‘I feel terrible about that now,’ Rollo says, ‘that I didn’t take it more seriously, but it wasn’t that out-of-character, not for Edith. I mean, she’s prone to this sort of thing. She’s a serious person, y’know? Gets fed up with me, says I’m glib about everything. When we travelled around Italy together interrailing, she was always wanting to talk about E. M. Forster and personal freedom versus duty. She likes to … intellectualise things.’
‘So she would text you existential questions like this, without preamble?’
‘Well, OK, this was slightly out of the blue. I mean, it came from nowhere, but it wasn’t enough to make me think … It didn’t make me worry, is what I’m saying. And maybe it should’ve done, with hindsight. She’s a student at Cambridge – they’re all at it, sitting around till 2 a.m. pondering Kierkegaard and the essence of being. I thought it was just part of that.’
‘And now?’
He shrugs. ‘After what Mum and Dad told me, about Helena and all that, I wonder if she’s talking about being unfaithful – about goodness in terms of what she was doing to Will. She would’ve felt really guilty about that.’
Manon
She’s laced them too tight, the boots. The strings dig into her ankles and the cold rises up off the ice, radiating towards her face. Her fingers are cold. Her cheeks are cold. Why have we come inside to get cold? Her shins are painful with the tensing of her muscles. She inches forward, one foot then the other, gripping hard on to the handrail.
‘Really fucking hate skating,’ she mutters, shuffling forward towards the poet, who is ahead of her.
He smiles. He has a meek face under a head of curls, but while her own emanate from her head at wild angles, his hang limp and wet-looking. She nods back at him, her body bent forward from the waist, her legs like scissoring crutches.
He doubles back to her, fast on his skates, and stops with a spray of ice dust, his skates a balletic ‘V’.
‘Are you all right?’ he says, his hand on her arm.
‘Fine, yes, all fine.’
‘Try to straighten up a bit. Here, take my arm.’
She holds on to him, his old suede jacket rough under her hand – she catches a whiff of mustiness from it – and tries to push her tummy out to straighten her body but her feet immediately slide forward and out from under her. She hits the ice hard – right on her coccyx. She hisses as the cold follows on from the pain, tries to get up, holding him, but her feet are scissoring wildly and she’s grasping at his smelly jacket while he tries to keep his balance, and then her arms are actually around his body, clambering up him until they are face to face.
‘OK?’ he says, smiling.
‘Take me to the rail.’
At the rail, she says, ‘That’s enough for me,’ and walks through a gap onto the rubber mat, relieved – so very relieved – that her feet can grip something. ‘You carry on. I’m going to get a hot chocolate.’
Two years of sifting through the detritus of the Internet, the sexually incontinent to the intellectually subnormal. Prior to this, she’d spent five deluded years gambling on meeting someone ‘naturally’, though there was nothing natural about turning up to every random gathering wearing too much slap and a desperate gurn, disappointed evenings in the pub, then clip-clopping home on uncomfortable heels. Christ, she’d even gone for drinks with the neighbours, at which everyone was coupled up and about fifty-seven. With this particular outing, she thinks, unlacing and pulling off the skates, she has plumbed a new low.
Her feet, however, are in a state of bliss. She can walk, she can un-tense, she is light as air. It is almost worth ice skating for the feeling of buoyancy of having functional feet back. Why do people do this – create for themselves physical uncertainty when there is so much of it to be had in daily life for free?
Her mind goes back to the child protection woman and the 67,000 children, as it has intermittently since she came out of the briefing, which must be Davy’s doing or perhaps the niggling feeling that there is something she cannot see through the half-closed smear of her sore eye – an irritation she forgets about for long enough to stop her visiting a chemist. She resolves to sort it tomorrow.
The hangar housing the rink is noisy and smells of hot dogs and rubber with the odd whiff of socks. She waits for him at a Formica table which is riveted to the floor, occasionally spots him whizzing round, pushing his body forward, confident and free. She is tempted to do a runner but alas, here he is, edging in front of her, between the plastic stool and table, both immovable.
He smiles but doesn’t say anything. She has noticed he’s a man of few words and when he does speak, it is so softly that she has to crane forward, cup her ear like a pensioner and say, ‘What was that?’
‘You’re a good skater,’ she says.
He nods.
‘When did you learn?’