Two by Two

The first two days were odd. Not bad. Odd.

They had got used to there being a third voice, and without it the silences weighed differently. Hortensia filled them. Hortensia would see a cow and say something about the cow. And now they saw a cow and nobody said anything, and the cow just stayed there.

Axel caught himself talking too much to cover the gap. He told the hotel story. He told a thing about university. He told a theory of his about why villages always put the church in the most awkward spot. And halfway through the church theory he shut himself up, because he was making Hortensia’s noise and it didn’t come out right.

They walked an hour in silence. And it was fine.

On the fourth day the car turned up.

They heard it before they saw it, because on a B-road at eleven in the morning nothing goes past, and then it drew level and the window came down.

“Hotel man!”

It was the bloke from the hotel. He had his elbow out and a pair of sunglasses that cost more than the tent.

“I was in the area. Well, I was two hours from the area.” He laughed on his own. “Get in, go on, I’ll drop you at the next village in ten minutes.”

Axel crouched down to the window with both hands on his rucksack straps and heard himself say no.

“What do you mean, no?”

“No. We’re walking.”

“Yeah, but it’s fourteen kilometres.”

“I know.”

The bloke from the car looked at the two of them, hunting for the joke, and didn’t find it.

“You’re idiots,” he said, delighted.

He got out anyway. He walked a kilometre and a bit with them, talking, left the car sitting on the verge with its lights on, and twenty minutes later went back for it because it struck him that round there they might nick it.

Before he left he stood a moment in front of Eva, who was sitting on the crash barrier doing up a boot.

“Listen. That thing the other day. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It’s not that I’m being a pain. It’s that nobody does that like that.”

Eva carried on with the lace.

“All right.”

“Not all right. All right is what you say when you’re not going to do anything.”

And he got in the car and went.

They walked the fourteen kilometres. They got in at half past seven wrecked, with a new blister each, and the village was hideous and there was nothing there.

That night, in the tent, the feeling didn’t come to Axel.

He noticed and thought nothing of it. He put it down to being tired.

On the third day it was one of those heats you don’t forget and they had gone five days without a shower. Five. Counted. And it wasn’t that they smelled bad: it was that they smelled of something. Of smoke from the nights, of sun cream, of rucksack.

They stopped at a petrol station mid-morning and Axel came back from the shop with two eight-litre water containers, one in each hand, and a face that had had an idea.

“Not a chance,” said Eva.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“It’s written all over you.”

What he had thought was this: that if you left the containers in the sun all morning, by three in the afternoon the water would be hot. And that eight litres is eight litres. He tied them to the sides of the rucksack, one each side, so they’d counterbalance.

They weighed sixteen kilos. He walked with that for four hours.

“Give me one,” said Eva after an hour.

“No.”

“Give me one.”

“No.”

And in the second hour she stopped in the middle of the road, untied one without asking permission and carried on walking with the container hanging from her shoulder like somebody carrying a handbag, and they never mentioned it again.

At three in the afternoon they found the place: a level patch behind some hazel trees, off the road, with a big flat stone and short clean grass.

The water was hot. Really hot. Bath hot.

“Well now,” said Eva, putting her hand in through the neck of the container.

“Eh? Eh?”

“All right. Fine. It’s good.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it.”

“It was a good idea,” she said, very fast and looking the other way. “And now you go over there.”

Axel went over there. He went fifty metres behind the hazels, with his container, and from there you couldn’t see anything and you could hear everything, which is what always happens.

What was heard was this: a little trickle, a stifled shriek, silence, another little trickle. And ten seconds later, Eva’s voice, very loud and very indignant:

“THIS IS NOT A SHOWER!”

“It’s hot water!”

“IT IS A GLASS OF HOT WATER, AXEL!”

“You have to ration it!”

“RATIONING IS NOT THIS!”

Then, two minutes later, in a completely different voice, almost inwardly:

“Good grief.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I’d had sand in my neck for five days.”

And Axel, on the other side of the hazels, with the container held up over his head and the water running down his back, felt one of the cleanest satisfactions of his life.

They ate bread with tomato sitting on the stone, with wet hair and their feet in the air, and something stayed on Eva’s face that wasn’t a smile but was like one.

“Listen,” she said, looking at her hands. “The containers.”

“What.”

“You paid for them.”

Axel was going to say “it doesn’t matter”, which was what he always said, and something else came out:

“Four sixty.”

Eva looked up.

“What?”

“They cost four sixty. Both.” He looked away. “I mean, in case you want to write it down.”

And Eva went very still for a second. And then she took out of her pocket the small notebook she had bought in a village, licked her finger, found a page at the back and wrote something.

“What are you writing?”

“Four sixty.”

“Don’t actually write it.”

“It’s already written.”

And she closed the notebook.

The division of labour happened without their discussing it. The first day Axel put the tent up and Eva made the fire. The second, the same. The third, Axel got to the spot and the fire was already made, and Eva got out the pot without asking. And that was how it stayed. He put up, cooked and carried. She made the fire, found the water and decided where they stopped, because she had a far better eye than he did for whether a place was any good. And her plastic sheet went underneath the tent, because the tent’s groundsheet was rubbish and the plastic wasn’t. They washed up together. They never said it. They simply both got up.

There were other things. That Eva always went on the right-hand side of the tent and he on the left, and neither had asked the other. That he put less salt in her food than in his, because on the second day she had made a face. That she passed him the bottle without his asking when he’d gone quiet for a while going up a hill. And that Axel had started putting his feet out of the tent at night, under the skirt, into the cool, even though they ended up frozen.

One more, which didn’t go into the division because it wasn’t there to be divided. Eva knew how. Axel wanted to. She would get to a place and know in three seconds whether it was any good for sleeping. He would get to a place and the first thing that came to him was to climb up high and see what was behind it. Neither of them made anything of it at the time.

He didn’t mention it. Nor did Eva.

The row was about the route. It was the fifth day, at five in the afternoon, with thirty degrees and a hill, and Axel had had the phone in his hand for half an hour.

“This way we save six kilometres.”

“There’s no path that way.”

“There is. Look.” He showed her the screen. “The line’s right there.”

“That line is twenty years old.”

“It’s a map, Eva.”

“It’s a map made by somebody who hasn’t been here.”

She carried on walking along the road. Axel stood planted at the junction with the phone in his hand.

“It’s six kilometres!”

“Then take them!”

And he took them. He went off up the track on his own, very dignified, with the rucksack and everything, and Kika went with Eva, which struck him as a personal betrayal.

The track was fine for four hundred metres. Then it narrowed. Then it filled with brambles up to his waist. And then it ended altogether, in front of a new wire fence with a hunting-reserve sign.

Axel stood looking at the fence for quite a long while.

He went back the way he had come, with his arms full of scratches, and it took him fifty minutes.

When he came out onto the road again, Eva was sitting on the crash barrier, in the shade of a tree, with the cat in her lap and the dog lying down. She had been there fifty minutes. She could have carried on walking. She had not carried on.

She didn’t say “I told you so”. She didn’t laugh. She passed him the bottle.

Axel drank half of it, sat down beside her and spent a while looking at the tarmac.

“Six kilometres,” he said.

“And a wire fence.”

“Mmh.”

They sat quiet.

“The thing is people make that map,” he said. “People who walk and mark it as they go. Which means somebody went that way.”

“Somebody went that way twenty years ago.”

“Maybe.”

Eva took the bottle off him and drank herself.

“I look at the verges,” she said.

“What?”

“I look at whether the verge is trodden. If there’s grass lying flat, people go that way. If it’s all standing up, nobody goes.” She lifted a shoulder. “That doesn’t come on the map.”

Axel sat thinking.

“Teach me that.”

“I already have.”

“No, seriously.”

Eva glanced at him sideways.

“All right,” she said.

And they got up and carried on walking along the road, which was longer and got there.

That night, while they were having dinner, something occurred to Axel and he was embarrassed to say it, and he said it anyway.

“Listen. That went well for us.”

“What did?”

“The arguing.”

Eva looked at him with her spoon halfway.

“You are in a terrible state,” she said.

But she laughed.