What You Will

‘I guess. I don’t know.’ Hilary looked a little dazed. ‘Do you think I’ll like this cereal? I never tried it all the time I was staying here. It looks so weird.’ Hilary thought she was off the hook.

‘It needs milk. Lawrence eats it,’ Gwen said with sympathetic diffidence. Then adopting a perky, administrative tone, ‘I can call him back and say next week instead of this? Is a week enough?’

Hilary put the cereal box down on the table and looked at Gwen. ‘Is it really important? I mean, do we have to set a particular date now?’

‘No. I mean – yes, it’s important. It’s harder for him to find the time once term starts.’

‘So he can’t come after I’m gone? I won’t be here long.’

‘He’s wonderful. You should meet him.’

‘Well, I don’t want to waste that, do I? A wonderful man? But I’m really not in the mood to meet a man right now, Gwen. It’s about the last thing I need. Don’t you think?’

Where does mood come into it? Gwen wondered. Either he’s the right man or he’s not. And knowing she was grooming things ever so slightly, pushing her luck, she said, ‘It’s not a date or anything. He’s an old friend of Lawrence’s – of both of ours.’

‘So you told him you want us to meet?’ Despite her fanfared emotional helplessness and her sleepy look, Hilary was nobody’s fool.

‘He comes here to supper – all the time. You happen to be staying with us.’ Gwen lifted her hands, absolving herself of setting anything up. ‘I haven’t told him a lot about you.’

‘What – that I’m roadkill? That someone needs to drag me to the shoulder before I get run over again and my guts squish out? Gwen, you said he’s wonderful, and you said that it’s important. So shouldn’t I be – well, at least shouldn’t I be looking my best? Maybe a few more days of real sleep, some exercise. I have to be ready to make an effort. Right now, I can’t really think or talk about anything apart from – from everything that’s happened to me since Eddie died.’

‘Maybe you should try. You need to get your mind off what’s happened. Just do something else. Distract yourself for a while, and let some time pass.’

‘Can’t I do that with you and Will and Lawrence? You guys are enough. And frankly, you’re all I can cope with right now. Christ, you’re bossy. And you must be at least two cups of coffee ahead of me.’ Hilary gave Gwen a camp smile. She stood up and looked around the counters until she spotted the coffee machine that during the weeks she had stayed in the flat she had never used because she had hurried out each morning as if to meet her destiny. The clear glass jug was dark with coffee at the bottom and the little red light was on.

Without a word, Gwen opened a cupboard, handed Hilary a mug, went to the fridge for the milk, hangdog, slack-footed. She was suddenly remorseful. ‘Hil. I’m sorry. Roland’s not a lot more than just us. That’s how well we know him. It’s just one evening.’

‘Do whatever you’d do if I weren’t here,’ Hilary said as she slurped. ‘But I reserve the right to hide in my room – or leave before he shows up.’

Gwen saw she might get her way; she decided to drop it for a while. ‘I got you some money,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if you need it or not.’ She pulled it from her pocket, held it out.

Hilary was surprised and embarrassed. Of course I need it, she thought. But despite herself she said, ‘I can’t take that, Gwen. God.’ What she was thinking was, Why does it feel like she’s forcing it on me? Is it just because she didn’t give me time to ask before she offered? And how the hell will I ask for it now?

‘Just in case you maybe don’t have pounds?’ Gwen put the money on the counter, and there it lay, burning a hole in the slate. ‘Do you want to go for a run with me now you’re up?’ Gwen asked. ‘We could do a little circuit down across Hammersmith Bridge and along the south side of the river to Putney?’

Hilary’s eyes focused hard at her; the glassy, washed-away blue brightened, sparked with enthusiasm. ‘So forget cereal. Give me five minutes.’

Outside, the first morning of October glowed at them; summer grown brittle, a little shabby, along the car-lined street. Gwen set off in front because the pavement was narrow and uneven, blistered by tree roots, and because she knew the way.

‘These poor trees,’ Hilary said, looking up and around. ‘They made me sad in the summer with their branches lopped off, trying to squeeze a leaf out of those knobs they have left. It looks even worse now that the green is turning.’

‘It’s what cities do, yeah? Cramping us all, making us into grotesques. The council prunes the trees like that because the roots are getting at everyone’s foundations. Lifting them and breaking the walls.’

‘All about insurance probably.’ Hilary puffed out the words in even bursts. ‘Just like the States.’

‘Getting like that here. How people think they can be insured against nature, against what grows, I don’t know. There are just so many of us on the planet now. Everything, everyone, has to give way. In the country, you know, those trees would have room to achieve their true shape. It’s why I can’t paint here, except to finish things. I have to have the countryside. The city doesn’t feel big enough. Or even – convincing. All hemmed in and restricted.’

Hilary called out to her as Gwen trotted ahead: ‘I don’t go fast any more, Gwen.’

‘Neither do I. Don’t worry.’ Gwen tempered her pace ever so slightly, her feet making almost no sound as she loped along. ‘Your legs are so much longer than mine, I thought you’d be tripping over me.’

‘Why’d you move from the cottage, then? I thought you guys liked the city?’

‘We like it. We need it anyway. Maybe people need a lot of things, not just one thing. It seemed like a question of survival for me – to grow. Some kind of abrasion. I was alone too much. And the company out there wasn’t any you’d really choose on purpose. But now that we’re here in town, I actually spend a lot of time trying to avoid people because there are just too many around. Especially if you have a child. All the school stuff. And if you really want to get any work done.’ Gwen’s voice grew expressionless with conserving breath.

For a little while, Hilary followed her in silence, feeling her brain sigh and expand with physical relief, feeling muscles let go that she hadn’t realised were tense. Her back was stiff, her ankles were swollen, but these were local irritations, aeroplane-wear; underneath them, she felt strong, a flow of energy starting as her skin grew warm and damp.

At the Great West Road, by Hammersmith roundabout, they had to wait for the lights to get across the rush of traffic. They stamped around, hands on hips, elbows flapping, then crossed underneath the thumping flyover and the cool, stony shadow of the church, its great, gold-rimmed clock almost on noon. The wide world and the bright air opened all around them as they bounded on to the pale green arch of the bridge; the long slings of cable swooped up over their heads, the silver-brown river slid long and slow through the broad, exposed mudflats beneath, their shaking footsteps were lost in the size and glory of it all. Cars and buses roared by, and the acrid exhaust mingled in their noses with the salt stench of the ebb tide.

Down they plunged on the far bank, through the translucent, yellow foliage and the dank air hovering under the bridge, then settled their pace side by side on the pebbly path. Seagulls wheeled and called over the lonely, squint-making shine of the river, foraging the urban bend as if it were the ocean’s edge. A pair of clean white swans nestled and waddled in the algae-streaked pools.

Hilary and Gwen grew easy with one another, slimy with sweat, breathing the layer of air that runners breathe, a chin length higher as the head tilts up and back ever so slightly. And in the depths of the mind, they were beginning to swim the channel of blue thought which grooves deeper, more vivid, with heartily coursing blood.

‘I can’t believe I never did this all summer,’ Hilary said, happy. ‘When was the last time we ran together?’

‘Before Will?’

‘But it reminds me of college. Along the Charles. When we used to train for crew.’

‘And see – a boat appears before your very eyes as if you had summoned it.’ Gwen stuck her jaw towards it. ‘Maybe boys from St Paul’s? There are boathouses back there, and more further along. Lots of crews working out here all the time.’

They were getting inside each other’s heads now, inside the same flash of memory, locked in step as the boat slid towards them among the trees. They both heard the sucking slap as the pale blades cut the water, both delighted at the sudden, mighty thrust of speed as eight lean backs curled hard and round and the prow shot towards them, blades kicking free of the water again, flattening in the air with the deep, unison thunk against the oarlocks. Then again. And again. The boat wobbled a little between strokes, the boys’ long, knobby bodies awkward, uncertain, as they came up their slides, arms and legs pretzeling crazily around their neat, clinging hands, the cox shouting, restless, his elbow flexed rigid up behind him in the stern.

‘The cox is overruddering,’ Gwen grunted. ‘Throwing off their balance between strokes.’

She spun around and jogged backwards a few steps in the scatter of fallen leaves, looking on as the boat receded upriver, and she saw the fresh, devoted faces, tousle-haired, of the stroke, the seven, suffused with the blood of effort, eyes down, determined, bearing it. Then Hilary’s face came between her and the boys as Hilary ran along towards her, so that she remembered how Hilary used to dive and pull, dive and pull, facing her in the stroke seat, her every movement perfectly matched to Gwen’s commands. And behind Hilary, seven more gigantic, muscled Venuses, bulging, nearly cracking, with conviction as their thighs and stomachs doubled up then exploded, doubled up then exploded, lungs raging for air, nausea scorching chests and throats, arms and backs racked out to the edge of violence, and the hard pads of their calluses rubbed and eaten at by the slippery, fat, unquenchable wood of the blade handles.

Hilary used to be taciturn then, Gwen thought, pudgy and enslaveable. But that beastlike willingness pointed out to Lawrence, like the plunging salaams, had given way to something more sceptical, more self-regarding. And she was thinner now, Gwen noticed, lithe with maturity.

‘You could still do it, couldn’t you, Gwen? Cox that boat. You’re light as a twig. Look at you, scuttling all around me like a spider. And your voice – big as ever.’

‘I could cox a boat,’ Gwen agreed, turning back to run alongside her.

It was exactly what Gwen had said the day they had met. ‘I could cox a boat.’ There had been no maybe, no hesitation.

‘Remember when I came up to you in our Greek class, that first time?’

‘On your quest for short people?’

‘Was it just because you were short?’

Hilary had noticed her up in the front row and brought her along to practise the same afternoon, like a prize. Around this time of year, a few weeks earlier. Indian summer, humid, bright. The delirium of starting college still on them. Everything new. Everything desirable.

The others had treated them like a pair: here was Hilary’s friend she was introducing. Which had made them intensely aware of each other.

In the shadowy quiet of the boathouse, a dozen or so big girls leaning up against the long, smooth-hulled shells overturned on their racks, a few more sitting on the concrete floor, bare legs crossed or negligently splayed, the coach droning on about trials. In their innocence. Most of them were there because it was offered. None of them had a clue. They were all nervous, eyes on the floor, faking cool, glancing up now and again to check the postures, the expressions, the chemistry of the group, furtively hunting for anything that could be pegged, judged.

We played along with it, Hilary thought, side by side through all the sizing up. And she could remember the anxiety, as the impatient seconds ticked by, filled with talking rather than the doing craved by every physique in the room. What did we know about each other? Only a hunch. And we both kept silent, poker-faced, made the same bet. That’s how it started. Over the gruelling months that followed, unimaginable sweat and exhaustion, they privately crept towards the commitment they publicly seemed to have made already.