from Distorting the Moon
by Suzanne Bosworth

Novel in progress

They were in the church the next day when he told her. Evening sun sang colour through the medieval stained glass story of Mary Magdalen washing the feet of Jesus. Dust spun in lazy orbit.
       ‘It’s not fair to Jayne. I can’t do this to her any more.’
     The side door opened and a middle-aged woman carrying an armful of greenery poked her head in.
       ‘Oh! I thought I heard voices. Have you seen Elaine? At all?’
       ‘Haven’t seen anyone. Sorry,’ said Philip.
       ‘Oh! She said she’d be here by seven. If you see a woman carrying a lot of shopping can you tell her Marjorie’s round the back.’ She smiled brightly, withdrew her head and shut the door, leaving Louise and Philip in a breathless silence.
       The description came to Louise of the kind of heightened awareness that precedes a lethal rockfall: a sudden, eerie quiet and the pricking of an ancient sense that picks up the first shift and slip of air before the first small stone moves.
       He wasn’t supposed to talk about leaving her. Not here. This was where he was supposed to make things come right and bring her life full circle. Instead she would come here in the future and remember what he had said, like seeing the pages of a beloved book defaced and torn by a savage hand.
       She walked away from him, down the nave, to the books and leaflets and the font, to preserve something private and untouched about this place that he couldn’t destroy. A little space to concentrate on other things: leaflets about the herbalist, the church fund which had reached £330,000, the link with the sister church in the Gambia. Pictures of smiling Gambian children in ill-fitting western clothes.
       One of the children stood out from the others, looking sideways and sullenly straight into the camera lens and Louise rooted silently for her. Stay individual. Stay separate. Stay questioning.


     Back in the car she looked steadfastly out of the window at the fields and trees and farms rushing by, refusing to look at him or to say anything to bridge their distance. He drove carefully, as always, the way someone drives when they have responsibility and others to think of.
     He asked if she was warm enough. Once, a few months ago, he had asked if she would like her cardigan from the boot, and she had looked at his impassive profile, half liking that he felt at such ease and half resentful that he should have been so thoughtless as to mistake her for his wife.
     He checked his mirrors, indicated left, slowed and braked carefully and pulled into a layby. The handbrake ratcheted into place: a full stop at the end of a tortuous sentence. A  fly buzzed at the sunroof, dancing an open sesame.
     ‘Look at me,’ he said.
     ‘No.’
     ‘Talk to me. I can’t let you leave like this.’
     ‘Why not. You’ve done it before. Twice. What stops you this time?’
       She made him drive her to a railway station and she walked through its entrance without a backward glance.


       Months later she had seen him on the news, one of many being given awards for community service. He stood in a line with that tight non-smile, eyes invisible behind sunglasses.
       He’d had his first affair, he’d once said, when he was twenty one and newly married. Six months it had gone on. At the time of his telling her she was astonished by his having cheated on his wife so soon into his marriage and missed a lot of what he said afterwards.