By Light Alone by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

considered this. ‘Her English isn’t very good,’ she said.
    ‘You think so? I’d say she was pretty fluent.’
    ‘No,’ said Marie, with enormous vehemence. ‘ Her .’
    George looked at Rana with a sort of helpless vagueness.
    ‘I can’t get her to understand,’ repeated Marie.
    ‘Understand?’
    ‘That she must come back to the States with me.’
    ‘Must she?’ said George.
    Marie’s shellac-hard gaze. Her lower jaw moved incrementally forward. ‘Of course she must.’ These four English monosyllables did not literally include the phrase ‘you moron’, and yet Marie conveyed the extra sentiment.
    ‘Madam, Sir, I may not,’ said Rana, in a mild, fluty voice. Ezra threw out a giggle-gurgle that had the neat little rhythm of a drum-fill.
    ‘I’m sure we can find somebody native in NY,’ George offered.
    ‘I am going back to the States,’ said Marie. ‘You, George – stay here until they find Leah. And when they find her, I want you to bring her back with you when you have her, and we have her back again.’
    George’s eyelids flickered, down-up, down-up. He experienced these sorts of lid fibrillations from time to time. Presumably it was related to stress. Brightness flickered in his head, like a fan spinning in front of the light.
    What could he say?
    He said: ‘Yes.’
    ‘You understand that I cannot stay in this place,’ said Marie.
    ‘Place,’ said George.
    ‘You understand that one of us has to stay. And you understand that it won’t be me.’
    George thought about saying but actually I don’t understand that . The problem, though, wasn’t at the level of comprehension. What was the problem? I suppose the problem was habit. A relationship may become habituated to the dynamic of one party being more decisive and the other less – to one individual taking predominant control and the other cheerfully acquiescing. In such circumstances, whilst the play may be a sustaining and refreshing aspect of life, the intrusion of reality upon the playacting will be all the more unsettling. In other words, George’s lack of understanding did not have to do with the content of his wife’s communication so much as with the tectonic grumble of the ground shunting beneath his stance. He had always been the one comfortable with the fiction that she was in charge. Evidence that circumstances had overwhelmed her – evidence, in other words, of her very overwhelmability – constituted a sort of anti-Copernican revolution. For the rich, few things are as disabling as uncertainty .
    ‘And I can’t get her to understand and she needs to understand.’
    ‘It is unpossible,’ said Rana, speaking to the carpet.
    ‘What is it that she must understand?’ asked George.
    ‘That she is to come back to the States with me.’
    ‘Oh,’ said George, ingenuously. ‘We’ll easily find somebody native in NY. We can use the agency Dench recommended.’
    The quality of Marie’s silence quietened him. She sat there, cross-legged on the bed, holding her mug of coffee in front of her. She raised it up like a chalice and tipped it over. The oval of blackness in its mouth elongated and broke over the lip. One, two, three seconds of micturating sound-effect. Then Marie swung the mug (still half-full) to the side to fall to the carpet.
    George and Rana were looking intently at her now. Even Ezra seemed to sense that something significant was happening. He stopped on all fours, mid-crawl, and looked up to his mother.
    ‘Are you suggesting,’ said Marie, in a level voice, ‘that I tend Ezra myself, the whole journey, from here to home?’
    Silence. Mossy-edged, flanked by dark green shadows. Sunlight on the pond. A single fin slicing the water like a paper-knife.
    Silence.
    George opened his mouth to speak without knowing what he was going to say. And indeed, when the words came, they came from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Possibly from somewhere quite other than him, at all. ‘Nothing about your life