Spring Tide by Chris Beckett

Author:Chris Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Roundabout

Two faces look out from a windscreen: Ralph’s on the passenger side, Eve’s above the wheel. They’re not speaking to each other. In fact they haven’t really spoken for this entire holiday. They’ve exchanged practical information when required, agreed on outings, sorted out meals, but there’s been no communication between them about themselves.

There’s a reason for this, which Ralph knows and Eve doesn’t. All she knows is that Ralph is absent – not unpleasant, not unhelpful, but simply absent – and that this absence is of a new quality. Something or someone beyond her field of view, some powerful gravitational force, is tugging his attention constantly away from her. When she asks Ralph a question and he answers, it’s as if a receptionist has been left in charge of his voice, quite polite most of the time and sometimes positively solicitous – as receptionists can be, when they sense that a caller is becoming annoyed – but never authentically Ralph.

‘There’s something on your mind,’ she says now. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’

He laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s been deliberately chosen from a range of options, as if from a set of dials or sliders: Volume 3, Warmth 1, Nonchalance 10. ‘As I keep saying, it’s just the usual stuff. Work worries. What’s going to be waiting for me when I go back on Monday. All of that.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘I need a weewee,’ says Lily’s voice from the back.

In the parked car, Ralph takes out his phone.

‘Ianthe, it’s me! I had to call. How are you?’ Even the simple word you is magical when he says it to her. ‘It seems so long. So long since I saw you last, so long before I see you again. Two whole days! I’m counting off the hours.’

As he listens to Ianthe’s reply, he peers out through the windscreen at the main entrance of a motorway service station.

‘Yes, I know,’ he says, his face a little crestfallen. ‘I know I must. But I really can’t do it now. Lily’s with us all the time. I’ll talk to Eve when we’re back home. Listen, I’d better go. We only stopped so Eve could take Lily in for a pee. They’ll be out in a minute. I can’t wait to be with you, Ianthe. I… Oh, here they are now. Sorry, my dearest, but I’ve got to go.’

Ralph’s face is impassive as he stares out at the road again, this time from the driver’s seat. Calamity lies ahead, he knows, but he’s oddly unmoved by it. All his usual loyalties are in abeyance, even his loyalty to his own future self. All his usual feelings are distant and muffled, as if behind soundproof padding. And if they do break through at all, he has simply to turn his mind to Ianthe – her smile when she sees him, the way she can’t help herself from touching him, the words she says, her throaty laugh – and everything else is subsumed at once into a surge of sublime longing.

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