Spring Tide

¹³ Roundabout

Two faces look out from a windscreen: Ralph’s on the passenger side, Eve’s above the wheel. They’re not speaking to each other. In fact they haven’t really spoken for this entire holiday. They’ve exchanged practical information when required, agreed on outings, sorted out meals, but there’s been no communication between them about themselves.

There’s a reason for this, which Ralph knows and Eve doesn’t. All she knows is that Ralph is absent – not unpleasant, not unhelpful, but simply absent – and that this absence is of a new quality. Something or someone beyond her field of view, some powerful gravitational force, is tugging his attention constantly away from her. When she asks Ralph a question and he answers, it’s as if a receptionist has been left in charge of his voice, quite polite most of the time and sometimes positively solicitous – as receptionists can be, when they sense that a caller is becoming annoyed – but never authentically Ralph.

‘There’s something on your mind,’ she says now. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’

He laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s been deliberately chosen from a range of options, as if from a set of dials or sliders: Volume 3, Warmth 1, Nonchalance 10. ‘As I keep saying, it’s just the usual stuff. Work worries. What’s going to be waiting for me when I go back on Monday. All of that.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘I need a weewee,’ says Lily’s voice from the back.

In the parked car, Ralph takes out his phone.

‘Ianthe, it’s me! I had to call. How are you?’ Even the simple word you is magical when he says it to her. ‘It seems so long. So long since I saw you last, so long before I see you again. Two whole days! I’m counting off the hours.’

As he listens to Ianthe’s reply, he peers out through the windscreen at the main entrance of a motorway service station.

‘Yes, I know,’ he says, his face a little crestfallen. ‘I know I must. But I really can’t do it now. Lily’s with us all the time. I’ll talk to Eve when we’re back home. Listen, I’d better go. We only stopped so Eve could take Lily in for a pee. They’ll be out in a minute. I can’t wait to be with you, Ianthe. I… Oh, here they are now. Sorry, my dearest, but I’ve got to go.’

Ralph’s face is impassive as he stares out at the road again, this time from the driver’s seat. Calamity lies ahead, he knows, but he’s oddly unmoved by it. All his usual loyalties are in abeyance, even his loyalty to his own future self. All his usual feelings are distant and muffled, as if behind soundproof padding. And if they do break through at all, he has simply to turn his mind to Ianthe – her smile when she sees him, the way she can’t help herself from touching him, the words she says, her throaty laugh – and everything else is subsumed at once into a surge of sublime longing. You, he thinks, you, and the hills beside the motorway seem to smoulder in her golden glow. Ianthe, he thinks, Ianthe, and even this banal river of cars seems suffused with meaning.

He glances in his mirror, flips the indicator downwards, pulls out past a cargo of shipping containers.

But I need to decide what to do, he tells himself, as he presses down the accelerator.

He knows there’s no way forward that doesn’t involve pain. He understands that once he’s told Eve what’s been going on, the golden trance will end. Eve and Lily are remote from him now, far away behind that soundproof padding, but once they know the truth, they’ll smash their way through, their own emotions far too powerful to be kept at bay. And even Ianthe will make new demands on him.

That’s already starting to happen, actually. Up to now, his desires and Ianthe’s have been so perfectly aligned, that to submit to hers has been to indulge his own. It’s been possible to be magnificently generous and greedily selfish both at the same time, to receive boundless gratitude for gratifying himself. But now, as he replays that snatched phone conversation in his mind, he can’t avoid the impatient edge in Ianthe’s voice. He called her for a heroin-like shot of numbing love, but she reproached him for keeping her waiting. And the reproach still stings, even though it’s him she says she longs for.

But her circumstances are not identical to his. She’s had to think of him going to sleep beside Eve and waking up beside Eve in the morning, while Ralph’s not had to imagine her with anyone but friends and workmates (though actually he envies even them). And there’s no calamity ahead for Ianthe either, no one whose life she must devastate in order to be with him. So Ralph has always had more of an interest than her in prolonging this golden limbo, this little eddy swirling round and round at the margins of the stream of time. He has never experienced such intensity before in this life, and he knows he may never experience it again. There have even been moments when he wondered whether this thing itself is what he most craves, not Ianthe, but this incredible intensity, this centrifuge of love. Of course, he’s always rejected this thought as soon it came to him. And, in any case, Ianthe is growing impatient. Whether he likes it or not, the golden limbo is coming to an end.

So there will be ugly practicalities now, money to be divided up, contact with Lily to be negotiated. He will have to deal with competing claims on his time and his loyalty, and face friends and relatives with the news of his callousness and duplicity. And then there will be this little family for him to grieve over, when he can no longer kiss his daughter goodnight every evening, or hear her cheerful voice calling out in the morning to announce the good news of her awakening.

Ralph can even see that, in this new world, his feelings about Ianthe herself will change, and hers about him. The two of them may be golden now in each other’s eyes, but gold derives its value from scarcity, and their seemingly identical desires up to now have been the product of the tiny and simplified universe, that little glowing nest outside of time, in which they have conducted their secret relationship. That is the centrifuge, after all, that’s how it works, whirling round and round to separate out pure golden desire from everyday ordinariness. He and Ianthe have both spoken of how they long to spend more time together, meet each other’s friends, walk hand in hand in the streets without fear of being seen, but the truth is that everything will be different when the two of them emerge into the world under the sky. Her only just barely noticeable sharpness on the phone was a harbinger, the tip of a chisel that will prise apart two halves of a golden globe of mutual longing and turn them back into separate human beings, with their own histories, priorities, foibles. It’s quite likely, Ralph thinks bleakly, that in the long run they will come to something not so different from the way things are with Eve.

It’s not the first time he’s thought this. Right from the beginning of his affair with Ianthe, there’s been a calm observer inside him, watching, noticing the dynamics, wondering at the melodrama of it all. The Czar dreams of new and golden lands. The peasant, to whom the fighting will actually fall, wonders what benefits, if any, will really flow from all that spilt blood and spent treasure. But the peasant has no influence in the polity of Ralph’s mind, for he and Ianthe in their golden nest have told each other that they can be Czar and Czarina forever, and, as is often the case with Czars and Czarinas, no one has had the the power to contradict them.

But never mind all that, Ralph instructs himself. And, as he pulls out round another lorry, he pushes practicalities aside and begins to calculate once more the precise number of hours it will be before he is able to see her again, touch her skin, hear her voice, bask in the words she says to him: ‘You’re the love of my life, Ralph. You’re all I think about. You’re—’

‘Lily’s asleep,’ says Eve, glancing back at their daughter in her car seat.

‘That’s good.’

‘So you can answer my question, Ralph. What is it that you’re not telling me?’

Again he laughs. Warmth 0, this time round, Nonchalance 12, and, for good measure, he nudges the slider for anger up to 3. It’s a defensive anger in reality, the anger of a creature that’s been spotted in its hiding place and is under threat, but Ralph so fervently needs it to be heard as the righteous anger of a falsely accused innocent, that he actually does feel righteously angry. Preposterous as the peasant knows this to be, the Czar really does feel that Eve is making unreasonable demands on him.

‘Don’t let’s go over this now, Eve. It’s not the moment. I’m tired and I’m driving at seventy mph on a motorway in heavy traffic. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing.’

He glances in her direction for half a second, sees her narrowed eyes watching him, and flinches. Is this going to be his future when he emerges back out under the sky? Eve, Ianthe, Lily: all three of them disappointed in him, all three of them asking him to deliver something he doesn’t know how to give?

‘We can talk when we get home,’ he mutters. ‘I promise. Is that alright? Will that do?’

‘Now’s not the time for what, that’s what I want to know? What exactly is this thing that we’re going to talk about then but can’t talk about now? Why can’t you at least tell me what it is?’

‘I’ve got a lot of worries at work. You know that.’

He feels Eve’s gaze searching his face, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the layers of armour plate.

‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘I don’t know what’s been happening at your work because you never tell me anything any more, but you’ve certainly been working late a great deal.’

‘Exactly!’ Ralph shouts, just barely managing to stretch his rage out far enough to cover up his panic. For Eve is almost there. She’s a single step away from naming what’s going on. She only has to ask one more question, and the calamity will have begun. ‘Exactly!’

The truth is though, that Eve, too, is afraid of that next question. She too hesitates to rupture the thin membrane that still maintains the outward appearance of normality, and plunge the three of them into new and terrifying territory. So she asks a less specific question instead.

‘Why are you so angry with me, Ralph?’

‘For going on and on! When I’ve already said I need to concentrate on driving! Our daughter’s in the back, in case you’d forgotten. Our precious daughter.’

This is a new low. He hears himself, appalled. Yet, bizarrely, he really does feel indignation, even though he knows it’s entirely spurious.

‘You’ve had every evening to talk to me the whole of this last week, after Lily went to bed,’ Eve points out. ‘But you just watched TV every night, and waited until I’d gone to sleep before you came to bed.’

‘I just want to concentrate on driving till we get home,’ he stubbornly repeats.

‘I wonder what you’d do,’ Eve says, ‘if you knew I was holding something back from you, and I refused to say what it was? Would you be content just to let me drive? I don’t think you would, you know. It seems to me that—’

‘I feel sick,’ whines Lily from the back.

‘Poor darling,’ says Eve, twisting round in her seat. ‘I thought you were asleep!’

‘She was,’ says Ralph, in the aggrieved tone of one whose sensible warnings have all been ignored, ‘but now you’ve woken her.’

‘We’re going to stop soon, sweetheart,’ Eve tells their daughter.

‘Remember we said we’d stop at the seaside for a bit, darling?’ Ralph joins in, in a voice that strives to be even kinder and more solicitous than Eve’s. ‘It’s not long now. It’s not long now at all.’

The rusty skeleton of a seaside pier is cut off behind a razor wire fence. The beach consists of grey mud. Most of the buildings along the front are empty and boarded up, blank sheets of metal or plywood bolted on over the windows of what were once guesthouses and amusement arcades. They look like blinded eyes.

‘This was a mistake,’ says Ralph.

Neither he nor Eve know this part of the country, and they chose this particular seaside town simply because it was at about the right point to break their journey.

‘Well we promised Lily, so we’ll have to do our best to make it fun.’

‘Of course.’

As he pulls up the car on the seafront, Ralph’s now constantly simmering anger is roused once again by Eve’s implication that he might in some way be less attuned to his daughter’s needs than she is.

‘Here we are, Lily my lovely girl!’ he calls out. ‘Here we are at the seaside!’

One good thing about the unattractiveness of this dismal town: there are plenty of parking spaces.

They emerge from the car. They look around. It struggles on, this dying place, like some maimed animal run over by a truck, but still trying to drag itself to safety. In between those blank squares of metal and plywood there is still a chip shop of sorts, a Pound Shop, a place selling plastic buckets and seaside rock, and a single small amusement arcade. The arcade is called Yogi’s Cave and it has a life-sized bear outside it, moulded in fibreglass. ‘Welcome, folks!’ says the bear, its smile fixed, the arcade machines bleeping and gurgling behind it. ‘Come and play in my cave! It’s bear-i-fic!’ For the rest of their time here, its mechanical voice will be there in the distance, coming in every couple of minutes with one of three standard phrases.

‘I guess no one needs seaside towns any more in the north,’ says Ralph, ‘now there are cheap flights to Ibiza and Corfu.’

Eve ignores this completely. If he’s going to refuse to tell her what’s on his mind, she isn’t going to offer him the comfort of ordinary conversation.

‘There’s a roundabout over there,’ she says shortly. ‘Lily will like that.’

‘Come on in, people, come on in!’ calls out the bear behind them. ‘Let’s all have some fun!’

Assisted from the car by her mother, four-year-old Lily climbs down onto the promenade and assays the attractions of this new place with her sharp grey eyes. The markers of poverty and decay mean nothing to her, and, unlike her parents, she has no sense of having strayed into the territory of an aggrieved and hostile tribe. Her mental template of a seaside town is more circumscribed than theirs, and requires only a short list of specific facilities, all of which seem to her to be satisfactorily present. The drifts of litter don’t trouble her, nor does the coiled dog turd over there by the metal balustrade. They don’t please her, of course, but they have no wider significance. She simply looks away from them, and gives her attention instead to the fibreglass bear that talks, the cartoonish tinkling and bleeping from the little amusement arcade, and the roundabout which her mother has already pointed out as a destination. Her parents might look at all this and see a dying thing, a mockery, a cruel parody of fun, but Lily takes it all at face value. Her mother and father are here after all, and she trusts them to keep her safe.

‘He-e-ey kids! Yogi here! Check out all the games in my cave!’

‘Hello, silly bear!’ shouts Lily, and laughs.

The roundabout is one of those miniature ones for small children, the kind with one tractor, one car, one double-decker bus, each with its own little steering wheel so the children can pretend they’re driving. All the vehicles have friendly faces. There is a cheeky space rocket, for instance, and a brave fire engine with a determined frown. There are also a few animals among them: a big chicken, a pale blue elephant, a pretty pink horse with a golden harness and big blue long-lashed eyes.

‘I want to go on the horse,’ Lily says.

Ralph goes to pay the man in charge, who has black greasy hair and a thin pockmarked face, and is wearing one of those dark camouflage jackets you see on men who like to fantasise about war. He takes Ralph’s money without a flicker of acknowledgement. Not that Lily cares. With Eve’s help, she’s already climbing up onto the horse. ‘It’s bear-i-fic!’ says the fibreglass bear in the distance. A cold wind blows diesel fumes towards them from the roundabout’s generator

‘Hold on tight, darling!’ Eve calls out to her. ‘Take care!’

There are no other riders, no other children anywhere near, as the roundabout begins to turn, its lights rippling and its speakers tooting out a Mary Poppins medley. ‘Spoonful of Sugar’ segues into ‘Chim-Chim Cher-ee’ as Ralph and Eve stand in the drizzle on opposite sides of the ride, watching their daughter going round and round. They never even glance at one another.

Lily waves proudly to her mum and dad. She bounces up and down. She cranes round to look at the riderless animals and empty vehicles, all circling round for no one’s benefit but hers. Then she throws back her head and laughs.

Lily’s laughter on that little horse, her peals of happy laughter: ten, twenty, thirty years later, they will still echo in Ralph’s mind when he lies awake at night. He knows this already, even now, when the original laughter is still there in front of him and the roundabout is still turning to the merry tune of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’. Numb as he is, cut off as he is from his own feelings about everything except the golden dream of Ianthe, he knows that when the dream has passed, and the Czar has been toppled from his throne, that laugh will haunt him all his life.

When the roundabout stops, Ralph goes back to the man in the military jacket.

‘Another go, please, mate. In fact can you make it a double turn this time?’

He glances briefly at Eve, but her attention is fixed firmly and entirely on Lily, who has decided to transfer to the little car for her next ride. Lily beams at her father as she settles into the car and waits for it to move. It’s true that something in his face makes her smile falter for a moment – something that was still lingering there as he turned to her from her mother – but when the roundabout starts up again, she forgets all that and gives her full attention to the car. And soon she’s laughing again, her small hands busily turning the steering wheel this way and that, though it’s connected to nothing at all.