The Actuality Read online

  THE ACTUALITY

  THE ACTUALITY

  Paul Braddon

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Willow House

  Stoneyfield Business Park

  Inverness

  IV2 7PA

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Paul Braddon 2021

  Editor: K.A. Farrell

  The moral right of Paul Braddon to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-913207-16-8

  ISBNe: 978-1-913207-17-5

  Cover design by Heike Schüssler

  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  There is no need to question the unity of soul and body, the one being form and the other the matter corresponding to it, that which possesses being and unity is in the fullest sense the actuality.

  ARISTOTLE, DE ANIMA

  There is movement along the skyline and figures with guns emerge between the trees.

  Evie takes the child by the hand and leads her away quickly along the bank.

  Four men in grey camouflaged jackets and military caps, carrying hunting rifles with telescopic sights, crest the hill, together with another – taller, familiar in outline. No, she thinks, it is an impossibility. She saw what she saw four days ago in Paris. It cannot be him.

  From here the ground rises and they hurry up an overgrown path, batting the branches from their faces with their elbows. As they run, the dog, sensing the child’s fear, fights its way out from under her coat, leaping to the ground, and valuable time is lost in retrieving it from between the rocks.

  While the voices behind grow louder.

  Hiding behind a fallen tree they watch the men descend. One carries on his back a steel cage, nine or ten inches deep and three feet high, struggling under the encumbrance to find his footing on the mossy stone.

  PART 1

  The Walled Garden

  1

  So what is it you think’ll happen? the voice inside her nags. If you continue to do nothing?

  Evie shrugs and walks more quickly, feigning weariness to hide her misgivings and save herself further interrogation. The afternoon is on the cusp of evening and the air, from which all the colour has rinsed, is foggy and cold; a mere forty degrees here under the bare branches of the black-skinned cherry. Despite that, she is dressed thinly in a hard-to-get-hold-of-any-more dress made from cotton, and a slate wool cardigan on which the neck isn’t even buttoned. When it freezes, she will take more care.

  You can’t hide from it, Evelyn. He is old. I’ve told you over and over that you must ask him what he has planned for us. The voice is male and assertive, and although part of her from the very beginning, has the habit of wrestling for control when she shows uncertainty. She thinks of it as Simon, as in ‘Simon says’. Of course, he is right – she needs to be doing something. She just doesn’t want to be reminded of her failure to decide what and how.

  She reaches the wall surrounding the garden. Nine feet high at this point, too high for her to see over. In sections the mortar has cracked and the bricks settled, shedding flakes of clay. Not unlike Matthew – no longer the young man she was presented to forty-one years before.

  ‘I will ask him when I am ready,’ she replies, picking her words carefully, hoping to close the conversation down. Her tone is clearly evasive and it would not be unlike Simon to tell her so. Walking briskly, she takes out her anxiety on the gravel. Anxiety, an emotion she was never intended to have but which, like a virus, has wormed its way in. If she had even been intended to have emotions.

  As you wish, Simon says, but he is not happy. If she could change anything about him it would be the tenor of his voice. Substitute the unsympathetic maleness with something motherly. Something with a hum of warmth. Something nurturing and reassuring. Something to make her feel less like a witless child. He should be helping her, advising her, encouraging her right now, not accusing.

  Are you going to continue to act sorry for yourself? he asks, monitoring her mood develop. Or can we actually get back inside out of the damp?

  The grey hedges at this end of the garden overhang the path. She comes to a stop and massages her hip. His upsetting her by raising all of this again, and her resulting restlessness, has caused her to walk heavily, jarring it. A warning light of age and neglect.

  She straightens and gazes back across the garden – the only outside space she knows – a mere sixty paces by fifty, although Matthew told her once that it is generously proportioned and up here, thirty-plus floors above the city, is as good as unique. In the early days of their marriage he walked its paths with her each morning, explaining the plants, the countries they came from and the programme for their maintenance. He’d delighted in surprising and amusing her, guiding her fingers over the jagged fronds of an Amazon fern or bending to pluck a tiny Alpine flower and tickling her nose with its minute petals. Perhaps he’d hoped to encourage an interest in botany so that she could grow as a companion. That had been her first summer; now it is winter many years on and the flowers are dead and the branches bare.

  Daniels – Matthew’s long-suffering servant – also has been known to proffer an opinion on the garden. ‘No, they certainly don’t do anything like it any more,’ she’s heard him say enough times, ‘far too much fuss ‘n’ bother,’ leaning on his fork, kneading the stiffness from his back with his knuckles. But despite the fact that it is he who must carry out the work, he goes to lengths to make things nice for her – trying his hand at propagating orchids, all because she once showed him their intricate designs printed in one of her husband’s books.

  Each in their own way – her husband Matthew and Daniels – wants her to be content.

  Simon inevitably has his opinions too. When doesn’t he? Generous proportions! he’s sneered. Prison exercise yard is closer to the truth!

  Simon is the third male in her life, but in the list comes before Matthew and Daniels as, unlike them, he is in her head from the moment she wakes, eavesdropping on her every thought.

  She reaches the corner and turns, the gravel crunching under her shoes. Beneath the ridges left by Daniels’s rake lies the groove she has carved over the years in the packed mud. Routine and repetition, which once provided a sense of security, are now a reminder that at some point things must surely change.

  The wall behind her provides shelter from the hard edge of the January wind. It will snow soon based on recent seasons. It is something to look forward to – winter, once the leaves have fallen, holds too little variety.

  Rain patters her scalp and she tilts her forehead to the darkening sky to let the drops slide down her nose and cheeks.

  We should go inside, Simon says, get out of this.

  No! she thinks back at him, more fiercely than she normally dares; even though of course he is right and she should. The drab weather, neither one thing or another, is only fanning her mood.

  The water collects in the hollows beside her mouth but she keeps her lips closed, careful not to let any in, wary of the seal around her gums.

  There is a swing here, attached to the branches of the crab apple. Perhaps merely to continue to resist, Evie lifts herself onto it, kicking back with her heel, and drifts in the wet air, scuffing the toe of her shoe along the furrow she herself has engraved in the bare dirt.

  By the time she walks back, her cardigan clings damply to her arms. She could cut across the lawn and skirt around the fountain but she returns the long way by the wall, completing her famili
ar circuit. The climbing roses here have been pruned hard, like they advise in the old-time copies of gardening magazines in the library, but a trailing stem that escaped the cull sways in the breeze and plucks at her sleeve. She stops to remove it before it snags the wool, pausing with the blackened thorn held lightly between her fingertips. Suddenly alert . . .

  The roof of a hovacar rises above the brickwork, the whine of its motors masked by the rain. The window of its cabin peers over like a swollen eye. There are people inside. Her vision is able to resolve the shadow detail and she identifies the ovoid form of their heads through the tinted nanospex. The car rises further, remaining just short of trespassing, staring down, its bonnet tilted towards her as it lingers in the air, headlights in her eyes.

  Then, with a damp whoosh, it descends again from sight.

  It’s the same one, Simon announces menacingly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The car. It had a dent in the front wing in the same place as the one from two days ago and the same scrape down the side. We’ve seen it before. He remembers this sort of detail. The sort of detail she does not.

  ‘And?’ Her voice is distracted.

  Evelyn, we’ve seen it before, he repeats, becoming exasperated as he so easily does.

  ‘So?’ She is staring at her hand, concerned about the damage she has managed to stupidly do. Bloody gel runs from her pricked fingertip, in which the thorn is deeply embedded, down the back of her hand and under her cuff where it blends and congeals into a sticky pink goo.

  I think it is spying on us.

  2

  Spying!

  Simon’s warning pulses around Evie’s head, as painful as the throb in her injured finger which she has covered with a handkerchief.

  She hurries past the music room, the soaked skirt of her dress sticking to her thighs. It is dark inside and the piano that stands close to the full-height windows is almost one with the shadows behind.

  Stepping over the puddle under the steps, she enters through the door at the end and, slipping off her wet shoes so she does not leave muddy prints on the tiles, joins the warmth of the kitchen.

  Daniels is hunched over a chopping board. The room smells powerfully of garlic, onion, mushroom and coriander as he slices through vegetables and herbs from the garden, using one of the knives he keeps honed to a razor edge. In this regard they are self-sufficient, immune from supply chains constipated by energy shortages and the weather, and the wide-ranging restrictions imposed by on/off government rationing.

  ‘This’ll be ready in twenty,’ Daniels says. ‘He’s asked for you to take it to him.’ Daniels glances over his shoulder and sees that she is drenched, her hair hanging lankly around her face. He adds with a note of exasperation, ‘Leave those wet things out for me or they’ll be ruined.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, as she crosses behind him to the door to the hall; feeling guilty for not thinking about the work she has made.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ he calls after her. ‘No longer, or it’ll spoil.’

  He continues to mutter to himself, after she is gone, ‘What was it that she’s supposed to have – “elevated intelligence”, something like that they called it – although it’s leaving out of her head even as much as a dollop of common sense that I don’t get!’ The door is already closed but her auditory perception has deteriorated little over the last forty years and she hears him as clearly as if he’d been speaking directly into the channel of her ear.

  You know why he wants us, Simon says.

  She doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to talk about it with him. This conversation always ends the same way.

  It’s her birthday.

  ‘It’s not her birthday,’ she snaps, ‘it’s the anniversary of her death. And don’t call him “he”, it’s rude. His name is Matthew.’

  He’ll still want it.

  She jolts her head in exasperation, vigorously enough so that he can feel it and know that she is cross with him.

  She closes the door to her room and pulls the sodden cardigan over her head, dropping it on the rug – before guiltily picking it up and laying it flat on the chair.

  So what are you going to do to stop him?

  ‘Nothing.’ She unwraps the handkerchief and examines her finger. The hole made by the thorn has already crusted over but it doesn’t stop it hurting.

  Nothing what? She feels his indignation behind her brow, fanned by his powerlessness. Passenger not pilot. This is not what he is here for, to spoil her pleasures, but to keep her safe, spot threats that she might otherwise miss. Maybe the problem is that there’s never been enough for him to do and that is why he finds fault all day, stressing her about one thing after another until she can barely think straight.

  ‘Nothing,’ she affirms after a delay, taking a towel from the drawer and briskly drying her hair; tugging at her scalp, wringing the ends. All more roughly than she would normally.

  You must . . .

  ‘He is my husband,’ she replies curtly, choosing from the wardrobe a dress decorated with summer flowers as if she is attending an afternoon tea party in a friend’s garden. An event where there would be trestle tables spread with paper cloths under the trees, plates of triangular sandwiches shorn of their crusts and pieces of chopped fruit floating in a bowl of punch. Not that she has ever been to such a thing. Not that she has any outside friends. Not that she would be allowed to go even if she had.

  Listen to yourself! he comes back with. This is not the Dark Ages. We have rights.

  Ignoring him, she lowers the dress over her head, shimmying it down over her clammy skin.

  Turning again to the mirror she brushes her hair. Now that it is dry again, it has lost its dark flush and turned mousy. Surprising really that the colour should be so unexceptional when he could have had any shade. She ties it with a silver ribbon – a weakness for ribbons, whatever her mood, is something she can do nothing about, it is etched into her coding.

  May I remind you what happened last time?

  She huffs. Now he is twisting things. Nothing happened last time other than what a married couple rightly gets up to in private. She closes the wardrobe door sharply, rattling the full-length mirror, as if it might somehow shut him down.

  Evelyn, you are not as young as you think.

  What’s that got to do with anything? She bites down on her lip, trying to remain calm, staring at her reflection, refusing him a reply.

  Evie returns to the kitchen. The tray is on the side with a bowl of soup and a crisp white napkin rolled in a silver ring. Daniels is reading his newsplastic, grinning to himself, his face lit by its shifting kaleidoscopic glow. He is sitting beside the warm oven, his legs crossed at the ankle, his heels propped on the handle of the stove door. He starts to laugh out loud.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks and tries to see over his shoulder. But he folds it closed and the radiance fades. Matthew has reprimanded him before for allowing her to see things that can make no sense unless one has experience of the world. Things such as forests being scythed to the ground by tractors taller than houses and terrified animals screaming as they flee from the cutters. Or lines of refugees crossing a bare landscape, casting shadows as thin as sticks, singed by a fiery sky. Such ideas only serve to leave her unsettled – confused and moody – and understandably he prefers an unruffled existence. As she should too, although a little natural curiosity was always part of her design.

  ‘Nothing much,’ he answers, ‘just someone being a prize idiot, as they often are.’ He glances at the tray. ‘Now you take that along to him, while it’s still hot. I don’t want to be in trouble for serving up cold food.’ He looks into her face and smiles and she detects a supportive conspiracy – an understanding that they are both in service to the demands of the same master. ‘On the same team’, as he wryly puts it.

  She picks up the tray and crosses the tiles, letting the door swing closed behind her.

  Don’t be tricked, he knows what the old fool intends, Simon
murmurs, not troubling to conceal his bitterness.

  ‘Daniels means to be kind,’ she says. It is frustrating that she must endure this same reaction every time – he really should have got used to it by now.

  Kind? He’s a fucking hypocrite.

  That is nasty and unfair, she thinks back at him.

  The hall is cooler than the kitchen and darker too, lit only by the wall sconces and in the distant corner a hologram of a Tibetan vase on a plinth, slowly flickering between two and three-dimensionality. Apart from herself it is almost the only concession to the modern world, and the heavy gilded frame of a Dutch seascape hanging beside it, with its leaden waves, rolling clouds and troubled fishing boat struggling in the gloom, is more typical of her home. It is as if time has been trapped here in the same net as she.

  Her husband’s room is at the end and, bending her side, she depresses the handle with her elbow.

  The room is softly lit. He is seated with a blanket over his lap by the picture window with its prospect west along the Thames towards Battersea Power Station. She knows that is what it is, because he explained the view to her when she first arrived and he was so full of his intentions for her. Those were the days when he promised to show her the world and her to it. Before the plans changed and parading her about no longer seemed such a good idea.

  Matthew smiles and holds his hands up as she approaches. ‘ “And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid so fair / As Nature could not with his art compare”.’ He starts to cough. He has been poorly this fortnight and for a few moments struggles to regain his breath.

  Her silhouette faces her in the window, the silkette dress cleaving to her hips. The red and yellow lights from the riverside buildings and the blue beacons on the tops of the power station’s three pencil-thin chimneys shine through her hair. This is the only room she’s allowed in which affords an exterior view and she greedily takes it in. She understands why they took her window away but she misses it.