Chapter 10
A boat called Hope
Once they’d made landfall back in the still more or less United Kingdom, the weeks went by in a woozily elastic passage of time, sometimes slug-slow, other times swift as an eel, but always slippery as either – hard to grip, and elusive as a dream.
The Girl, her freckles now punctuated by a startlingly pink slash of puckered scar tissue, sat fretfully in the sun and tried to heal, as if she could accelerate the process by furious willpower alone.
She overdid the gentle physiotherapy she was prescribed and would get uncharacteristically snappy when tired, which now was most of the time since she also overstretched her mental energy on a rack of her own devising, trying to make sense of the random act of which she was unaccountably the victim.
He knew she was in a bad way because her hands lay still in her lap for hours, not interested in drawing or painting, seeming to resent the fact he’d tactfully left pencils and charcoals and her battered black tin watercolour box out in plain sight.
He’d never known her not to sketch, not to keep her hands and mind busy and inquisitive like this.
And in the end she did break the vow she’d sworn herself, and told the Boy that she had – miraculously – become pregnant, but then had lost the baby back in the hospital in Ayvalik.
It took nearly all of a bad couple of months to do it.
She only did so at the end of a long week of sniping and arguing with each other, the worst time they’d ever had, a bruising so bad that it suddenly felt like the irrevocable end of things for them.
He’d persuaded her to come sailing with him on the small sailing boat on which they had had so many happy days in their past. The boat was called Hope, and he remembered one especially blustery evening a couple of years back as they’d come racing in against the tide dodging rain squalls, and he had slid down out of the wind, leaning against her as she held the tiller and she had smiled up at him when he’d asked if she was OK and said of course she was, it was impossible not to be when on-board Hope.
It was, she said, her happy place. And she kissed him and said how lucky they were that their happy place could move with them and anchor anywhere in the world they liked.
It was one of his happiest memories. And though he had hoped the boat and the open sea might once again work their magic on her spirits, it was instead one of those days that started badly and just got worse.
First off, the furling drum on the genoa got jammed and he had to spend half an hour crouched against the pulpit at the front of the boat trying to unjam it while the partially unfurled jib slapped away at him and the anchor shackle poked away at his kidneys.
Then once they got under way, the wind was fretful, the weather clammy and the sea somehow thick and sluggish beneath the keel.
The final straw was when the kicker under the boom came loose, one of the bolts having sheared for no reason other than the everyday malice that inanimate objects sometimes seemed to hold against the animate.
It sheared while she was at the tiller and had just come around more sharply than perhaps necessary, and though he said nothing and though of course it was not the reason the bloody bolt had decided to fail, she caught a flash of frustration in his eye as he looked at her the moment it parted.
And given the amount of toxic tinder now lying all around them, the flash was enough.
She didn’t mean to tell him, certainly not right then and there on the open water, but since she was suddenly sure they were about to break up she found the words bounding from her mouth as if this was the brutal but quickest way to do it, by going nuclear and dropping an unforgivable bomb to end the grinding war of attrition their relationship seemed to have turned into.
And it was brutal, but it didn’t do the trick.
It didn’t break them up.
“Good,” he said, jamming the kicker back into its seating and snapping a carabiner through the bolt-hole as a temporary fix to get them home.
The cold contrariness of his reaction smacked the wind out of her, shocking as a slap, and she gaped at him in disbelief as she got her breath back.
The silence between them suddenly held a vertiginous, sickening certainty that the bond that held their two worlds together was pitching and yawing on the slippery fulcrum of this exact moment, and that the wrong next word would tumble them into an abyss that would break them apart for ever.
He shook his head sadly and opened his mouth to speak, but she beat him to the punch.
“What’s good about it?” she said. “What single fucking thing about it could possibly be good?”
He shook his head again.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing about losing the baby. That’s never going to be anything but unmendably, desperately bad. What’s good is that you said it.”
“I’m telling you I lost a fucking baby, that I was fucking pregnant in a world where no one is pregnant any more… and you’re telling me—”
“I’m telling you I knew,” he said. “They told me. In Turkey…”
“You bloody knew?” she said. “And you decided to keep it secret that you knew?”
“The nurse told me,” he said. “And then when you didn’t tell me, I just…”
“You just fucking what?” she said.
“I thought you’d tell me when you were ready,” he said. “And then when you didn’t, I didn’t want to add to the pressure on you and decided to just…”
“To just what?” she said.
“To look after you,” he said. “I just thought I’d look after you and things would heal, and you’d tell me when you felt strong enough, and then you’d get better.”
“I’d get better?” she said. “And everything would be unicorns and rainbows?”
“Everything wouldn’t be this,” he said. “I’d settle for everything being not this. I hate this.”
As a morale booster the sailing trip could not have been more of a betrayal of the promise offered by the boat’s name.
They returned to shore despairing and exhausted, and drove home in a murderously unhappy silence, each afraid to speak more than necessary, as if aware that any exchange would only make things final.
Later that night she found him in the kitchen, long after they should have eaten, supper unprepared because neither one dared ask the other what they would like to eat because even that might trigger the end of them.
But eventually she spoke, watching his back as he looked out of the window.
“Is that why you changed your mind?” she said.
“About what?” he said, staring out at the night. He really wasn’t ready to meet those eyes.
“About agreeing with me, about leaving in a hurry,” she said. “About getting home.”
“Yes,” he said, staring at the window, but seeing nothing but his own drawn face reflecting back at him. He watched himself grimace.
“They were sending doctors. A medical team, from Ankara. The nurse said you might get taken up there. To some kind of closed ward. She said if she was your mother she would not want her daughter being a lab rat in a foreign country”
“Which nurse?” she said.
“The one with the kind face,” he said.
“I don’t remember her,” she said. “I don’t remember any kind faces. Except yours.”
In the mirror world of the night-blackened window he watched her hand slide over his shoulder, a long, elegant starfish spread out across his dark shirt. His own blunter hand rose to meet it then they were both falling, but the bond held, and they fell together.
And in a world that seemed to be tumbling in its own freefall, they found something halfway between respite and equilibrium, and in it they relaxed, and in relaxing, were able to feel safer, and so healed better.
He knew she was on the mend when he woke late one day and discovered her in the garden, drawing the pair of crows that came to the bird feeder every morning with the swift strokes of the pencil he had always admired for their decisiveness.
She had the rare ability to capture things in one fluid line in a way he could never match.
He loved watching her work. Her ability to choose a line and commit to it unswervingly, without any second-guessing, had always seemed to him to be both open and somehow courageous, and in that was a distillation of what he had always loved about her at her core.
He stayed very still so as not to break the moment by letting her know he was behind her or to disturb the birds.
“I do just love them,” she said quietly, without looking up from her sketch book, the telltale uptick of a small smile just visible on the side of her face. “Such clever birds. Don’t know why people used to say they were unlucky.”
Ten days later they were woken by an insistent knocking at the front door at eight in the morning, and the world turned upside down again.