The Gravity of Love Read online

  First published 2018

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  Nautical House, 104 Commercial Street, Edinburgh EH6 6NF

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2018

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 207 7 in Epub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 193 3 in paperback format

  Copyright © Noelle Harrison 2018

  The right of Noelle Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  For Barry, my guiding star

  And we are put on earth a little space,

  That we may learn to bear the beams of love

  William Blake

  Contents

  Title

  1. Particles

  2. Magnetic Field

  3. Connection

  4. Attraction

  5. Escape Velocity

  6. Resistance

  7. Reaction

  8. Relativity

  9. Light

  10. Space

  11. Time

  12. Gravity

  13. Synthesis

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Particles

  Scottsdale, Arizona, 13 March 1989

  The postcard arrived on the same day as their twenty-first wedding anniversary. It slipped into the green mailbox, landing inside its morning-cool interior without ceremony. A silent intruder.

  Twenty minutes later Lewis Bell emerged from his house. He walked across his dusty front lawn in an old Hawaiian shirt, jeans and flip-flops.

  Lewis opened up the mailbox and reached inside. At first, he thought it was empty, but then his hand touched the glossy side of the postcard. He pulled it out and looked at the image on the front. He wondered if he was imagining what he saw.

  A neighbour started up his growling old pickup and pulled out across the road from him, but Lewis didn’t look up. Nor did he hear the yelps of the children playing in the front yard of the house two down from him. On Lewis’s Cactus Road all sound had been pulled into a vacuum; all motion had been stilled. His universe had narrowed to what he was looking at.

  It was a sea view. In the foreground of the image there was a cliff edge covered in verdant grass, which fell away to reveal seaweed-strewn rocks and a family of bathers. The aquamarine sea was capped by gentle waves, and behind it the curve of a sandy beach rose to another mossy cliff with a small white cottage atop it. In the far distance a flat-topped mountain made an indigo silhouette against a blameless blue sky. It was a view he had never forgotten, even now when his life showed no trace of who he used to be. A place lodged in a mist of nostalgia in his memory. If he was in any doubt, all he had to do was read the text beneath the photograph: ‘The Beach, Rosses Point and Ben Bulben, Co. Sligo.’

  Who had sent him a postcard from Ireland?

  He knew the answer of course, yet he could not quite believe it.

  He turned the postcard over. His heart constricted as he read it, and the world around him shrank to the six words swimming in front of his eyes. In the distance, he could hear his wife calling to him, but he was unable to move.

  Something was shifting. As if the lawn were sliding away beneath his feet; as if the world were on a tilt. His breath caught in his throat.

  ‘Lewis!’

  Samantha’s voice eventually roused him – pulled him back with a gasp as if an icy palm had slapped his back.

  He moved forward, walking back towards the house, the postcard gripped in his hand. He paused on the threshold to take one last look at the card, convince himself that it really did exist, before slipping it into his jeans pocket and stepping inside.

  *

  Joy Sheldon sat in her kitchen, mug of coffee steaming in front of her, the paper opened upon the table. It was her morning ritual. Ever since the kids had started school, even now they had grown up and left home, she read The Arizona Republic every day before she started the cleaning and laundry. She knew everything going on in Arizona. Who had died, what new political wrangle was going on in the state and what new housing developments had been built. She even read the adverts, fantasising about being able to apply for one of the jobs.

  After she’d read the newspaper she sat at her kitchen table, watching the world spinning by outside her window, then gathered herself up. She had done this every weekday, year in year out.

  Yet, since her father’s passing, her ritual was not enough to get her through the day. These past few months, she’d felt more and more restless.

  In a few weeks, he would be dead one year, and still she could not quite believe she would never see him again. Her daddy alone had understood her love for nature because he had shared it, nurtured it in her. Who said that the desert was barren? Not Joy’s Arizona where, each spring, banks of golden poppies, purple chollas, desert chicory and Indian paintbrush would erupt from the gritty earth. Each time it felt unexpected and spectacular. It was an experience she had always shared with her father, the two of them setting off for hiking trips before the summer came and it got too hot to move that far south.

  Joy and her daddy had shared this annual event each year of her childhood. Her mom had pretended to be happy about it, but Joy knew she’d felt left out. Yet when her dad suggested she come along too, her mom would shake her head.

  ‘Oh, no, Jack, you know I don’t like nature.’

  Joy always found this the strangest of statements. Her mom, perfectly at ease riding a horse down the main street of Scottsdale, would never consider hiking in the Tonto National Forest with her family.

  ‘I’m a city girl at heart,’ she’d say, tucking Joy’s shirt into her jeans and placing a wide-brimmed hat on her head. ‘Now you stay covered up. I don’t want you getting burned. It’s bad enough that you’re covered in freckles.’

  Joy’s father had died at exactly the time of year when they would have gone on their annual hike. Yet it was not just his death that bothered Joy. It was what he’d said to her the day he died. How, reeling from the shock of his words, she had suddenly understood why her mom had never really been happy with her.

  Joy had no brothers or sisters. If her mom had been distracted by siblings, maybe she wouldn’t have had so many expectations for her only daughter.

  ‘There are plenty of opportunities for girls now,’ she used to tell Joy when she was still in school. ‘You can do whatever you want. Go to college. Have a career.’

  Joy had heard that thwarted ambition in her mom’s voice. She’d been told that when her parents met her mother had been studying law in New York. She’d given it all up to be a wife and mother. Joy owed her mom a career. Yet she had struggled with books and learning. She had no inclination for the intricacies of law. She much preferred the sensory world of plants.

  Her parents had saved up for her college fund since the day they’d moved to Scottsdale. Joy guessed the money was still sitting in the savings account. She had never gone to college. She had failed them. In fact, she hadn’t even finished high school, and her mother had never forgiven her. Even now, over twenty years later, she would harp on about it
.

  ‘You could have done so much with your life,’ her mom often berated her. ‘But you had to go and fall in with that Eddie Sheldon.’

  She still said her son-in-law’s name as if it left a sour taste in her mouth.

  ‘I didn’t fall in with him. I fell in love with him,’ Joy would reply, and her mom would look at her with disdain.

  ‘Oh please. You were seventeen. You didn’t know what love was. You were behaving badly. God only knows why because I never brought you up that way. You got caught out.’

  ‘Please, Mom, that was so long ago, can we not talk about it?’

  It made Joy miserable to hear her mother go on like that. To be reminded how she’d never had any faith in her and Eddie. She’d never understood the bond that tied them together. It was stronger than love. Love was such a delicate thing, so easily crushed. She and Eddie were joined by something more robust. Joy thought of it as a sort of primal connection. That’s why she’d got pregnant the very first time they had sex. How incredible was that? And as Catholics what else were they supposed to do? They were meant to be married. Of course, they’d had their ups and their downs like any couple, but Joy couldn’t imagine her life without him.

  She took a sip of her coffee, glanced back down at the paper and for once a headline leaped out at her.

  ‘Northern Lights Give Arizona a Rare Show’

  Her father had often talked about seeing the Aurora Borealis when he was a young soldier stationed up in Alaska. He’d told her it was something she should make sure she saw one day.

  ‘Thanks to an unusually violent storm on the sun’s surface, people throughout Arizona are getting a rare view of the Northern Lights, colourful displays created when tiny particles from the sun strike the Earth’s upper atmosphere.’

  Joy read on, her disbelief turning to excitement. How could it be possible to see the Northern Lights all this way south?

  ‘Astronomers say to look for a bright glow shortly after 4 a.m. in the northern sky just below the Big Dipper.’

  The article went on to state that city lights would intrude on the view and recommended driving out into the desert.

  Her first instinct was to pick up the phone and call Eddie.

  ‘I just saw in the paper that you can see the Northern Lights from Arizona!’ she told him.

  ‘The what?’ he asked, sounding irritated.

  ‘You know, the Northern Lights! You usually only see them up in the Arctic or Alaska, but for once they’re this far south. If we drive out into the desert at four in the morning, we’ll be bound to see them.’

  ‘Joy, I’m in the middle of something here, can we talk about it later?’

  ‘But can we go? It will be so special.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Joy. You’re talking about four in the morning. I’ve got work.’

  ‘But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity . . .’

  ‘Okay, we’ll see,’ he said, not sounding the least bit excited. ‘I’ve got to go, honey.’

  He hung up on her and she felt like she’d been slapped in the face, despite knowing he hadn’t meant to be rude. He was just busy.

  He was always working. Making money, he said, for her, for their daughter’s wedding in April, for the future. But what about now? Why did her husband never have any time for her any more?

  *

  All day long Lewis saw that postcard in his head. He tried to focus on the job in hand. He was typesetting a leaflet for Scottsdale library but as he laid each letter out he saw the image on the postcard. He could hear the Atlantic Ocean crashing against the western coastline, smell the salty air, almost taste it on his lips, and beneath the sound of the waves he imagined he could hear laughter bubbling with suggestion. These images and sounds were haunting him to such an extent he nearly forgot to call into The Pink Pony to book their table. Every year they went to the same restaurant on their wedding anniversary. He asked himself why he couldn’t think of taking Samantha somewhere new. He wasn’t sure whether she would be pleased or not at the change. After all this time, he still couldn’t be sure what his wife wanted.

  Tonight Samantha was in a coral top that flattered her fair hair and sun-kissed skin. He could see a shade of the pretty girl he’d met all those years ago. What had happened between them had been so sudden, so fast, and yet they had stuck together all these years. They should have been proud of the achievement of their marriage, yet this anniversary meal didn’t feel like a celebration.

  ‘You look lovely tonight,’ Lewis said, taken by a spontaneous urge to see Samantha smile.

  His wife looked up in surprise. Her expression was stern.

  ‘It’s a long time since you paid me a compliment, Lewis.’

  Why did she always do that? Twist something that was positive into a negative? Take the joy out of a simple compliment?

  He shrugged, deflated. ‘I’m just saying you look good.’

  ‘Well thanks,’ she said, picking at her steak.

  Lewis could sense her unhappiness, but he was reluctant to ask what was wrong.

  ‘I’m going to Santa Fe with Jennifer at Easter, is that okay?’ Samantha asked him, pushing the rest of her food to the side of her plate and laying down her knife and fork.

  ‘Aren’t we spending it with your parents?’

  ‘You can go if you want,’ Samantha said. ‘They seem to like you more than me anyway.’

  ‘Come on, Sam.’ He reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away, picking up her glass of wine. She sipped it as she held his gaze. For a moment he thought she might cry, but then her expression shifted.

  ‘I need a break,’ she said, not a trace of emotion in her face.

  Of all nights, this should be one when he made love to his wife, yet when Samantha said she was tired and off to bed Lewis didn’t stir from the couch. Instead, once she was gone, he went in search of the postcard, retrieving it from the jeans he’d discarded on the bathroom floor before they went out. He carried it back downstairs and into the kitchen. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. If he loved his wife, shouldn’t he throw it away? And yet he couldn’t.

  The words on the back of the postcard were written in block letters, a neat black print.

  EVENTUALLY THE TRUTH WILL COME OUT

  Lewis read the words again, and again, until they brought him back to the morning upon which they had been said. He could almost hear her voice. He imagined her soft Irish lilt, and it took him back in time, transported him to another world altogether, when he was a different man.

  He placed the card gently on the counter in front of him then looked out of the window at the star-strewn night hanging above the dark silhouette of the McDowell Mountains. He was right on the edge of the desert and its vast sky, like those words, gave him hope.

  He leaned on the sink, gazing out into the Wild West. He still felt a sense of awe at being an Englishman, an outsider, in cowboy country.

  He was about to pull the blinds down when he saw a shimmering red light in the desert sky. It intrigued him for the sun had long set. The red light turned into swathes of fuchsia, and bright green, moving in waves above the mountains. He’d never seen anything like it.

  *

  It was the darkest hour before dawn. Joy was sitting on her old Navajo blanket spread upon a rocky mound on the Papago Butte. Eddie had refused to drive out to the desert. He’d told her he was too tired and warned her not to go on her own.

  ‘Anyone could be lurking out there,’ he’d said.

  She hadn’t told him that she went out to the desert on her own all the time, although maybe not at night.

  When they’d gone to bed, she’d tried to give up on the idea. But she’d been unable to sleep. Her daddy had told her about the wonder of the Northern Lights – that she must see them. And here they were on her doorstep. She never went anywhere. It was now or never.

  She’d waited until Eddie’s breathing shifted to a deep sleep and slipped out of bed. Made herself a thermos of hot coffee and crept out th
e house before she had a chance to change her mind.

  Now, in the desert, she was not alone. There were several couples nearby, arms around each other, as they waited. A few whispers, but nothing more. There was a hush of anticipation as she looked up at the sky again. Was she imagining it, or was the dome of the night sky crackling with a kind of electricity? Shivering, she pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders and cradled her hands around her cup of coffee. She was going to sit here all night if she had to, for Joy had faith in her daddy’s words.

  *

  It was only when Lewis had pulled in at the side of the road and begun to climb up Papago Butte that he realised he should have woken Samantha and brought her with him. He had taken off on the spur of the moment, but surely this vision was something he should share with his wife. Would it not have been the perfect symbol for their twenty-first wedding anniversary?

  But the truth was he was glad to be on his own. Samantha would know exactly what was causing this light display in the desert sky. She would take all the magic out of it with her scientific explanations, and for the moment he didn’t want to know.

  He drank in all the colours in the sky. Deep shudders of purple, ecstatic pink and luminous green shot through him. It felt like a message. Things could change. The unexpected could happen. The postcard could be just the beginning.

  If only he was brave enough.

  Lewis kept climbing up Papago Butte, his way illuminated by the fantastical lights, his heart pounding. He felt exposed, thrilled to be doing something out of the ordinary.

  *

  Joy looked up and what she saw took her breath away. It was beyond anything she could have imagined. Clouds of vivid reds and purples, shot through with a mystic green, shifting high in the sky, shimmering over the distant desert.