She had never once moped. She re-created herself. She did it for the tall attractive doctor. She did it for the young man in the lake.
‘My sister also had a near-death experience,’ said Tony. ‘A horseriding accident. After her accident, she changed. Her career. Everything about her life. She got right into gardening.’ He gave Masha an uneasy look. ‘I didn’t like it.’
‘You don’t like gardening?’ said Masha, teasing a little.
He gave her a half-smile, and she saw a flash of a more attractive man.
‘I think I just didn’t want my sister to change,’ he said. ‘It felt like she’d become a stranger. Maybe it felt like she’d experienced something I couldn’t understand.’
‘People are frightened of what they don’t understand,’ said Masha. ‘I never believed in life after death before that. Now I do. And I live a better life because of it.’
‘Right,’ said Tony. ‘Yeah.’
Again Masha waited.
‘Anyway . . .’ Tony exhaled and patted his thighs, as if he were done. Masha would get nothing else of interest out of him. It did not matter. The next twenty-four hours would tell her so much more about this man. He would learn things he did not know about himself.
A glorious sense of calm settled upon her as she watched him leave the room, hitching up his pants with one hand. Those last remnants of doubt were gone. Maybe it was because of the thoughts of her son.
The risks were calculated. The risks were justified.
No-one ever ascended a mountain without risk.
chapter twenty-six
Napoleon
It was dawn at Tranquillum House. The fifth day of the retreat.
Napoleon parted the wild horse’s mane three times both sides.
He enjoyed the soft swooping moves of tai chi, and this was one of his favourite moves, although he heard his knees crunch like a tyre on gravel as he bent his legs. His physio said it was nothing to worry about: people Napoleon’s age crunched. It was just middle-aged cartilage.
Yao led this morning’s class in the rose garden, quietly and calmly naming each move for the nine guests who stood in a semicircle around him, all wearing their green Tranquillum House dressing-gowns. People seemed to be wearing the robes more often than not now. On the horizon behind Yao, two hot-air balloons ascended so slowly above the vineyards it looked like a painting. Napoleon and Heather had done that once, on a romantic weekend away: wine-tasting, antique shops; multiple lives ago, before children.
It was interesting: when you have children you think your life has changed forever, and it’s true, to an extent, but it’s nothing compared to how your life changes after you lose a child.
When Masha, an extraordinarily fit and healthy-looking woman, clearly passionate about what she did (his wife mistrusted passion and Zoe was still young enough to find it embarrassing, but Napoleon found it admirable), had spoken on the first day about how this experience would change them ‘in ways they could never have imagined’, Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.
While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation.
‘The white crane spreads its wings,’ said Yao, and everyone moved in graceful unison with him. It was quite beautiful to see.
Napoleon, who stood at the back, as always (he’d learned to stand at the back of every audience once he hit six foot three), watched his wife and daughter lift their arms together. They both bit their bottom lips like chipmunks when they concentrated.
He heard the knees of the guy next to him crunch too, which was pleasing, because Napoleon guessed he was at least a decade younger than him. Even Napoleon could see this guy was notably handsome. He looked at Heather to see if she was maybe checking out the good-looking guy, but her eyes were opaque, like a doll’s eyes; as usual, she was somewhere deep and sad within herself.
Heather was broken.
She had always been fragile. Like a piece of delicate china.
Early on in their relationship, he thought she was feisty, funny, a tough chick, athletic and capable, the sort of girl you could take to the football or camping, and he was right, she was exactly that type of girl. She was into her sport, she loved camping and she was never high-maintenance or needy. The opposite: she found it hard to admit she needed anyone or anything. When they first started going out, she once broke her to
e trying to move a bookshelf on her own, when Napoleon was on his way over and could have lifted that piece of plywood junk with one hand. But no, she had to do it herself.
The fragility beneath that feisty demeanour came out slowly, in odd ways: a peculiar attitude towards certain foods that may have just been a sensitive stomach, but may have been something more; an inability to make eye contact if an argument got too emotional or to say ‘I love you’ without bracing her chin, as if she were preparing to be punched. He’d thought, romantically, that he could keep her funny, fragile little heart protected, like a tiny bird in the palm of his hand. He’d thought, full of love and testosterone, that he would protect his woman from bad men and heavy furniture and upsetting food.
When he first met her odd, detached parents he understood that Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it. Heather’s parents weren’t abusive, but they were just chilly enough to make you shiver. Napoleon became excessively loving in their presence, as if he could somehow make them love his wife the way she should be loved. ‘Doesn’t Heather look great in this dress?’ he’d say. ‘Did Heather tell you she came top in her midwifery exams?’ Until one day Heather mouthed the words: Stop it. So he stopped it, but he still touched her more than usual whenever they visited her family, desperate to convey through his touch: You are loved, you are loved, you are so, so loved.