The Book of Strange New Things(165)

Peter struggled to recall what he’d said about Severin; struggled to recall Severin at all. ‘I had no idea you were impressed.’

‘It was beautiful.’ She basked in the afterglow of his compassion for a few seconds. Then her brow wrinkled. ‘Too beautiful for those . . . dickwads, that’s for sure. There was a meeting about it afterwards, and everyone agreed you’d overstepped a line, and if there were any more deaths of USIC personnel in the future, it would be best to keep you out of it.’ The insects were venturing back now. A lustrous jade one settled directly on her forehead. She was oblivious. ‘I defended you,’ she said, staring up at the sky.

‘Thank you.’

Resting on one elbow, he gazed at her. Her bosom rose and fell with her breath, just two lumps of fatty tissue on a ribcage, two milkbags designed to feed children she would never have. Yet to him that bosom was intoxicatingly lovely, an aesthetic marvel, and the rhythmic swell of it made him desire her. Everything about her was miraculous: the downy hair behind her ear, the symmetry of her collarbones, her soft flushed lips, even the puckered scars on her arms. She wasn’t his soulmate: he had no illusions about that. The intimacies he had once shared with Bea were impossible with her; she would quickly find him ridiculous, and he would find her too much trouble. In fact, like most men and women who had made love since the beginning of time, they had almost nothing in common. Except that they were male and female, thrown together by circumstances, and, for the moment at least, alive. He lifted his hand, held it in space, prepared to settle his palm, gently, on her breast.

‘Tell me about your wife.’ Grainger’s eyes were closed now. She was tired, torpid in the heat, and a little drunk on the liquor of reminiscence.

‘She’s turned against me,’ Peter said, withdrawing his hand. ‘We’ve grown apart.’ Although he intended merely to state facts, his words sounded peevish, craven, the clichéd complaining of the typical adulterer. He could do better than this. ‘She’s been having a horrific time back home, everything is falling apart, all sorts of disasters, and she . . . she’s lost her faith in God. Our cat Joshua got killed, tortured, and I think it pushed her over the edge. She’s scared and lonely. I haven’t been giving her the support she needs.’

Grainger shifted the orientation of her body, for comfort. One arm cradled her head, the other draped across her chest. She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You’re not telling me about Bea,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me what’s going on between you. Tell me about her. What she looks like. The colour of her eyes. Her childhood and stuff.’

He lay down next to her, rested his head on his arms. ‘Her name is Beatrice. She’s a few years older than me, thirty-six. She doesn’t mind people knowing her age. She’s the most . . . un-vain woman I’ve ever known. I don’t mean in terms of appearance. She’s beautiful and she dresses with style. But she doesn’t care what other people think. She has pride in herself. Not a puffed-up pride, just . . . self-esteem. That’s so rare. Incredibly rare. Most people are the walking wounded, you know. And Bea really ought to be, with the childhood she had. Her father was abusive, a total control freak. He burnt everything she had several times, all her possessions, I mean everything, not just toys and books and special things, but everything. She remembers going to Tesco’s, a supermarket in the industrial park that was open all night, with her mother. It was about two o’clock in the morning, Bea was maybe nine years old, and she was in her pyjamas, she was barefoot and her feet were blue, because it was January and snowing and she’d had to walk from the car to the store. And her mother took her to the girlswear section and bought her pants, socks, T-shirts, shoes, trousers, the lot. That happened more than once.’

‘Wow,’ said Grainger, without any perceptible awe. Peter guessed she was comparing Bea’s formative sufferings to her own and judging them to be no big deal. That’s what people, unless they were ?????, tended to do.

‘What does she look like?’ Grainger said. ‘Describe her to me.’

‘She has brown hair,’ said Peter. ‘Auburn.’ It was a struggle to conjure up a vision of Bea’s hair as it really was; maybe he was just recalling mentioning its colour in other conversations. ‘She’s tall, almost as tall as me. Brown eyes, slim.’ These details were generic, unevocative; they would fit a million women. But what was he to do? Describe the mole under her left nipple? The precise shape of her navel? ‘She’s very fit, she’s a nurse. We met at the hospital where she worked. I’d broken my ankles jumping off a ledge.’

‘Ow. Were you trying to commit suicide?’

‘No, I was trying to escape from the police. I was a drug addict then; I did a lot of burglaries. That day, my luck ran out. Or I should say, I got lucky.’

Grainger grunted agreement. ‘She lost her job over you?’

‘How did you know that?’ He’d never shared this with her, he was pretty sure.

‘Just a guess. Nurse gets involved with patient. Who’s a drug addict. And a criminal. It doesn’t look good. Did you ever go to jail?’

‘Not really. Detention in police cells, a fortnight once when I was awaiting trial and nobody would bail me out, that was about it.’ Only now did it strike him that he’d been shown extraordinary leniency.