17. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The fog came in off the water at about four and by five you could not see the shed.
Fog on that island simply arrives and takes everything away and does not make a single sound about it, and by six the lane was gone, the hedge was gone, and the world ended at the gatepost.
Michael brought Archie back at the usual time and could not find the gate.
I heard the car crawling up the lane before I saw the lights, and the lights when they came were two soft rounds hanging in nothing, and he got out and stood there for a second like a man checking whether the ground was still there.
“It’s come in.”
“I can see that it’s come in.”
“I couldn’t see the turning. I’ve been past it twice.”
“You’ve been past it since you were fifteen.”
“I know,” Michael said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”
He was going to drive back. He had his keys out and everything, and Archie was flat against my shoulder already going, and I stood on my own step and said absolutely not.
“Willow, it’s twenty minutes.”
“It’s a lane with no lines on it and no lights on it and deer in the hedge, and you’ll be doing it at walking pace with your head out the window.”
“So I’ll do it at walking pace with my head out the window.”
“And when you put it in the ditch at the bend, who do you think gets rung?”
“Levi.”
“Me, Michael. Somebody rings me, because I’m still the wife on the form, and I have to stand in a hallway at two in the morning and be told.”
He stopped with the keys in his hand.
“Dee Coffin’s nephew put a van in the ditch at the bend in fog like this,” I said, “and he’d lived here his whole life. Come in.”
He stood there in it. Fog was going past the porch light in slow handfuls.
Say yes, you stubborn bastard, I thought. Say yes and I can be furious about it later, at my leisure, in private.
“You’re sure.”
“I’m not sure about one single thing,” I said. “Come in anyway.”
Fog is quiet in a way I had forgotten.
There was no wind on that house at all. Nothing moved. And out beyond everything the horn started up at the point, that long low two-note thing that goes on all night, and Archie sat bolt upright in the bath and stopped breathing.
“What was that?”
“That’s the foghorn, baby.”
“What?”
“It tells the boats where the land is.”
He thought about this with his whole body.
“Boats can’t see?”
“Not tonight.”
“Boats sad.”
“The boats are fine. That’s what the horn’s for.” Michael was in the doorway with a towel over his shoulder. “It’s a man saying here, over here, come this way. It goes all night. It’s the most boring job on this island and it’s the only one that matters.”
“BOAT,” said Archie, satisfied, and put his whole face in the water.
I fed him. Michael did the bath and I did the bottle and we did not once get in each other’s way, which after a season should not have felt like anything and did.
He went down at seven without a fight, holding Duck by an ear, and nobody remarked on the fact that his father had been in that house at bedtime for the first time since the day I walked up a dock with him on my hip.
Then it was the two of us and no wind and a horn going somewhere out in nothing.
“There’s the sofa,” I said.
“There’s the sofa.”
“It’s a bad sofa.”
“You’ve said.”
“I’m saying it again so you can’t accuse me of hiding it. There’s a spring gone at the arm end and the back room’s got the damp in it, and if you wake up with a wet elbow that’s your affair.”
“Understood.”
“Right.”
And then neither of us moved, and the horn did its two notes, and I went and got him a blanket out of the airing cupboard because there was nothing else on this earth to do with my hands.
I could not have predicted that he was better company that night than he has been in years, and it was because there was nothing else in the room.
No phone signal to speak of. No television.
No boat to look at, no view, no window worth going to, because the window was a gray square with nothing behind it.
So we talked. We talked about the roof. We talked about Dee Coffin’s opinions on the Newton people.
He told me about a captain in Antwerp who has stopped speaking to him over a container of bathroom tiles, and I laughed so hard I had to put the mug down, and he propped his chin on his hand and watched me do it, the way he did at a window table once, and then he was the one who looked away first, which he never used to have to do.
“Can I ask you a thing,” he said, “and have it not be a whole event?”
“Depends on the thing.”
“Do you eat, when it’s just you and him?”
“That’s your question?”
“That’s my question.”
“I eat.”
“Willow.”
“I eat what he doesn’t finish, standing at a counter, out of the pan, like an animal.” I heard it come out and did not take it back. “It’s not a tragedy. It’s what everybody does.”
“It’s not what everybody does.”
“It is what every woman I know does, which is the same thing.” I looked at the window, which had nothing behind it. “Don’t fix that one. I’m warning you now. If a food delivery turns up in this lane I will put it in the hedge.”
“Noted.”
“Say it back.”
“Hedge,” said Michael.
At some point he said, “Do you remember the fog the year the ferry went aground?”
“Everybody remembers that.”
“You were on the beach at Steps with a flashlight.”
I had not thought about that in a very long time.
“I was fifteen.”
“You were fifteen and half the island was down there with flashlights pointed at nothing,” Michael said, “and I came down and stood next to you and did not say one word for about an hour.”
“You said one word.”
“Did I?”
“You said here,” I said. “You’d walked all the way down from the top road and you stood next to me in the dark and said here and then said nothing else all night.”
He looked at his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “That sounds like me.”
I went to bed. I went to bed at half past nine like a coward and lay in it listening to a foghorn.
I came down again at some point because I could not sleep and I wanted water, and that is the entire truth of it, and I would say the same under oath.
He was not on the sofa.
The front door was open. Open, all the way, with fog standing in the frame of it like a wall somebody had installed, and Michael was sitting on the step in the blanket with his back against the doorpost.
“You’ll let it in.”
“You can’t let fog in. It’s already in. It’s in the hall.”
I stood behind him for a moment and then I sat down on the step too, at the other end, with the doorframe between us.
It is a good step. It does not give under two people. A man I had to pay in apples came and put a joist under it while another man was busy finding me a house.
The horn went. It goes about every half turn of a minute and after a while you stop hearing it and then you hear it again.
“I can’t sleep on that sofa,” he said.
“I did tell you.”
“You did tell me. I’d like it noted that I have not complained.”
“You’re complaining now.”
“I’m reporting,” Michael said.
And then, after a stretch of nothing,
“I’ve been trying to work out how to say a thing all week and I keep making it bigger, because bigger’s easier. So I’m going to say the small version and then I’m going to shut up.”
Here we go, I thought. Whatever this is, don’t help him with it.
“Go on.”
“I didn’t notice.”
The fog took the whole garden. There was no shed, no hedge, no lane. There was a step and two people on it and a light behind us.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the entire thing.
Everyone keeps handing me a better version.
Dad died, the board, Rotterdam. And every one of them’s true and not one of them is the answer, because if I’d been choosing between you and the work you would have won, and then at least I’d be a man who made a decision and got it wrong.
You could hate me for a decision. We’d both know where we were. ”
“But?”
“But I never made one. You went out like a light in that apartment, a bit at a time, in rooms I was standing in, and I did not notice it happening.” His voice did not do anything. That was the part. “And I’ve worked out that’s worse. And I’m not going to soften it, because you’d know.”
I sat on my own step with my arms around my knees.
“It is worse,” I said.
“I know it is.”
“Do you know why?”
“Tell me.”
“Because if you’d chosen it, I’d have been the price of something.” My voice went somewhere I did not send it. “I’d have been what you gave up for the company. That’s a horrible thing to be and at least it’s a thing. I wasn’t a price, Michael. I was already yours, so you stopped checking.”
He did not say anything for a long time.
“Yes,” he said.
That was all. He did not reach along the step. He did not do the thing where a man makes a small physical gesture so the moment can be about the gesture instead. He sat at his end and I sat at mine and the horn went and went.
“You could have said that in New York.”
“I didn’t know it in New York.”
“When did you know it?”
“When I moved a pile of toys off a chair,” Michael said, “so I could sit down.”
I had to look out into the fog for a moment.
“You didn’t know at the time.”
“No.”
I went up eventually. He stayed on the step.
I lay in Ruth’s bed listening to a man not sleeping in the room underneath me, which is a thing you learn about a person and never unlearn, and the horn went on all night telling the boats where the land was.