. Then she let the wind and the glory of the skylarks usher her into the downlands — out of which, an hour later, still feeling blessed and strange, she emerged at an unexpected angle, having lost her way. She found herself descending steep chalky ground into sweeps of water meadow and low-lying pasture dotted here and there with thistles, dog rose and spreading bramble, where willows lined a small river winding through. This composition was spoiled only by the house that stood to one side of the pasture.

A four-bedroom new build in the 1990s, assembled from unremitting pale brick and still looking like an architectural drawing, it hadn’t weathered. Its profile was low, yet it was clearly not a bungalow. There was a patio like a hard standing for machinery. The white lattices of security grilles, which from a distance looked as if they had been taped on, divided every window. Sunshine glittered off the clutter of photovoltaic and hot water panels set into the shallowly-sloping roof. The only character it possessed lay at the end of its long asymmetric garden: a few trees inherited from some previous, more authentic dwelling on the site. Something resembling life would be lent it each spring by the energetic scraping conversations of the starlings that nested in its gutters. Otherwise, it reminded Anna of a cheap toy abandoned on a carpet; something unable to age because of the sheer purposive artificiality of the materials used to construct it. If it was familiar, she realised, that was because it was her own house.

‘I’m not sure I like it any more,’ she told Dr Alpert that afternoon.

‘I can’t explain why.’

But she could. Too many rooms like plaster boxes. Too much furniture that had aged but somehow never gained character. Clothes she longer wore. A car she never drove. It was less a house than a place to store things.

‘Every room is a box-room,’ she complained.

‘Are you sure it’s your house we’re talking about?’

Anna laughed. ‘I have three toilets,’ she said. ‘One in the en suite, one in the house bathroom and one downstairs. Who needs three toilets? I wake up at night wondering which one to use and wishing I lived in a single room again. I know exactly what I’d want. I often imagine it.’

Dr Alpert was interested in that.

‘Tell me about the room you imagine,’ she said.

‘Why?’

Because it’s been a slow session, the doctor thought, and we might as well have met for tea somewhere instead. Because a wet afternoon had followed the promise of the morning. Because, she thought — glancing out of the consulting-room window at Chiswick Eyot, then down at her desk where the open case file, a vase of pale yellow narcissi and a box of Kleenex lay like something more than themselves in a clear puddle of watery light — the Thames is up as high as the road and nothing is drearier than rain on the tideway. Because today you seem like such a nice ordinary woman.

‘Because it’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Oh come on, Anna, what fun!’

‘Well, I’d like it to be wooden,’ Anna said. ‘But less like a garden shed than a beach hut. Or if it was brick I would want it wainscoted.’ White wainscoting to shoulder height, then dove grey paint above. Bare floorboards painted the same grey. One good-size window behind curtains of heavy, off-white linen featuring thin vertical stripes in ice-cream colours; a similar curtain across the door to keep out the draught. No pictures on the walls. That’s all she saw, really. Her imagination ended there. Obviously there’d be a bed, a chair; they wouldn’t take up a lot of space. Nothing that forced itself on you, she thought, although perhaps a bedspread or a rug, something bright that captured the eye. ‘I’d like a shelf or two of books, but no more.’ A lot of books would pass through her room but not many would stay. ‘If I couldn’t have a view of the sea from the window, then I’d want a quiet garden which perhaps belonged to someone else but they never used it. I would know them but I wouldn’t be involved with them. When I think,’ she said, ‘I see it mainly as autumn or spring. In winter I would hope to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm.’

She was describing the summer house, she realised, or an idealised version of it. She was imagining how she might end her days there. She began to cry. She couldn’t stop. ‘I feel such a fool!’ she said.

Helen Alpert watched her for some moments, a satisfied expression on her sharp features. Then she pushed the box of tissues across her desk.

‘Take as many as you need, Anna,’ she recommended.

The rest of the day Anna was prone to weep suddenly for no reason; on the platform at Clapham Junction, at home in front of the TV news. Exhausted by the effort of it, she went to bed early, and dreamed she could feel a needle penetrating the inside of her gum. It was a sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. She knew that if she thought about the needle, it would go in elsewhere too. Wherever her concentration was, there it would go. She would feel it slipping into her chest, high up; feel it touch the collarbone — not prick, but just touch it — on the way out, just momentarily rest against the bone as it was drawn past. She had no idea why this was being done to her, although she believed it to be her own fault. Saliva filled her mouth as if she could taste the needle — as if the taste of it was a branch or possibility or consequence of the feel of it. That thought made even more saliva come. She woke up to moonlight — tireder than ever and convinced that someone had just spoken — and went down to the kitchen.

‘I’d give anything,’ she told James the cat, ‘for a night of beautiful dreams in which someone really wanted me.’

James, padding disdainfully about around her legs, indicated that he would like to go out. Anna opened the back door and watched him run off towards the orchard with his tail up.

A minute later, for no reason she understood, she slipped into her shoes and followed him. He soon vanished beneath the apple boughs. ‘James?’ She left him there, listening at the small tunnels in the grass, and went to the back fence to gaze across the water meadow.

All evening a benign weather system, stalled over Europe, had been pulling warm air out of Morocco to drape across the southern counties like a shawl: it was a night that smelt faintly of cinnamon, prone to faint mists. The light of half a moon lay across the field like the light in some woodcut — forgotten before Anna was young — in which the shadows of figures fell a little too strongly across the ground. Everything was roughened by that raw moonlight, especially the grass. Anna, who thought she saw a small oblique shadow make its way in quick, low dashes and pounces from thistle to clump of thistle, let herself out of the garden and went down to the river, to which everything stretched away.

The water lay in short serpentine reaches, black and shiny between willow and elder. The soft earth bank, stamped down by generations of ducks, was churned anew each morning by excitable Labrador dogs. Anna stood for what seemed a long time, like someone listening. She took off her shoes, tugged her white nightdress over her head, and, having bundled them together out of sight, waded into the river until she felt it push insistently at her upper thighs. Oh dear, she thought. Who swims alone at night? Dr Alpert would find it interesting; Marnie — who, seven years old, some scraps of sinewy brown nothing in a red swimsuit, had loved to be towed around in the river by her father, coming in late to meals all summer — would judge it irresponsible. Anna took one lurching step back towards the bank, then, changing her mind again, knelt down and launched forward, careful to keep the water out of her mouth. The river accepted her. It was warmer than she expected, the current amiable and slow. Midstream, a faint narrow track reflected the sky; but the shadows were bulky and like objects in themselves. She swam fifty yards slowly; after a further thirty turned on her back; then — arms out, feet together — allowed the stream to take her and float her along, past a line of poplars, between some darkened houses, through the village and out again.

Wyndlesham appeared drenched in starlight but condemned by its own pleasures: litter and dog-droppings, discarded paper tissue, the bleak poached turf of the sports field with its goalposts as luminous as bone, a concrete culvert, a used condom hanging from a branch over the water, long gardens from which Anna heard quiet voices or loud bursts of music. Beyond that used space, out along reaches fringed with reeds and rushes, between long fields sloping shallowly up to woods, it was no longer the river she knew. The current strengthened. The water, its motives discernibly its own, moved darker and heavier between the banks. Anna wasn’t being swept away but she was certainly picking up speed, while the Moroccan air grew warmer still; and the night, clear and white to begin with, tinted itself a sourceless neon pink. Pink then blue, then both, then neither, a colour as faint and sourceless as neon seen a street or two away, as if the fields themselves were gently broadcasting it. Copper poppies nodded and swayed over the water in a warm dry wind. Bit by bit she began to see things. Long shadows from short objects, falling across the landscape like pointing fingers — stones, simple, slate, shattered, still upright, tumbled about at all angles. Then large isolated figures with a look of two dimensions, very still, placed at curiously precise distances from the river bank like some exercise in perspective. Complex in silhouette, uninterpretable except as 17th century illustrations of satyrs, they were men with the rear legs of horses. They had the cocks of horses too. Really, they were quite big. Their heads were turned away in threequarter profile, frozen in stylised attitudes of listening. They meant her no harm: it wasn’t certain they knew she was there. And beyond them so much was going on — bustling city streets, noises like a building site, powerful beams sweeping a horizon which had withdrawn and was withdrawing still, to a considerable distance. That was the place, Anna suspected, where things would change completely and suddenly; if you left the water and walked up there, you might begin to learn things you didn’t want to know. Up above, subtly pulsing stars: a great ragged arc of them pulled and pushed into chaos by the black radio winds Michael Kearney had spoken of so eloquently before he walked into the sea. Michael Kearney, afraid of everything, yet rendered almost like an ordinary person by sex, for a brief time able to have feelings. Past every surface, he had taught her, at every level, things were so wrong and inhuman: get below any surface and instantly you saw how wrong things were for us. ‘Forget all the anthropic crap,’ he used to insist. ‘None of this made itself for us.’ His own advice would frighten him and he would be ready to fuck again. Anna had always felt like the calm one in those situations. ‘I was the least damaged one,’ she told herself now, looking up at the stars and then down at the satyrs in their inexplicable landscape, each one looking out of the corner of its eye at her, a faint sidelong glitter of intelligence, self-awareness, self-regard. She was leaving them behind now. They looked quite small again.

Five minutes later, the night cooled and darkened. The fields were fields again, washed clean of mystery. The river widened and slowed, pooling into the shape of a long glass, a champagne flute perhaps. A fierce steady rushing sound filled the night. Anna pulled herself into the bank and listened: water plunging over the old four-foot broadcrest weir at Brownlow, perhaps a mile outside the village; beyond which the river, bending east to look for a way through the downs to the sea, would lose confidence and, a few miles further on, somewhere above Barcombe Mills, submerge its identity in the Ouse. Part-beached, Anna sat contentedly in the warm shallows, letting the water support her legs so that they bobbed and glimmered out in front of her, just beneath the surface. A small grey moth flickered about. She could smell guelder rose, night-scented stocks from some distant garden; and above that the replete, weighted, yeasty scent of tonne after tonne of water pouring over the weir. I don’t feel in the least tired, she thought. Seeing herself with a sort of loving amusement from the outside, she wondered what she might do next. A minute or two later she was crossing the pool step by difficult step, hugging the upstream side of the weir itself, pummelled and deafened by the roar, struggling to move her legs against the vast, steady sideways pressure of the water. Halfway over, something made her stop. She dipped one hand into the shining flow across the crest — it was like pushing at the shoulder of some big, steady animal and feeling it push back. What else was there to do? she would ask herself later. Once you saw a thing could be done, what else could you do but try to do it? Shiver with excitement, laugh aloud as the water shoved your hand about, stumble out on the other side and walk the mile home along the river bank in your sodden knickers. She had a powerful urge to pee. It was dark, and who, after all, would see? She felt very calm and satisfied, even when, trudging back across the pasture with her wet shoes in her hand, she saw that her summerhouse was on fire again. Great silent orange and yellow flames went up from the roof at the same odd angle as before. There was no smoke. There was no smell of smoke. The summer-house seemed taller, and as if it was leaning away from her. Heat shimmer gave it a squat conical shape like a windmill. Glorious showers of sparks, blown in a strong wind despite the dead calm below, lit up the crowns of the orchard trees beneath. Beneath the sound of the flames, she thought she heard a voice calling her.

‘Michael?’ she whispered. ‘Is this you? Are you here?’

There was no answer, but Anna smiled as if there had been. She dropped her shoes and opened her arms.

‘Michael,’ she begged him, ‘it’s safe to come back.’

But if it was him, he was as afraid as ever, and as Anna let herself in through the gate, her face turned up and tightening in the heat, the fire went out. She stood there in the dark, caught between one movement and the next, between one feeling and the next — until, just before dawn, she heard the birds waking up and let herself back into the house.