Yurt
‘The reservation was for a single person,’ said the landlady, standing in the doorway.
‘Yes, it’s a last-minute thing.’
She puffed her cheeks. ‘There are two single beds, if you don’t mind sharing the same yurt.’ The woman was tired, greasy hair pulled back into a functional knot, and somewhere inside the house a baby was crying. ‘I’ll leave you to think about it,’ she said, and disappeared inside. It was a whitewashed farmhouse that had long since ceased to be a farm, the remaining few acres now occupied by four drum-shaped structures swaddled in red fabric, like miniature circus tents pitched high on the dale’s northern flank.
‘We could try the next village along—’ he said.
The sky was reddening, the river path far beneath them. ‘No, I don’t mind.’
‘—because I know your feelings about tents.’
‘It’s not a tent, it’s a yurt. And, anyway, it’s good to rough it. It’ll be like one of your field trips. I’ll get drunk on Cinzano, give a Frenchie to a local lad.’
The remark hung in the air for some time.
‘So I’ll say yes?’ he said.
‘Let’s run away to the circus,’ she said, and he went inside to find the landlady, confused and unsure about what was happening and how he might explain things: Marnie,can we wait, it’s just what happened today, and I’m seeing Natasha, and I need to think, and the timing, give me a day, thirty-six, no, forty-eight hours, but I do want to kiss you again at some point. Yes, that was what he’d say, without the phrase ‘at some point’, which lacked passion.
Inside the farmhouse, he found the landlady feeding banana to a sticky-faced child in a high-chair, and she explained how the food and showers worked, how they could order drinks and breakfast. The signal was poor and he made conventional noises about this being a good thing, going off-grid, et cetera, though in truth he’d need Wi-Fi to make plans.
The tent, the yurt, was effectively a large circular room with rough wooden floorboards concealed beneath a ragged Oriental carpet. The reddish light gave it a vaguely boudoir air and they stood for a moment at the end of their two beds. ‘Left or right?’ she said.
‘I’m easy,’ he replied, and that hung in the air too, all these remarks, hanging in the air like scaffolding, cracking them on the forehead. She took the left-hand bed, where she usually slept, and he usually slept on the right, so that was fine, that worked, and off she went to the shower block.
For the first time since the incident on the hill he was alone and in her absence he felt the depression crawling back inside him, almost a physical thing, its symptoms as tangible as the beginning of flu: smarting eyes, a tightening in his neck and shoulders, a sense of helplessness and a sudden exhaustion that caused him to lie back on the bed. He draped his arm across his eyes, like a compress, and felt a sharp sense of shame, loathing really, for fleeing today, and though it was irrational, it was enough to make his breath come faster. At such times his doctor had instructed him to breathe in for five then slowly out for seven, but he was always troubled by the imbalance, because if you’re breathing out more than in, surely you’re suffocating …
‘Are you all right?’
He sat upright, pressing his palms into his eye sockets as an alibi. ‘Sorry, I was just falling asleep,’ and he blinked and yawned and turned to smile.
Marnie stood in the entrance, her old clothes bundled up in her arms, her hair wet and slicked back in a way that was unfamiliar, her face shining, and she looked so bright, warm and new and so patently a great thing, that he wanted nothing more than for her to cross the room and hold him. Or perhaps he could go to her, perhaps, he wasn’t sure, and in the time it took to consider this, she said, ‘So what do you do, on these famous field trips, to pass the time?’