The First Day Read online

  But Orr’s preparedness to take Philip on, to challenge him, had shifted something, and in the last week, the week before the window was smashed, Philip had asked his father when his brother was coming home. Orr had been cautious in reply—Philip’s interest in his bastard sibling had not registered in some time, barely at all since Anna and Sam moved out—but he had read it as a positive development, a sign that despite Philip’s apparent frigidity, some hidden thawing was taking place. However, in the subsequent days Philip had not followed up his initial enquiry, and Orr now wondered if he had not, rather, simply been working out the timescale for a new assault, a widening of targets. Anna asked him why she should be Philip’s victim, especially now, since they had had so few dealings in the previous year. And Orr had no answer, just an instinct: By their fruits ye shall know them, he said.

  Anna sighed. Faith without works is dead, eh? was her wry reply, and Orr could not resist a smile.

  The hurling of a brick through a window was hardly an insinuation that could be, without any evidence whatsoever, hurled back at the boy, but both Anna and Orr agreed that they could not simply ignore the possibility, and so they agreed that Orr would—for the first time in almost two years—bring his three boys to Anna’s house, for a visit. They could not think of a pretext, but decided that only Philip would demand a pretext anyway; that the two younger children, although they may be surprised, would not complain. In this they were proved partially right: only Philip raised his eyebrows when Orr made the announcement over dinner later that evening, though in fact he said nothing, merely smiled, a hint of satisfaction passing across his face, of recognition. He did not ask why, he did not complain; Orr was unnerved by this, and called Anna to tell her. She dismissed his fears. Maybe he’s not what you have made him out to be, she said. You have a propensity for stories, she said, with some satisfaction.

  Anna had left the cardboard in place, putting off the glazier until after the visit of Orr and the boys; she felt manipulative, aware of the dark pleasure she was getting in anticipating Philip’s reaction, of seeing his face, but could not relinquish it. When Anna opened the door only Orr and the younger two were initially visible; Philip lurked behind, detached. But when she stepped back and they made their way inside, Philip moved towards her with a smile, and hugged her as he entered. It was entirely unexpected, and she was uncertain of how to respond to this boy, this man-boy, and briefly hated herself, hated how much her body was still the property of Orr, of how her contraction at Philip’s embrace was because of him. She moved into the embrace but too late, and she knew that Philip had sensed it, had felt the incompleteness of it. She felt shame immediately, her judgement already, against her own will, passed. She looked at Orr with an almost palpable anger as Philip walked away, and was still staring at him when she heard Philip’s voice from the kitchen: What happened to your window?

  Orr looked at her, and Anna felt that same contraction, felt something detach inside her, and she knew Orr had been right, and that Philip had thrown the brick, and was so utterly in control that he could walk straight to it, deliberately and fearlessly, to nod at it like a handyman assessing an unfortunate breakage. It was the lack of fear, she said later, that unnerved her. She did not feel herself to be in actual, physical danger; but some immeasurable unease now flickered at the edge of things, some refusal of peace. When you close your eyes you feel everything should go black, but it doesn’t. Some light bleeds through.

  When they followed him into the kitchen, Philip was poking at the cardboard, testing it. He turned and smiled at her.

  It’ll be fixed tomorrow, she said.

  Oh, that’s good, he replied, and took his finger away.

  He sat down at the table, in the same seat Orr had been sitting in days previously, and Anna was struck by the likeness. The same fineness of line along his cheek, the intensity of look; though Orr’s kindness, his almost physical approachability which she had long tried to assess (was it in the hold of his shoulders, the line of his mouth?), was perfectly absent from his son. It was astonishing to behold. She detested herself for thinking it, but it came without her permission, this wave of hatred, as though he had drawn it out of her. He was a crucible, the thought came, unbidden, for the opposite of everything she had loved in Orr. Christ and antichrist. All of this flooding her, almost wordless, as Philip stared, the half-smile, an almost imperceptible nod. Yes, he was saying, yes. It is what you think. And even more. Yes.

  Anna’s book was published at the end of the summer. The title was taken—stolen, wrote one reviewer, which amused Anna greatly—from Beckett. If I Do Not Love You I Shall Not Love. Poetry rarely created a stir, and this publication did nothing to change that. Still, Anna, at almost thirty years old, moved from academic anonymity into a small but revered space of creative community. She began to receive invites to events of all sorts: gallery openings, book launches, even political gatherings, and every few months would be persuaded to give a talk. At first she turned most of these invitations down, but shortly found herself—this is how she thought of it, as though it were something happening to her, rather than an action of her choosing—attending more and more, and making friendships with others on the fringes of the small Belfast scene, usually other solitaries, writers and artists, similarly sceptical of public profile but tied to the game through their careers, if that is the right word for an often unrewarded artistic commitment. One of these was an older man, in his mid-fifties, a painter called Patrick Curran. Curran taught occasionally at the art college but spent most of his time painting landscapes in a small barn in the Antrim hills, attached like an anchorhold to the side of his cottage. He threw paint on thick, as often with a knife as with a brush, and, like Cézanne had done with the hills around Provence, created a significant and impressive body of work simply by watching the light change in one place; for Curran, Glenariff. The modern world of painting had passed him by, he was aware, but somehow his very lack of fashionability, his naïve commitment to painting in what was still, more or less, an impressionist manner, albeit with considerable skill, allowed him to carve out a career freed from contemporary fascinations, and he was for the most part respected by other artists. He was large, with a face quick to smile, and a quietness in company which belied a sharp wit and a rough, familiar kindness. He was married to Edie, who taught at a small primary school in Cushendall, the nearest sizeable town, less than six miles from their home.

  Curran took to Anna, her wryness, her quietness of manner, the unforced control she seemed to have at a platform while reading a poem or delivering a short lecture, and he asked her to come to dinner at the cottage. They were at an art opening, a new group show at which Curran had a couple of paintings, and they were discussing Molloy, sharing an appreciation for Beckett’s tongue-in-cheek, boyish humour, his affection for the puerile. They had met on a couple of occasions previously, though they had exchanged only a nod and and a How are you, and she did not really know him when the invitation was first made. He saw the hesitation in her eyes, and recognised immediately, or so he later told her, that she had been hurt by a man before and would not be hurt again. He smiled—that broad, open smile—and assured her that his wife would be there. Anna smiled then too, relaxing, and accepted.

  Alongside her friendship with Curran, a new relationship had begun, surprisingly, to form with Philip. Following the incident with the window, he at first seemed to retreat into himself. His bravado, his finger on the cardboard, the sheer brazenness with which he owned Anna’s kitchen, seemed to be a high point from which he slowly retreated. He still gave no inch to Orr, but the directness of his attacks changed, subdued, and the front that Anna feared was opening up on herself never materialised. What did happen, eventually, was much more surprising, to both Anna and Orr.

  Within a couple of months of her return from Barcelona, Anna’s disquiet had all but disappeared, and the routine had re-established itself without complication, Orr’s attention for Sam continuing to grow and soften. It was a
period, Anna began to feel, of genuine peace; a brief season, six months or so, of an almost effortless contentment. Orr himself seemed, for reasons Anna could not determine, to take a step back from his own intensity. The simplicity of the happiness he appeared to have discovered with Sam dismantled, or at least tempered, his zeal, and it struck Anna that he was again, over three years since they had first met, and after a significant retreat into a harsh, solitary wilderness from which she—and Sam—had been ruthlessly excluded, more like the man she had captured on her camera smilingly emerging from his tiny church. She was reluctant to dwell on this, and refused herself, or tried to refuse herself, the idea that a clearing was opening up into which they might once again move, the hurts of the recent years subsiding and love once more possible. Whatever stirred in her, whatever hopes were glowing below, breathing slowly, she made no move towards Orr; but the ease in their interaction created a genuine satisfaction, which had for a long time been missing. Into this ease stepped Philip.

  He appeared at Anna’s door at the end of the August. She opened to the rung bell and was taken aback to find him standing there, black T-shirt and jeans, his arms loosely tracing his sides. His hands, though still, appeared to be moving, twitching, though Anna was uncertain if perhaps she was imagining it.

  I thought you might need your grass cut, he said.

  Anna was briefly struck dumb. She stammered for an answer, nodding. Did your father send you?

  He shook his head. No.

  She felt she could not refuse him. She led him around the back and unlocked the shed where the mower and shears were kept.

  She retreated to the house and waited on an attack, unaware of what it might look like, of what mix of kindness and cruelty it might be formed. Philip went about his business as he had promised. He mowed the lawn and tidied the garden, carrying the grass and hedge cuttings by hand in bags to the skips a quarter-mile away. Anna watched him from Sam’s room, his young body moving into the work with the same strange grace she had seen in his father. The severity of her previous reactions seemed suddenly unfair, untrue even, and more than once she walked away from the window, troubled by a combination of thoughts and yearnings to which she could not give names.

  As he left her house that first evening she invited him in. He looked at his feet, and for the first time she had ever seen, appeared uncertain of himself, almost shy. Then he looked up at her and smiled—Orr’s smile—and she found herself catching her breath, exposed, as though she had been caught naked.

  Next time, he said, and walked away.

  He came again, the following week. There was less to do in the garden, only a week’s growth, and he finished his work much earlier. The sun was dropping just above the houses one street over, the shafts beginning to pierce the gaps between them. The garden was bathed in a warm glow, and Anna, looking from her kitchen window, felt some corresponding warmth inside herself, a peace beating through her, heartbeat by heartbeat. Birds were returning to the trees for the night, their low calls rising in volume. Anna pushed open the window and called to him. Come and have a drink.

  They stood in the kitchen, drinking Coke from glasses, saying little. They had never been alone together, like this, and the awareness crept up on Anna suddenly, her mouth dry and awkward. Philip did not seem to notice. He held himself differently, she thought as she watched him, without the aloofness, the distance she was used to. She talked to fill the gaps, though he did not seem to feel unnerved or anxious. She talked about how she loved the time of year, of the changing seasons, of the threat and promise of winter. He didn’t say much, just nodded in a teenage way, smiled occasionally, rattled the ice against the glass when he had finished drinking.

  I should go, he said finally, setting his glass in the sink. Thanks for the Coke.

  Anna nodded as he opened the back door and stepped outside.

  In the week that followed she returned again and again to their conversation, one-sided as it had been, poking at the edges, the corners, trying to uncover something that would reveal him, but there was nothing there. In any other context there would have been nothing to explore; he was just a kid helping with the gardening. But there was so much underlying their relationship that she could not let go of the need for a meaning, or rather a motive. The previous week she had not mentioned to Orr that he had visited. She was not sure why, but she had felt that whatever thawing, whatever engagement was occurring, it was between her and Philip. On the following Saturday, however, when Orr came to collect Sam, she told him. He hesitated before replying; she saw his body contract, saw him search for a rationale the way she herself had done. Before he even spoke she knew he had nothing to say, that he knew no more than she did, and that Philip’s reaching out, if that was what it was, was separate from his father, distinct. She made Orr promise not to mention it to him; if Philip was moving in this direction, if this was the opening he needed to let go of his animosity and fear, then Anna would provide it. Orr was resistant, but Anna held her ground, demanded from him his word, and, shaking his head, he gave it.

  And so a tentative, unspecified pattern evolved; for the next couple of months it was still tied to Philip’s work in the garden, but by November, when it was cold outside and the leaves and grass required less attention, a kind of camaraderie had established itself between them, even—Anna hesitated to use the word—a friendship. One week he turned up early, still in his school uniform. He was sitting on her front step, freezing, when she arrived home with Sam. She was struck by how young he looked in his blazer and tie, a kind of false armour, seeming to distance him from the perils of adult life, with which he was already far too familiar. He smiled immediately, and Sam rushed up to him, the affection they had created so early still evident.

  I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to be here yet, he said, and Anna shook her head and told him it was okay, of course, and brought him inside. She made dinner. He told her he had had a fight with another boy in school, and had won the fight but it was not over, he had simply made more enemies, who would come for him when the time was right.

  Are you scared? she asked him.

  Scared? No, he answered flatly.

  Why are you telling me? she asked.

  He shrugged.

  The following week she handed him a key. He stared at it, then at her.

  You can come and go as you please, she said.

  He held the key in his flat palm, as though weighing it. She waited for him to say something, and it seemed he was about to, but he remained silent.

  Okay? she said, eventually, unnerved by his reticence. His face relaxed, the tautness fell away, and he smiled. Or, more truthfully, Anna felt, he tried to smile. I’ve thought often about this moment, this tiny window of possibility when something was given to Philip and he didn’t know how to react. Can you imagine what went on within him as he stood there, contemplating his small victory, the turning of his enemy into his friend? How fucking Christlike, what a gift he must have had. But did he realise, even for a moment, the price he was paying? Did the reality of his inability to win descend upon him, the utter impossibility of it? Did he feel any dread at all, the sickening sense that he had, in rewriting all the rules to his advantage, rendered the game a joke? All his hatred suddenly a useless skill, like a man who spends years mastering the piano only to lose the feeling in his hands?

  Perhaps I am being unfair. I am sorry. God knows I make up my own stories too.

  As Philip entered her life, so too did Curran. The solitary Anna found herself opening up, connections forming that were as unanticipated as they were joyful. She drove up to Curran’s house often, usually in the late afternoon, and would sit in his gallery as he worked, working herself on poems and articles, or sometimes just watching him paint. His cottage sat high in the glen, on the slope running down from the Lurig ridge. A large window overlooked the land spreading wide and low towards the sea at Waterfoot. A number of canvases stood on easels before the window and around the sides, always, it seemed, h
alf completed, patches of greens and blues and greys echoing the landscape outside. He showed her what he was trying to do, the combination of rough, almost geometric blocks of earth tones interrupted by fine lines of much stronger, visceral colour, reds and yellows and blues, so fine sometimes as to be virtually invisible, but which deftly broke the regimentation, so that the painting seemed both tightly structured and yet free. I began to see nature a little late, he quoted Cézanne’s letter to Zola, and Anna nodded, amused and impressed.

  Curran roamed in conversation, a natural essayist, moving from the sublime to the mundane without a comma. How difficult it is to see what is in front of you, he said, and how strangely radical a commitment. He was talking of Cézanne. Curran was disdainful of the contemporary fascination with photorealism, seeing it as a kind of psychological naïvety, the belief that what you see is what there is. Reality, the Impressionists taught over a century ago, is unsteady, broken, elliptical, he said. Excess. There is more truth in one of Manet’s discarded roses than in most galleries in London today, he complained. After a time Anna began to respond, to talk of her poetry, her frustration at finding herself always coming up short, and then her slow embrace of this failure, her growing sense that mastery was not the point, that if she could just aim her words in the right direction she would have succeeded, or perhaps failed in a useful way. Curran smiling. Failed in a useful way, he echoed. Put that on my gravestone.