Night Air

Night Air

1974 Twenty year old Marcus is waiting at midnight for his girlfriend, Anna, to sneak out from her parents’ house. But Anna fails to appear. Marcus is convinced she is elsewhere. Marcus met Anna on holiday and followed her to live and work in Bath. But the city with its honeyed stone, hidden jewel-like within its surrounding hills, is alien to him. Marcus works long hours in a restaurant and lives in an attic bed-sit. Increasingly unconvinced about Anna’s commitment he feels more and more out of kilter. Marcus shares the attic floor with Rosie, a woman of “indeterminate age”. They circumnavigate each other, seem to pass as shadows, so that Marcus feels more and more cut off up here. Aware of Rosie’s constantly close presence, Marcus and Anna have learnt to communicate close to whispering, so that ‘their world was more secretive and insubstantial as if each moment was already faded and only love or time would remember”. When seventeen year old Anna’s mother discovers she is on the pill “as if Anna has appropriated the events, that it had been narratively correct for her mother to find out”, Anna’s loyalties seem to shift, it’s as if she is growing away, and the relationship falls into a downward spiral. Meanwhile, Marcus is drawn into Rosie’s sphere of influence. She accuses him of being absorbed with his own affairs, dismissive of others and challenges his all consuming passion for Anna. And he discovers that she knows William, an old man whom Marcus has met at the local pub. Connecting over food, Marcus has recently cooked lunch at William’s flat where William has attempted to seduce Marcus. When Marcus tells Rosie about the attempted seduction her sympathies are with William. His desire, she argues, is a kind of defiance. It’s as if she is pleading with Marcus to be more open to life. As his relationship with Anna founders Marcus is pulled increasingly into Rosie and William’s world, shocked to discover they are now engaged. He is persuaded by Rosie to join William on his “stag night”. William, drunk, collapses and dies. The final part of the novel is set years later. Marcus discovers an old photograph of his wife, Zoe, and is taken aback by this image of her younger self from a time almost forgotten. In love over again. Marcus remembers what William had said about a whole life being in a photograph. He now understands how Rosie and William became a rich part of his life and understands their need for each other; a last opportunity for a connection to something long past — love, desire. They were the backdrop to his narrative. And Bath, that he realises has always had his heart. Then there is Anna in the shadows. After all, it was her city. The past in the present, time and place held together by memory.