“You want to read it to me?”
“No, not right now. You’re right, I’m tired. It just made me think of us, like we’ve met but maybe it’s too late.”
“That’s grim.”
Caroline smiled. She had a small mouth but a large smile. He could see a sliver of her pink gumline. “It is, I know, but I can’t help how it made me feel. Look it up and read it.”
“Okay, I will.”
After ending the call, Ethan got up to use the bathroom, brushing his teeth and getting a glass of water from the kitchen. As he passed the sliding glass doors that led to the small backyard, he thought he heard something outside. Pulling the curtain aside he saw the feral cat he’d named Townes chowing down on the cat food he’d left out on the brick patio. It was a full moon, and there was a yellow sheen across the scrubby yard with its two lawn chairs, its rusty Weber grill.
Back in bed, he found the Larkin poem online; it had been published in The New Yorker a few years earlier. It was clearly about being old, about meeting someone and falling in love when there’s not much time left, and it bothered him that Caroline had thought of them when she read it. He almost called her back but decided to let her sleep, instead. He’d text her first thing in the morning.
6
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 11:11 P.M.
Jonathan’s house in Bermuda was not what she had expected. Alison had imagined a swank newly built mansion in a gated community, but she’d been brought to a ramshackle nineteenth-century colonial on a narrow twisty street in St. George’s. There was an overgrown garden, and the rooms were filled with musty furniture and threadbare oriental rugs. Alison loved it there. Every morning she would ride a scooter down to Tobacco Bay and swim until she was exhausted, then bake herself in the sun. In the afternoons she’d retreat to the coolness of the house with its high-ceilinged rooms. There was wireless, of course, but except for that, there was nothing modern in the house at all. The kitchen was probably the most recently updated room, and that might have happened sometime in the 1950s.
Being with Jonathan all day was not what she had expected either. He spent a lot of time in his office on his laptop, or taking phone calls in the garden, but he’d take a walk with her every evening around six when the day had cooled. They’d circle a quiet park that smelled of flowers, her arm linked through his. Since his wife’s departure something had changed in him; he was colder, quieter, but prone to asking sudden strange questions. Did Alison think anyone in the world was truly happy? Did she believe in an interventionist God? It was possible that this was Jonathan’s true personality, and she’d just never seen it emerge during their weekly get-togethers. He’d even stopped wanting to have sex with her, although he seemed happy to have her with him in the king-size four-poster bed. He’d fall asleep with a hand on her thigh and a paperback novel perched on his chest. Some nights he’d have bad dreams that would cause him to say indecipherable words. Once, when he moaned, she woke him up, and he looked at her like he had no idea who she was.
The house had belonged to his parents, and he’d been coming there since he was a young boy. There were framed family photographs hung along the upstairs hall, and there were oil paintings in the large sitting room, one of his parents, and one each of Jonathan and his sister, when they were both little kids, probably eight and ten. She asked him about his family, and he wouldn’t say much, just that they were all gone now, and he should probably sell the house sooner rather than later. A local woman came every other afternoon to clean, and Jonathan always made it a point to chat with her; they’d known each other for fifty years, he said, longer than he’d known anybody. She did very little cleaning, just some dusting and vacuuming, so Alison had begun several house projects on her own, mostly working her way through closets and storage spaces, looking for silver to polish, or new artwork to display. One day she found a set of etched cocktail glasses from the 1960s, cleaned them up and served rum swizzles to Jonathan for cocktail hour. But her best find had been an old Instamatic Kodak camera, probably also from the 1960s, plus a whole box of film. She started taking photographs of the house, and of the village, not knowing whether the film was still good. After she’d finished a roll, she’d brought it to a small processing shop in Hamilton and had it developed. The pictures were beautiful, she thought. And now she was working her way through the rest of the rolls, feeling as though the old camera, maybe in combination with the old house, and this new part of the world, had reignited her passion for photography.