Some sparks flew from the fire and she swept them up and moved away from the hearth. Her knees cracked as they were flexed.
‘I think about swimming but I don’t swim,’ she said. ‘I imagine what it would be like to be in the water, especially the sea. I imagine what it would be like to dip my body into the freezing salt water and how it would feel to be fully submerged and then come up for air but I never do it. I don’t go to the beach and I don’t get into the water. Sometimes I think I could have been an actor. It’s the one profession I’ve never tried. In one way or another, I have spent my whole life impersonating other people. Acting out fantasies with personalities that I’ve made up in my head. Brave people that go about the world and do things. But it’s not like it’s the achievements that matter to me, it’s the interest. The interest the people I play take in the world around them. I suppose they love it in a way that I don’t. They’re fanatics.’
She sat down on the sofa but remained erect rather than sinking back into its curves. ‘What are you, Daniel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What are your father and sister?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well if you don’t, then how can I? But I do know they’re fanatics. When they care about something, whatever it is, they care about it to the full. They care about it as much as anyone can. They don’t pretend, like an actor would. They’re not concerned with being seen to be doing something. They just do it.’
‘Daddy likes to fight,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Vivien. ‘I know all about that.’ She looked as if she did. She looked as if she knew more than I did. I wondered again how she and Daddy knew each other. Daddy the brute and this well-dressed, mild-mannered lady who liked to sit inside her stylish house with her stylish possessions.
‘It’s his job,’ I said. ‘He says it’s just something he does to get paid.’
‘Do you believe it’s just a job?’
I looked up at Vivien for a moment. Then into the fire.
‘A lot of men feel like they should be violent,’ said Vivien. ‘They grow up seeing a violent life as something to aspire to. They don’t have any real sense of what it means and they hate every minute of it. Your father is not like that. There is a tension about him when he approaches a violent act and a calm about him when it is finished. The times at which he is on edge are those just before he strikes. He is most frustrated when a fight is a couple of months behind him and a couple of months ahead of him. That’s when you’ll see him shake. Your Daddy needs it. The violence. I wouldn’t say he enjoys it, even, but he needs it. It quenches him.’ She sat and looked at me. Minutes passed, possibly, but I did not respond and she did not speak again until she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a whale, Daniel?’
I told her that I had not in real life, only on the television.
‘On the television have you seen a whale breach?’ she asked. ‘That’s when it jumps clean out of the water only to smack down onto the surface of the sea. Have you seen that? The almighty splash it makes?’
I told her that I had.
‘We don’t fully understand why whales do that but there have been many suggestions. Some people say that it’s to see the world and especially the sea from a different perspective, to catch a glimpse of what it is they spend their lives swimming around in. It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth. The whales want an experience like that. A different view. Some people have suggested that it’s not a visual experience they’re after but a sensual one. When they breach the water they feel the full size and heaviness of their own bodies in the air. They feel gravity and dry cold and when they smack the hard brine with their full airborne weight they quake to their blubber. People say that they’re trying to brush off dead skin, barnacles, lichen, and that breaching is like a horse scratching its rump against rough tree bark. But it meets at the same point, doesn’t it? The need for a physical sensation that they can’t get any other way. That sensation becomes a fixation and each time after they feel it the pressure slowly builds until they can feel it again. I think it’s something like that for the whales. They swim around for days, weeks even, feeding and sleeping and breathing and they start to think about that last time they jumped clean out of the water and how it felt when their head, then their body and fins, and then their tail, all emerged from the sea, and how it felt to momentarily hover in a substance that fills their lungs but dries their eyes, and then they remember especially about how it felt to return to the water after their moment in the air. That thump. That splash. The whale continues to think about the breach, more and more, until the urge to repeat becomes irresistible and it erupts out of the ocean only to fall again into it. And so it’s sated for a while. Your Daddy’s like that, I think. Like one of the great whales. And when he fights it’s like one of their breaches. But bloodier, much bloodier. And it isn’t a lone act. It’s not just an animal and the elements. There’s another animal too. Another human. But it’s the same. It quenches him.’
Vivien and I spent the rest of the morning speaking of softer subjects and baking cakes iced with buttercream. She kept horses in the large field behind her house and there were always chores to interrupt our routine. We paused from our work to go out and feed them and to muck out the stable.
My sister returned from her rovings before noon. Her mood was sweeter than usual. She smiled broadly as she knocked the dirt off her boots and left them on the slate by the back door. Her face was hot red from the cold and dry from the chill of the wind. Her eyes were alert.
Vivien watched Cathy come in then returned to her task. She did not ask the girl where she had been or why. We were setting the table for lunch and Vivien handed Cathy the bone-handled cutlery to lay around the place-mats as if she had just come down from an upstairs bedroom. Cathy put the items in parallel sets and Vivien went to the cabinet to pull out the plates and napkins. I busied myself at the sink. I washed and dried the tall glasses that had been in the basin since the night before and placed them on the table next to a full jug of water.
‘Your father said he was going to bring us lamb chops from the butcher.’
‘From butcher called Andrew Ramsey?’ asked Cathy.
‘That’s him.’
‘Andrew Ramsey sometimes gives us cuts of meat for no money. They’re friends, him and Daddy.’
‘They must be.’
‘Daddy goes down to village to drink with Andrew Ramsey. He’s one of the only men Daddy will drink with.’
‘He must trust him.’
‘Daddy helped him with some business a while back. Andrew Ramsey had some trouble with a supplier and Daddy sorted it.’