Let's Start Again

Their hands, acting on their own accord, joined as they walked along the glittering edge of the field, and stayed joined swinging loosely in the space between them even when they threw sticks for the dog.
  They had sat opposite each other in the pub the night before and he’d said ‘you’re back’ with eagerness and hope even though her eyes mocked him. She’d seen that he wanted to try again - how risky, how brave, she’d thought and still did under the high blue sky along the edge of the vivid green field. His face had aged but not changed, hers had changed in some subtle way, he'd said, sneaking peaks at it through half closed eyes. And he kept repeating her full name like some incantation while she wondered if he could possibly forgive her and if he could - how risky, how brave. She liked courage in a man, it seemed the main point of them above a good sense of humour and kindness or being solvent.
  He dropped her hand and strode to the middle of the field flattening some of the impossibly green, lush grass. He threw a stick which arced into the clear sky and she felt the power of the throw as a jolt through her body. She realised, with a sickening sensation like falling down a lift shaft or one of the wells in a childhood fairy story, that she’d fallen in love with him, yet again. She looked out over the glittering field and thought of the Arabian Nights and the universal mystery of a city at night, and watched this place, this field become a foreign country. There were millions of jewels in the grass, droplets of water, dew or last night’s rain but jewels anyway to her dazzled eyes. In other parts of the world war was raging, an invasion had taken place and the streets of London were filled with protesters. These two old-new lovers had disagreed acrimoniously and fallen out in the space of one night – the one night in which they had rekindled a thin flame from the ashes of the old fire. So soon, she'd thought, so soon and saw no good coming of this so late in life, at such a precarious time in her life. But her heart moved over to give him room.
  They plunged across the field and up the grassy bank through the crazy green and the jewels with the dog leading the way, her black coat sumptuous against the green, her panting amplified in the quiet air, candy pink tongue lolling out of her clean mouth.
  He turned to the woman and delivered a severe question – ‘do you really think we can start again after the way you aborted my child?’
It was a genuine if clumsily put question with, she was sure, a snaking layer of aggressive resentment towards her underneath the simple words. Her mind skittered away it, her eyes sending frantic messages to her brain to make her think of something, anything other than that. She wasn’t staunch any more as she had been all those years ago, not so cut and dried, she had started to see the grey areas of all thorny issues as her hair began to grey, had noted this and thought how trite, how predictable it was. She looked away and saw that the mountain peaks had been reduced, by a black layer of thunder clouds, hovering just below their peaks, to a mere scribble; it was a feature of these mountains, perhaps all mountain ranges that there could be blazing sunshine on the gentle lower slopes and a snowstorm going on further up.
‘Well, do you?’, he insisted trying to pull her back from the mountain peaks and the privacy of her own thoughts. ‘No, I don’t but it seems we have anyway.’
He smiled then, a big beaming grin and pulled her down the side of the slope rushed her back to town and into the nearest pub; she girlishly allowed this, excited by his decisiveness. The pub, a drink, any excuse; she remembered that he was a heavy drinker and she distinctly heard a single note of warning as if a bell had been rung just once. She looked around the small dark bar to see if anyone else had heard it but no one moved. They were all in place like insects suspended in amber – Dai the plumber in the most shadowed corner of the bar, fair curly hair, an overweight angels face, keeping his trouble close to his chest, touch and go whether he would even say hello; Bunny the fish man dandified and still trying to pull turned outwards to the company at large which was only Dave Jock whose trembling legs and white halo of hair made her think of ghosts. That was it at half past eleven in the morning and then him coming back to the table with two pints of Guinness looking cartoonishly oversize for the time of day.
  He sat tight next to her but the space inside her ballooned as his earlier question repeated itself like an echo in her mind.
‘I didn’t know you cared so much,’ she said.
He mumbled into the froth of his pint.
‘I did it because it was the only thing to do, it was best for us all, your children, mine, and I could not have coped at that point.’ She didn’t say that he hadn’t been father material, that she wouldn’t have trusted him and that that wasn’t what she had wanted him for.
‘Don’t get angry.’ He said.
‘I’m not.’
‘If you say so.’ He had that look of false appeasement and she remembered how he always gave way without really meaning it, ‘I expect you’re right’ he would say meaning the exact opposite.
‘I can’t believe it’s still an issue, it was so long ago.’ This was disingenuous knowing as she did his capacity for taking wounds deep within himself and never allowing them to heal completely.
  ‘Drink up and we’ll have another. Maybe several. And there was the table on the mountain what was all that? God that rubbish went on for weeks. What was it, the I Ching?’ He was laughing. There was cruelty under the bonhomie, the mild exterior – hard as a stone sitting in his heart.
  She shrugged not wanting to get into all that, not seeing that she should if this was going to happen and that it was already happening. She’d seen the herons down by the river below the house she’d rented to shelter her while she looked, unaware that she was doing so, for her dead mother. She’d seen them grey and prehistoric and knew that they mated for life. The signs were all around weeks before she’d come across him at his usual table in the bar surrounded by cronies and drunk as a lord, one trouser leg shorter than the other, a stray leaf in his wild hair and a terrible twitch in his left eye. And later found herself with him on his twisted grey sheets telling him of the guru she’d found and her spiritual quest which she kept quiet about most of the time.
   She was trusting him with the knowledge, she trusted him then and was surprised. Did he trust her, could he after she’d terminated the life he’d given her and gone off to Scotland on the back of a bike with another man.? She could not believe that he would but still he pressed on and she wondered if he, once having got her, would go in for punishment. But there was birdsong and more beer and desire which she’d thought was over and she’d never held back, she was headstrong, she was a quiet adventurer and would go on.
  Regulars were coming in and passing their table slowly like cruisers waiting to be asked to join them, to share in this reunion. One of them sat down at a nod from him.
'Yes, we’ve become an entity,' he was saying, 'we're starting again.”
The regular leaned heavily against her and said, peering round her, 'you always said she was the only one – we all know that, you went on about it often enough and the songs, all those songs you wrote. Christ.' He shook his head slowly in disbelief, drunk, nudging her in the ribs, too close for comfort.
  He, the old lover, nodded, pleased, slightly embarrassed, 'it’ll probably end badly though. Joke!' And then, 'what was that all about – the table on the mountain, that I Ching stuff?' He was challenging her.
  'Oh Gawd, remember your old man?' the regular said to her. 'Mean bastard wasn’t he? Never bought a round in all the years I knew him – you were best out of that one – better off with him over there. But why’d you do that, why go off like that? He was in bits for months. Oh Christ in absolute tatters. But then a woman will do that, look at my Mrs.”
  She tried to move away from this onslaught but could only press herself further up to him, the one she’d shattered and humiliated all those years – was it fifteen? – ago.
She stood abruptly, she wouldn’t be interrogated. She pushed past them mumbling about the toilet.
  When she came back she sat in a chair opposite them – the old-new lover and the regular, at a safe distance from which she could look at them, eye to eye.