Border Crossing Read Free Page A

was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.
    His mother (not that she knew the details, thank God!) blamed their difficulties on the new pattern of their lives. For the past year Lauren had been working in London, teaching at St Margaret’s School of Art, coming home only at weekends. ‘Husband and wife should stick together,’ his mother had said, sniffing over the tea towel she was using to polish a glass. ‘You and Dad were apart when he was in the army.’ ‘And a fat lot of good it did us,’ she flashed back at him.
    But marriage was different now, he told her. Women didn’t expect to sacrifice their careers to their husbands.
    ‘Marriage doesn’t change as much as you think,’ she said, with another sniff. ‘You’d be better off sticking together.’
    At the time he’d dismissed her as old-fashioned. Now it didn’t seem as simple as that. In his bleaker moments, he wondered whether he and Lauren hadn’t separated already, without even letting themselves know they were doing it. He could have gone to London with her. He was on sabbatical at the moment, writing up a three-year research project, and books can be written anywhere. There would have been nothing to stop him e-mailing chapters to his colleagues for comment, and if he had needed a face-to-face meeting he could have come back for a few days, or overnight. He hadn’t gone because he wanted to stay here. And since then, month by month, the sex had deteriorated. He blamed thermometers, calendars and pots of urine, and okay, he did find them a total turn-off, but there was something else he wasn’t admitting. Perhaps he’d just voted with… Well. Not with his feet.
    ‘Why?’ Lauren asked, after one of his not infrequent failures.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    But she was having no truck with that. He was a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. It was his job to know.
    He’d downed one tumbler of whisky, and was starting on the next, when Lauren came into the kitchen, and wrapped her arms around him. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘What you did was very brave and I’m sorry.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘For hating you for doing it.’
    Suddenly they were both laughing, and, for a few moments, it was all right.
    *
    It was late evening before he remembered the post. He’d left the house yesterday in a tremendous hurry because he’d thought he was going to be late for Lauren’s train, and didn’t want to leave her stranded at the station. The postman had met him a few yards from the front door and handed him the mail. Without bothering to glance at it, he’d shoved it into his coat pocket, and then, absorbed in discussing the difficulties of the marriage, he’d forgotten all about it.
    Lauren was loading the dishwasher. ‘Where did you put my coat, darling?’ he called downstairs.
    ‘Utility room.’
    As soon as he lifted it off the peg, he knew. River mud and, mixed in with that, a whiff of stale tobacco. He thrust his hand into the right pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. It was immediately obvious what had happened. He’d wrapped his own coat round the boy, because it was heavier, and that was the one he’d handed into the ambulance. He couldn’t put off trying to get it back, because there were spare keys in the pocket, and oh God, yes, his address on the envelopes. Admittedly, the boy wasn’t in much of a state to contemplate burglary, but you didn’t know. You didn’t know who or what he was. He could be a drug addict desperate for cash.
    ‘I seem to’ve got the wrong coat, darling. I’ll have to go to the hospital.’
    ‘Can’t it wait?’
    ‘Well, no, not really. There were letters in it.’ He didn’t want to alarm her by mentioning the keys.
    It was only a short drive to the General, but then he had to spend fifteen minutes trying to find somewhere to park. Visiting hour. Cars crammed bumper to bumper in every legitimate, and illegitimate, space.
    The casualty department was packed. On a bench near