The Valley
It’s not always easier to walk downhill, and as they descended, he smiled at the yelps and groans behind him as the hand that had held them back on the ascent now shoved them forward. Finally the ground levelled, and they crossed a beck swollen with the recent rains and followed its bank into a valley, sickle-shaped, steep-sided, exquisite in its pale greens and russet browns, like a perfect apple. The path was well-worn but it felt as if they’d stumbled on some hidden kingdom, reed buntings flitting alongside them, like perfectly skimmed stones. The adults were together now, and rather than join them, he fell into step beside Anthony.
‘How’s the walk? Not too much?’
‘A bit too much. We’re nearly there, yeah?’
‘About an hour.’
‘And tomorrow?’
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ said Michael, ‘but tomorrow is hard.’ Anthony clapped both hands to his face and dragged them downwards. ‘Kids love nature walks with middle-aged people. Is that not right?’ He felt more comfortable, talking to Ant. In the school corridors, the boy occupied that strange role of the pupil whose parent is also a teacher, both privileged and vulnerable, like a young prince in a treacherous court. Michael watched over him, had known him since he was born, had been on holidays with him, applauded his grade-1 guitar pieces, had taught him card games and football (his father was not the type to kick a ball). He and Natasha had looked after Anthony for long weekends at a time when they’d been trying hard for a child of their own, and on his departure, they would be left silent and dazed, struck dumb by a kind of surrogate love for the boy.
Since then, Anthony had watched him go through break-up and breakdown, had even visited him in hospital, and Michael wondered how that changed things, to see an adult in the aftermath of a catastrophe, stripped of the illusion of authority and control. He wondered what Cleo had told him. Our friends Michael and Natasha are spending time apart. Was the boy curious or was this all just grown-up stuff, as irrelevant as mortgages and pensions? Whatever he knew, Michael was keen to reassure him all was well, but again the question, how to be? The older the kid, the harder to impress, and while Michael had no ambition to be a role model, he should try not to be weird.
‘You see that bird, there, in the trees? With the black stripe on its cheek? That’s called a reed bunting.’
‘Yeah,’ said Anthony, not looking up. He might as well have told him that it was called Steve. Best let the bunting go, though he found himself wondering, as he often did, how he would have fared as a father. They’d both wanted it – had they even needed to ask? – had tried for years. When nothing happened, he had taken the tests and, while scrupulously avoiding the language of blame, there seemed to be an issue with sperm count and motility. The problem was, he was assured, not insurmountable: the sperm were there, but were variously shy, lazy, sluggish, so he took on the advice about bicycle saddles and boxer shorts, spinach and hot baths, and they made the stoical jokes that couples are expected to make in such circumstances.
But nothing diminished his mounting … ‘broodiness’? No other word existed and yet it seemed a frivolous, imprecise term for a feeling that had once, after Anthony’s departure, left him in private tears at the end of the garden. They did what they could to improve their chances and it was at this point that he’d had the incident, the fight, and had ended up in hospital and nothing, not a single thing, since then had gone right. Natasha had been gone for eighteen months now. He was forty-two, with idiopathic oligospermia, and what was he to do with the broodiness now?
Concentrate. Buck up. ‘How’s the manga?’ he asked, a tourist who has taken the trouble to learn a few words of a foreign language. ‘Or is it anime? I get confused.’ He knew the difference, but Anthony was telling him anyway, regaining the touching effusiveness of pre-adolescence. Michael asked questions with no need to know the answer, enjoying instead the sound of the boy’s fluent speech in the final days of his high register, the miles passing easily until they were back on tarmac, a shaded lane that rolled down towards the village where they’d spend their first night.