The Outcast Read Free

room.
    Lewis waited until he heard his father say something to Alice, and then the sound of the door, closing.The wine bottle on the table was empty. He looked at the liquor on the sideboard. There was no gin.There was brandy and whisky, in decanters, and glasses next to the decanters. He hadn’t had a drink since the night he’d been arrested. He could have one now. It wasn’t as if he’d decided not to drink, he wouldn’t be breaking any promise. He took a breath and waited and then got up and stepped out of the open window onto the grass and walked up the lawn.

    The woods were dark already. The sky was pale and the house was lit up behind him, but there was dark ahead. Lewis looked into the trees and he thought he could hear the river – but he

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    couldn’t hear the river, the river couldn’t have got closer. He felt a coldness go over him at the thought of the water coming closer to the house.
    ‘All right?’
    Alice was standing next to him and he hadn’t realised and he hadn’t heard her.
    He looked at her and tried to pull his mind back to where they were.
    ‘I wanted to say,’ she began,‘I wanted to say – let’s try and be friends, this time, shall we?’
    ‘Of course.’
    She looked so worried, he couldn’t disappoint her. ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘he missed you.’
    It was kind of her to say so, but he didn’t think it was true. ‘Was it bad?’
    He wasn’t sure what she meant, and then realised she was asking him about prison. She didn’t really want to know, though.
    ‘There are worse things.’ ‘We didn’t come.’
    They hadn’t come. At the beginning, when he was so fright- ened, it had been unbearable that they didn’t, and he had written to them a few times, asking, but after that it was easier not seeing them and hardly hearing from them, and he’d forgotten about it – or nearly.
    Alice let the silence go on as long as she could and then she tried again. She put her hand out, indicating his arm, stretching her fingers lightly towards it.
    ‘No more silliness?’ she asked.
    He pulled his arm away and put his hand in his pocket. ‘Right,’ she said,‘right,’ and she smiled again, apologetic this

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    time. The grass was wet with dew and she had taken off her shoes to come out to him and carried them now as she went back to the house.

    It was the same dream, and when he woke in darkness and sweat, and cold with the fear of it, he had to sit up and put his feet on the ground, and make himself keep his eyes open, and tell himself he wasn’t there and it wasn’t true, or even if it was, it was an old truth and he should forget it. He’d had the dream while he had been in prison, but much less than before and sometimes not for weeks at a time and he’d hoped it was leaving him.
    He waited for the fear to drain away and to feel like he was breathing air again, and not water, and he kept his eyes open and looked for a moon outside the window, but there wasn’t one. He thought of Alice, pointing at him like that, and his forearm reminded him of itself, like a separate thing making him look and, after a while, he did. It was too dark to see the scars, but he could feel them with his fingertips, both numb and raw; a feeling of wrongness.
    He went to the window and tried to make real things from the shapes of the garden. He could see the apple tree and past it he could see the line of the woods meeting the sky. He made himself stand still, but it was very hard to be still and very hard to stand there, and he would have clawed out of his skin if he could, just to get away from himself. He told himself it was a luxury to be able to get up in the night without disturbing anyone and a blessing to be able to walk to a window if he wanted, and there to be no bars on it, and a garden beneath. He told himself all that, but it didn’t mean anything.

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    PART ONE ‌

    C hapter O ne ‌
    1945

    Gilbert was demobbed in November and Elizabeth took Lewis up to London to meet