EMPIRE

THE car slowed behind her. She knew it was him, she did not need to turn round. Winter evening dripped off the trees, the stone walls glassy wet, the iron grey clouds beyond. Winter's empire held the land and all its occupants. She was back in the old place. What would be would be.
"Will you take a lift, madam?" his laughing face called out through the rolled down window.
She walked around to the passenger side, got in beside him. It smelled of animal and hay.
"You're back again," he said.
The evening was a poem's last verse slipping away from them. She wanted to hang on to the words of it, the beauty. The sky gently lowering to dark, the ghosts of oak and hawthorn and the blackbird's threat to the coming night. Would she entice him this time?
"How are things?" she asked.
"Fairly quiet. This time of year, there wouldn't be much doing . . ." he lapsed into silence, slouched back in his seat, one hand steadying the wheel as they drove the empty roads.
"The kids?" she said just to fill the quiet. Rain was sifting down on them, trailing over the windscreen. She saw that they had felled some more of O'Sullivan's Wood. Bit by bit they'd clear it, letting on it was the storms and disease. She saw the wrecks of the great trees downed with their boughs amputated, neatly stacked for firewood. Eventually they'd sell out, make their money. Then the builders would move in and the place would be finally lost to the poem.
"Tom's started secondary," he said.
She remembered the boy as the puling, fat-cheeked wonder of his mother and father, walking him in his pram on a Sunday afternoon when she would present herself in front of them and watch for the desire in his father's eyes.
"A big boy now," she said.
"Aye. The little one misses him at school. She has to come home on her own, or Marie collects her." She saw that he was uncomfortable now that he'd said his wife's name.
"How's Marie?" She could not resist pushing the advantage.
"She's fine, as always," he answered.
You couldn't win with him. That was what kept her coming back. He slowed the car outside the house.
"Come in for a minute," she said. He began to make his excuses.
"Please," she said.
"I'll park back around the corner."
There was need in his voice, and guilt, there already. The house was still damp from its months of emptiness. Waiting for him to return she blew on the turf embers till the fire flamed up a bit, then put on some wood and more turf and filled the kettle.
He knocked quietly on the open front door before entering. She didn't respond, swilling out the teapot with boiling water, her back to him, coat still on in the cold. He hovered around the fire listening to the spits of it. The room was almost dark. she loved that. She would think of the failing light and the fire struggling to take hold. Those best moments of the return to their affair when it was fresh and needy after the months of dream and pain.
"How's London?" he asked to break the spell.
"Different to here, that's for sure."
She saw herself in the classroom, the faces on her - Bengali, Chinese, West Indian - with their London accents, their places unknown to her, hers to them. They and she working their way through a foreign curriculum, fulfilling requirements, doing what was deemed necessary, not asking why.
"They've made me head of English," she said. "It's more money, not much, but something. More work mostly."
"Very good," was all he said.
She put the teapot down in front of the fire after pouring out the two mugs. They sat apart on the sofa, nestling their tea. She knew he wanted to go. He stared into the fire. She watched the flickers of light across his eyes. His mood was turning. She could see that in the set of his face. He wanted to go but he wouldn't, not yet. She had only to touch him, reach across and brush her fingers against his. Then he'd be on top of her. He was waiting for that she knew. And dreading it too. She thought of the days to come, when she'd be back at work, back to her life, and he'd be with her every second, the need for him feeding her days. She'd have only this to savour then.
"I got a fright last time," she said suddenly. "I nearly rang . . . but I wouldn't. Anyway, it turned out to be a false alarm."
He had come inside her. Rutted her hard and come without withdrawing as he usually did. And cried out long and deeply his hunger for her. He was hers then, she had him then. Tenderness afterwards too. How he had kissed her skin, held on to her, his eyes she could see that, holding. She had taken it all back to London with her, elated, smiling inside over her secret and waiting, planning, counting the weeks. She would come home huge. Shock them all, march around with a pushchair a disgrace to the parish. And their child, there, beautiful, undeniable. Their love undeniable.
But no. The blood came. Ten days late but there it was. She went shopping. She was too angry to face school. She would have a new dress instead. In the changing room there were two full length mirrors so that she could see herself from every angle. She studied her body for ages, from the side, the back. She saw that she was beginning to change. Age was creeping over her, the girl was being left behind. She would be 30 soon. In the next cubicle a woman was chivvying her child, a small boy.
"Now I told you, David, what would happen if you didn't behave." The woman's tone was indulgent, kind, cruel. She began hitting the child. Through the flimsy wall she could hear the smacks against his face and head, rapid, repeated and insistent, the while the calm words.
"You know what happens David, don't you? Don't you?"
The boy was whimpering, the smacks continued. When she couldn't stand it any longer she threw open their door and white-faced and shaking with the new dress draped around her neck she said, "If you touch him again I'll fucking kill you."
She was more shocked at the outburst than the woman and child standing before her exposed in the tryst. The woman regained herself quickly. "But I've told him," she smiled at her. She was breathless from striking him.
"He knows what happens, he knows."
She saw that the woman was insane. The child held his arms over his head waiting, as much involved as his mother. And she was outside of it. She returned to her own cubicle, slumped down and cried. Saw her face in the mirror rupture into the grief that had been lurking so long, cried and cried, the dress still hanging around her neck, not caring who heard her. She had known then that it was over. Only skirmishes until the finish now. There was nothing to hold them. She could not keep coming back. It would all escape into memory, to be forgotten one day. She'd sell up the house, that was expected anyway, move permanently away. And the poem would go on without her.
Smoke and flame disappearing up the chimney. There was pleasure in that, she was thinking. About them was a circle of warmth beyond which was the cold darkness of abandonment, of winter. He was looking at her.
"Eileen," he said softly, calling her out of it.
She would touch him now, she thought. But she did not. Night was well down, rain lashing outside, wind starting up. The last skittering blackbird was holed up in its refuge against the night's held store. When she looked at him she saw that he was crying.
"Eileen," he said again. "I . . ."
She took his head in her arms and rocked them both. He sobbed, his face buried in her neck. She rocked and crooned to him.
"Ssh, now, ssh."
They made love there by the fire. The love was gentle and close this time. Winter love of warmth, of sadness, of passing away. Some comfort in the great barren empire holding them all in its grip, as it had always done. He slept afterwards, lying on top of her, a blanket thrown over them. She felt his weight pinning her down. She would take that back with her.