Consequences by Penelope Lively
“Hi, there!” says Al. “How was your day?”
“Fine.” This is an automatic response, and an inaccurate one, but she does not propose to go any further.
“Good. Me too. I got some good pictures. Listen—I’m tired of this dump. How about going some place else for a meal? I have this hire car. We could go along the coast.”
Ruth dithers. No, she thinks. Then—why sit here?
“Ruth?” says Al.
“Yes. Yes…I…Well—Okay, then.”
“Half an hour,” says Al. “Meet you at the entrance.”
They drive into Rethymnon. There are restaurants on the waterfront. “Great!” says Al. “Seafood. I could use a lobster. Shall we try this one?”
Al orders lobsters and white wine. They share a platter of calamari. He is relaxed, talkative, neutral. He is not making a pass, Ruth decides. Which is just as well because—well, because she does not quite know what she would do if he were.
Al talks about Phaistos. “Amazing place. Not that I could make much sense of it, but the shoot’ll come out just as good.” He laughs.
“You should have had Manolo with you.”
“He’s a great guy, our professor, but tell the truth I cover more ground on my own.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“Berlin. A shoot for a German magazine. Then it’s New York.”
“I couldn’t live like that,” says Ruth.
“Not many could.” He grins. “And I can’t stay put for long. So…have you got your piece all sewn up?”
“Plenty of notes. It’s just a question of writing it when I get back.”
“And what’s next for you?”
Jess’s dentist appointment, she thinks. Tom needs new shoes. Fix for the boiler engineer to come. “Oh—routine sort of things. An article about the Child Support Agency.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“You really don’t want to know,” says Ruth. “It pursues deficient fathers.”
“Not guilty, I’m glad to say. I’ve never fathered anyone, far as I’m aware.”
The lobsters have arrived. Dismemberment is both messy and convivial. “Here,” says Al. “You’re making a real hash of those claws. Let me…”
It is dark now. The restaurant overlooks the harbor, its light flooding onto the water, where shoals of small fish flit to and fro. Ruth discovers that if you throw down pieces of bread a football scrum ensues, a silver melee of darting fish.
She says, “Tom would love that. My son. He’s six. And Jess is eight.”
“I guessed you had kids.”
“Oh. What’s such a giveaway?”
“You looked at kids a lot when we were in those villages. A sort of professional look.”
Ruth laughs. Then she adds, “Their father’s not with us. We’re separated.” She always prefers to get this out into the open; no good reason to make an exception now.
“Ah. Too bad.”
The lobsters have been demolished. “Pretty good,” says Al. “Ever eaten crocodile?”
“I have not.”
“Don’t bother. I met that once in India. Curried. You do global food, in this job—take what’s on offer. Sometimes I’d kill for a Big Mac.”
“Are you sure it was crocodile? I’ve simply never heard of them being eaten.”
“Are you questioning my integrity, ma’am?”
“Handbags, yes. And shoes. But eaten?”
“Well, that was what we understood, from the gestures. Something long, with teeth. Mind, China’s the worst. There it’s dog. And owls. And fried cat.”
“I’ve always thought oysters were going too far,” says Ruth. “Let alone snails. I’m conservative, gastronomically.”
“But you’ll allow a lobster?”
“That’s where I go a bit radical. They’re so delicious.” Ruth smiles wryly.
“In fact,” says Al, “I can’t get up a big interest in food. Gourmet stuff, I mean. Basically, it’s just essential fuel, isn’t it? Cookery shoots I will not do. Food and fashion—no thanks.” He eyes her. “Hope I’m not treading on toes. You’re not in that line, are you?”
“No,” says Ruth “I’ve got out into…issues. The deficient fathers, and suchlike.”
“And this sort of thing?” Al waves vaguely at the light-strewn harbor, the gleaming water.
“This was a one-off, really. I don’t do travel.”
“Very wise.” Al describes various occupational disasters: a hurricane in Cuba, a dodgy aircraft in Mozambique. She looks at him across the table—the long rangy body, the maleness of him. She is disturbed once more. Damn, she thinks. Shit. She focuses deliberately on the backdrop: the floodlit Venetian ramparts, a line of bobbing fishing boats—and now the afternoon comes back, the geometric patterns of the white headstones, the cavalcade of names. And I’m sitting here, she thinks, drinking wine and talking, as though all that never happened, sixty years ago, as though I didn’t know what I now know about it. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s what people do—move on. That’s all that can be done. What must be done.
“Hey!” says Al. “I’ve lost you. Where’ve you gone?”
“Sorry. I’m a bit distracted. By where I’ve been today.”
“More of Manolo’s ruins?”
“No, no.” And, without having intended to, she is telling him. About Matt. About all of it.
He listens carefully. He asks the occasional question. What’s a wood engraving? How old did you say he was? What happened to his wife?
Eventually he says, “Now I understand why you seemed to know so much about world war two. It was personal.”
“Sort of. Though how can it be, when I never knew him?”
“That’s not the point. It’s that he’s—well, all those other guys who died are anonymous, as it were. He’s real.”
“Yes,” says Ruth. “That’s what it is, I suppose. It takes on a different dimension. And you start to feel—guilty, in some awful way.”
“About being here, like this?”
She nods.
“Ruth,” says Al, “you have to ditch that, right? Okay—I understand the sentiment, but it doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Least of all your grandfather. If he’s looking down from up there he’ll be saying—go for it, girl. Live.”
Ruth smiles wryly.
“So think positive, okay? This is now. Then was then—all we can do is respect it, and you’ve been doing that, today.” And he pats her arm—a warm, friendly pat from a large sunburned hand. It seems to seer Ruth’s skin.
Oh no, she thinks, you had better not do that. Kindly do not do that.
“So what I’m thinking,” says Al, “Is that we should have some more wine, and perhaps a dessert, and when we’re done here what about a stroll through the town?”
And so it goes—more food and drink, and then the lit-up populous narrow streets where shops apparently never close, and the beautiful youth of Rethymnon parade, eyeing up the competition. Al shepherds Ruth through the crowds, she buys T-shirts for the children. They stop off for a coffee at a pavement bar.
Ruth observes to Al that there is more left of this town than she would have expected, given the pounding it took in 1941. There are ancient houses, Venetian doors and windows, stone fountains.
“Of course,” says Al. “Nothing gets wiped in this place—friend Manolo’s history lesson. Nothing ever gets wiped—period.”
“People wipe things. In their heads, I mean.”
“That’s shrink stuff. I don’t go near those guys.”
“Nor me,” says Ruth. “I mean all the times that just vanish. Who remembers being four, or six, or even sixteen?”
“Sixteen is easy. First time with a girl. No one forgets that.”
“Well, yes. Dramatic survivals—equivalent of the Venetian doorway. But what about everything that goes down the plug?”
“Ruth, this is getting heavy. I thought I’d got you off this stuff?
Relax.”
&nbs
“Nor me,” says Al. “But you never do know what will turn up in the course of work.” And he gives her that large, quizzical, assessing grin.
They walk slowly back to the car. They pause to watch the long ribbons of light on the water of the harbor; they discuss whether that black ripple could possibly be a dolphin. “Probably not,” says Al. “They’re all but done for, the fishermen net them.”
“I insist that it is,” says Ruth—“another survival.”
“Then specially for you, ma’am,” says Al. “That is a dolphin. Something to tell your kids—they’ll want to know about this trip.”
“Some of it,” says Ruth.
“They miss you?”
“Hard to tell,” says Ruth. “They have their own agenda. And three days isn’t long.”
Except that it is, she thinks. These three days have had their own dimension—time out, time suspended, time confused.
They reach the car, get in. The coast road, once more. Not much is said. Al is humming the Greek song that had been played in the restaurant. Ruth glances sideways at him. This is a man who cruises through life with his hands in his pockets. How do you get like that?
Back at the hotel, he parks the car in the forecourt and they walk past the main building to the hinterland of bungalows. They are going to arrive first at Al’s, Ruth realizes. I knew this would happen, she thinks. I knew it.
He stops, and stands looking at her. “Well,” he says. “I guess we’re home.” And then he lays the back of his hand against her cheek for a moment. “So…How about it, Ruth?”
She cannot move. Or speak.
He takes her arm, guides her gently to the door, and then inside. He switches lights on, pulls down the blinds, and then, somehow, they are in the bedroom.
He sets about undressing her—kindly, efficiently, unzipping her skirt so that it slides down her legs, lifting her T-shirt (and she raises her arms obediently, like a child), undoing her bra.
“That’s the girl,” he says. Then he draws back for a moment, frowning. “So long as you’re sure you want this?”
She stands there, in her pants—helpless, hopeless. “I’m afraid I do,” she says.
“Who’s to be afraid? This’ll be good.”
And it is. She is astonished. She has never before had sex with a man she knows she will not see again. She is amazed at how easy it is, in the event, how—well, how unembarrassing, how inevitable. The process is familiar—oh dear me, yes—but is also radically different. His stranger’s body; her own unanticipated responses. At one point, she thinks fleetingly of Peter; it is like remembering some old home when you are in foreign territory. Al’s love-making is in tune with the rest of him—companionable, frank, purposeful. The idea is satisfaction all round, and that is achieved. But afterwards, lying there beside him, Ruth thinks: what’s missing? Something crucial, but it doesn’t have a name. Not love—that would be too obvious.
It is past one when she makes her way back to her own bungalow. “Stay,” Al had said, but she declined. She must leave for the airport at eight. “Okay—makes sense,” he says. At the door, he gives her a hug. “You’re a great girl, Ruth. Keep in touch. Take care.”
She opens her door, and sees at once the red light flashing on the phone. She picks it up. Please come to the hotel reception—there is an urgent fax for her.
She runs, her heart thumping. Something has happened. Something has happened to one of the children.
And, indeed, something has happened. But not to the children. It is Molly.
Part 8
JESS HAS HAD HER EARS PIERCED. Without permission. She has taken herself off to Oxford Street, with her savings and two friends, and there the three of them have done the deed. She stands now in front of Ruth with pink ears, little gold studs, and an expression of distressed defiance: “You said I could when I’m fourteen. So what’s the difference?”
“Ten months’ difference,” says Ruth. “And you should have asked.”
Tom is looking at the ears with interest. “They’re all puffed up. Can I see the holes?”
Jess bursts into tears.
Ten minutes later, emotional order has been restored. Jess is texting an outer circle of friends to report on her rite of passage; Tom, bored with the fuss, has withdrawn to engage with his Game Boy; Ruth has conceded tacitly that there is not much point in trying to counter the tide of peer pressure. She reminds Jess that they have company for supper, shortly. Sam is in town for some poetic commitment, and she has invited Simon and Tim to join them.
“Be thankful it wasn’t her belly button,” says Simon. The children have gone to watch television; the four adults sit around Ruth’s kitchen table. Throughout the evening, as always now, there has been a void in their midst, that keen abiding absence; they are broken-backed, but carry on. This, now, is the family.
“Or a tattoo,” suggests Tim.
Ruth sighs, then laughs. “To think this is just the start of adolescence. Was I like that?”
“Of course,” Simon tells her. “I recall door slamming and funereal silences.”
Ruth looks at Sam.
“By the time I came along you were a mellow seventeen. Entirely reasonable. Or nearly so.”
Sam today, in this new age, is himself, yet at the same time he is someone different, as though loss had stripped him of some aspect of personality. He is more silent, more withdrawn; he is thinner, he has honed an interest in bird-watching, and goes on long solitary forays to uncomfortable places.
“The thing now,” says Simon, “is that teenage is a status. It’s a social category, and they are well aware of that. In my day—or Tim’s—it was seen as an apprenticeship. We knew our place.”
Tim recalls that his parents imposed an eight o’clock curfew, which rose to ten when you were eighteen.
“Interesting idea,” says Ruth. “I can’t see it catching on these days. Oh well—the next few years are going to be challenging, that’s clear.” She turns to Sam. “That envelope you forwarded…”
“Ah,” says Sam. “‘For Molly Faraday or other connection of artist Matt Faraday.’ I hoped it wasn’t some belated creditor.”
“No way.” Ruth gets up and goes to the dresser. “Look.” She lays on the table some photographs and a letter.
Sam inspects the photographs. “It’s…they’re wood blocks, aren’t they? For engraving?”
“Right.”
Simon is reading the letter. “This chap thinks they are Matt’s. And he lives in that cottage.”
“He does and they are,” says Ruth. “I asked Max and he said definitely. But I knew anyway. This Brian Clyde found them in a box in a shed. And there’s some sort of maquette, apparently.”
“However did he trace you? Or Moll, rather.” asks Simon.
“He sent the photos to the Society of Wood Engravers, and they got someone to identify them. And then he seems to have done some clever detective work. He’s suggesting I visit, so he can hand over the blocks and the other thing.”
“You must.”
“Oh, I shall. Though goodness knows when I’ll fit it in.”
“Business brisk in retail art?”
“Business is never brisk in a gallery. We’re more genteel than that. One transaction a day is thought quite good going. I have suggested a summer sale, but Max considers this vulgar.”
“Quite right too,” says Simon. “Someone has to maintain standards. We independent bookshops try to do our bit. No three for twos, no promotions, and no doubt we shall all go to the wall in due course. You should have diversified into merchant banking, Ruth, or share trading—whatever it’s called. Not some fossilized area of commerce.”
“I doubt if that was ever an option, given my credentials.”
“We must rest our hopes in Jess and Tom. Mind you keep them well away from any sort of creative activity.”
Sam grins. “Make sure they learn a trade. Plumbing’s the thing, I’d say.”
“Tom might do well there. He’s been digging up what passes for our garden to make a fish pond. With fountain. Anyone like more coffee?”
Simon and Tim leave. Sam, who is staying the night, helps Ruth to clear up. The children have gone to bed.
“I’ve forgotten why you’re here,” says Ruth. “Apart from to see us.”
“A reading on the South Bank.” Sam pulls a face. “Time I hung up my clogs, where that sort of thing is concerned.”
“Nonsense. You’d fester. Nothing but cars and birds.”
“Festering has its appeal.”
“Mum would say…” Ruth begins.
“Oh, I know what she would say. She says it frequently. And I say—I hear you, my love. And sometimes I obey and sometimes I don’t.”
Ruth smiles and nods. “Me too.” And they both listen to her voice, see her face, as they stand there in Ruth’s kitchen amid the debris of the meal.
Sam shakes his head, and picks up the butter. “This go in the fridge?”
The present flat was somewhat larger than the old one, and had this garden of brickbats and cat shit on which Tom had designs. Peter, his wife, Marta, and their two-year-old daughter had moved to a house in a neighboring postcode, which involved some shunting to and fro, though the children now spent rather less time with their father.
Ruth also made postcode transits, but hers had a wider significance, when she moved twice a week from the upland suburbia of north London to the city thicket of South Kensington. It always seemed to her that she moved not only through space but through time, as she left Edwardian brick and arrived amid Georgian stucco with its sparkling white terraces and squares, while the traffic and the glossy shops reminded you that a city mutates, puts on new clothes, changes shape, adapts—year by year, decade by decade.
The gallery was in a street of boutiques and restaurants. Ruth had come upon it after a visit to a friend in the big hospital nearby. Feeling in need of a coffee, she wandered along the street, in search of a likely place, and stopped for a moment to look into an art shop, spotting from the door a wall of what seemed to be wood engravings. She went in, glanced around—lithographs, watercolors, assemblies of prints, and this display on one wall at which she looked more closely, and there, dead center, was one of Matt’s.