But Morna couldn’t manage the next day. She had a date with a new man. In the circumstances, we couldn’t ask her to break it, she was doing enough for us already, or for Andrew and Alison, whose fates in a curious way seemed so bound up with our own. Especially with Silver’s. Whatever happened to “don’t worry”? I asked him. What happened to the way he was when first we met?

“I’d nothing to worry about then,” he said.

Chapter 31

31

WIM NEVER MENTIONED LIV’S name. He seemed to have forgotten her existence. Jonny was of no importance to him either, neither as himself nor as the perpetrator of his terrible injury. He was like someone who faces death, who has become used to the inevitability of death, and considers everything in the light of this. Yet there was no question of his dying. The only risk was of a thrombosis occurring in his right leg. The doctors had told him they feared at first his foot would have to be amputated but that was no longer a threat. He would walk again, they said. With time, and if the stretching of the ruptured tendon went according to plan, he’d be walking within months. You’ll never win the long jump, a kindly registrar had told him, thinking this a restriction no reasonable man of nearly thirty would care about, you’ll never run a marathon.

For Wim was nearly thirty. He’d been twenty-nine at his last birthday, a year or so older than we had thought. He told us so as we sat by his bed and the arrangement of pulleys and strings that held his leg up. His story, which we’d never expected to hear, he told us also, his right hand in mine and his left hand in Silver’s.

His father was a Dutchman who’d been in a circus that traveled across northern France and Belgium, a tightrope walker. A funambule, Wim called him. It was when the circus made a stop in Wimereux that he met Wim’s mother, Catherine. She had driven in from the countryside with a crowd of girlfriends to watch him walk the tightrope, which was suspended from one high building to another, right across the town’s main square. It may have been from a church tower to the mairie, Wim didn’t know, but it spanned the square and there was no safety net. Maurits, which was Wim’s father’s name, never used a net. A net would have removed the danger and spoiled the crowd’s awed pleasure. Catherine went out for a drink, then a meal, with Maurits that night and left her girlfriends to go home alone.