more sunbeams to warm the window and stretch out toward the quilt, toward his arms, hands, and face. He lies there until the sun is fully visible, astonished by the emotion its embrace evokes in him. He’s in the habit of sleeping with the curtains open because the light helps him to wake, and the endlessness of the sky is what he likes to see first. But this morning it shines at him more magnificently than usual, and at the same time more sweetly. As if this year the summer is refusing to yield.
He looks at Cat, who’s still sleeping. Soon she’ll be getting good news, he thinks. He carefully lowers the blinds; she sometimes complains about too much light too early. In the bathroom it’s the smells that take him by surprise, those of his bowel movement as well as the shower gel, every particle intensely present, almost tangible. ‘What’s happening to me?’ he wonders, but the smells are already fading into the background.
Dressed in his underpants and a T-shirt, he fills the kettle and rummages in the garage in search of a lighter pair of overalls. While lifting the straps onto his shoulders, he walks barefoot along the hall and picks up the newspaper from the floor.
It’s the photo of a dead Palestinian child on the front page that recalls his dream of the night just past, if only a few horrible details of it: heart-rending close-ups, no story. There was a man with his brains dripping down out of his long hair, a woman’s bleeding nipples, a child with ripped stumps for fingers, and none of them were dead, they screamed, stared at their wounds in panic, fully conscious, stumbling about aimlessly.
And then there was the sun and that cloud boat, warm light, a reaffirmation of the supreme happiness with which he woke. He wonders how he could possibly wake so happy after a dream like that. He searches his memory for similar experiences but finds none. Was it the realization of having been spared extreme suffering that struck him on waking? He used to take the assertion that things ‘could be worse’ as a threat, as if you were about to discover that your suffering could be far greater than it already was. Now it’s different, now he sees the extraordinary magnificence of every day on which no fateful turn of events befalls him.
He hears Cat coming downstairs and takes a second cup out of the cupboard.
‘I didn’t get much sleep,’ she says.
She’s wearing his bathrobe, which would leave anyone else guessing as to her figure. She’s far less pale than she has been.
When he puts the cup down for her she turns her face toward him and he kisses her on the lips. She pulls the paper closer by one corner, groans on seeing the burnt child and throws it down on a nearby chair.
‘I had a strange dream,’ he says. ‘It was horrific. I saw mutilated people, but when I woke there was only light and I felt happy.’
She looks up at him, suspicious.
‘Still do. Something strange is happening to me. Something’s changed.’
He wants to explain it to her but he can’t find the words, managing only to increase her mistrust. She uses a knife to break up a lump of sugar at the bottom of the cup in front of her; an industrious pixie, infuriated by a stone in the soil where it’s trying to plant something. The corners of her mouth point down.
Cat studies the man she lives with. Sometimes he seems like a caricature of vitality, a man for yoghurt adverts. She loves him with an intensity that she begrudges him on occasions because she can’t imagine it’s reciprocated to the same degree. That he’s chosen this morning to emphasize his zest for life is one illustration. He takes no account of her, really, and not because good news is coming. This morning she’s going to refuse to be dizzied by his confidence.
‘Let me go with you.’
It makes no difference that he’s correctly interpreted her disgruntlement. She resolutely shakes her head.
‘I can wait in the car.’
‘Let me do this alone,’ she says.
He wants her to call him as soon as she knows anything.
He’s set aside half a day to go with her, so the appointment with his next client isn’t until the afternoon. He reluctantly throws himself into his paperwork, putting his mobile phone where he can see it and checking the landline is working—it’s working.
The folder of invoices is a catalogue of domestic problems. Although his memory usually lets him down when it comes to names and faces, he recalls the houses and the conversations he’s had in them. Because those conversations are rerun repeatedly in his mind as he works, it often seems in retrospect as if he’s left them behind on the walls, covered with a thin but impenetrable coating to protect them against time.
Today, however, the invoices and the reminders they bring fail to distract him. Cat’s appointment was at 8.30. It can sometimes be busy in hospitals. He mustn’t bother her, mustn’t ring.
At ten o’clock he can’t bear to wait any longer. She shuts off his call. She’s face to face with the doctor, he tells himself. She’s sitting there looking at the doctor. Last time the results were as good as they could be at that point; today she has to be declared completely cured. She seemed to assume the results would be given to her immediately.
For another half-hour he paces the floors and stairs of their house, faster and faster, then he calls again. And again when she fails to answer.
‘Yes?’ she says, her voice powerless.
Seagulls, he thinks. Is that the sea? ‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘I’m on the beach.’ De Panne, perhaps, where her parents live. Did she want them to be the first to comfort her? He can’t imagine so.
‘What did the doctor say? Not good?’
‘No.’
An ice-cold fish is tossed into his stomach cavity, where it thrashes for life.
He can guess which part of the beach she’s walking on: the broadest, between the campsite, the dunes, and the sea. ‘Stay there,’ he says, deaf to her protests.
He curses this region of winding lanes now; if a ring road ran north from their house he’d be with her in fifteen minutes. It takes twice that long.
After he’s parked the van, though, he finds her almost immediately. She’s sitting cross-legged on the dry part of the beach. This is where they usually come for a breath of fresh air after visiting her parents.
The way she stands up—reserved, ill at ease—prompts a sympathy that softens him. He won’t leave her side. Their raincoats fly up in a wild dance as they embrace.
‘What exactly did the doctor say?’
With a dismissive gesture, she turns away from him and starts walking.
‘The last test was fine, wasn’t it? Is it back now? At the same place? How’s that possible?’
She shrugs. He presses her to him again. You generally only believe there’s a pit called tough luck after you fall into it. The unfairness that makes such a fall possible. His anger turns against him. He’s forty—how can he still let himself be misled by a few months of joy and inner harmony? He’d secretly started to believe in an autobiographical success story. A light that shone inside him. Fundamental well-being. Were he to cling to a more clearly defined faith, he’d be convinced
