Our Tragic Universe Read Free Page B

tomorrow if I’m still alive.’
    She looked at her watch and then walked away down the Embankment towards Lemon Cottage, her red shawl movinglike a flag in the wind. I remembered a Zen story about a flag in the wind. Does the wind move, or does the flag move? Two monks are arguing about this when a wise man turns up and says, ‘The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.’ I walked on slowly, with B re-sniffing benches as if nothing had happened. Libby didn’t look behind her, and I saw her get smaller and smaller until she reached the corner and went off towards Bayard’s Cove. Of course, as any scientist would tell you, she didn’t really get smaller and smaller; she simply got further away.
     
    The wind breathed heavily down the river, and I half-looked at the little ripples and wakes in the blackish, greenish water as I tried to hurry B home. There was no sign of Libby’s car. I was watching the river, not the benches, so when someone said ‘Hello,’ I jumped. It was a man, half hidden in the gloom. B was already sniffing his ancient walking boots, and he was stroking her between her ears. He was wearing jeans and a duffel coat, and his messy black and grey hair was falling over his face. Had he seen what had happened? He must have done. Did he hear me suggest the whole thing? He looked up. I already knew it was Rowan. So he had come. Had he been coming every Sunday for all this time?
    ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘You’re …’
    ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Chilly, isn’t it?’
    ‘Freezing.’
    ‘You OK?’
    ‘Yeah. I think so. How are you?’
    ‘Cold. Depressed. Needed to get some fresh air. I’ve been at the Centre all day working on my Titanic chapter. Can you believe I’m still at it? I should be grateful I’m still alive, I suppose. Everyone said retiring would kill me.’
    Rowan and his partner Lise had relocated to Dartmouth just over a year before to help look after Lise’s mother. They lived in a renovated old boathouse near the castle, with spectacular views of the mouth of the harbour. Everything inside it was tasteful and minimal: nothing was old or shabby, although it must have been once. Rowan had not yet retired when I went there for a dinner party. Lise wore too much make-up and spoke to Rowan as if he was a child. She told stories about him getting lost for three hours in a shopping mall, wearing jeans to her company’s black-tie Christmas party and breaking the new dishwasher just by touching it. I’d pictured him alone in an airy office at Greenwich University, with an open window and freshly cut grass outside, surrounded by books and drinking a cup of good coffee, secretly dreading these dinner parties. I’d wondered then why he was retiring at all.
    ‘Most people retire and then take up gardening or DIY, don’t they?’ I said. ‘They don’t go and get another job as director of a maritime centre. I don’t think you really are retired, by most normal definitions of the word.’
    He sighed. ‘Pottering about with model ships all day. Wind machines. Collections of rocks and barnacles. Interactive tide tables. It’s not rocket science. Still, I’ve had time to take up yoga.’
    So he wasn’t going to mention Libby and her car. We were going to have a ‘normal’ conversation, slightly gloomy, slightly flirty, like the ones we used to have when he came to Torquaylibrary every day before the Maritime Centre opened – to do paperwork – and we ended up going for lunch and coffee all the time. Would we kiss at the end of this conversation, as we had done at the end of the last one?
    ‘How’s your writing going?’ he asked me.
    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of. I’m back on chapter one of my “proper” novel yet again, re-writing. The other day I worked out that I’ve deleted something like a million words of this novel in the last ten years. You’d think that would make it really good, but it hasn’t. It’s a bit of a mess now, but never