Among the Missing by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online Page A

you wanted to forgive me but, much more, to forgive yourself, for the way we were forced to live. It was a way of letting you do both. Because then you took me in your arms and wrapped me in close against you, and with no more words we made love, fitting ourselves to each other’s bodies for each other’s consolation and for the glad familiarity of it, our slow, deep rocking together in the dark.

I was having a bath when Col returned from his kayaking, and he shouted through the door that he would wait for me in the bar. When I came down, he offered me a drink and declared with a little bravado that he would “join me” and ordered the same for himself, tonic without the gin, though usually he drank beer. He meant it as a kind of compliment, symbolically rejecting the notion of our incompatibility by rejecting a different drink, but the gesture was slightly too big for him. He sat and sipped his tonic, cowed by the formality between us. We had to be so careful. We exchanged tight remarks and little smiles, until I ordered him a pint, which he drank as if released from some sort of test. I watched him, not sure what I loved. But whatever it was in me he wanted, I did not want him to stop wanting it.
    We ate early. Over dinner he drank a bottle of wine, which helped him, and we talked a little about his day on the river and about mine, supposedly in Inverness. We pared our stories down to safe generalities. I barely had to lie; I said I’d had an interesting time and had enjoyed seeing new places, and he didn’t ask any more of me than that. His lack of interest in my day was a courtesy, an offer to me to talk freely in the knowledge I would not really be listened to, so it was easy to reel off inane remarks about a day of vague impressions without being specific about locations or—the courtesy reciprocated—endanger him by bringing him anywhere near the orbit of my real thoughts. In return, when I asked him about the kayaking, I showed satisfaction with answers that were neither engaged nor precise. We ate in small mouthfuls, and every one was taken slowly, as an opportunity to push a little more of the evening behind us. But still, when we had finished, I was appalled athow much time was left to fill. Our bedroom, smelling of carpet cleaner and hot electric light, lay above us at the end of a musty hotel corridor. I had imagined, all through dinner, the hours of the coming night cramming themselves into its emptiness, lying in wait.
    I suggested we have coffee in the lounge. The couple from the morning were already there, drinking whiskey and yawning over the papers. The waitress brought in our tray and made her exit, saying she hoped we would enjoy the rest of our evening.
    But there was so much of it. While Col glowered over a book of aerial photographs, I browsed the bookcases on the other side of the room and wandered around studying the prints on the walls of stags and mountains, Highland crofts and cattle. I sat down again on the sofa and examined the china minutely, as if I might discover in it something about cups and saucers that had so far eluded me. The couple got up to leave and invited us to join them in the bar when we had finished. Col looked longingly after them. I took up the newspaper they had left behind and completed a couple of crossword clues, then folded the paper back up as neatly as I had found it. Col drank his coffee. I drank my herb tea.
    “Col, if it’s about money, if there wasn’t a problem about money, do you think—”
    “There’s no point discussing it,” he said. “We haven’t got the money. I’m not discussing it.”
    “But suppose we had, suppose—”
    “Stop. Just—stop,” he said. “There is nothing to say.”
    I got up again and studied a rack of leaflets and maps. It was no good. No task took long enough. I found myself looking at a pamphlet about salmon fishing, wondering how long I would be able to keep this up, listening to my life pass along in thudding