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Commencing Our Descent
Suzannah Dunn
Sadie is in a tailspin: will anyone break her fall?Having had more than her share of misfortune, Sadie Summerfield seems to have finally ended up lucky. She has the perfect homelife. For the first time in a very long time, she has a future.So when another man, a cautious, subdued man, so very different from her own warm-hearted husband, drifts into Sadie’s life, she must ask herself the question: Is she ready to risk everything for the sake of love? And besides, shouldn’t affairs begin with a shiver of danger, with the thrill of the chase, rather than this?In Commencing Our Descent Suzannah Dunn proves she has unrivalled access to the most hidden, most intimate workings of our lives and longings, our marriages and affairs, our secrets and lies. Wry, sharp and witty, this is her most astute and affecting novel yet.Suzannah here combines the sharpness and tautness of her short stories with the warmth and detail of her novels, and achieves perfect balance.
Commencing Our Descent
Suzannah Dunn
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_0b828b82-a130-567d-bfda-2495691613db)
Flying too high
With some guy
In the sky
Is my idea
Of nothing to do.
Yet I get a kick
Out of you.
‘I Get a Kick Out of You’
Cole Porter
CONTENTS
Cover (#uf27322ac-d9a1-5121-8c55-8ceed6a37f6d)
Title Page (#udc503a58-1e02-5820-a051-67502033a180)
Epigraph (#ud9fb5191-8f22-5088-8c8d-be073df51846)
Things which are Not (#uae6db24d-ba88-569e-9598-5f633231ced8)
A Weep from a Wound (#ufacffb1f-4397-597b-8599-e4245bd475eb)
Treaclier (#u36f8d51c-b4dc-5627-8d29-85c3e68e23bc)
Quick, Slow (#u6e7e47ec-131d-5bae-a0ee-b8cd3d370af7)
Dead Give-Aways (#u9d5cafc3-b699-57f3-9ae9-e2cd99a1125a)
Tripwire Tense (#u9ba3a2fc-f9f8-584e-8ede-43ad94f6f66c)
Ruinous Blue (#ue80261fa-985f-5c44-ba03-9f82d289ec45)
Waylaid (#ud5d6368f-c7b3-575b-b5c1-3edebd5ef8b4)
Wish (#u495796b4-e4da-58e9-ac1c-9d75630aea8b)
Make No Bones (#uac3b48c3-9fe9-55a0-a2fc-e1cd93b86fb0)
Good as Gold (#uae1f751b-9a55-5b04-83a2-dc05313d2800)
Acknowledgements (#uf5196455-91cc-581f-8a00-f2aa60f0040f)
Keep Reading (#uf52aea9c-b835-5800-ba39-b6b2b95030f6)
About the Author (#u3c787629-23f2-55d2-80ec-ed267a734864)
By the Same Author (#ub68cf5f8-680e-5bf3-864d-31a466f8a4ce)
Praise (#uf5d13307-5cae-5b52-9793-8973019dff45)
Copyright (#ub66fde30-c346-5ad2-9744-692bf8d9e433)
About the Publisher (#u262f06a1-ad8a-582e-9f71-b9b566461936)
THINGS WHICH ARE NOT (#ulink_472ab906-cb38-5261-86c0-745a646a72aa)
‘Decisions? Don’t look at me.’
But this is exactly what he does: he stops sawing through the thin copper pipe as I reach the top stair, he turns around and looks. And when he has looked for several seconds, he says, ‘You’re so pale, you know, Sadie.’
Jason’s own hair and eyes are the colour of charcoal, perhaps a touch warmer, closer to burned wood, scorches on wood.
‘Yes, thanks, I do know.’
My pallor is more than compensated for by hair the colour of pomegranate pulp. I am a lucky redhead, if that is not a contradiction in terms: none of the legendary temper, no incendiary freckles, and my skin lacks that blue tint of exposed bone. Philip says that my skin is the colour of Chardonnay; but he is kind, he is my husband. He says that I caramelise to muscat whenever I catch the sun.
Jason says, ‘But because you’re pale, you’ll always look young. Younger than me, anyway.’
‘I am younger than you.’
He is thirty-five, I am thirty-one. Earlier in our lives, when we had had fewer years, four of them would have made the difference of a generation: he would have been playing rugby on Saturday mornings when I was playing with my dolls; he would have been into punk when I was impressed by Genesis; smoking dope when I was sipping Pernod-and-black. Nowadays, four years is no time at all, but our lives are incomparable for other reasons. He is a father of four, the eldest of whom is fifteen.
‘Decision number one: I want to know where you’d prefer me to run this pipe. You have two options: beneath these floorboards here, or …’ he swivels, to point, ‘along this wall, which is less pretty but less work for me, less of a bill for you.’
I sit down on the top stair. ‘Give me a moment.’
He resumes his sawing: a sound effect for a music hall magician. ‘Enjoy your walk?’
Hal’s walk. Before Hal came, four months ago, I rarely walked as far as the local shops. When I agreed to take him on, I read in a book that a Labrador should have an hour each day off the lead. And I do everything by the book. He lives for his trips to the park, which seems very little to ask. So I take him twice each day. Between these excursions, he dozes on his bed, slumped or curled but somehow tuned in for the sound of my arm slithering into a sleeve or for the change in tempo of my movements that implies that I am going to leave the house. Sometimes he knows before I do that I am thinking of leaving. I have had to become careful, self-conscious of my signals, because I hate to turn him down, to have to watch the droop of his ears, those blond velvet triangles. Whenever I do leave the house without him, his stare – sideways, heavily-lidded – seems to accuse me of going alone to the park.
During our walk this morning, the clear sky was punctured by a knuckle of half-moon. Leaf-laden trees made a foreshortened horizon of green thunderclouds. The hedgerows were scattered with convolvulus flowers like washed but un-ironed hankerchiefs. Hal and I encountered other regulars. Firstly, the childminders: a bespectacled, tattooed man and a hennaed woman with their two battalions. Childminders, surely, because the children are too numerous, too similarly-aged and dissimilarly dressed to be their own. Four toddlers were strapped into two double buggies. Others were on foot, on small and unsteady feet, taking small and sometimes reluctant, even petulant, steps.
Further on, I exchanged nods and smiles with the polite middle-aged couple as he, with her support, was venturing from his wheelchair; he managed a little more than last week. Then we passed the elderly, hobbling man and woman, both of them as arthritic as their dogs, her Alsatian and his dachshund. We were passed in turn by the cheerful, late-thirties mum who strides behind her baby’s plush pushchair and kicks a tennis ball ahead for her puppy to chase. We avoided the wrinkled but elaborately made-up woman who throws a small plastic naked doll for her miniature dog to fetch. Today, there were irregulars too: one of the benches was occupied by a canoodling couple of kids with masses of matted hair and layers of army surplus clothing. They were sharing a bottle of vodka for their elevenses. As Hal neared, they bellowed to their dog to ‘Play nicely’.
None of them will be there when we go back this afternoon: by four o’clock the day will have drained from the park. Even the groundsmen will have stopped work and gone home. Hal and I, too, fail to take the afternoons as seriously as the mornings: in our half-hour we will manage a lap rather than a lap and a half. A mere break, a breath of fresh air. Hal will be contemplative, his nose close to the ground, his concentration as thorough as that of an avid reader.
‘Anyway, this pipe. Oh, don’t pull that face, Sadie. And don’t tell me that I’ll have to wait for the man of the house to come home before I can have a decision.’
‘You could build an Eiffel Tower from these pipes before he comes home.’
‘Still working hard?’
‘Still working hard.’
‘Still at the hostel?’
‘Manager now.’
‘And how is he?’
‘The same. Fine. Thriving. Busy.’
‘Good. Let’s give the Eiffel Tower a miss and hurry up with this.’ He brandishes the sawn-off pipe.
‘I’m a Libran.’
‘So?’
‘So, I can’t make decisions.’
‘You believe in all that?’
‘No. Just happens to be true, in my case.’
Hal is coming up behind me. He is only ever inelegant when on the stairs, his four legs encountering something designed for two. Determinedly digging his way up the steps, plucky but gawky, he looks like a puppy.
‘Hal’s a Taurus.’
‘Hal’s a dog.’
‘He’s a typical Taurus.’
‘He’s a typical dog, Sadie.’
While I rub Hal’s head, his ears, he is butting my hands. I am perversely proud of his prettiness. Would I love him quite so much if he were plain? I did adopt him unseen. His previous owners, friends of friends, were going to live abroad for several years. Having been persuaded to take him, I drove the two hundred miles to fetch him. I had been told that he was a Labrador cross: the look of a Labrador, but smaller. I had not been told that he had the slender face of a deer, that he was all cheekbones.
‘You spoil that mutt.’
‘So? Isn’t life hard enough without a bit of spoiling? And he’s four. Didn’t people spoil you when you were four?’
‘I was a person.’
‘When you were four? You sure, Jason?’
Hal, with his impeccable manners, his love of home and liking for everything to be just so, seems human. He is more domesticated than I am.
Jason’s mobile phone screams from the tool box. During all the years that he has been coming here, he has carried this particular prop: a workhorse of a mobile phone, antiquated and bulky.
He tells me, ‘I’m not answering.’
‘Mobiles are for answering; that’s what they’re for.’
Despairing of me, he snatches the phone from the box, stops the noise, listens intently.
‘Yep. Okay. Six-ish. In a while, crocodile.’
He slots down the aerial, and I think of the shop on the way to the park: For all your satellite and aerial needs. Needs that I do not know that I have. Every day, I resist the urge to go in there and ask, All my satellite and aerial needs?
Jason says, ‘My eldest: could I pick her up from rehearsal on my way home.’
I am awed by his daughters’ social schedules, by their mother’s fixing of old-fashioned girlhoods for them: stage school, horse-riding, hockey club and music lessons. The household seems to run like a finishing school, but the finish is a tough one: from what Jason says, the activities do not revolve around an aim to become accomplished, to learn, but a desire to be equipped: with competitiveness and a sense of fair play, improved posture and strengthened bones.
As a child, I had no place in any world apart from that of my mother’s. Unless I was in school, I went everywhere with her, which was nowhere: the park, the shops. The only advice that I remember from her was that there is nothing more important than a good marriage, but she never told me how to make one because she did not know. Odd to think of my parents now, in early retirement, relatively companionable, apparently having reached some kind of truce.
‘Just one more year of school for my eldest.’
‘And then?’
‘Wants to work in a shoe shop. Says she loves shoes.’ He frowns into the tool box. ‘Does that mean that I love power showers and central heating systems? Suppose I do, though.’ He looks up at me. ‘Do you think you’ll have kids, now?’
‘I have to find a job first: that’s the plan.’ Instantly, I realise how ridiculous this must sound to him. I try to explain, ‘I need a life, Jason.’
‘You have a life, don’t you?’ He is genuinely puzzled.
I used to be a carer: that is the currently favoured term. Caring is the buzz word for what I did, here, at home, for eight years. So perhaps, now that it is all over, I should turn professional. There is nothing professional, though, about the jobs in nursing homes that are advertised every week in our local newspaper. Unsociable hours and low pay. If I had such a job, I would see even less of Philip. Hard work for very little money, he says, and we have no real need of the money, so why work simply for the sake of working? He says that I should do something that I want to do. But this is exactly my problem: what do I want to do? What can I do? I have a sense that I should train for something, learn something, but training is extensive, expensive, and I have no experience of anything, so no one would want me for their oversubscribed courses. And even if I did train, would there be a job for me? My problem is that I have been away from the world for too long. I cannot imagine how other people cope with the power struggles, timetables, deadlines, and expectations, not least the expectation that they will leave the house every day, for most of the day. No, I do not want to do anything. But I know that I cannot stay as I am.
‘You’re looking for a job?’
I wrinkle my nose: ambivalent confirmation. This morning’s cursory look through the newspaper ended prematurely in a perusal of adverts, one of which was entitled, Impotence problems?
Impotence problems? Problems over and above the impotence?
There were other adverts: Hair loss?, Flabby belly?, Panic attacks?
And I thought that I had problems.
‘Coffee?’
‘Wonderful.’
As soon as I move, Hal whips from his prone position. He is due his lunch. What would he have done if I had forgotten? I love to watch him with his food. Fast but fastidious, he laps up the gravy before beginning on the biscuits. His tail, usually wagging, will droop: serious happiness.
