‘Isn’t he?’ For a minute her face lit; then recollection clouded it over again. ‘The trouble was …’ Suddenly, she looked directly at him, and there was a kind of pleading in her eyes. ‘Daniel was white. Nathan’s far too dark – he looks half Indian or something. But I’d never had an Indian lover. There’d been no one but Daniel since we met. We were together eight years, and I was faithful to him. I wouldn’t want to play around. After Daniel died, when I found I was pregnant, I was very happy. And then the baby came, and he was beautiful, so beautiful, but – since then, I never seemed to stop running. Till I came here.’ After a few moments, she went on: ‘Please believe me. I can’t explain why Nathan looks the way he does. I can’t explain any of it.’
‘How very interesting,’ Bartlemy said at last. ‘Don’t fret: I know you wouldn’t make it up. You’re not that type at all. Anyway, why should you? There would be no real point. Can you tell me how Daniel died?’
‘It was a car crash. He’d been working late – he often did – and they said, the police said, he may have fallen asleep at the wheel, but he wouldn’t. I know that. They said at the inquest another vehicle hit him, a van or a truck, and must have just driven away. He only had a little Renault: he was knocked off the road into a tree …’
Her mind was carried back to the pale hospital room, pale as a sepulchre, and the still figure in the bed, with his battered face almost unrecognizable between the bandages, except she would have recognized him however he looked, however bruised and broken. She held his hand, tight, tight, and the tears ran down her cheeks unwiped, and she begged him to live in a running whisper which she knew or dreaded he would not hear. Looking back, she thought she had sat there forever, that a part of her was still sitting there, trapped in a moment of time, with his hand in hers, imploring him in vain: Don’t go, don’t give up, live. Live. And then he had opened his eyes.
They had given him morphine for the pain; the nurses thought he would not wake again. But somehow his body rejected the drug, and he came round, looking at her with love, so much love that she thought her heart would burst, and then the pain came, the price of that instant, that love, because he had shaken off the influence of the morphine. His face was wrung with it, scrunched up in the final agony, and she reached out with all that she had, all that she was, with mind and heart and soul, reached into his pain, into his death, and in that second she would have given life and happiness to save him, to spare him even an atom of suffering. But the pain was smoothed away, and his life with it, and when at last she drew back it was another age, another world.
‘Nathan was born exactly nine months later,’ she told Bartlemy. ‘I always thought …’
‘You thought you became pregnant in the moment of Daniel’s death,’ he said. ‘I understand.’
‘Something happened then, something I can’t remember. I don’t mean there are blanks: it wasn’t like that. It’s as if there’s a scar, a scar in time, or a fold, and inside it there’s the memory, the forgotten thing. Afterwards, I was different. I was … more. I knew I was pregnant, I knew it immediately, though I hadn’t known it before. I couldn’t even grieve properly. I missed Daniel – I’ll always miss him – but the differentness, the moreness, filled me up.’
‘Life out of death,’ said Bartlemy. ‘It makes sense. Yes. There is a Gate we pass when we die –’ she could hear the capital G ‘– a Gate out of this world. What lies beyond it no one knows. Religion invents, philosophers speculate, and the rest of us merely hope. If there are other universes, other states of being, then that is the only way to reach them – the only way we know of. But none may pass the Gate alive, or ever return. So they say. But even the Ultimate Laws may be broken, by the very wicked, or the very rash, or those whose love takes them beyond fear – or by the Powers themselves.’
‘Is this your philosophy?’ she asked him. ‘A Gateway between worlds, and unearthly powers making laws for us to live by?’
‘I’m not so original,’ he responded. ‘Others have done my thinking for me, long ago. I simply follow a well-worn path.’
‘I like the sound of it,’ she said. ‘People say they see a tunnel, but I prefer a gate. A gate opens both ways. Maybe I did pass through, and return … But then, why doesn’t Nathan look like Daniel? Have you a philosophy to answer that?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at the moment. There could be many explanations. I will give it some thought.’
The years of Nathan’s childhood passed in something close to an idyll. Of course, the trouble with a happy childhood is that you are much too young to appreciate it. Nathan, with the unthinking acceptance of youth, assumed happiness was the lot of most human beings: the unhappy were few and far between, and after a period of suffering they too would be helped to find contentment. He had never known a father so he couldn’t miss him, but his mother’s talk of Daniel gave him a feeling of security, of being watched over by a friendly ghost, though strangely she had no photographs to show him. Otherwise, his Uncle Barty filled whatever space there might have been – filled and overfilled it, his solidity a protective wall, a quiet strength behind his placid manner. And Annie, trying her best always to be firm and fair, determined not to lose her temper under the stresses and irritants of parenthood, found it, much of the time, unexpectedly easy. Money was not plentiful but there was always enough, and the little feuds and fracas of village life could not disturb her comfort. Nathan went to the local school, excelled at his studies, played football in winter and cricket in summer. The other children admired him but were also wary of him, slightly daunted by his effortless intelligence and something about him that set him a little apart, a sort of calmness, an inner certainty. The few who became his particular friends felt themselves somehow special, singled out, though Nathan was friendly to all and never seemed to do any visible singling. His most frequent companions were George Fawn and Hazel Bagot – something which surprised his classmates, since he could have hung out with the most popular boys in the school. George was chubby and shy, regularly picked on by pupils and even some of the teachers, given to stammering when he was nervous, which was often. He was cornered in the playground one day by the school bully, Jason Wicks, when Nathan came to his defence. ‘Leave him alone. He’s never harmed you. Why should you want to hurt him?’
There was a chorus of laughter from Jason’s backing group. ‘’Cos he’s fat, and he s-s-stammers, and his mother’s a –’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Nathan, not angrily, but with a kind of set look on his face. ‘I told you, leave him alone.’
‘You’re going to protect him, are you?’ Jason bunched a big fist.
‘I’ll try.’
The fist shot out, knocking him against the wall. George moved to help him and then shrank away, too frightened to aid his champion. When Nathan straightened up, there was blood on his lip.
‘Now fuck off,’ Jason ordered. He had learnt both his manners and his vocabulary from his seniors at home.
‘No.’
This time, Nathan dodged the blow, grabbed the lunging arm, and drove it past him, with both his weight and Jason’s behind it. Knuckles rammed into the wall – Jason screamed as flint cut his flesh to the bone. ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan said, ‘but in future, let George alone.’ The backing group could have jumped him, but they didn’t. Maybe they had read enough of the right books, or at any rate seen enough of the right movies, to know that this was how a hero behaved. George would have become his willing slave from that moment, if he had wanted one.
As for Hazel, she and Nathan were near neighbours, nursery playmates, squabbling companions, sharers in adventures both imaginary and real. Mrs Bagot worked in the deli, and Hazel was frequently left at the bookshop, in theory under Annie’s eye, the two children chasing each other up steps and stairways in rowdy games, or mysteriously quiet as Nathan showed her wonderful books with yellowing pages and illustrations shielded in tissue paper. Without his encouragement