Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker Page B

it. ‘Got it!’ the boy called.
    She went into the living room. He was standing in a corner holding a cable that came down through the ceiling.
    ‘Now there’s a moment’s tension while we see if we can plug it in somewhere on the TV,’ he said.
    She needed to sit down. The boy in the yellow light of the lamp, happy to have found the aerial cable; the wood-burning stove whose coals she had raked over like Cinderella earlier that morning, blowing to get it burning again without matches. She watched him lift the TV out of the cardboard box and put it on the floor in the corner. He went down on one knee and fiddled with the back of the set, his T-shirt creeping up to reveal a strip of lower back above the waistband of his jeans. ‘Done it,’ he said. ‘Now, a power point.’
    ‘There.’ She pointed to the double socket the lamp was plugged into.
    He plugged the TV in too and turned it on. A picture appeared immediately: a rough sea, people in rowing boats bobbing around what looked like the wing of a small plane. ‘
Real Rescues
,’ Bradwen said. ‘Every morning from quarter past nine to ten o’clock.’
    ‘Fantastic,’ she said. ‘Turn it off.’
    He turned it off and stood up. ‘Shall I carry on with the trees?’
    ‘If you don’t mind. I find it very heavy work.’
    ‘Of course I don’t mind.’ He looked at her.
    ‘Are you going to finish that path too?’ she asked.
    ‘Sure. It’s my job. That’s what I get paid for.’
    ‘But not tomorrow?’
    ‘If that’s OK by you. My time’s my own.’
    ‘Mine too,’ she said.
    ‘Maybe we can do a section together?’
    ‘I would very much like to go up that mountain sometime.’
    He went upstairs and came down soon afterwards with his coat and hat on. ‘Do I use a kitchen chair?’
    ‘Yes. It’s still out there. I forgot to bring it in.’ She didn’t move from the sofa, even though she wished she was standing next to him at the front door.
    He pulled on his boots and went out, calling the dog. A gust of cold air blew into the room. She lit a cigarette.
    After a while she got up to put a log in the stove. Then she swept the kitchen floor. An old kettle was steaming gently on the cooker. Now and then she looked out. Sometimes Bradwen was standing on the chair sawing, sometimes he carried a branch to the pile against the low garden wall and disappeared almost entirely in the mist. The dog was nowhere in sight. She wondered if he’d noticed that she’d lain on his divan.

35
    She sat on the sofa in the living room watching
Escape to the Country
. Bradwen was doing the shopping in the car. Sam was lying at her feet. While an agitated couple walked around on the screen with the woman shouting, ‘I’d rather die than give up my cats,’ she wept silently. The wood-burning stove, the big cooker, the new TV and radio, theboy and the dog, the garden. ‘Dog,’ she said and Sam raised his head, licking the back of her hand. How on earth had Dickinson done that, withdrawing further and further, writing poetry as if her life depended on it, and dying? The life of the spirit, human truth – or authenticity? – expressed through the imagination and not by deeds. She sipped her red wine. Always red wine, as if it were some kind of tonic. Her uncle used to drink a medicinal glass of Pleegzuster Bloedwijn every night. Did they still make that? Red wine fortified with health-giving minerals? ‘Watch the cat,’ said the woman on TV. She climbed a staircase with a hideous carpet, neither stroking nor paying any other attention to the cat, which was lying on one of the steps. At least, she assumed her uncle drank a glass every night; she didn’t know what he did when she wasn’t there. She wondered what the boy would bring home. She had wanted to give him a shopping list but he wouldn’t have it. He also refused the money she tried to give him. She thought briefly about her husband and saw him before her: pulling the laces of his running shoes tight,