The German Numbers Woman

ELEVEN

Madagascar came in loud and clear, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Laura had put herself to bed, the cat comfortably installed at her feet, until he joined her and it had to go. Meanwhile he picked up a rogue station on a wavelength where it had no right to be, an Albanian emitter with a kolkhoz bully boasting of the overfulfilment of the pigshit quota for the current five year plan.

Sometimes he would alight on the pirate station of Chang the Hatchet Man, a warlord loose around the headwaters of the Yangtze River, shouting exhortations of liberation, his followers no doubt shouldering the latest heat-seeking missiles behind crags overlooking the gorge, waiting for a steamboat of tourists to feel its slow way along …

He wanted to hear Judy and her Spanish friend, would wait as long as necessary, and in the meantime contemplate sending on his key the Old Testament scriptures, a task which, at twenty words a minute and for an hour at a stretch, would occupy about four hundred days, a heavenly task indeed if he saw it as a suitable penance for eavesdropping, perfect for a recently installed mediaeval monk wearing rough garb and sitting in his cell expiating previous misdemeanours — except he couldn’t believe in such a process, would only send the Bible as a gift to God but not for balancing the books of his ups and downs. Nor would he bother to tap out the New Testament, for to credit that a man could be a God seemed the worst insult to God — who in any case Howard wasn’t altogether sure he believed in, though he had called his name a few times during trips over Germany.

But to hear Judy and her friend he wouldn’t have to wait so long. The weather forecast from Voronezh taxed his wits, likewise that from the North Atlantic. Search and rescue messages told which if any sailors were in peril on the sea though not, dear God, that one of them was Judy. A voice in the night, calling her Spanish lover, sweetly through growling static, was as yet unheard. Their recently discovered method of communication galled her when she called to no avail, the aether making difficulties which might in the end do little for their relationship. The maleficent sunspots played bedlam with communication, much, he supposed, to Mercury’s disapproval.

The cold coffee, sickening but drunk nonetheless, was Laura’s last gesture before giving him up to the airwaves, knowing it was more kindly than scorning his mundane searches, convinced she would never lose him no matter how many light years he travelled.

Aware of the wavelength on which to find Judy, he even so skated across other stations so as not to come under the influence too soon. But he heard her, anyway, couldn’t resist, as if he had crept helplessly into a listening position close by.

‘Miss you a lot’ — clear words came out of mush that sounded like fat bubbling hectically in a frying pan. ‘I’ve just been on shore for a glass of vermouth. Can you still hear me, Carla? Maybe you have a problem with your transmitter.’

Carla: ‘No, it’s all right.’

Judy: ‘I want to see you. Anywhere will do. Can I see you in Izmir?’

Carla: ‘Not possible.’

Judy: ‘Typical! Where are you tonight?’

Carla: ‘Ajaccio. Where you?’

Judy: ‘Naxos, hundreds of miles away.’

Carla: ‘Bloody ’ell!’

Judy: ‘It’s nice to hear your voice. I really miss you. I want to be with you. I want to stay with you always.’

Carla: ‘Me too. I hear you very well tonight, as if you close. I want to kiss you.’

Judy: ‘It’s terrible that we can’t. I was lying on deck today in the sun, thinking about us in Corinth, when you first kissed me. It’s too long ago.’

Carla: ‘Like yesterday for me.’

Judy: ‘I want to find some way of seeing you. There must be some way. The thing is, we might come your way in two weeks. They don’t often tell me where we’re going next, but I sometimes overhear them, or I can work it out.’

Carla: ‘You busy now?’

Judy: ‘Yeah. We have six people on board at the moment, which means a lot of work for me. I have to do everything for them, but it’s my job anyway. Will you stay long with your boat?’

Carla: ‘I suppose.’

Judy: ‘Maybe we’ll run away together. Or perhaps I’ll come and try to get a job on your boat. I have a long list of things I want to do with you. I miss you so much. I want a nice dance with you.’

Carla: ‘I too. But this is our life. I can’t see you in Izmir. Or Naxos. Not my fault.’

Judy: ‘I know, but I love you, you sexy thing. Love you, love you. Can you hear me better now?’

Carla: ‘There’s much electric.’

Judy: ‘That’s atmospherics. There’s been a lot of shooting stars here, all evening. Beautiful. I wish we could see them together.’

Carla: ‘Every guest on board here asleep. We have accountant who wears waistcoat always, even when hot. He’s got a lovely blonde with him.’

Judy: ‘I suppose you can’t keep your eyes off her. How many more women are there?’

Carla: ‘Only two. The men are ugly. Tomorrow we go ashore. We go every day nearly, to buy food, and catch other things.’

Judy: ‘I don’t want to know. Same with us. And I have to look after everybody. I eat so much I’m putting on weight.’

Carla: ‘You can be more for me.’

Judy: ‘I don’t want to. I need more exercise.’

Carla: (laughing) ‘I give you plenty when we meet.’

Judy: ‘We can do it in the day as well. I can’t say all I want to over the radio, but I love you so much.’

Carla: ‘Don’t say anything. I know what you think. Just remember what I say. You tell me when we meet. Lights are on all over the harbour. A plane is going in to land. Wish you were on it. Another one leaving. Wish I was on that. But I’m happy to talk to you. I dream about you every night, unless very tired. I can talk all night if you want.’

Judy: ‘No problem for me, though we’re very busy these days, going from one island to another, picking things up, seeing things. A lot of telephone calls. No problems, though. I don’t know what the skipper’s up to. I don’t want to know. I just do my job looking after them.’

Carla: ‘I like when you tell me things.’

Judy: ‘Love you, stewardess. You’re my sailor.’

Carla: ‘Love you, too. Wish you were here. Tell me in a letter how you feel. I like your letters.’

Judy: ‘I’ll send you another. Do you want me to buy you anything in Izmir?’

Carla: ‘Maybe you buy nice underwear.’

Judy: ‘The black? I don’t know about Turkey, but I’ll try. It’s so nice speaking to you. You know what I want to do now? I’m shaking. I have to smoke a cigarette.’

Carla: ‘Me too. You sleep now?’

Judy: ‘I don’t want to, but I think I have to.’

Carla: ‘Me too.’

Judy: ‘Alone?’

Carla: ‘No, with girl.’

Judy: ‘I’ll kill you.’

Carla: ‘I love you, OK?’

Judy: ‘Thanks a lot. Get your boss to buy a helicopter, then we can meet anytime.’

Carla: ‘Maybe we meet in Izmir. I know good restaurant there. I want you in my arms.’

Judy: ‘Don’t torment me. We’ll be zig-zagging around here for another two weeks. Talk to the man with the waistcoat and maybe he’ll suggest it. Got to go now.’

Carla: ‘Me too. I don’t want to. I love you too much.’

Judy: ‘Not enough. Love you too, Carla. We’ll talk the day after tomorrow. Make sure you’re there.’

Carla: ‘I listen. Love you.’

Static, atmospherics, mush, the heavenly code for silence. He was in a different country after they had signed off, on his own, in a stranger’s skin, an altered person, bereft of more than sight, sat without knowing how long, hands by the morse key as if to tap out a message and get Judy and her lover back on the air or, better by far, to talk to Judy alone, though she wouldn’t understand the medium. The call had been taped and he could play it back when he liked, though felt no wish to at the moment, it would make him feel more isolated, more desolate. Despair enriched a darkness he would not be without, painful though it was. But he reached for the key, and tapped away his misery at not being close.

‘Dear Judy, I know more about you than you can know about me, though if you were able to hear what I’ve just listened to you would undoubtedly know more about me than I am allowed to know about you, or about myself. Or would you? Forgive the maunderings of a blind man. You are the chosen heroine of my night hours, and I am your unacknowledged swain of a listener, who knows more about you than you can know about me because I can hear you while you can’t hear me, though we’re on the same level in that neither of us can see each other. You don’t even know when I listen to your voice electrically pulsing through the air. I know you have a lover, but I am infatuated by you so intensely that I might call it love as well, besotted hopelessly by your voice and personality coming into focus before my empty eyes. There’s no one I can tell it to, which makes the pain worse, yet for that reason richer and easier to be endured. To confess it to Laura would put her into despair, or she would have me sent quickstep into a lunatic asylum, and who would blame her? To admit it to myself makes me laugh with a cynicism I haven’t known before. There’s a helpless yearning inside me which is new, as if I’m just born, ready to go into the world, a new man filled with hope and inspiration, willing to set out on any journey, however long and difficult, to find you, and see what you look like, though I can’t, so maybe you would fall in love with me, so that I could touch you, know your shape, feel your kisses …’

A traffic list from a China coast station couldn’t divert him from the amalgamation of misery and illumination. Nor would the German Numbers Woman have consoled him had it not been her night off. Nothing was able to disperse the miasma of light beyond his barrier of darkness. Some Japanese ships on call completed his dislocation. He was an island of flotsam in the mist, the coastline indistinct as on a part of the ocean not yet properly explored, or seen even by the Flying Dutchman’s ever-searching telescopes, that ragged weevil-rotted and eternally turning craft, privileged or bedevilled in having some of the latest technology to keep it going.

He twirled the knob, searching for the night frequency of the Moscow HF-DF station. For months he had been hoping to find it, done all kinds of mental calculations to bracket the exact band of the spectrum, but with no success. There obviously was one, because planes in darkness over the vastness of Russia would need even more to know where they were, flying as blind as he was for the most part, and dependent on electrical assistance, just as he was, sitting at the radio trying to track them down. Nor could it be that planes weren’t up at night, no more than he didn’t listen at night. His eternal searching had put him onto Judy, but he still wanted to hear the Russian night planes asking Vanya where they were.

When the lamp was on he sat in the light though couldn’t see it, reaching for the switch to press it off and cut away even from his little world within the house, stronger around him than if he had been in the deepest prison, and as alien a piece of territory as the fact of his blindness because it prevented him from travelling to Naxos and Izmir.

His blindness was a cloth pinning him to the ground and stopping all movement, mental or otherwise. With normal sight he could have found her, maybe even spoken the time of the day while passing between the tables of a café on the quayside, close enough to reinforce his imagination and call it sight, yet giving no hint of his love. He would know more what she looked like, or at least decide which of the many pictures that had passed through his mind’s cyclopean eye was closest, an accomplishment sufficient to send him home, having foolishly wasted time, money and effort.

He was embarrassed, almost ashamed at the juvenile intensity of love that forced him to sit in the darkest dark unable to think of anyone but Judy, not even to move a finger, a still figure that had no will to get out of her thrall and go to bed.

If I had not been blind, he wondered, would I have left home, work and wife, and set out on a fortnight’s jaunt to look for someone whose voice I’d only heard on shortwave, a voice belonging to a woman who already had a girlfriend but whom I had, like a schoolboy, fallen in love with? Why not? How can you be in love, and prove that you are, if you aren’t prepared to ruin yourself by advancing matters further? Especially if it was the first time you had fallen in love which, coming at any age, was bound to strike you like a thunderbolt into paralysis. Nothing could be done, and it was yours to endure till the overwhelming wave diminished in power and broke itself — if you didn’t break first, succumb to despair at the powerlessness of your life.

He did not know what got him on the move, but he was halfway to the kitchen before smiling at the fact. The kettle was filled for breakfast so he had only to throw the switch to get water for tea. Cups also were set out, as would be marmalade, cornflakes, plates and cutlery, orange juice glasses. Laura liked as little as possible to do in her somnambulist state before a drink and something to eat in the morning.

He thought of himself as a man with two lives. One was rooted here, with Laura, while the other was enclosed within a mind which was his alone, the whole reason for his existence, making his blood run faster than it had since the night over Germany had put the full stop on him. If he hadn’t been blinded, and was still the same person, he would have abandoned everything and gone on his mad escapade, a thought which bridged the gap between then and now.

But when you cannot see, when most of what occurs cannot be seen, you can’t affect the course of action. Neither on the other hand could you see the leaping cycles of the aether, the megahertz and geigerhertz containing speech and pictures, messages and weather maps and morse, the calling of and replying to aeroplanes, police, firemen, ambulances, ships and people, life within that immense span of the planet going on since the genius of Watt, Volta, Ampere, Hertz, Morse and Marconi had set it going. You couldn’t see it, but it was there.

Laura’s arrangements for breakfast were signs that one day would follow another exactly — items that hadn’t been touched by him before because he had never needed to make tea at such a time. Any change of routine disturbed her, though she always denied that it did. She would wonder what had been in his mind for him to make tea on his own in the middle of the night. Let her wonder. He sat until he was too tired to move, and then moved.

TWELVE

‘You never take me anywhere,’ Amanda said. ‘I like to go out now and again.’

‘You go out all the time.’

‘With you, I mean.’

He wanted to belt her one, because her accusation was only too true, but you didn’t do that kind of thing, though he was ashamed to admit that the impulse came often enough. Luckily they were outside, which made the charge easier to take.

He knew every weed and corner of the garden, but was no gardener, except that he had tied a sickly tree to a pole to stop the wind pushing it down. It didn’t seem to thrive, had no will to grow or even live while fastened up for six months. Ken had advised him to do it, but in spite of such countryman know-how his sensibilities were too elementary to realise that what a tree needed was tender loving care. Noticing the tree from his window one day he went out with his Leatherman knife and cut the cords so that, in the next months, it thrived, easily able to withstand the winds. ‘Let’s go somewhere today, then. We’ll find a nice pub, and have lunch.’

Surprising how few words made her happy. They only ever went to bed after she had passed her bleak mood onto him, though he knew that to suggest they go there wouldn’t work at all. He could wait, not denying that her own terms usually made the experience a notch or two higher than memorable.

‘That’d be lovely,’ she said. ‘I like to see the sea now and again.’

‘So do I,’ he smiled, ‘from land,’ making himself happy too. He stood in the frame of the back door, looking across the lawn and hearing the languid hot day whistle of the birds from the belt of trees surrounding the house except where the lane led up to the road. The trees there never had any difficulty, plenty of mutual support, lived and died among each other. But a tree on its own needed special treatment.

She had always thought the car a good place to ask her questions, so when into the clear of the main road said: ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Richard.’

No problem in taking Sunday off, because messages didn’t come through on that day, proof that government agencies liked their leisure hours. Nevertheless he had flicked on the radio, idly between getting out of bed and shaving, to hear that the French cops were ready for Pentecostal traffic being dense towards EuroDisney. Whenever she used his first name he knew something was on its way that he wasn’t going to like. ‘What about?’

‘Well, you might say I’ve been snooping.’

He overtook a Mini on a bend, just made it. Mustn’t do that again. Don’t let her think she’s got you concerned about whatever the asking’s going to be. He pushed in the cigarette lighter. ‘How, snooping?’

‘I was in your room a few days ago, to see if it wanted cleaning. You’d gone off to do your good deed for the blind man. Your wastepaper basket was full. You always empty it to save me the trouble, I know, but I couldn’t help noticing what was written on the sheets.’

A queue of traffic stalled them on the way to Rye. ‘Oh, it was just rubbish for putting in the stove.’

‘Why burn it, though? They collect waste paper in the village. Every bit counts.’

‘Only newspapers. Anyway. I like to burn it, because strictly speaking it’s against the law to write such stuff, even though I only do it out of curiosity. I’ve a passion for poking my nose into other people’s business. The world’s full of shortwave listeners doing the same. It passes the dead hours when I don’t know what to do with myself, between getting work on the boats.’

She saw little point continuing because, after all that, it was his problem, or business. Even so, he had stopped talking, and somebody had to break the silence now that the air inside the car thickened, and not only from cigarette smoke. She could tell he was worried because, going towards Folkestone, he drove as carefully as if the car had L plates. ‘These transcripts, I found them absolutely fascinating. I’d never known they were like that.’

‘Like what?’

He sounded irritated, or nervous. He was both, but she went on: ‘All to do with smuggling, from various government stations it looked like, and the police in France, as well as diplomatic traffic. Priceless. But dynamite as well, I should think, wouldn’t you?’

‘What else do you expect me to take? Weather forecasts get boring after a while.’

‘But couldn’t all that information be useful to somebody?’

‘It could, I suppose.’ The Merc in front seemed to be slowing, so he flashed and shot out. As he drew level the Merc, with four youths inside, increased speed, and both went nearly a ton along the flat before Richard got in because another car was heading towards them. Then he noticed the Merc behind trying the same trick on somebody else. No use slowing down, and starting a fight with four of them.

‘I’m hoping to get out of this car alive,’ she said. ‘I don’t fancy life as a basket case.’

‘You can’t blame me for that.’ He picked up the new mobile phone and punched in 999. ‘Police? There’s a Mercedes’ — he gave the number — ‘with four lads inside on the A259 east from Rye, playing murder games when people try to overtake.’ He put it down. ‘You saw what they did.’

He didn’t like people on the road who broke the law, she knew. ‘But those papers, don’t you pass some of the information to other people?’

Changing his mind about stopping on the coast, he turned onto a winding lane towards higher ground in the distance, as if starting a circle to get back home. ‘I hate that road on Sunday.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘No, I don’t pass it on.’

‘Is that the truth?’

The truth was what he told her whether it was true or not. A woman who didn’t believe your lies when you said they were the truth ought to be sent packing because there was no greater injustice. The relationship was intolerable from that point on. He might not believe certain things that she told him but he could never let her suspect it. He pressed the tab to let fresh air into the car. ‘Why should I lie?’

She only knew that he was lying. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Have I ever lied to you?’

‘Only by not telling me things.’

‘There was never any point in telling you what you didn’t need to know.’

‘There is that, I suppose.’

He laughed inside, which gave his face a grimmer expression. ‘There certainly is.’

‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘we are married, which means we’re fairly close, shall I say. Everything that happens to me, I tell you.’

‘That’s not the same.’

‘I like to think it is.’

So would he, but wasn’t able to. Silence was the best policy, though once something had a grip on her mind there was little hope.

‘For example,’ she said, ‘when I read such things from those papers I wondered about the smuggling part, and wondered whether you have anything to do with it.’

‘You would, wouldn’t you? That’s normal. But the answer is still no.’ He hoped that would satisfy her, but it didn’t. It never had. He took a sharp corner in the lane and bumped a verge below the hedge, which was just as well because a car coming overfast barely missed him, a mere tick on the wing mirror. The answer had to be no, and no again, till the end of time.

‘I can’t believe it.’

She was doing well as an interrogator, so would he have to stop the car and tip her out, as the only way of bringing it to an end? ‘Why not?’

‘It’s a feeling.’

‘Oh, well, is that so? We all have them.’

‘Based on evidence. I’ve got to believe what’s before my eyes. You don’t sit at that radio day in and day out for fun. I can’t believe it. I don’t think I ever did. The stuff you take is lethal. You sell it to whoever it’s useful to. They must pay you a pretty high price. I would, if I was in their game.’

‘You have a good imagination.’

‘I don’t need much of one to think that.’

‘I’m sure I would.’

‘You’re not me.’

‘No, I’m not.’ If they fell to bickering maybe the argument would go away. He joined a B road heading towards a village, the church tower visible. ‘We’ll find a pub there. I could do with a drink.’

So could she. To question him further would be futile, and demeaning since he would admit nothing. In any case she knew the truth, and would have to be satisfied with that, and with him knowing she knew. Like so much else in their life it would remain unspoken, just another sore festering in the relationship, but one so charged with danger and ruination that destruction seemed the only prospect. She couldn’t live in peace with it, which he didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or was incapable of knowing. Or he just didn’t care, or couldn’t afford to care.

When they first got together and she had taken him to meet her father he had said, as soon as Richard went down the road for some cigarettes: ‘What do you want to marry somebody like that for? I wouldn’t trust him an inch. He’s as sly as they come. I can see it in his eyes. I’ll be worrying every minute you’re with him’ — or words to that effect. Well, he didn’t worry for long, because a heart attack took him off three months later. But it was galling that he’d been right. ‘I’m hungry as well.’

They gave their orders for the meal, and stood at the bar, Amanda with a pale sherry, and he a vodka with a cube of ice. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes, but I wish you trusted me as well. Or doesn’t your sort of love include trust?’ She’d intended not harping on it anymore, but was upset, fighting back tears, so it just came out. ‘I always thought it did, or at least I hoped, but I know different now.’

‘Oh, don’t say that.’ He felt like throwing the vodka into her face. Nothing less would stop her, so he had to stand there and take it till she packed it in. The pub was full of the green wellie brigade, as he had known it would be from the phalanx of Volvos and Land-Rovers outside. Braying voices made it hard to hear, their faces too close. ‘I trust you as much as I would trust anybody.’

‘Oh, thank you very much,’ she scorned.

He turned, to look across the dining section. ‘They’re taking long enough with our bloody meal. I suppose they want us to order more drinks. They never miss a trick in these places.’

‘I think I’m going to need another, in any case.’

‘I can’t, though, because I’m driving.’ A number was called. ‘That’s ours.’

She was no longer hungry, but split the fillets of fresh mackerel in two, and ate a piece with some bread. Lack of honesty had given him an appetite, not surprising. He was empty but for the telling of lies, and it seemed as if his body was also empty, the way he was eating. In his certainty he had all the answers, and therefore more inner peace than she could ever have with him. The distance was increasing between them, which touched her with despair, and made her wonder whether she shouldn’t walk out now, just go, leave him to it. Surely one of the green wellie brigade would give her a lift back to town. The older she got the more she needed to be close to him, but as time went on such a necessity had less importance on his part. He didn’t want it, and maybe never had, though there had been some promise in the early years.

‘You’re being unreasonable, in quizzing me.’ His first course finished, he was disturbed at her not eating. ‘I thought we were coming out to have a pleasant meal.’ He refilled her glass with white wine. ‘But something has got into you.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Oh yes, it is.’

Now he would put on a show of understanding her. Either that or he would be angry. He was so simple it was impossible not to know him, and they had been through the same pattern many times. After needing to be close she no longer wanted his sympathy, or whatever it was. She only wanted to finish the meal, clear out, and go home. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

‘A minute ago you wanted to.’

‘Now I don’t.’ He looked miserable. No doubt he felt it. She hoped so, but that too was a show. ‘There’s no point talking if you can’t tell the truth.’

Their plates were taken away. ‘I wish to God I worked in a bank, or some sort of nice nine-to-five office. You’d like that, I’m sure. Then I could amuse you with all the scandal and tittle-tattle I’d heard during the day.’

She laughed at the idea, not wanting to, but it tripped out. ‘I just expect you to be what you are.’

‘That’s exactly what I am. But you don’t like it.’

‘No, but I like you.’ All said and done. ‘And I love you, that’s what I know.’ She asked herself if it were really true, whether she was telling the truth only to emphasise his lies, but if she wasn’t, which seemed more and more likely, let him be deceived for a change. She would say anything at the moment to ensnare him and get a straight answer. After she had read those sheets of incriminating paper she had screwed each one up and thrown it back into the basket so that he wouldn’t know they had been disturbed. He must have burned them the following day, all but the most blatant drug-related transcript, which she kept hidden, without knowing why. Anyone she showed it to would realise straight away what it was. She imagined the police going crazy at the sight of it, and sending a dozen squad cars to get him. But oh damn, they could take her away as well, on the assumption that even if she wasn’t as deep in it as he was she might well have something to tell them.

‘I just ask you to trust me,’ he was saying, ‘because if you can’t, there’s not much point in staying together.’

It was as if she had caught him having an affair. Once she had, and he insistently denied it, his last ditch ploy for defence was that he would pack his bags and go if she didn’t believe him. Such ultimatums were childish and base. Those without trust and honesty were never able to grow up, be mature, responsible, and truly loving. ‘I don’t trust you,’ she said, by now enjoying the rack of lamb. ‘How can I? If you tell me I’m wrong, in the face of such black and white evidence, what can I think?’ He really wasn’t worthy of straight talking, didn’t deserve it, was best left alone.

He wondered if others in the same game had this kind of trouble with wives or girlfriends. They probably told them all about it, boasted even, but threatened to disembowel them if they breathed a word. Either that, or they kept their mouths firmly shut. It was a career exclusively for button lips, as Waistcoat had said. They told their women to mind their own business, and they did because they didn’t want to lose such an easy going life. He couldn’t trust Amanda because she was a different type of woman. Reaching across, he laid a hand on her wrist. ‘Look, since you know about it, why keep on asking me if it’s true?’

She smiled. ‘All of it, though?’

‘Up to my neck.’

There, it was done, said. She would never breathe a word, of course. Maybe someone else would have taken his messages and plastered them all over the district as handbills, but not her. They went on eating. ‘You’re a difficult bastard.’

He seemed about to laugh. ‘Am I?’

She had always known it, but hadn’t thought to tell him. What greater proof of love can there be than that your partner gives you something to churn up your liver about? ‘You certainly are.’

‘I try not to be. I just don’t want you worrying.’

‘Oh thank you very much again.’

Neither of them could do anything about that. If his boat went down she didn’t want to go with it. Love was love, but self sacrifice was unhealthy. ‘I feel much better now it’s in the open.’

‘So do I,’ he admitted, unable to know whether he did or not, but there was no doubt he felt better at having made her happy, marvelling at how easy it had been, though far from assuming he had been right to capitulate, wondering if she realised what she had got herself into. At least he’d make sure to burn everything in the basket from now on. Lifting his glass, he looked into those palest of blue-grey eyes which he had found so sexy in the beginning and still did: ‘Here’s to us, darling.’

She clinked his glass. ‘Who else? We have to stick together’ — though I hope not till the edge of doom, at least not if I know it. Her hard won victory brought a steely attitude into her thinking not known before. He still didn’t trust her, and never would, even though it might be to his advantage to do so. He was just hell bent on destroying himself.

THIRTEEN

After dark, when nothing more of significance could be expected to come through, Richard thought of sending a morse letter to Howard, but he hadn’t reckoned on the difficulty of filling a half hour tape, or deciding what sort of items to mention. Nothing in common between them beyond the hobby of shortwave eavesdropping, he had no notion where to start. In any case he had never written a letter of more than a few lines in his life, and to concoct one at eighteen or twenty words per minute by morse code would have to cover at least two pages of transcript. He needed to think of something that even Howard hadn’t heard on the radio. Ordinary chatter of everyday life would be too much like cheating. The main thing was to begin.

Following the address and the date he sent: ‘Dear Howard’ — and stopped. His morse was crisp and clear. The beginning always did sound musical, fresh on the ears, notes evenly spaced, rhythmical, in the best professional style — a concert fist, as they used to say — but to send morse for half an hour without cease and not to make an error would be something of a feat, though he could stop the tape recorder whenever he did so or his hand grew tired.

Even so, thumping out banal generalities by such a method hardly fitted the effort that went into it, or the uniqueness of the means used. He wound the tape back, reached for a pencil so as to write the letter first and send it from sight as a long message. That way he would be less likely to make mistakes, or give out anything he regretted.

Yet that also was cheating, and he couldn’t get further again than ‘Dear Howard,’ wondering why he had suggested such a revealing and difficult means of communication.

He threw the paper away, set the recorder going, and reached for the key. ‘Dear Howard, for the last week or so I’ve intended calling on you again, but I’ve been much of the time in the sort of mood that wouldn’t even let me leave the house.’

Not a good start, but it would have to pass. ‘Not knowing what to do with myself I spent several hours a day at the radio, and usually got something interesting to ease the mind. To sum up, there was diplomatic screed on the eighteen-megacycle band, as well as government stuff knocking around on various other wavelengths. I have to be careful of course to shred the stuff afterwards, having no further use for it. I don’t suppose you’d care to see it, either, if I sent it to you, which I won’t unless specifically requested. This obsessive attachment to radio stops me going bonkers.

‘You do it for different reasons, I know, but it stops me thinking of things which aren’t pleasant to dwell on. What are they? Well, how I got to the stage of life I’m at now. After I’d had enough of the Merchant Navy there were lots of shore-related jobs I could have taken. I might even have gone on a course and become a teacher in a comprehensive school for the rest of my life, but that seemed too much like a living death, and in any case what would a character like me have to teach? I’m an all or nothing sort who, when I end up with nothing, as I sometimes have, diverts into something easy to do, and has such rewards on the payment side that at least I can have a good life, and enjoy myself while it lasts.

‘And there’s the rub, you might say. Nothing good goes on forever, only the ordinary, the humdrum does that, and who wants that kind of existence? Your life isn’t anything on those terms, with your unique disadvantage. But my life floats along between one high moment and another, each moment (which might last a fortnight) packed with sufficient excitement to keep the adrenalin short-circuiting very well between times.

‘The boat trips are what I’m talking about. In the last two years I’ve been to the Med a couple of times, across to Holland more than once, also to the Canaries and down to Madeira, to pinpoint a few. I mix with people I wouldn’t be seen dead with on shore, but it’s the sort of trade in which one can’t choose one’s companions, and since I’m paid well I can hardly complain.

‘In spite of the ideal life I’m telling you about, I can’t but think there’s a better and more fulfilling one waiting for me somewhere. Why I’m going on about it I don’t know, but at least it’s in morse and is filling the tape, exclamation mark! though I realise it may be of no interest to you at all. Doing such top secret work as I do, which I can’t even talk about to my wife, makes what you might call a lonely man out of me, but I like that, because it matches perfectly with my temperament, whatever of course that is.

‘Having made your acquaintance improves my situation, because-at least there’s someone I can talk to without inhibition or limit. Maybe we are equally cut off from the world in our different ways, when we’re not at the radio and in touch with more than anybody can realise.

‘It’s a different world, and that’s the attraction. I often wonder when the point came in my life that made me what I am today. The more I dwell on it, the less I can decide what it was. This suggests to me, perhaps as an easy way out, that such a decision must have taken place before I was born.

‘In other words, it’s in the genes. We’re born more than made is what I mean, and what I’ve thought for as long as I’ve been capable of thinking — or asking questions — which may not go that far back. In one respect you are lucky because you can say exactly where and when that special something happened which made you what you are today.

‘Forgive such rambling. The tape runneth over. I’m not stuck to the radio every hour God sends. Another exclamation mark! I walk over the hills, and through the woods when the paths aren’t knee-high in mud. Sometimes I drive in the Bracebridge direction and call at the pub where I took Laura for a drink — to whom best wishes, by the way. Occasionally I take Amanda to London, where she does a bit of shopping, and we enjoy a night out.

‘But it’s time to stop. Wrist’s aching like the devil, as you must twig from the number of erasures. Let’s meet. Call you soon. Best regards. End of tape, which alas can’t be endless, Richard.’

Sweat plastered his hair, from the effort of prolonged sending. He’d pumped more than expected, or that he had intended, felt uneasy at having let the words sparkle out and not thought once of censorship, and hoped he hadn’t revealed too much of himself. Spinning the tape back he played it through to hear what had been said. Amanda knew all of it and more already, but it would be interesting to know what Howard guessed on listening in.

The replay, all the same, seemed to concern someone quite different, not another person exactly, but a sidestepped version of himself who both puzzled and fascinated. A fool in the grip of cosmic forces couldn’t avoid being who he didn’t want to be.

He smiled however at the similarities which couldn’t be disowned. Tapping out more such missives would illuminate himself to himself, both versions eventually turning into one person so that he would finally know. He might even find a clue as to what he wanted to do in life, and then do it.

Howard, a man made wise by his inability to know what went on in the physical world, would be his correspondent. Whatever comments came in return should be interesting, if you thought about it, because a person was just as blind when it came to dealing with the world as was a man who had lost his sight, though the man without normal vision would have known it all along, and had no illusions about the benefits of seeing. Therefore he developed alternatives of which a man with eyes could not conceive.

A man who had eyes to see blundered around without thought, without vision, imagining he saw everything, whereas in many cases he was more blind than the blind man. The man who was blind, due to impacted sorrow over the years at not being able to see everyday details of the world — either to love, hate or wonder at — had cultivated, in order to stay sane, a deeper connection with the human heart because he moved around in subterranean emotional strata with more surety of perception. Even though he might not be able to put the experience gained into words, he developed an instinct which allowed him to endure in equilibrium — something all of us wanted to do — and bring important matters to the surface now and again when it was important, to himself and even others, to do so.

Richard conjectured as to whether such thoughts came because a change was taking place. They seemed benign and helpful, whatever was happening, bringing calm to his recently disordered condition. If a blind man could get on so well in the world, without being a burden to it, and be even less a burden to himself, how was it that he (though the state was not apparent to Amanda or others) could be harrowed at times with confusion and anxiety?

On the other hand that’s not me at all. I’m making it up. It’s a game. If I didn’t take life as a game I couldn’t exist another minute. I’m playing with a phase of mind that has no connection to me, which comes easy because whoever I’m with I have to pretend to be somebody I’m not; neither with those on the jobs I go to, nor with Amanda, nor with Howard and Laura. If a third personality shoulders its way in to claim me I ought not to be surprised. Two, three, or even a dozen could make no difference when I’ve never been the sort of solid man with an innocuous career, a character of substance and probity, honest in every fibre, plain to myself and to everyone with whom I come in contact.

That’s the sort of person his father had wanted him to be, but then he would, wouldn’t he? The old man has never been happier than when a ‘person of substance’ just one notch of the ladder above, complimented him on his work or merely gave him the time of day. You could expect the sons of people like that to be anything but certain of their place in life, lone wolves and wanderers all, spoiled and disloyal, beholden to no one yet itching to make money and get rich, camouflaged jackals moving around the periphery of the jungle and ready to pounce on anything easy, having long since learned to avoid the traps which society sets in the form of law and order. Partially blind Richard may be, but his eyes had served him well enough up to now.

Since there had to be a reason for everything, such thoughts might come as a warning. He would take more care, check and recheck (and check again) the details of every seagoing operation, make the most of the time allowed instead of slinging back drinks beforehand as a form of celebration for the success of what they hadn’t yet pulled off. They relied on him to be painstaking, and he would be, for their sake but most of all for his own.

Shadows dimmed the room, and when it was dark he cut himself off even more from the world by drawing the curtains. Lighting a cigarette, he sat at ease in the armchair. A morning phone call had told him to be in Glasgow by tomorrow evening. Something ‘big’ was on, maybe a delivery from one of the East European fishing ships beyond some remote point of the Hebrides. Or they would beat their way out at night on a high powered yacht to meet one even as far off as St Kilda. To intercept spot-on they would have to navigate by homing in on the ship’s transmitter, a radio beacon to be used only sparingly, and by changing wavelength every ten minutes, so that no suspicious interception could pin them down.

All his expertise in radio would be called on to get them to the exact meeting point, and his mood in the days beforehand swung between anxiety and excitement. He wanted to be off, and joining the fray, to be on deck at night in uncertain weather (it was invariably bloody awful) earphones clamped and senses well tuned as he gave directions to the man at the wheel.

Such primitive excitement was hard to come by. A head on meeting with a distant ship showing the faintest of lights, their smaller boat beating a way through wild and inhospitable seas, was always an achievement. It was a medium in which the half dozen crew knew how to survive, having been in the game so long that if they couldn’t do it neither could anyone else.

While anti-drug agencies joined efforts against those smugglers from South America and the Middle East, the door was open — and had been for years — from Russia and Eastern Europe. The main transit routes flowed from the central Asian republics and converged on Moscow, then spread by barge down the Don and Dnieper rivers to the ports of Rostov and Odessa. Or stuff went north along the Dvina to Archangel, then by Onega and across the Kola peninsula to Murmansk. Nobody had known about that arm of the business, or they hadn’t been able to do much to stop it.

In the trade it was known as the Snowflake Route, and boats setting off from such places unloaded their cargo by devious and indirect means throughout Western Europe. What began as a trade had turned into an industry, and too many were making a living for it to be dented, even if the odd person was caught or the occasional boat stopped.

Morality, he reflected, knows no bounds. Nor, to be realistic, does necessity, because if it wasn’t drugs it would have to be another commodity, and if there was no something else: ‘I would have no way of earning a living. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and though I am not a beholder anymore, but the activist, I can still take the place of one and see myself for what I am, or for what others think I am, and laugh.’

He only ever felt guilt when he went north to see his father, and played at being the son of a disappointed man. Last time he had taken a Leatherman tool knife, and half a pound of duty-free Gold Block tobacco. In spite of himself old Len had been unable to resist being pleased as he took the knife from its small leather case and opened the various implements, from the main blade to metric screwdriver. ‘I can throw my tool set away now.’

‘You can, Dad.’

‘And you’ve brought me a good smoke as well. I can let myself go for a month. The old puff-stuff keeps me happy. A bit too expensive for me to smoke all I’d like.’ He lived in a bachelor ground-floor flat in Southport, and Richard had called because he could hardly avoid it, down from Glasgow on his way to London.

‘Still messing about in boats, are you?’

‘I make a living.’ He had already told him that the radio officer job had gone bang. As you can see from what I’ve given you, you stupid old bastard.

The presents in his hands, Len stood as if he might throw them into the fire. ‘Big ships are better. You were doing well as radio officer.’ He put the things down. ‘I’ll make you some tea, anyway.’

Instead of following his tall well-built figure into the kitchen Richard looked around the room, at the pathetic artifacts on shelves and dressers, and photographed groups of becapped putty-faced pipe-smoking men on decks or quaysides. The photograph of his mother, who had died of cancer when he was sixteen, had been set in the grandest frame, the enlargement of one taken on Form by beach when she had, apparently, been happy. Not much use looking at her, since she had been so long gone.

By the settee was a pile of library books: A.J. Cronin, P.G. Wodehouse, J.B. Priestley, and accounts of sailors’ travels, and Richard wondered with a smile why the old man’s favourite writers always had to have two initials.

‘I don’t suppose I need to say that you’ve always been a great disappointment to me.’ He came in with the tray, tea things immaculately laid out, cream biscuits on a plate with a doily underneath, two paper napkins and, when Richard tasted it, the very best tea.

He banged the point home on every visit, and Richard couldn’t think why he had bothered to call, unless it was that he needed to hear it for the good of his soul. Or was it necessary to strengthen him into going on more trips to do with his nefarious work? The old bugger said it either because he was senile and had forgotten about the previous time; or he knew very well what he was saying, and wanted to show that he hated his son’s guts.

‘I’m sorry about that, but I have my own life to live.’ He always made the same response, so that his father could come back with the rejoinder:

‘It’s wrong to live for yourself. Every man’s duty on this earth is to live for others. Those who live for themselves end up living for nobody. They die bitter and disappointed, and alone.’

Like you, he thought. ‘I’m a long way from that yet.’

‘You won’t say so when you’re there, in thirty years’ time. Today will seem like yesterday.’

Time to get out of his presence, steam down the road in a happier state. All the same, the old man fascinated him, and he couldn’t deny there was a profound connection between them, nor feel altogether unhappy about it. He hated to admit that he loved the grumbling old bastard. ‘What would you like me to be doing?’

Len smiled as he put down his large cup. ‘I don’t know much about anything anymore. You’ve always been your own man. I give you that. But I’ve always felt you were perfect on a ship. You’d have had a good position by now, on a cruise liner even. Or you’d have had a good job on shore, with Marconi’s maybe. It’s never too late to change, and get back on course.’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’ Humour the old dog. ‘But how are you, these days? You look well. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen you better.’

He winked, a heavy lid covering his blue eyes. ‘I feel good, I’ll say that much.’ He flexed the muscles under the sleeve of his shirt, and pressed to show how hard the flesh was. ‘Not bad for seventy-five, eh?’

‘I’m glad to see it.’

‘I walk five miles a day, all along the sea front and back.’

He must be healthier than I am. ‘You’ll see me out.’

‘No, please God, I don’t want to do that. That would never do. I couldn’t imagine a world without you.’

‘Nor me you,’ he forced himself to say. Not to have spoken would have been vicious, what Amanda called lying by omission.

‘I don’t enquire too closely into what you do on your small boat journeys, but I hope it’s all four square and above board.’ He put a whole biscuit into his mouth. ‘That’s all I say.’

‘It is,’ Richard told him. ‘You can rely on that.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

Lies were useful in stopping people assuming what you didn’t want to hear, though they only deceived good and simple people like his father — except that it didn’t seem to stop him worrying, or continuing to get at him. ‘You seem to be leading a fine old life. Just look at that car outside.’

‘I’ll take you for a spin if you like.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve got my old banger, though I don’t use it much, except for shopping once a week, or if I want a trip in the country. Sometimes I call on an old shipmate in Bootle. He’s bedridden now, so he’s always glad to see me. Silly bugger’s younger than me,’ he smiled with obvious pride.

Richard usually departed thinking he would write as many letters as were needed to get a regular shore job, but by the time he was coasting around Birmingham he knew that his destiny was fixed, his life set, his feet locked onto the course until disaster struck or he had so much money put away that even excitement wouldn’t tempt him on another trip.

Amanda’s car came down the lane, back from her work at Doris’s hairdressing shop in Angleton, so he went down to put the kettle on and make her some tea. She would feel welcome, and like that. He couldn’t wait to set off in the morning.

FOURTEEN

A sound, as if produced by the idle trawling of fingernails along a corrugated tin fence, came into his earphones. Was outer space trying to get in touch? If so was he the last person they (whoever they were) should want to reach. Yet maybe only a blind man could make sense out of the chaos they would need to know about.

What produced such a noise? Aerials and the superheterodyne stage plus the magnetism of power pulled it in. Molecules were so small that not even he, using the best of his mind’s eye, as well as infallible equipment (and what could be a more acute combination?) was able to see them. Yet we can, Howard thought, contemplate the universe in which they function, imagine the most elegant of their trajectories breaking off and free-going beyond all vision, while nevertheless imprisoned within our horizons.

Tracking the molecules by their patterns was a form of prayer to the Great Creator, trying in his blindness to understand the unleashed energy of the universe, the dust in motion whose scattered structures were called atoms. Electricity sent protons and neutrons on a journey to the infinite, never to disappear. Science might not solve the final mystery. Only the heart can explore beyond the range of mechanical contrivances.

Besides the electric heater, he wore a white wool sweater (knitted by Laura), a padded parka (blue with a white band at the back), a woollen rainbow hat, and fishermen’s socks tucked into long johns, as well as boots. The Persian Gulf was warmer, morse hammering through in plain language, but he looked forward to Christmas, the New Year and Easter, when the mariners of the world would have loving and friendly greetings sent to wives and relations, telegrams of goodwill and hope for the future, in all languages but especially Russian and those of Eastern Europe.

He would mull on this in his next morse letter to Richard, for want of anything else to say, because Richard’s shallow communications in the code did not help to suggest an easygoing, though interesting, response. To begin with, Richard’s character was difficult to get into and sort out. He was no ordinary man — though who was? — or maybe he was ordinary enough yet lived so unconventional a life that Howard wished he was an ordinary man. Hard to tell, for he could hear his voice, and had a strong sense of him when he was present. Maybe his occasional boat journeys were no harmless excursions, and perhaps he was in some sort of trouble, for he had caught the change in his voice, almost a catch, when he related his experiences. He wasn’t telling the truth, and that was a fact.

On the other hand his morse letters were slightly different, because he made an effort to be as straightforward as possible, by which Howard concluded that he wasn’t normally truthful. His ‘fist’, his style, his sending of the symbols was suspect, if only because he tried to make it as machine-like as possible, impermeable, hiding any trait or peculiarity of character that less precise sending might reveal. Clear and easy to read, his sending was too perfect.

One way to break down the palisade surrounding such perfection was to send a letter with a mass of false information about what he, Howard, was receiving on the wireless. To make the text plausible he would build up a special letter piece by piece, mix in a true item now and again, and hope such a ruse wouldn’t be too subtle to bring the required response.

There was certainly no shortage of time on his part, though he wondered how much there would be for Richard, who was out in the world and trying to make a way for himself. Nor did Howard altogether like constructing such a web around a so-called friend, but excitement in the kingdom of the blind was hard to come by, so the project seemed valid.

He would claim that the falsehoods came to him in agitated morse and through the most difficult curtain of atmospherics: ‘Let me introduce myself. No, perhaps I’d better not. You might not want to know me if I did, and I’m not the sort of personality to waste time and energy, since everyone comes to me in the end, or I go to them, it makes no difference. No, I’m not a miller, a monarch, or a millionaire. And no, “no” is not my favourite word.’

‘Can’t make anything of it,’ he would say to Richard. ‘So you tell me. He faded at that point, went right off the air. I tried to follow him, searched all over the spectrum, but he’d packed up and gone. Where to? Who can say? Your guess is as good as mine. At first I thought he was the chap from the Flying Dutchman, then I didn’t think so because he didn’t seem at the point of death. People in the worst situations go optimistic when they think it will save their lives. It sometimes does, I expect.’

For what came next he would say: ‘The last six months I’ve listened mostly on one frequency out of the whole radio range. Don’t stop reading this morscreed. Everything will be explained. This is a sort of confession, to tell you I’ve fallen in love. I’m not used to disembowelling myself, but telling you has got to be done, because who else is a blind man to confide in but his best friend? I’m a perfectly happy person, but have strange dreams which lead me over oceans I alone know how to find. All I will say is that it’s a very special wavelength I’ve lit on, and hope I’m the only one who has. Her boat, called the Daedalus, does erratics in the Dodecanese, trundles around the coast of Turkey, slides in and out of rock bound gulfs of Greece. I’m on their track all right! This woman talks to someone every night in the Pontifex, and wouldn’t it be a strange coincidence if you had been on one or both of these yachts?’

He would send it when the time had come for the net to be cast out and drawn in. Such work would be too much of a self indulgence on this cold night, and in any case it was almost the hour for Judy to come on schedule. Morse news in Italian could go by the board, likewise the RAF weather, and material from the Gulf, as well as navigation warnings from the Caribbean, and five figure groups from Haifa. Time for Judy to be calling her lover, and nothing else mattered.

He took the bottle of whisky from the sideboard, where it stood between Gin and Sherry, and poured a small glass, the liquid so warm it came out like nectar. What he wouldn’t have given for such a tot in the Lancaster, flying at eighteen thousand feet over Germany on that last winter of the war! He filled the glass, a finger at the rim to feel its progress, so full to the top he saw the liquid as convex in shape, his hand so steady that nothing spilled as he lifted it to his lips. Another one warmed his insides as he made ready to search for the star-crossed lovers.

Everything was unclear at first, mush swamping the earphones. He thought he heard her voice but couldn’t be sure, an oscillation halfway between morse and speech, increasing to Donald Duck chatter as he turned the wheel at such slow speed the gradations would hardly be measured. Russian talk was mixed into their interchange, and by the time he found them they must have been on the air for some time.

Judy: (haughtily, about the Russian speaker, as if Carla could) ‘Tell him to go away.’

Carla: ‘He not hear me. He go soon. Your transmitter too weak.’

Judy: ‘Flippin’ hell, it’s on full. Do you hear me properly now?’

Carla: ‘I hear you.’

Judy: ‘Last night we went ashore, and had a meal of couscous.’

Carla: ‘Don’t you eat that fackin’ thing.’

Judy: ‘That’s not nice language. You shouldn’t swear.’

Carla: ‘You swear, some time.’

Judy: ‘I know. But I try not to. The couscous was delicious. Then we had sherbet ices.’

Carla: ‘In my flat, when my boyfriend not there, you make me fish cakes, remember?’

Judy: ‘Oh yes, I remember.’

Carla: ‘They good.’

Judy: ‘Wish you were with me now. I have lots of ideas.’

Carla: ‘Flippin’ ’ell! I want to sleep with you all night.’

Judy: ‘I want minimum one week, OK? I’ll hijack the yacht and come and see you — all on my own. I don’t think I could manage it, though. I’d probably end up on the rocks somewhere. You’d have to come and rescue me.’

Carla: ‘I come and meet you.’

Judy: (laughing) ‘If I took the boat they’d kill me. It’s full of valuable stuff. Know what I mean?’

Carla: ‘Judy, I worry about you. What if you get in a lot of trouble?’

Judy: ‘No trouble. Just come and get me.’

Carla: ‘Turkish prison no good.’

Judy: ‘Don’t talk about such things. People on pleasure cruises don’t get into trouble.’

Carla: ‘It makes me glad to hear it.’

Judy: ‘Just give up everything and come to me. Leave your man.’

Carla: ‘I can’t.’

Judy: ‘If you loved me you would.’

Carla: ‘I do love you, more than anybody.’

Judy: ‘So you say. You’re all I have.’

Carla: ‘Judy, I love you. You got to believe me.’

Judy: ‘I do. But I feel like crying. We’ve had such a busy day here, I can’t tell you. I can only talk to you like this because the others have gone ashore. I expect they’ll be back soon, probably drunk.’

Carla: (sounding worried, almost angry) ‘And what happen to you?’

Judy: ‘Nothing.’

Carla: ‘I think of you all the time.’

Judy: ‘I want you, as well. Why can’t we be together always instead of just a couple of days every few months? I sometimes think I want to die.’

Carla: ‘Me too. I love you. Don’t like to think of you on that boat, only one woman.’

Judy: (laughs) ‘You needn’t worry. I don’t fancy any of them. Anyway, what about you and your crew?’

Carla: ‘Nobody want me. I’m forty, but you young.’

Judy: ‘Don’t worry. They’re all too busy here. Anyway, they go after the local variety, or look for tourists. They know I’ve got you, so they leave me alone.’

Carla: ‘I kill them.’

Judy: (another laugh) ‘I like it when you’re jealous.’

Carla: ‘No good. Love not jealous. It’s just I worry about you.’

An excitable Russian, as if he was in difficulty trying to steer a container ship through the Corinth Canal, drowned Carla’s voice for a few moments.

Judy: ‘There’s that man again. I can’t hear you.’

Carla: ‘Me change channel?’

Judy: ‘I always hate doing it in case we don’t make contact again. Up to the next OK?’

Howard trailed after them, step by step until he overshot or passed, nothing to fix on because they had as yet made no contact. He saw them both, on the bridge of their yachts, or maybe down in a cabin, in the dim light anyway, hearing nothing but lost in the thrall of calling, drowned by annihilating atmospherics, and the ever expanding crush of iron filings, an aural snowstorm from earth into space. Morse got through, but voices had a hard time of it, till he heard Judy clearly enough: ‘Pontifex, Pontifex, this is Daedalus, can you hear me, over?’

Again and again, voice close to frantic, often with a note of pleading, as if the Almighty might hear and, out of sentimental feeling, turn down the static: ‘Pontifex, Pontifex, where are you? Carla, can you hear me?’

Howard picked up both when they were deaf to each other, a common failure between two people trying to make contact. Their transmitters were no doubt accurate in definition, pre-set and spot on for the required number and decimal point of kilocycles, but the voices working through them failed to meet. Vanya didn’t always hear aircraft wanting to know where they were, and ships working on different wavelengths failed to get in touch. In spite of technical perfection and acute professional ears contact was often difficult, Howard amused and gratified with evidence that scientific man was not always master in his own house, and that a greater Power could foil what was supposed to be certain — no bad thing for the sobering of whoever assumed they had chained the forces of nature.

But now he felt woeful that Judy couldn’t hear Carla nor Carla Judy, call as they might. Judy’s tone was fretful, though her voice was loud: ‘Pontifex, this is Daedalus, can you hear me?’

Carla was exasperated: ‘Daedalus, no can hear you. Where are you? Can you hear me?’

They regretted not having struggled along on the previous wavelength, in spite of shrill interference from the Russian captain, who persisted in manoeuvring his vast ship through the Corinth Canal for a bet. They had searched for improvement, if not perfection, as if the power of such love would bring them physically together — and who could blame them? He wanted to hear Judy as if she were in the same room, and with whatever senses he could muster try to imagine what she looked like. Knowing such a meeting to be impossible — at which he might be able to ask her, or get someone else to describe her — he felt a pain at the heart, an ache which could only be alleviated by another tot of life giving whisky. He would crawl to bed if he had to, meanwhile resuming his brush-like sweeping of the aether, and wondering whether he would give an account of his tribulations in the next morse letter to Richard. Then they were reunited.

Carla: ‘Now I hear you. Top strength. Wonderful.’

Judy: ‘I hear you too. Where have you flippin’ been?’

Carla: ‘Nowhere, here.’

Judy: ‘I’ve been on this frequency all the time. You must have been somewhere.’

Carla: (sound of annoyance) ‘I can’t tell. Where have you been?’

Judy: ‘I’m not telling you. It was very nice. But I needed a shower afterwards.’

Carla: ‘I kill you.’

Judy: ‘I was with my lover, Carla, the best woman on earth.’

Carla: ‘What we do?’

Judy: ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

Carla: ‘You drive me mad. I love you today.’

Judy: ‘Love you, too. Tomorrow we’ll be going to Salonika. Can you come?’

Carla: ‘No, we go to Sicily. Trapani. Much work.’

Judy: ‘I’ll call you at midnight.’

Carla: ‘Don’t know if possible. Not if captain on bridge. We try, though. Also lots of people on board. We take horse to Naples.’

Judy: ‘Horse! What do you do with a flippin’ horse?’

Carla: ‘Boss likes.’

Judy: ‘Funny boss. Do you know Salonika?’

Carla: ‘Empty place. But we did much work.’

Judy: ‘Don’t tell me. Just say you love me.’

Carla: ‘I love you. I remember when in bed.’

Judy: ‘Do you want me to come now? No, I’ll meet you on the quay in the morning. In Italy. Italy! We’ll find a café and eat breakfast in the sun.’

Carla: ‘’Olding’ands!’

Judy: ‘How can we eat when we’re holding hands? We’ll just look at each other, and smile. And when we’re finished we’ll go upstairs, and stay in bed all day. It’ll be a café with rooms.’

Carla: ‘At night we eat again, and have bottle of wine.’

Judy: ‘We’re tormenting ourselves.’

Carla: ‘I can’t hear you.’

Nor could Howard. She had faded, overwhelmed by atmospherics and interference. They called each other in the wilderness but heard nothing. Using their lovers’ intuition they would both, without telling the other to do so, change to the next wavelength down, which Howard had already reached and knew to be clear. If he were Carla he would know what to do, but neither were wireless operators, and nor were they blind. Then he heard Judy, who came in as loud as if she had made a thousand-mile leap closer to Howard: ‘Hello, Pontifex, can you hear me? This is Daedalus calling Pontifex.’

Her lover was lost, or still at the previous place, and Howard was happy to know that though he couldn’t talk, he now had Judy to himself. He felt the pain of her forlorn pleas for her lover, anguish lodging in him for her. She went back to the old frequency and began calling there, telling Carla to change to lower down, as if trying to lead her by hand into clearer skies and greener fields. Howard heard Judy on one and then the other, sensing tears behind an ever despairing voice. When she was calling on one frequency Carla was calling on the other, and each would think to change at the same moment, Howard turning the wheel and hearing their voices going futilely into space. They no longer used the names of their boats, Carla calling for Judy and Judy for Carla: ‘Can you hear me? Carla, where are you? This is Daedalus calling Pontifex.’ Howard poured another whisky to celebrate.

Judy: ‘Hello, I can hear you. It’s so hard keeping in touch, and now it’s nearly one o’clock. I have to get some sleep. I dream about you, but I would dream more if I could stay in bed in the morning. I love the woman I can’t have, that’s all I know.’

The separation had worn away her normal ebullience. Carla spoke into the silence.

Carla: ‘OK. We are in love, but what can I do? I think it all my fault.’

Judy: ‘I don’t know. What do I have to do? You don’t want me enough.’

She was crying, tears to rend Howard’s heart, so what could it be doing to her lover’s? Perhaps not half as much.

Judy: ‘What do you want me to say?’

Carla: ‘You don’t want to talk anymore? I hear this noise. I don’t want you to be unhappy. It’s not my fault. What I have to do now? Nothing. Don’t be upset, is all I say.’

Judy: ‘What do you want me to do? Go out with somebody else? I can’t. There isn’t anybody else. You have the power, telling me to do this, do that. What’s it all for? We’ve got to do something.’

Carla: ‘You know my situation.’

Judy: ‘I know. You can’t do anything. You never can.’

Carla: ‘All right, don’t wait for me anymore. Find somebody else.’

Judy: ‘You don’t understand me. I don’t want somebody else.’

Carla: ‘Judy, how we get in this quarrel?’

Judy: ‘I don’t know. But what can we do?’

Carla: ‘Now I don’t know. When you finish on the yacht we find a job together.’

Judy: ‘I don’t know what I want. Oh, there’s that voice interfering again. Let’s change up, but don’t get lost this time.’

They found each other immediately, and went straight on.

Carla: ‘I’d like to do something for you.’

Judy: ‘I know what that is. But you’re not the only one who’s upset. I’m more upset than you are. You can only say go and find someone else.’

Carla: ‘No, I understand now that you love me.’

Judy: ‘It upsets me when you think I’m not serious. I love you, and try to make you feel better. Sometimes I go out with the crew, and we go to a café. Maybe I have a dance with a man, but it doesn’t mean anything.’

Carla: ‘I come to your boat. Maybe they give me a job.’

Judy: ‘No, I want you to come to England. I’ll show you around Lincolnshire. Lots of nice places, Stamford, Boston. We can go to Cambridge and Ely. I’ll take you around, my old woman! I’d love that.’

Carla: (shouting) ‘Flippin’ ’ell, I’m only forty.’

Judy: ‘Well, I’m twenty-eight, so you’re a lot older, but don’t worry, I’ll keep you young, though I know I don’t need to. You’re all right. I only see you two or three times a year, but I get so that I can’t wait anymore. I want to dance with you, even though you tread on my feet. I want to go to a restaurant with you. I want to walk along a beach. All those normal things. In England we’ll find a cottage by the sea for a month. I want to bring you your breakfast in bed.’

Carla: ‘Me too. I want all those things. I love you deeply.’

Judy: (laughs) ‘Your voice has gone very gruff, so I believe you. It makes my spine tingle. Must go soon, though. I’ll try to call you tomorrow night.’

Carla: ‘Love you, darling.’

Judy: ‘I love you a lot. This minute, and all the minutes after. All today and all next week and next month, all this year and all the next year. To love you anymore than that would destroy myself. I only want to hold you, Carla.’

Carla: ‘I love you, Judy.’

Judy: ‘Love you truly. Not hearing you too well. There’s a horrible noise coming on. It’s that Russian again. Let’s change.’

They switched, but only to say goodnight.

Carla: ‘Time to sleep. Boss coming on bridge.’

Judy: ‘Good night, Carla.’ (sound of kisses) ‘Buenos noches!’

Carla: ‘I light last cigarette. Love you, darling.’

Howard couldn’t move, unable to say for certain where he was. In spite of the whisky his feet were sleeping, as if his body was solidifying and would be launched like a stone out of the world’s orbit. He tuned in to the call sign from China (XSG) and let the rhythm go through his mind, as if the repetition would bring his senses back.

If he didn’t make a move he would fall asleep and be found in the morning, a piece of old rock. The cat would jump on the frozen lump and run howling to Laura. He exercised his faculties on picturing Judy: fairly tall for a woman, maybe five feet six or seven, a good full figure, grey eyes and rich brown hair of medium length. She wore slacks and a white shirt, the two top buttons undone, sat on the deck of the Daedalus in the sunlight smoking a cigarette, engrossed by a Turkish fort on the hill behind the small harbour town, thinking not so much about her lover as of life in general, and what would happen in the future.

He sighed, though she was worth more than that, would hear her if they met, a warm accent with a level of north country still discernible, suggesting Derbyshire, remembered from a fortnight in Matlock ten years ago. Perhaps she had been born there, and her family had moved to Lincolnshire when she was a child. Everything was possible, and whatever you imagined could be true.

The door opened, and he knew the main light went on. She would be wearing her heavy dressing gown, and furry carpet slippers. ‘Howard, come to bed.’

‘You’ll have to sleep with an iceberg. I forgot about the time.’

‘I’ll warm you up. What have you been listening to all these hours?’

‘One thing and another. I think I’m going to hear a message that will change my life, but I never do. Nor ever shall.’ He hadn’t lied before, surprised at how easy, no guilt to ruffle him. ‘It’s just one of those mad dreams.’

She trembled with anguish at the idea that he would want to alter his settled existence. ‘Why should you want to?’

He caught the tremor in her question, as she had known he must. ‘I don’t.’ A few words heedlessly brought out. ‘There’s no better life than this. But you’re right. I’d better switch off.’ Once he was in bed, thoughts of Judy would bring back warmth. ‘It’s just that I get carried away with some of the irrelevant things I hear, and can’t leave off.’ Judy would be sleeping, wrapped in her pyjamas, or maybe even naked, enclosed in a narrow bunk and dreaming of the unworthy Carla.

They walked through the hall. ‘I worry about you,’ she said. ‘You might catch cold.’

‘I had a few drams of whisky.’

‘I know. I can smell it.’

He laughed as they climbed up the stairs. Nothing could destroy his awakening spirit. ‘It’s not often I have more than one or two.’

‘Yes, it was good of Richard to bring it. I’ll help you to get undressed.’

‘No, you go and warm the bed. I must call at the bathroom first. Shan’t be long.’

FIFTEEN

He filtered right from a line of traffic, in front of a man and his girlfriend entering left from the opposite road. The vile morning of frost and mist called for navigational lights, and though as yet on the outskirts of Glasgow, he was in a hurry to get south in the hope of more human weather. The breakfast of scrambled eggs, kippers and two large washbowls of coffee would take him beyond Leeds and well down the M1 without stopping.

But the man he had placed himself in front of, driving a low grey TR7, presumably disliked Richard’s alacrity and, when the traffic thinned further along the road, shot by on a straight bit, and drove in front of him at thirty miles per hour. Funny devil, Richard thought, being forced to overtake before getting on his way. The TR7 came screaming by again, to resume his previous crawl in front, even slower this time.

The swine’s trying to teach me a lesson, where none is neither welcome or warranted. Hasn’t had his morning crap yet. With a sigh, Richard passed him again, and speeded up a little so as to get out of his way, but the man, either a fool or a fanatic, managed the same manoeuvre. Richard caught a millisecond’s glimpse, no more, but he had the picture clear: a man in his thirties with short ginger hair, pencil moustache of the same colour, and a reddish well-fed face. He wearily got by him once more, and went somewhat faster to avoid his dangerous game.

He came on, roaring by. He went so fast that, able to place himself in front of Richard only by a too-abrupt reduction in speed, and a too-sudden swing to the left, he lost equilibrium, wobbled, struck the embankment and went halfway up it, then overturned twice on the way down before settling, minus a few bits and pieces, on the hard shoulder.

Richard considered stopping, in case the man and his girlfriend (or perhaps she was his wife) were injured, but because no part of their cars had touched, meaning he couldn’t be held responsible for what had happened, he drove on and left them to it, convinced that a fool must pay for his folly.

The contest, if such it had been, had unnerved him. For a start the man, no doubt even now too stupid to realise that everything was his fault (if he wasn’t too dazed to think of anything at all) should have had more sense than to tangle with a BMW. He probably thought himself king of that stretch of the road because he drove along it every day, and had the right to try killing whoever he felt was getting in his way. Perhaps I was a bit precipitate at the traffic lights, Richard thought, but certainly not more so than most motorists at such a junction.

A further notion was that maybe the man had known him, that the awkwardness had been no accident, that someone was aware of what he carried in the boot. He hadn’t noticed another car close enough behind to be in cooperation, so as an attempted hijack the tricksy business would have turned out very clumsy. No, it was a common near-accident of the road, and he had been lucky to get off — as it were — scot free.

The road was good through the Lowland area of dismal hills, not too much traffic, visibility a kilometre and therefore reasonable for speed, though he kept close to seventy in case a cop car was planted in dead ground, always law abiding at the wheel because it would be ridiculous to get pulled in, even supposing the boot was empty, which it surely was not. He could either regard the stupid man’s accident as a bad omen for his day, or think of good times coming because the bad thing had already happened. Superstition was a weakness, but he looked forward to the luxury of getting to Carlisle and into England.

To pass the miles he mulled on his recent stint on the water, something of a killpig, as Scuddilaw had accurately termed it, a trip out and in whose incidents made his duel at the traffic lights seem like the pleasant arsing about with an old friend. He had arrived at the hotel in Glasgow in time for breakfast, as a sailor home from the sea after having been, it seemed, almost to Iceland and back. ‘The Cod War’s got nothing on this,’ Scud said, another swig at the whisky when they were halfway there, though no one yet knew exactly where there was.

‘Rockall, it’s supposed to be.’

‘Fuck all, not Rockall. Here we go again.’

And a thousand times they went — but who was counting? — up the hills and down into valleys of malevolent water. And who had the heart to calculate after the first, in any case? Cannister looked knife-blades at Richard who had taken down the weather forecast. ‘This is yer force-fucking-two, is it?’

‘Well, we’re on our way,’ the skipper said, ‘and we don’t come back without the cargo. It’s the Barbadoes for me next week. Sweat blood now, and get a touch of the sun later. If we aren’t beaten, we’ve won.’

Richard, to himself, agreed. It was a mood to his liking, but every trip seemed to hinge on an all or nothing gamble, the ever expanding peril of a forlorn hope, and he more than once saw the next white topped emerald wave as his last, except you thought of nothing beyond staying alive.

The Polish skipper wouldn’t risk his rusty old ship too near the Hebrides, or the eyes of the customs men, but Richard’s radio navigation got them to the rendezvous, when the real trouble began. Had they come all this way for nothing? They weren’t fighting for their lives now. Money was involved, millions, and though only a comparative pittance went into their pockets there was a fortune to be counted out for the gaffers.

The ship’s flank was a rusting cliff, they were one moment bottomed out, in danger of being keel hauled and then, whoops, you bastards, they were staring boggle-eyed right into the buttons of a sailor’s coat on the bridge, who was looking back at them no doubt wondering what creatures had come out of the deep. After the captain had grabbed his single tea chest of payment (and not before) the stuff came up and over, and they didn’t lose a bundle.

Set for home, no one dared to think so. The risk of being caught was subsumed by the danger of being drowned, but Richard could only see such a picture by looking on it from safety, like now, steaming effortlessly down the dual carriageway. Wet, hungry, and cramped at the bowels, the power of concentration had threatened to evaporate any second but was kept in check, only he and the skipper at times holding the boat on course. Could Waistcoat and the big men in London know what the crews went through?

He took them back part way on the Omni Range beacon at Tiree, but kept well clear when in the pull of the islands. No one had seen them go, and no one would spot them sliding in. So they hoped, and so it turned out. The night was long and, despite the sea, the powerful boat landed them far enough into the cove to start the welcome work of humping bundles up the track and into the cars behind the ruined bothy, so that the material could go by various cars to London.

Mulling too long on the hard night, he bumped the centre studs for a second or two, which told him he was getting tired. Ought to stop soon and stow my head for twenty minutes. But the exhaustion, if that’s what it was, put him into the Republic of Euphoria, only welcoming after all had gone well, setting him up for another hundred miles.

Beyond Carlisle he overtook a steady Eddie Stobart on its way south, glided by the usual Wallace Arnold and Shearing coaches, Dodd’s pantechnicons, and various self-hire vans. The odd car coming the other way had lights aglow as if playing Volvos. Then he was overtaken on the outer lane by a vehicle of the Freebooter Transport Company doing well over eighty.

He pushed in the lighter and felt for a cigarette, a simple-minded gloat that if all the cars overtaken in his life had been given to him he would be rich indeed. To while away the miles he pushed in Howard’s morse tape which had arrived before leaving home, slotted it into the cassette deck. He’d carried it in the pocket of his duffel coat out and back, and wondered at Howard’s amazement if he knew the nature of the trip.

‘Dear Richard, these are cold days, and it gets cold at the heart sometimes, though Laura and I are weathering it — you might say. The wireless has me in its grip as much as ever. Usually it cools any sparks of passion a blind man might have, but these days it has a nasty way of stoking them up instead. It’s always hard to get through the winter, and seems like a victory when I do. Long nights mean too many long journeys. I’m working on a certain voice frequency, but can’t tell you much as yet, not being sure exactly what I’ve got onto. It may be of interest to you, perhaps not. A woman is talking to her lover, another woman, a few hundred miles from the yacht she works on. Their business might be something to do with smuggling — immigrants or drugs, who can tell which? Probably neither, just my imagination running away with itself. It occasionally does, the one luxury I’m allowed.’

A sliver of burnt out tyre lay across the motorway. He stopped the tape to get by various weaving wagons, a lorry churning smoke like a haystack about to flare up. A bus overtook him on the inner lane at ninety. Accident black spots move around and settle themselves temporarily in certain places for no apparent reason.

A few more miles, and he felt safer. Someone always gets killed on the last day of the war, or the final lap home. In a car one loses the feeling of being at the whim of the elements, of crossing a rainswept field with little between you and dull cloud on a winter’s afternoon. He supposed there were people who never knew such a sensation — lucky or not he wouldn’t say.

He set the tape spinning, to find out whether Howard would be more explicit about the smuggling, but the silly blind devil waffled on about something else until: ‘I walked down the hill to get a sniff at the sea, just before midday, well wrapped up because a fair wind was on, mostly from the old south-west, telling myself I wouldn’t like to be at sea in such a blow. My cap went flying once, but some kind soul brought it back. The only fit haven was a pub, and a pint was soon set before me. A large coal fire burned, a few of the regulars sitting around. I was familiar with their voices, and heard them chin-wagging about a local character called Charlie (no surname mentioned) who had been arrested by the revenue men (that was the term they used: would you believe it?) coming back from Cherbourg in a fast launch with half a dozen other chaps a few nights ago.

‘Rumour had it that they had stuff stowed on board worth millions. They’d always wondered where Charlie got his money, because he never seemed to do much, and always had plenty. Now we know, they said. You can imagine how I enjoyed such talk, saying to myself here is a bit of tittle-tattle to tell Richard in my next communication. I usually have precious little to say in such an ordered life. I’d give my right arm to go on such a trip as you now and again take yourself.’

Richard switched off the morse a few moments to wonder if Howard had made any connection between the two but, though with some unease, decided it wasn’t possible.

The rhythm soothed him so he let the tape play on. ‘Not being able to see anything wouldn’t rob me of the pleasure, you can bet. But of course, it’s out of the question, and I can only work on the imagination till it seems like reality, as if I’ve actually done the thing. Then it calms me, and I’m happy enough to get back to the radio, which does its job by living for me.’

Break time. The clock goes slowly not the miles, and landscape stays more or less the same, so there are times you do A to B and have no memory of the scenery at all. Your mind has submerged itself, yet your reactions work if they have to. He thought he was getting a cold, feeling a notch below perfect, which could be dangerous if he didn’t lock his perceptions onto taking care, so he signalled to reach the inner lane, and slowed along the one-two-three white marks for the service station, lorries already cutting along to his right.

The parking space was fairly full but he found a slot not too far from the cafeteria entrance. The wind freshened his cheeks, and he put on his mackintosh because the sky was low and grey. Preferring to eat little and often, rather than scoff a debilitating sleep-inducing meal, he sat in the smoking section with his cheese roll and pot of tea. Two women across the way were talking about how to make life happier for someone who had recently tried to kill herself. They sounded like social workers but he couldn’t be sure. The pill victim could have been a sister or cousin — a world away from his own life. He was glad of the empty table, for in his line of business it paid to be alone if you wanted to stay in the game.

A man further along was so untidily bearded it was hard to tell his age. The hair was mostly ginger, with frontier wisps of grey. Exhausted and filthy, wearing a blue jersey, checked jacket, and jeans, he looked like someone who could sleep with his eyes open, and certainly didn’t have a car in the parking lot. Down one side of his face, only partly covered with hair, was a scar still streaked with congealed blood. ‘Going far, are you?’

Richard knew who was meant.

The man stared at an empty cup and crumb-strewn plate, a small rucksack beside him with a woolly hat on top. ‘I said are you going far?’

‘Far enough.’

‘I’ve been here four fuckin’ hours, and nobody’ll gi’ me a lift. Yer know what kind of life that is?’

He didn’t, wasn’t interested in finding out, finished his food and swigged off his tea. The country was full of such people, on the road for London, where they could beg and sleep rough.

‘It’s nay life for a man who only wants to work. Up every fuckin’ mornin’, and I walk the arse off me feet looking for it.’

Richard buttoned his mackintosh: ‘I’m turning off at the next junction,’ but set two pound coins on the man’s table, in case he was genuine, then walked to the exit without hearing a thank-you. Only now, as the achievement of the sea trip swept over him, did he realise his life was one long bottle of champagne. He started the car, and drove to the pumps to fill the tank, check oil, water and tyre pressures, then go inside to pay, have a piss, and buy a newspaper.

The same trampish man stood by the lane when he slowed down on turning from the pumps. Richard stopped, leaned back to open the rear door. Served him right for handing out the two quid. ‘Come in, then.’

‘Ah, ye’re a gentleman.’

Like hell I am. He shot off to get in front of a juggernaut and into the middle lane, already regretting his action, in that good deeds never came cheap, or did much for you. He had put him in the back because on giving someone a lift a few years ago the man had managed to purloin some earrings from the glove box which he was taking to Amanda.

‘Where the fuck are we?’

‘Cheshire.’

‘Where the fuck’s that?’

No point telling him, in case it strained his vocabulary, but he passed over a cigarette, which the man lit with a brass Zippo. The face was scarred, pockmarked, veined, ruined by want and self-indulgence, a face whose movable features, even if they had been washed and cared for, would not have made him pretty. An ugly bastard, and no mistake. After a few more miles he threw the cigarette out of the window, then seemed to doze. Richard liked it that way. He pushed the button to hear more of Howard’s morse.

‘You see, there is something to write about after all. That little bit of gossip in the pub made my day, but I don’t really find life’s real until I’m tuned into the two lovers on their yachts, one among the Isles of Greece, and the other somewhere between Corsica and Sicily. I’m particularly attracted to one of the women, but then, I would be, wouldn’t I? It’s the sheer mystery of her that appeals to me, and what also whiles away the time is the fantasy I spin, of one day going in search of her, to try and find out what she looks like.’

‘What the fuck’s that noise?’

He switched off.

‘Sounds like fuckin’ morse code or somethin’. Drive yer fuckin’ mad.’

Richard slid along the wall of a bus doing seventy, and in the mirror saw his passenger rolling up his left sleeve. He took a primed needle from the side pocket of his pack, and jabbed it among the knotted veins. Services, seven miles, Richard noticed, as the man snorted, head back, struck Richard’s spine with his knees and laughed: ‘Yippee! London, here I come!’

Not in my car. Against expectations, the miles went quickly, and he jinked beyond a sports car and a builder’s van, onto the inner lane by two lorries, and shot up the slipway onto the car park. He didn’t bother to look for a space, but stopped at the steps leading to the entrance. ‘This is as far as you go.’

The man, head back and looking with rolling eyes towards the sun roof, as if to coax it open so as to see heaven more clearly, heard nothing. Hazard lights on, Richard got out, pulled the door wide open, and took the man’s arm in a twist too powerful for him to resist. He pulled him onto the tarmac. ‘You don’t shoot drugs in my car.’

‘What the fuckin’ hell’s going on?’

A happy family group — mother, father and two children — coming from the cafeteria with chip butties instead of hands, looked on as if a piece of street theatre was being provided especially for them. The man’s rucksack hit him in the stomach, Richard now knowing why he’d had to wait four hours for a lift. The scumbag even tried to get back in. ‘It’s London I want, not fuckin’ Cheshire.’

Richard evaded the heavy punch, and gave one back which, with the power of an angry sea built in, sent him scuffing across the steps. Very Merchant Service, as the captain once said when he’d laid out a man who had gone berserk on the bridge.

You goddamned fool, he told himself on driving away, how can you be so brain dead as to pick up a hitchhiker, and a hop head as well? He fumed for the next fifty miles, until he knew himself lucky compared to Howard and his sky-empty life, which reminded him to bring the morse rattling back:

‘There is a demon in me trying to break out, to let fly, to fragment my existence in return for I don’t know what. This is the first time I’ve expressed myself openly as an adult, believe it or not, since the full stop put on me in March 1945. Whether the demon, or the impulse, is evil or not I wouldn’t like to say, but certainly it could be destructive, though not while the thought is unable to change into action. In that sense I’m safe and can talk to you, or tap rather, freely.

‘Perhaps my ideas as to what I mean, and what might be possible, will have clarified by the next letter, though the agitation does diminish somewhat while I try to describe my feelings to you. At the most, or worst, I envy the fate of old Charlie, who was nabbed for smuggling. To sum up, I sometimes think we have to look on life as tragic because otherwise it would be too dull to be acceptable. By way of banalities, Laura and I are well, and hope that you are, too. Until next time. Signing off. Howard.’

Fringing the dereliction of the Black Country (though there were signs of resuscitation) he thought it not a long letter, though there was quite enough in it to make him sweat. Spaghetti Junction posed no fears, after the ins and outs of such a missive which, far from the old boy going off his chump, showed he was on to something bigger than he realised by having picked up Judy babbling away. Howard couldn’t know what kind of tramcar he was jumping onto, in passing over such red hot gen, because if that big silly lesbian wasn’t stopped she would have the Mediterranean end of the game wrapped up by Interpol. She wasn’t cracked enough to blow the gaff on anything knowingly, but any slight clue could get the dogs of the law on the lot of them. Since Howard was picking them up loud and clear there was a chance others were as well. Waistcoat had always had too much affection for tenuous social connections, more than was good for him or them, having fitted her as a general slavey into the outfit to prevent her doing worse mischief to herself than she had already.

Couldn’t think why, but he changed his mind about the M1, rolled around the Birmingham conurbation to the M40 turn-off, and headed southeast for London. He pressed the window button, to get rid of the beer and druggie stench of the hitchhiker, glad of the cold air to keep him awake. By-passing London, he would drop his load as arranged at Tonbridge, and keep on for the coast.

Howard couldn’t know that, on the other hand, he was worth his weight in gold for his latest intelligence, that he was now part of the decision as to what should be done with it. Or when. He would ask Howard to type up a log of what exactly he had heard, or maybe only a résumé, giving black-and-white page proof, so that nothing more incriminating would be spoken by Judy or her girlfriend after it was handed in.

Stopping at the next call box to inform Waistcoat would be seen as another startling exhibition of his power, for them to marvel at. On the other hand to wait a little longer might mean getting more information which he could use in some way for himself alone. To hang on for a typed log would make the matter easier to credit, while to delay telling what he knew would give more time for Howard to play his sentimental game. You could only handle Howard with the velvet touch, because he was the sort of person who had a mind that talked to him all the time, and so had to be treated with respect.

No need to spoil Howard’s life unnecessarily, though at the same time he didn’t want him to spend all his listening hours on this one matter. He needed him back on day work, where he might for example find something more useful about the Afghan and central-Asian traffic. In that case it would be better to stop Judy’s mouth sooner rather than later. Yet Howard seemed so besotted that if she went off the air his despondency could put him out of action for a while.

He had to be handled carefully. Being blind, he was a man of feeling, and it was strange that he had become his only friend after Amanda, a person he could talk to more or less freely — which he couldn’t always even with her. It had come about because of his attraction to Laura, though how far she looked on him as friendly — apart from merely charitable — was hard to say. She was even more of an enigma than Howard, as if she knew that to become open might let slip a deadly secret gnawing inside her. If such was the case, only some kind of psychic dynamite, of the kind well packed in the back of his car, would solve her problem.

In spite of their long married life he thought Howard wasn’t as aware of her secret self as he imagined. Every woman had a secret self, and that was a fact. If you thought about it few people did or could get close because if they did there would be nothing to hold them together. Such a truth struck him as bleak, but obvious. With Amanda, their most violent quarrels occurred when the final barrier before mutual revelation was about to give, but they always kept it in place, by embarking on a wonderful bout of bedroom love. Perhaps they knew each other better than they thought, an observation which was not so bleak. He enjoyed long distance driving because the monotony allowed him to think, but he only wanted to deliver the packages and get home as soon as possible, so that he could rattle off a tape letter to Howard. He didn’t yet know the text but was confident that one would come as soon as he sat down at the key.

SIXTEEN

White gulls mocked him with their freedom, squealing in the unlimited blue. They concentrated on the area as if waiting for a house to break free, head for the open sea like a ship, and begin discarding choice leftovers for them to eat.

He took off his cap to feel the wind. Instead of wondering what he would do if Laura went shopping and didn’t return, he thought: what if I didn’t go back from my morning walk? What if I was hit by a car, was incinerated by lightning, or strolled off the breakwater and drowned? Better still, what if I took a train to London, got to the airport, and boarded a jet for Brazil? Secret preparations would be necessary so, like a prisoner of war, I would work at my escape for weeks.

On the other hand, how far can a blind man get on his travels? Hard to disguise myself as someone with sight, and clever is that man who can act blind without detection. The alarms would go off as if I really had escaped, and I would be brought home like a mental case, shackled to a triumphant social worker, a number painted on the back my jacket in case I made a run for it again. Even the gulls would become part of the search, circling the copse in which I had crawled to hide or die.

He sat on a low wall halfway down the winding steps, relishing the touch of spring breeze. A man was digging in his garden, and Howard knew that the soil was rich and black from the easy sound of the spade going in. The leaf mould of last year and the emerging leaves of this had a cool vegetable smell, reminding him of his infants’ school when the teacher managed them across the road and into the hedged field for a lesson on how to recognise flowers and trees.

Before leaving he had taken a signal from his wireless telling of nine stowaways who had been arrested some miles inland. The captain of the ship they had come on, now at sea again, was disputing the fact that his company should pay for their repatriation. The local police had checked the ship before leaving Casablanca, and found no stowaways, so how could it be his responsibility?

Everyone in the world was on the move legally or without formality, and it was easy for those who had the will to get up and go. Even if the stowaways were sent back, their journeying would fill part of their lives, and the memory stay to be talked about. No doubt they would set off again, an enterprise to envy.

He walked on when the man rested from his rhythmical digging, and the sea breeze took over from the smell of earthy life on rounding the bend, counting the taps with his stick so as to know when he was about to reach level ground.

The igniting signal had lit a way through a lifetime of regrets. He would rather not have heard it, except that he could pass the message to Richard in his next morse letter. There was little to tell. Even the story about old Charlie coming back from Cherbourg with his launch full of drugs, heard supposedly in the pub, had been invented. A man must say something amusing when writing to a friend, and such items as smugglers getting caught appeared often enough in the newspapers. Still, it wasn’t good to spin a lie, and he wished he hadn’t done so, regarding the unease as an indication that he would not do so again.

Instead of continuing to the beach at the bottom of the hill he turned and climbed slowly back, impatiently counting the steps so as to know when he reached the house. He imagined Laura’s lift of the eyelids as he opened the door. ‘What have you forgotten?’

‘I had my walk.’ He put his stick in the rack and took off his cap. ‘I got to the bottom, but suddenly felt it was futile to go any further.’

‘I’ll make your coffee, then.’ To think of her concern as worry would be extreme, yet his breaking of habit was always done for a reason. For weeks, instead of shutting down his wireless at eleven, he had stayed as if mesmerised till well past midnight. He no longer told her stories about what he intercepted. Was what he picked up responsible for his reticence, and if not then what could be? Nothing ever received had been of the sort to chill her, or surprise her, or alarm her, but it wouldn’t do to question him about a world they had agreed should be his own. A blind man needed more inviolable territory than anyone else, but what afflicted him must have something to do with what was part of him and not of her.

A few days ago she’d heard the hum and click of morse as she stood in the kitchen. He must have been sending for at least half an hour, and on asking him why, he responded in a tone of not liking to be asked, which she hadn’t heard before. Then he admitted it was a tape letter to Richard, who sometimes wrote to him in that same way. They exchanged information about what each had heard on the radio and, if there happened to be nothing of interest, just what came into their heads.

She didn’t therefore see how that could be the reason for his morose state, since they had been communicating for months. Nor did she think that if she knew morse she would gain any enlightenment by listening to Richard’s tapes. Another reason for his moods could be that the year-in and year-out sameness of existence preyed on his spirit.

She laid the coffee before him. ‘Perhaps it’s time we had another holiday.’

‘I’m happy enough here.’

‘I sometimes think you might not be.’

He put sugar into his coffee, the first time in years. ‘I’m as happy as you are, my love,’ touching her wrist and joining thumb and finger around as if to gauge the span, one of his oldest caresses.

Today the gesture annoyed her, though again it was too strong a word, merely that together with his new remoteness he was shackling her into a situation he wouldn’t explain. ‘I know, but I worry. Stupid, probably.’

‘I’m well, except that a shadow goes over me now and again. But it’ll pass. It always has.’ He wanted to get back to the radio, a drug impossible to do without, by day now as well as night. Judy might come on at any time.

‘Maybe we should go for you to have a check-up.’

The cat brushed his ankles, and he pushed it forcefully away. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

He was putting on weight, but eating gave pleasure. No harm in that. He had so few, apart from her. Going on a diet would seem too regimented to put up with.

‘I don’t want you to worry about me.’ He laughed, his old self. ‘That would really make me ail. I’ll go for a long walk after lunch, and it would be a pleasure if you’d join me.’

He stroked the cat, and its rattling harmonised with her agreement. ‘I’d love to. We can go to the Pot and Kettle on the front, and have tea.’

‘We will,’ he stood. ‘In the meantime me and Ebony will listen to a few funny squeaks coming out of the wireless. Won’t we, pussy cat?’

‘We’ll get a novel on tape from the library later, to take your mind off things.’ She watched him go, no diverting him from whatever it was, and feeling still more desolate, though she couldn’t think why. There was no reason, except there must be. As he had often said, there was a reason for everything.

A shake of the hand as he readied himself for the search. She hardly ever came on during the day, being busy in the galley serving three-course meals for a boisterous and hungry crew. The waving bush of atmospherics on her frequency sounded like the wash of water around the boat as it plied tricky channels of the Dodecanese. He consoled himself with the weather forecast: ‘A moist and unstable air circulation is still affecting the eastern Mediterranean. Patchy cloud and moderate visibility. Outlook similar.’ And so, he thought, is my future, though similar to what?

The ten-o’clock transmission from France was useful for honing his brain. Even when I’m close to dying, or halfway to being ga-ga, I’ll still be able to take morse and work a typewriter. If my brain loses its sharpness for that it’ll prove I’m going into a darkness greater than the one I’m in now, and I’ll enter it quietly because there’ll be no option.

The French station emitted a few score groups of letters, cunningly throwing in a figure now and again to fox whoever was taking it. Then came ten minutes of prose, which Howard got the gist of because he had taken the language for Higher School Certificate. Every little endeavour or event before the age of twenty had been drawn on to reinforce his life-long effort of survival.

Laura once remarked as a compliment that only the simplest people could live their lives to the full, but he had never known till now how right her observation was, recalling it because today’s French transmission ended with: ‘… l’homme le plus simple du monde, ce n’est pas assez dire, il est avec les autres comme il est dans l’obscurité silencieuse de sa demeure,’ which he rendered as: ‘The simplest man, needless to say, remains, when among others, in the silence and obscurity of his own soul.’

He moulded the daily aphorisms to the demands of his own mind, messages from God manipulated to distil the basic beliefs of his life, an innocent conceit, but supportive all the same. Some he recorded on tape for listening to whenever he needed to speculate on who he was, and ponder the reason for being on earth. They were more relevant than if coming through in English, for his imperfect French could suggest meanings that may not have been intended, or weren’t there in the first place. They tested his wits, prompted him to formulate questions and search for answers, unable to deny that any disturbance elevated his often deadened mind into a higher state than boredom or the mere transcribing of morse.

He sometimes forgot the station for weeks until, one morning, without knowing that he needed to, he would give up his walk, and tune into the half-hour transmission, the hundred or so code groups inducing a mindlessness which prepared him for the gnomic utterance of the prose.

The older he got, merely inhabiting himself wasn’t enough to satisfy his existence. The blister of discontent, there since birth, plagued him more because he was blind, an anguish of uselessness sometimes close to madness, as if he were an animal in the zoo and he the only member of the public looking on.

An undignified picture but maybe it would guide him towards making a better situation for himself. If he could take morse, he was still sane, which was good. If he told Laura of his lack of moral fibre she would say he was restless, needed to see a doctor, or could do with a holiday, so he wouldn’t hint that anything was wrong because nothing was. Rather, in some ways, it was more right than since taking off for that last bombing raid over Germany. The flimsy covering of renewal was lifting with an effect as painful as when plaster was taken from a healing wound. He could only endure, knowing that uncertainty and discontent could be tolerated as long as you gave no sign to anyone else.

He pressed the radio button, and put on earphones. A crushing phase of interference, like a load of gravel sliding from the uptilted back of a lorry when a new road is being laid out, obliterated a few words of the weather forecast from the Gulf of Mexico. What electrical machine caused the disturbance was impossible to know, the noise not lasting long enough to give clues. He heard the voice of Judy, the tone as if she was in danger, though most likely from exasperation.

Judy: ‘Still don’t hear you very well. I woke up at four this morning. I had a bad dream.’

Carla: ‘What it say?’

Judy: ‘Horrible. That’s all I remember. Then I thought about you, and went back to sleep. It was bliss.’

Carla: ‘What do you do?’

Judy: ‘Don’t be rude. It’s you I want, not me. It’s driving me crazy. Maybe it would be good if we didn’t talk like this nearly every day. I’d feel more settled perhaps. I hate the radio sometimes.’

Carla: ‘If you want.’

Judy: ‘I don’t want. It’s you I want, but I can’t have you. I want to be near you again. In two weeks I fly to England, and stay a fortnight at my aunt’s place in Boston.’

Carla: ‘Boston in America?’

Judy: ‘No, silly.’ (laughs) ‘Boston in Lincolnshire. That’s where the people came from who went to America. So they called their town Boston. Don’t you know about the Pilgrim Fathers?’

Carla: ‘Don’t like fathers.’

Judy: ‘Nor me. Somebody will take my place here on the boat, then I can leave. Maybe you can come with me.’

Carla: ‘I can’t. I work here.’

Judy: ‘Ask your boss for leave.’

Carla: ‘Maybe not possible.’

Judy: ‘I’ll see you in Madrid then, on my way up.’

Carla: ‘Yes, I think. Two nights, I can. You meet old boyfriend in England?’

Judy: ‘Don’t worry. I’ve only seen him once since I met you. He took me out to dinner but I told him he was wasting his time. It’s no good, I said to him. Forget me. I only love you, Carla.’

Carla: ‘I’m jealous.’

Judy: ‘You needn’t be. We should live together.’

Carla: ‘We can’t. You don’t understand.’

Judy: ‘I do. I know we can’t live together. Anyway, I like this job, but only for a few weeks at a time. But why can’t we live together, I should like to know.’

Carla: ‘We damn lovers. In autumn yacht go in dock. I have more time. Maybe we see more each other.’

Judy: ‘Yes, that’ll be good. In September we’re going to do things in the Azores. I can’t say more.’

Carla: ‘Tell when we meet. If long way away, in Atlantic, no radio talk, too far, maybe.’

Judy: ‘We’ll have to write letters.’

Carla: ‘Difficult for me. Telephone could be. We find way.’

Judy: ‘You’ll have to come to England.’

Carla: ‘No good for me.’

Judy: ‘I know. You’ll be with your man. You never talk about him.’

Carla: ‘What the use? You know about him from start. No secrets.’

Judy: ‘I know. I love you. I don’t want to upset you. Lots of mosquitoes in this place. I swat them. I see all the rooms we’ve been in, I go through the list of places we’ve been together in, every night I do it, over and over again, so that I can get to sleep. It always works.’

Carla: ‘I think of you. Much pain, though. I think of restaurants we eat in. But time to go to sleep. Siesta time for me.’

Judy: (laughs) ‘You don’t love me anymore.’

Carla: ‘I do. I prove it when we meet, OK? What about your crew, what they do?’

Judy: ‘Oh, don’t worry. The captain’s forty-eight years old, and he’s got a girlfriend called Brenda. She goes back tomorrow. I can’t hear you very well. Maybe I’ll let you go. Let’s talk at the same time tomorrow.’

Carla: ‘All right. I’m sleepy now. I call you.’

Judy: ‘We call each other. Love you, Carla.’

Carla: ‘Kiss, kiss, Judy.’

A Niagara of atmospherics scraped his eardrums to an itch. Able to hear both voices on the air, which neither of them could, he caught a tone in Carla’s that Judy missed, and something in Judy’s that Carla wouldn’t notice. Judy was infatuated (you might say almost in love) to the point of destruction. Carla no doubt liked her, flattered to have her on the line, and proud to have such a compliant English girlfriend, though they met so rarely — and she may not be the only one. She’s a sailor, after all. He speculated as to how long the affair would go on, and hoped not for much longer. They were near the end, but who would break first? He noted impatience in Carla’s tone at Judy’s importunities, which she couldn’t control, or didn’t care to. From his God-like position he felt the threads weakening, yet hoped they wouldn’t break because he wanted to continue listening, keep them under control. On the other hand he would like them to separate so that he could have Judy to himself, at least in memory.

At lunch he said to Laura: ‘When I was young my parents used to take me to the Lincolnshire coast for holidays. Well, they did once or twice. A time or two we went to Llandudno, but mostly to Skegness. I had a vision of Lincolnshire just now while I was sitting at the radio, a place called Boston. I don’t know why it came to me, but I’d like to have a sniff at the old place.’

‘Funny you should think of your boyhood.’

‘Isn’t it? Maybe I’m getting old.’

‘We both are, if you think about it.’ He had turned her down point blank at the mention of a holiday that morning, and now he was back on the subject, though in as courteous a fashion as he could manage. She would like to know what lay behind his change of mind, if anything did. Things often flashed into his consciousness, and into hers as well. Hardly a day went by without a glancing return of her horrible powerlessness under the sweating rage of the man she had trusted, who had ‘interfered’ with her, and done what she still could not put the right word to. She used to think that every miscreant was somehow redeemable, but the older she got, and the more her torment grew rather than lessened, the more she believed that some people were damned even beyond the grave.

‘We could go there, perhaps in three weeks’ time,’ he said. ‘And stay a few days. Won’t cost much, if we do it by car, and take a midweek bargain break.’

She wondered why now, and why the excitement in his voice. It wasn’t something he had picked up on the radio, or heard on the street, since he hadn’t even gone into town from the bottom of the steps, yet the insistence was too strong to have shot out of the past as he claimed. Nor was he merely agreeing to her suggestion that they take a holiday, and leaving her to say where they should go. In any case there was nothing wrong with the idea, they had the time, and could afford it. Paris was the last place, and Malvern before that, but now he stipulated Lincolnshire, and she was always glad to go along with him, to improve the life of darkness and boredom he fought so well. ‘Yes, I think I’d like that. It’ll be a pleasant break.’

He touched her hand. ‘Everything good in my life depends on you.’ But would it be so wonderful? The obstacles to getting close to Judy were like sheets of black cloth. They would surround him, zone on zone spreading out and impossible to break through, yet there was no problem in motoring to Boston, lodging there, and walking around, and even if he didn’t find her he would be happy at being within a mile of her whereabouts.

‘I’ll look Boston up on the map,’ she said. ‘I expect it’ll take most of the day. I’ve never been that way, so I shall enjoy it.’

‘We’ll go through Cambridge and King’s Lynn. Should take about five hours, unless we stop off in Cambridge for tea.’

She marvelled at how thoroughly he had absorbed the geography of the country before his injury. He was never so happy as when they were planning a trip, though there was something unusual about this one. Adding the word fateful as well, she told herself not to be silly.

Excited at the prospect of an adventure, he tapped out his letter to Richard: ‘All I want, all I can have, is to hear her voice unframed by a monsoon of atmospherics. I may not be able to talk to her, but it might enhance the platonic acquaintance if I get in any way close. And perhaps I’ll end up with some idea as to what she looks like.’

He ran the tape back and started again, trusting no one to guess what he was planning, even regretted mentioning Judy and her lover in a previous letter, surprised again by his competent recourse to subterfuge. In a normal unblind life this is what I would have been like, he told himself. Near-fatal wounds distort the character, delay development, keep one in a still pool of inertia and quietude so as to give the strength to live from day to day. Such is my way of justifying the instinct of self preservation, rather than admitting to a lack of moral force in my character. An obsession forges its own rules, or acknowledges none. A man with nothing but his private world to keep him going needn’t share thoughts with anyone else.

The downward slide was sudden and complete and, far from damaging his morale with vain regrets, he was buoyed at being able to act even in this small way. Though realising what he was doing, his state seemed preferable to how he had felt a year ago.

Something had to be sent. A rule of civilised life was that you always responded to a letter.

‘Dear Richard, I hope your trip went well. Nothing worth reporting has happened to me. It was quite otherwise, though, on the radio. I intercepted a telegram from a ship’s engineer in mid-Atlantic to his wife saying he would be coming ashore at Southampton in four days’ time, and that she was to meet him at a certain hotel. Armed with her name and address I went to the library and had someone get her number for me from the local directory. Not knowing what to do with it, I nevertheless wondered how such information would allow a blind man to play God. On the way home I sat on low wall by a telephone box. All kinds of wicked plans went through my mind. I could call the police, like an anonymous informer, and say that the man was a smuggler of heroin who should be intercepted. I could contact the wife and, posing as an old friend, tell her about her husband’s infidelities. Or I could phone the man after he had got home and pretend to be the wife’s lover. Knowledge would become power, yet if it didn’t improve my position in life it would stay as malice.

‘I had no wish to do any of these things. It would be the height of evil to do so, which just isn’t me, though I suppose you could say that even thinking in such a way shows evil enough. In any case it is only the evidence of an exploding mind, a minor temporary eruption that subsides and, I hope, leaves no trace.’

He was telling a story, having received no such signal, not recently, and similar ones that had come his way in the past had vanished into the mulch of so many others. He wanted to fill the tape, put marrow into the bone of his letter, out of polite reciprocation that mutual confidence called for. It was more a missive to himself, as they all had been, which made them instructive by putting his mind into a state of fermentation. It only mattered that you knew what you did, and squashed the temptations arising out of what you thought. Truth lit a way through the labyrinth, kept you close to yourself, and stopped you doing harm to others, but the light was yours alone, whatever its fuel, illumination known only to the Almighty who, he hoped, would forgive a darkening soul suddenly finding it necessary to use whatever light came close.

‘All in all, things are good with me. I still listen to the German Numbers Woman, and hear the Moscow latitude and longitude merchant trading position reports with aircraft toing and froing with cargoes of poppy dust between Europe and Central Asia. Some planes have four slow engines, while others do six hundred miles an hour on three or four jets. The traffic goes on, and I suppose the world goes down, and we can only make sure good people such as us don’t go with it. From what I hear on the news, and from what Laura reads to me out of the newspapers, the prospects for the world are dire, but we have to stay part of that rock of ages which holds the swamp back, hoping there are enough of us on earth to do the job.

‘An item on the news said a blind man was knocked down and robbed by some lads. Such mindlessness is appalling, and my response would be, if they were caught, utterly Biblical. Maybe they were drugged up, as many are these days, but that shouldn’t alter the quality of retribution. I do not say: “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” because everybody knows very well what they do. I become less of a Christian as life goes on; if ever I was one, that is.

‘I’m rambling, but what’s the point of a letter to a friend if you don’t say what’s on your mind? The troubled spirit needs the solace of communication, as I’ve always known, and it’s better to be in touch rather than talk all the time to yourself, as I suppose most people have to do, blind or not. I shall be away for a week as from the thirteenth. Laura and I want to have a break, and explore the Wolds (or is it the wilds?) of Lincolnshire. Which is all I have to say for now.’

SEVENTEEN

‘Any flowers by the roadside?’

‘Only dandelions, as far as I can see, otherwise fields, green of course, but a sheen of orange from that few seconds of sun. Pleasant, though. Rich agricultural land, by the look of it.’

‘Petrol fumes must put the prettier flowers off,’ he said. ‘They run for the woods.’

‘There aren’t any,’ she said. ‘It’s better in spring, though, on the lanes.’

‘Dandelions are tough. Yellow and gritty. They thrive anywhere.’ He turned his head left and right, as if seeing their dull mustard faces, not knowing they were too far off. Such gestures used to bring tears to her eyes, ‘You are a lovely soft-hearted thing,’ he would say, ‘and I adore you for it, but don’t weep for me, dearest. I’m as hard as nails.’

‘I’m sure you are not,’ she said, and he loved her even more for disbelieving him.

‘Another roundabout, a straight road now. Still flat, of course. Enormous bales of straw piled on a lorry turning right. Electrical pylons we’ve just gone under. A cabbage field to the right.’

‘Are we going very fast?’

‘Only fifty. I’m way behind that lorry in front. Another roundabout.’

‘We’ll call it Roundabout Land,’ he smiled.

‘Six miles to go,’ she said.

‘It feels smooth.’

‘A line of houses, but we aren’t there yet.’

‘I like flowers in the spring,’ he said. ‘Also to smell them in cottage gardens.’

After a silence she announced: ‘Boston, three miles. And yet another roundabout coming up. I can see the church.’

Howard breathed, and she felt his excitement at picturing it more clearly from her description than if he hadn’t last seen it as a child.

‘I’m slowing down.’ Tarmac was slippery after the rain so she trailed behind a lorry, clearing the windscreen continually against an oily backwash. Impossible to know why — since it seemed to have meant so much — he had waited all these years to come back. Maybe he had met a girl before getting to know her, a storybook experience of unrequited juvenile passion. Since mentioning the trip there had been an atmosphere about him, and between them, that had never been there before. She wished her intuition wasn’t so finely tuned as to feel it, but having been married so long such nuances were hard to avoid. Life with him called for the sort of unremitting care and vigilance which demanded that she live within his skin, as much as he sometimes seemed to be in hers. She had never been discontented, having had the prescence of mind in marrying him to expect the kind of existence about which she would never be able to have any regrets or make complaint. Was there a firmer prison than that?

‘Can you still see it?’

‘There’s the lorry in front,’ she said. ‘A line of lorries, in fact.’

‘I thought there was, from the noise.’

‘We’re almost there. We’ve just passed the Boston Coat of Arms by the roadside.’

‘I can’t wait.’ He was revealing too much. ‘I mean, it’ll be good to get out of the car and stretch the legs a bit.’ Both arms would be so far apart, as if trying to get them around the earth and pull it sufficiently open to let daylight pour from the middle — a common dream, or nightmare.

‘Same here.’ The subterfuge was plain, but what if I’m wrong, she thought, and things are as he says, and I’m tormenting myself into a kind of madness? ‘It was a good idea, to come up here. We certainly needed a break.’

‘I’m glad you think so. I can feel houses.’

‘A sign for the town centre. Over the river now.’

‘Muddy?’

‘Not sure. I think it was.’

‘It always was.’

So he had been there before. The tide was out, water retreated from steep banks. ‘We’re turning towards a bridge.’

‘It smells the same. Mud, tobacco, beer, smoke. Cleaner, I suppose. It takes me back more than I can say. I first came in from the west side. My father had an Austin, and I was in the back. Ten I’d be. It was a real job winding the window down. No electrics then. But I managed it. My father had a leather map case, a special uniform set of England and Wales. I remember the smell of its leather. You opened the case with a little key, and whenever my mother told him she thought we were lost my father would stop the car by the roadside — you could in those days — and get out and say: “All right, lost are we? Unlock the maps! We’ll soon find where we are!” My mother went into stitches at him sounding so pompous, but he had said it like that on purpose, so that we could laugh together. We had wonderful times in Lincolnshire. At home, she would stick out her bosom and say: “I haven’t the foggiest notion where we are. Don’t you think you’d better unlock the maps, dear?”’

More reason to believe him. He sounded like the boy he remembered being.

They went around the town and came into it as if entering by the back door. ‘Looks a very old fashioned place,’ she said. ‘Handsome buildings. Most beautiful town I’ve seen for a long time.’ In the early days she used to wonder how far she ought to go in praising memorable scenes, because she didn’t want to make him too depressed at being unable to see, but quite soon she recovered from such a nicety, and described everything so that he could see almost as well as she.

She turned a corner, and there they were. ‘Well, I shan’t have to unlock the maps, because this is where we are going to stay. It looks a very pleasant place. I’ll go in and register, then come out with someone to help with the luggage.’

‘And I’ll wait here, just to smell the place.’ He felt people going by, found the edge of the pavement but decided not to wander, strained all the power of his ears to hear a voice that would be Judy’s, or even Carla’s. Far too early for it to happen, but even the harshest exchanges registered like the best of music.

‘What we’ll do,’ she said, when they were in the room, ‘is rest an hour before dinner. We usually do.’

He stood by the window. ‘I feel rather restless. I’d like to amble around the town while it’s still light.’

The veins on his lids were dark, as if he was under some sort of stress. But then, he always was. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. You look so tired.’

‘I’m not at all. It’ll be pleasant to exercise the limbs. I know the name of the hotel, so I can ask if I lose my bearings. You know my navigation is good, though.’

Not always, in a strange town. It was all according to his mood. Malvern had been easy, either up or down, but even there he’d needed a few outings on her arm. ‘I’d better come with you.’

He couldn’t say no. Could, but it wouldn’t do. Besides, he could walk more quickly with her, cover a bigger area, hear more voices, sense more. Luckily the rain had stopped, and people were out in the main street. ‘The air’s clean. I’ll sleep tonight.’

‘Would you like to see St Botolph’s? It’s famous.’

The more places the better, but he wouldn’t know if Judy was in the church, unless she walked with a companion and he heard her talking. Maybe her voice would sound different to when on the radio from two thousand miles away. It was so with Laura who once phoned the house to say she would be home late. He’d noticed a higher tone, not apparent when close. When he’d first heard his voice on a tape recorder he couldn’t believe it was his.

He took in the local accent on hearing two men talking outside a pub. The hotel manager had come from somewhere else, and his staff were foreigners. ‘You’ll have to explain it to me.’ Graveyard mould was rank to the nostrils. ‘I must have gone into it in the old days, because my father insisted we call at all the churches. He ticked them off from a guidebook. Whenever he stopped the car my mother liked to annoy him by saying: “Make sure you get the right one!” But I don’t recall going in here, though if you describe it the memory might come back. I don’t think anything can be forgotten.’

He could tell no one was inside, so didn’t care to waste time, but couldn’t say so because she was already reading aloud about the wood carvings, going on to explain the tombs and a chapel as they walked its light and spacious interior, with its lofty arches, which he felt went up forever into a sky she couldn’t see, towards a God he had no feeling for. Bored and impatient, he stayed close, chilled at every step. Judy would never be seen in such a place, not even to get married, which he supposed she never would.

He wasn’t interested, and she was glad when he said: ‘We can go, if you like.’

‘I think so.’

‘Churches are much the same.’ They walked back towards the High Street. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever had much time for them,’ which was perhaps churlish, because Laura went to church occasionally. The frying of fish and chips brought a shock at the notion that Judy might be in the queue. ‘I salivate so much at the smell I feel like getting a bundle and eating them on the street.’

‘We’ll be having dinner in the hotel,’ she said.

‘I know. But I used to do that as a youth. We’d go into a pub for half a pint, then go out to eat fish and chips. Very daring, because we weren’t eighteen. Young people don’t bother about that these days.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is more freedom about. Maybe we’ll have some for lunch tomorrow. I’ve nothing against it. We can even sit down. I saw tables inside.’

‘Were there many people?’

‘About half full.’

‘We’ll certainly sit, then. The purpose of being here isn’t for me to re-live my childhood and youth. I’m not that old.’ He was chagrined they couldn’t go in now, but consoled himself by hoping that Judy might come to the hotel for dinner, though she wouldn’t be staying there. Carla would have flown up from Corsica, and they would put up at her aunt’s house. Unable to tolerate the cooking, and not being welcome to, they would go out for something to eat, and because Carla was a stranger to England Judy would want her to sample the local fare. Or the food of a typical provincial hotel. There wouldn’t be much on the menu to pick from, though neither would worry about that. Even so, he would rather encounter her voice when she was on her own, though that was impossible unless she talked to herself.

Not being at home put him into a tense state. He spilled his soup more than usual. ‘I’m getting shaky in my old age,’ he smiled.

A Nottingham couple at the next table was giving the waiter more trouble than Howard thought necessary over selecting the wine. When the bottle came his wife said it was like vinegar, so the man ordered champagne for her and drank the wine himself. Both turned quieter in the process, which enabled Howard to tune in to what others were saying, though with everyone talking at the same time it was hard to separate words which, like broken strings of beads, clattered around the room and were difficult to pin down. Catching at the tail of one, the words of someone else butted in.

He thought a woman said: ‘I don’t believe you, Carla,’ anything further crushed by a woman’s laugh at the joke of a man who thought being amusing was the best way to win her love. The clash of plates put his senses aslant a promising conversation. No good. ‘Any young people here? Or are they all like us?’

She was looking. ‘A woman in her thirties is eating in the corner on her own, that’s all.’

‘Does she look a bit nautical?’

‘She’s doing The Times crossword, it seems. But why do you ask?’

‘Boston’s a seaport, isn’t it?’

His soup slopped again, the hazard of such an affliction, though a man with less control might have spilt more than his soup: ‘Can’t think what’s wrong with me this evening.’

The next course came, and she cut up his steak, which for some reason annoyed him. ‘I like this place,’ she said, eating her own.

‘Me too.’

He was set apart, unusually so, had been even before they left home. He’d been determined about booking a room on the front instead of at the back which they normally liked because of the quiet. On her asking why, he merely said it would be a change. He could pick up voices from the street instead of listening to the sound of plumbing and the shouts of people who worked at the hotel. ‘We must come here again.’

‘Any time,’ he said.

‘Did you put up in Boston in the old days?’

Couldn’t remember. He thought not. ‘Just a jumble of rooms. We stayed a few days at a boarding house in Skegness, which my father didn’t like. Said the place was too common. So we motored around. Went to Louth (which mother called Loath) and Horncastle.’

‘Would you like to see those places?’

‘If we have time. But I’d like to concentrate on Boston. A lot comes back to me here. Atmosphere, if you see what I mean. Can’t quite put it into words.’

‘You’re not doing too badly. I’m getting to know more about your childhood, and that’s nice’ — glad he was managing his main course better. He came out so naturally with his reminiscences, having nothing to hide. Nor had she, if caring to go so far back, but blocking her from such days of innocence was an obstacle to all speech and reason, a permanent and constant bewareness, and she thought what sort of woman would I have been if that ghastly event hadn’t happened? Perhaps I wouldn’t have married Howard — the first time such a dambusting idea had occurred to her, shocking, but brought out by the puzzling disturbance in him. She wouldn’t have worn herself into this mood of stern quietude but for that. There could have been gaiety and laxity instead of a spirit tamped by secretions of bitter ash and fear, keeping her under the lock and key of endurance.

‘I love you when, you smile,’ he said.

‘Did I?’

‘Right out of the blue. I saw it in my mind’s eye, you might say. As if you were looking at a Charlie Chaplin film, and waiting to laugh when he really got going.’

It wasn’t a smile, rather a tilt of pain at the lips, and even that she had instinctively covered. He hadn’t seen it, but he would have guessed. She sometimes thought he had one-second flashes of actual vision, too quick either to notice or for him to think it meant his sight was coming back, which was not thought joyous, though it should have been. ‘I always smile when I’m happy,’ she said. ‘It’s quite involuntary. Don’t think too much of this trifle in a glass, do you?’

‘Bit too sweet.’

‘We’ll sit in the lounge afterwards so that you can smoke your smoke.’

‘It wasn’t a bad drop of Bordeaux. A smoke tastes good after the wine.’

‘I feel quite tipsy,’ she laughed.

‘It could be you’re tired. You’ve driven a long way. Why don’t you go to the room and rest? I’ll just pop outside the front door for a breath of air. I’ll get back all right.’

Uncanny if he knew the lie of the land already. She would have to believe him, but was more than uneasy at the notion of letting him go. ‘I don’t like to think of you wandering around.’

There was something determined in his laugh. ‘Like a lost soul?’

‘Well, not quite like that.’

‘You can’t lose me, never fear. Nor can I lose myself. Wouldn’t want to, in any case.’

He didn’t seem altogether convinced, but to respond in the same mood would only increase her anxiety when he came back with an untruth. He had decided, so she would give in, though not before a last try. ‘Wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour at your portable wireless? You might get something different, being in another part of the country.’

He had been looking forward to that, a length of aerial wire slung out of the window to bring in the east coast stations on medium wave, not always easy down south. ‘I’ll give it a try tomorrow night.’

No stopping him. ‘I’ll sit in the lounge,’ she said, ‘and look at the paper. It’ll be easier for you to find than the room upstairs.’

‘I’ll beam in on it all right. Don’t you worry about me.’

She would, though. A blind man had been knocked down and robbed, she had heard on the wireless. They were an easy target for thugs. ‘Oh, I shan’t.’

‘Just ten minutes or so.’

He must have been measuring the distance and direction between table and door throughout the meal, remembered it exactly when coming in. On her way to the lounge she saw him, still standing by the door, uncertain which way to go.

He felt her presence, and turned to the left, went slowly along the High Street. Navigation must be precise, and for every turn-off he transferred a coin from the left to the right pocket. There wouldn’t be many. A gang of youths jeered but made way.

‘Somebody’s nicked his dog.’

‘He’s off on the razz!’

‘I bet he can see as well as I can.’

‘That ain’t much, yer cunt.’

Laugh with them, though with impeccable sight he would never have done so. ‘Are you lost, duck?’ a voice called when he hesitated about turning back to the hotel.

‘Judy?’ he cried.

‘I’m not Judy,’ she said. ‘I’m Tracey.’

Judy wouldn’t have called anyone duck for a start. ‘It’s all right, Tracey. Thank you, but I know where I am. It’s just that I once knew a girl here called Judy.’

‘I expect there’s lots of ’em,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’

He turned left into a narrower street, hearing the odd tangle of sounds from a pub, under the window a good place to stand, being out of breath from hurrying more than usual. Or from excitement, though traversing an ocean of blackness was no way to find anyone. If he was a sailor adrift in an open boat during a moonless blackout he would be as keen sighted as the next man, except he was in the middle of a lit up town where everyone could see. Would shouting her name loud enough make her hear?

He pushed the door, and a couple of taps with the stick opened a way to the bar. Beer following wine wouldn’t do, but had to when he was asked. ‘Half a pint — best bitter, I suppose.’ He could stay half an hour over that.

‘Yes, sir.’ Light pushed against his senses, though the noise made it hard to tell who was by his side. ‘It’s a nice night after the rain,’ he said, to find out.

‘I like a frost, myself,’ the man put in. ‘You can’t beat it in winter. Healthy, as well. Wind straight from Siberia. Puts your back straight it does, but rain gives a man the ague. A good sharp frost sets him on his own two feet.’

‘If he don’t slip on his arse. But you’re right, Lionel,’ another man chimed in. ‘If yer can tek this climate yer can tek any.’

‘Mother’s milk to me,’ Lionel said. ‘As long as you’re brought up on it.’

‘Are you visitin’, then?’

‘Yes,’ Howard told him. ‘For a couple of days. Motoring round the country. With my wife, that is.’

‘A nice county, as well,’ Lionel said, ‘even in the hilly parts. I see you’re blind, though. Or can you see a bit?’

‘Not a thing. My wife tells me all she’s seeing, and I get a good idea from that. I got her to stop in Boston because I’m trying to locate a woman called Judy, friend of the family.’

‘Lives in Boston?’ the other man asked.

‘So I heard, when we last met.’ His hand shook as he put the empty glass down, gone quicker than he’d thought. ‘She works on boats, small yachts that take people around.’

They didn’t know, couldn’t say, the landlord adding that he would know, if anybody did, but he couldn’t say, either. The question went around the room, till a woman said she used to know her but hadn’t seen her for over a year.

‘Do you remember her address, where she lived?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Could it be down Skirbeck way?’ Lionel said.

‘Shouldn’t think so. Might have been. Could be anywhere,’ the woman said. ‘You never know, do you? She went away. That’s all I know.’

They were talking about her, so she was real, not just a voice. He was suspended in hope, yet cursed the darkness. Turning to go, as if to get outside would give more light, he said: ‘Thank you for your help.’

‘Shall you be all right getting back?’

‘Yes, thanks, it’s just around the corner and up the street a bit.’

‘Bloody funny bloke,’ a man said while he was still at the door.

‘You’d be bloody funny if you was blind. He must have second sight, going about like that. I’d have led him back to his hotel, only I didn’t want to push myself. He might be a bit touchy. They are sometimes, if they’re blind.’

Howard didn’t know whether he’d heard or imagined it, and he let the door go and paced back to the wider street, didn’t much care, because though he hadn’t found anything firm about Judy, there had still been the achievement of sauntering into a pub and talking with people who seemed to have known her.

Laura threw the paper down. ‘I was worried.’

He was tired of being worried about. He could live in the dark without any help. Being worried about all his life had stopped him learning to live properly on his own two feet. Being blind, and worried about as well, doubled the pain of being alive. And now that he had put it into words it would get worse because he didn’t know whether the real him was the loving and long-suffering husband of this wonderful woman who looked after him, or the petulant self-engrossed burden that these new revelations and his search for Judy would make for them both.

‘You needn’t have been.’ He sat by her. ‘It’s the sort of adventure I have to indulge in now and again.’

Shouldn’t have said I was worried. Must control myself. She had noted before how the difficulties were at least doubled while travelling, a strain on them both. ‘Was it good?’

He laughed. ‘I went in a pub, and had half a pint. Chatted with the locals. I felt very sociable.’

‘What about?’

‘The weather. What else? One of them offered to lead me back, but I said I could manage, which I did, as you see. They were nice people. I’ll have something to tap out when I send my next morse message to Richard. Where did you go for your holidays when you were little?’

‘Oh, to Cornwall mostly.’

‘We’ll go there next.’

Her uncle had stayed at the same hotel. ‘Cornwall’s a better Riviera than the French one.’ He held out both hands. ‘Time for a walk along the cliffs,’ glittery blue-grey eyes fixed on her, a beam of love and a command making for nothing but obedience, the relinquishing of her will that stunned her like a rabbit before a reptile. But she ran to take his hand, all innocent and loving in white socks, buttoned shoes and blue frock. And now in Boston — though why here? — she wanted to scream, but locked it in, thanking God Howard couldn’t see her twisted features.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Funny, I felt it.’

A denial might warp his intuition, do him no good. His peace of mind depended on knowing when he was and wasn’t right. He looked as if he had eyes to see, and the longer the pause the more he would know his guess to be accurate. Then she could say less guiltily what was not the truth at all. ‘I didn’t like Cornwall, so won’t want to go there again.’

‘Fair enough, my love.’ There was something she couldn’t talk about, but he was neither concerned nor curious, since he was unwilling to say what was in his own mind.

‘There are so many places to see,’ she said, ‘especially abroad.’

‘Like Turkey,’ he said, not sure he wasn’t in a dream. ‘Or Greece.’

Anywhere, except Cornwall. Or here, though she did not entirely dislike the place, which wasn’t after all to blame. The first few days on their trips were always difficult. They needed time to adjust after the too-settled life at home. ‘Yes, maybe we should go abroad again.’

‘All the same, I’m enjoying this more than I can tell you, especially that visit to the pub on my own. I love you to be with me, you know that, but it’s such a treat for me when I go somewhere alone. I know you don’t mind. Probably gives you a rest, too. It satisfies a deep instinct in me to wander, to get out on my own two feet. In normal life we’d have gone on exploring holidays, to Africa or the Himalayas, but since that’s not feasible the closest I can get to it is to be on my own now and again.’

‘That’s all right. You know I understand.’

‘And I understand you, sweetheart.’

‘We have a bond between us.’

‘So I’ll want to go out on my own tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’

‘A stroll, no more. I get an authentic feeling for the place when I’m alone. It brings things back.’

She stood up. ‘I have a headache. I must go to bed.’

‘It’s probably from driving.’ Some of the exquisite pain of searching for Judy had passed onto her, yet he felt remorse at not keeping the evidence of his obsession more to himself. ‘Yes, that must be it.’

He was like a man who had met another woman and made up his mind to run away. Or he was in the coils of wondering whether to do so, as my uncle had pleaded with me after he had raped me. ‘Come with me to the ends of the earth,’ he said. ‘I’m game. I’ll cut myself off from everything. We’ll go away together. We’ll even be happy. It’s our destiny.’

What harsh, stupid, unruly words they sounded. She had wanted to say: ‘Yes, take me then. I’m yours till either or both of us dies. We must be made for each other after this. I’ll stay with you till I’ve poisoned you, or driven you mad, which I’ll have the strength to do in the years to come.’

He didn’t mean it, wasn’t serious, was testing her, taunting her, tricking her into silence, and into going on with him so that he could do with her what he still craved to do. He played with her out of weakness, and the injustice cut her off from the world so that she wailed half mad in her dark corner, hearing her never ending rhythmical cries that she didn’t know were hers till the flesh plank of his hand struck her to make her quiet in case the neighbours heard. Her screams frightened her back to sanity and remorse, and from that time her true mind had hardly spoken. Nun-like, she had taken on the healing burden of guarding Howard for life.

They had booked a room with single beds, but got a double, and between the sheets held each other as if some cosmic force might try to wrench them apart. When she took off her night dress he turned to face her. ‘What colour?’

‘White,’ she said, though it was blue.

‘Thought so,’ her tears an unmistakable signal that she wanted him in the old and most effective way. ‘If only you could see.’ Cruel to say, but he would imagine even better what was there, and feel her soon enough.

‘Love you,’ he murmured. ‘Love you.’

‘Love you, too.’ Her anguish dissolved. ‘It’s the only thing.’

He lit a cigarette, put on his cap, and set off to find the public library. Laura had read a street plan to him in the lounge, and indicated which way to turn from the door to reach the middle of town. ‘Ask,’ she said, ‘if you lose track.’

‘I’ll show you,’ a woman said when he did. ‘It’s not far. I go past it to get home. Take my arm, if you like.’ She was young, no doubt personable, her accent like Judy’s. But she wasn’t Judy, nothing so miraculous. ‘I was in Turkey last year for my holidays,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been?’

‘No, but I went to Majorca once.’

‘I met a woman from Boston called Judy.’

‘Lucky devil! Here we are. Mind the steps. I’ll get you to the door.’

A youngish woman inside helped all she could, but Judy came nowhere on the electoral rolls. Another girl said she knew her, but she wasn’t in town at the moment. A pressure at the heart caused him to sit down. ‘She’s supposed to be.’

‘Well, I haven’t seen her lately.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘Tall, and well built. Blonde hair coming halfway down her back in a ponytail. She always wears trousers, and a blouse. Sometimes a sweater folded around her neck, if it’s going to be chilly. She wears small gold earrings, and walks quickly.’

‘It sounds like you know her well.’

‘She’s a bit too stuck-up for that, but I always see her walking by the house, when she’s around. You couldn’t mistake her.’

‘She was nice enough when I met her in Turkey,’ he said.

‘I suppose she would be, out there.’

‘What sort of work does she do?’

‘I couldn’t say exactly. She goes away for a few months, then comes back for a week or two. Something to do with boats, I think. She’s always got nice clothes. Must cost more than she could afford if she worked here at the library. Last time I saw her she was walking along the street eating an ice-cream. I must get back to my work now.’

He stood. ‘Can you tell me how to get to the street?’

She explained, but he caught the tone of disbelief that he would find it, or get much satisfaction if he did.

Success discouraged him, had taken the heart out of his search while making his slow way along. He was afraid. He didn’t want to find the place. He felt embarrassed, almost ashamed at being so close in his tracking, wouldn’t know what to say, felt an impulse to turn back, to leave the issue unresolved, in the air, so as to have something to regret for the rest of his life. If he met her he would have to confess to his clandestine listening, reveal himself as a snooper, a stalker, a dirty old flasher, a sneaking eavesdropper. He would invent a story. ‘You met me and my wife at a café in Antalya and told us to look you up.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. We’d had a few drinks.’

‘I don’t remember. I meet so many people.’

‘Oh, well, sorry to have bothered you. Maybe I’ve made a mistake.’

‘No, it’s all right. It could have been me. Come in for a moment. Now I think about it I do remember meeting someone like you.’

‘I wondered if you might.’

He smelled the mud of the river. A man took him to the gate saying: ‘That should be the house.’ Disembodied voices sometimes brought tears. Or they hardened the steel in him. The range could be unimaginable.

He walked along a path between dead flowers, till his hand found the knocker. Anyone passing would think him a burglar, or a beggar — a bit of both. He let the knocker drop three times, holding onto the lintel to stay upright. A dog barked from the next house. He looked up, as if to see something, as if to sample the comfort of rain, his throat as if a cloud of wool surrounded his neck. Houses and traffic melted away, and he was alone in the middle of a plain, no human life for miles, only the ever renewing howl of the dog. Doing something alone made him feel more isolated, floating and unattached, his own island.

Another hammering echoed through the house. Inside were chairs she had sat on, a bed she had slept in, a mirror she had seen her unsettled melancholy face in. Nobody in. She had gone shopping. She had gone to meet Carla. She had gone for a walk to the sea. She wasn’t there, and never would be. He knocked, called her name, couldn’t believe she wasn’t there. She was telling her aunt or whoever not to open the door, though why should anybody want to do that? Why should she be afraid of a knock at the door? She had turned the curtain aside and saw who it was. A man with a white stick and obviously blind couldn’t be dangerous, unless she thought he wasn’t blind at all, afraid it was the police come to talk about smuggling.

He walked slowly away — inanity to persist. Having tracked her to her den was more success than he had hoped for.

Waiting for their cod and chips, pot of tea and bread and butter, Laura said: ‘Howard, I want you to tell me what’s going on.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘It hurts me to put it like that, but you’re up to something. I’ve never been so mystified in all my life. It’s making me miserable.’

Understanding her plight — only too well — raised the level of his irritation, but he was adept at keeping it down. ‘I’m sorry you’re not enjoying the holiday as much as I am.’

‘Well, so am I. Which is why you must explain what’s going on. I feel I’m being driven mad since we came here. We only arrived yesterday, but it seems like years. I can’t take feeling that something’s wrong and not knowing what it is.’

‘Ah, here’s our meal. I’m as hungry as if I hadn’t eaten for days.’ He separated fish from bone, making a mess of it, batter spilling from the plate. ‘I suppose you’ll think it silly, if I tell you.’

‘Not as long as it makes sense. It won’t be silly to put me at my ease.’

‘It’s all to do with radio.’

She sniffed. ‘I guessed as much. What else?’

‘For the last few weeks I’ve been listening to a couple of boats in the Mediterranean talking to each other — by voice, not morse — and I’m sure they’re up to their necks in smuggling. A woman talks to another woman, and one of them comes from this town. The other’s Spanish, and I’m not sure what place she’s from. Anyway, I thought I’d play detective, and look the Boston woman up. The last thing I heard she was supposed to be here on a fortnight’s leave. I wanted to hear her voice, confirm that she existed, listen to what other people might say about her, see if I could dig up any clues, get another angle on the puzzle as to what she’s up to.’

He used his hands more while talking, but as if to calm his excitement. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ she said. ‘We could have been in it together. I would have helped.’

‘I wanted to concentrate my own mind on it, accomplish something by myself.’

She thought there had been too much of that lately. ‘And did you?’

‘I found out where she stays, but when I went to the house, no one was in.’

Hilarious and pathetic. He was biting on the sky of nowhere. The right words wouldn’t come, but she let what cared to, which could be the right ones after all, though none she would reveal. There was a vein of slyness in him, worst of all, but was she being repaid for that quality in herself? ‘That’s quite a feat, to do so much. I wondered why you wanted to go to the library. Where do you intend to go from here?’

‘I don’t know. Seems there’s nowhere else. I might have to leave it, listen to the radio when I get back and see if any further light comes from that. It’s my only hope. The whole thing may be a fantasy, about the smuggling especially, though I don’t think so.’

She should have been glad of his independence, and in a way was, but secrets from each other had never been expected in their life together. The singularity of his quest led her to wonder whether he was telling the truth, that it wasn’t a smokescreen hiding something else, but common sense told her that though he might be sly he was in no way subtle. The two never quite went together. In any case it was so bizarre a notion, to imagine he could ever catch anyone smuggling, though if it made him feel part of the world then she must admit and appreciate the good it might do. On the other hand he seemed a little too far in the land of obsession, which was most unhealthy, to do all he’d done unbeknown to her, unless she was going too far in the same direction by thinking so. ‘You must keep me up to date on your investigations.’

‘I’ll have to now, won’t I? I don’t suppose I’ll really learn anything up here. Enjoying your meal? I know I am.’

She poured tea for them both. ‘It’s a pleasant change.’

‘It’s just that my mind is rather taken up by trying to track her down.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Whether I like it or not is beside the point.’ He enjoyed talking to someone else about Judy, though without giving anything vital away. ‘I’m just going where my inclination leads me.’

‘Do you have any feeling that you should resist it?’

‘Since there’s no possible harm,’ he said, ‘I don’t. It’s like a game, and I’m enjoying it.’

‘Well, of course, it’s all right listening to the wireless out of interest, as a hobby, and even making up stories from what you hear, but trying to fit something into a reality you can only imagine strikes me as a little unhealthy.’

‘You can hardly say I make a habit of that kind of thing.’

She was going too far. ‘I didn’t mean to imply you did.’

‘Wouldn’t your curiosity have been aroused?’

‘It might have been. I can’t be sure. I would have waited for more information before coming up here.’

He spooned hot apple tart and custard. ‘We needed a holiday, as you said, so I suggested we come.’ Their talk was embarrassing now that she had decided his venture was weird and futile, not fit for her approval, but he saw no way to convince her, especially since the quest was peculiar even to him. He controlled an unfamiliar annoyance, though spoke as openly as possible. ‘I didn’t tell you why I thought we needed a holiday because I assumed you would see the reason as a bit daft, and I’d get discouraged.’

A response would lead into the unusual territory of a quarrel. He had wanted to do without her, even to deceive her. If she hadn’t asked he would have told her nothing. He was suggesting it had been a mistake to ask, and perhaps he was right. Rules in such a marriage had to be made up as you went along. Because every day was the same there was always the danger that one day would be different. ‘What shall we do this afternoon?’ she said, after the silence.

‘I’d like to walk the town a bit more.’

She folded her paper napkin, and reached for the bill. Only one thing was on his mind, which it seemed nothing could move. ‘It’ll be tiring, you know, and boring for me.’

‘I’d be happy to go alone.’

More than happy, no doubt. ‘What I mean is that it will be boring for me without you.’ The girl took the twenty-note. ‘I have some ideas about our holiday as well, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll go to a place called Somersby. I read in the guidebook that Tennyson was born there. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I know I will. We can both walk around the town some more tomorrow.’

Such negotiations over disputed territory brought them closer, gave something to talk about at least, laced with the unfamiliar frisson of infighting. He would relent, allow chance to operate in the hope of it bringing unforeseen results. ‘Fair enough. We’ll do it your way.’

She gave him his stick. ‘Not my way entirely. If you aren’t going to like it, we won’t go.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘I’ll enjoy it.’ Judy must know about Tennyson, and it was more than possible she would want to show Carla his birthplace.

‘And tonight,’ she said, ‘you can try to get the east coast stations on your radio.’

Between tea and dinner he lay down to sleep. So did Laura, on the other side of the bed. Somersby, embosomed (a word she used) in early greenery had exhausted them. ‘All those Tennysons,’ she recalled, ‘half mad, and doped on laudanum!’

‘I want to hear his poems again,’ he said. ‘“Tiresias” is the one I like, but it would be, wouldn’t it? How did it go?’

‘Like this, I think.’ Years ago she had thought it apposite to learn:

‘I wish I were as in the years of old,

While yet the blessed daylight made itself

Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke

These days, now dull, but then so keen to seek

The meanings ambushed under all they saw,

The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice

What omens may foreshadow fate to man

And woman, and the secrets of the Gods.’

‘I forget the rest, though it is rather long. What a pity I didn’t bring the book. I could have read all of it.’

‘I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll leave the day after tomorrow.’ If he couldn’t find Judy by then he would conclude she’d gone elsewhere, maybe taken Carla to Scarborough, or Blackpool, or to the Derbyshire hills.

After dinner Laura stayed in the lounge with a couple telling her about their holiday in Israel. Upstairs Howard put his radio on a chest of drawers under the window, threw out a length of wire, and plugged in, using earphones so as not to disturb anyone next door, leaving him alone with the ionosphere hissing and crackling, talking and morsing as the needle swivelled through scores of stations.

A hotel bedroom was more clandestine than his own mock radio shack, and the last two days of speculation were erased by the streaming of bird sounds into the brain, a relaxing therapy never known to fail.

The east coast transmitters, loud, brash, and a delight to listen to, nevertheless gave out little of interest. Messages from tankers requested pilots to guide them to their berths, sounding so close he had to decrease the volume. He soothed himself for half an hour with North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico weather, such clear and easy to read rhythms transferred to his hand held tape recorder in case anything was worth putting onto the typewriter at home.

Switching to short wave, he trawled the usual frequencies and fancied, with a shock that went through his whole body, as if he had touched a naked cable, that he heard Carla calling her girlfriend. He twitched the needle, to go back slowly over an arc of almost silence. The aether played party tricks to bemuse and deceive. There were footpaths, bridleways and lanes through the static, no terrors or lack of navigational know-how for a blind man. Distant laughter on the half wane mocked him to return and look for it, but he was adept at playing ring around the moon, went up wave and down wave, waited on the edge, smoothed in and came out again, sneaked as slowly over the frequency as if a voice he wanted to hear, and which knew he wanted to hear it, could feel him changing kilocycles, each one passing like the clanging of a door.

Carla must know something I don’t know, or she’s calling another boat and another woman. Maybe a man, because you couldn’t always tell with such people. A Slavic voice poached on the wave but didn’t stay, and Carla’s urgent requests fell into the silence, then came clear enough from the whirlpool: ‘’Ello, Daedalus, Daedalus, this is Pontifex. You hear me now, over.’

Judy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or she wasn’t anywhere but in Boston, which Carla seemed not to know. Again and again she called, as if convinced Judy was somewhere waiting — pleading for her to answer. He felt angry at such importunity, at such clamouring for Judy when she knew she couldn’t possibly be there.

But she was. ‘Pontifex, Pontifex, this is Daedalus, this is Daedalus. Now I hear you. My receiver wasn’t tuned in properly, but I found the trouble.’

Her voice was nowhere as loud or clear as on the larger receiver two hundred miles further south, but he heard enough, wanted to bang his head against the wall because they had conspired to deceive him as to where in the universe they would be.

Carla: ‘I thought you in England.’

Judy: ‘I should have been, but they stopped me. I couldn’t go. The other woman didn’t come out to replace me, and they had to do a job which was urgent. I lost my airline ticket, but it means nothing to them. They’ll pay. I cried when they told me. It’s getting too much. I sometimes want to die.’

Carla: ‘You no die.’

Judy: ‘I know. But I feel like it. I wanted us to go to Boston. I wanted you in bed with me.’

Carla: ‘Me, as well. What we do?’

Judy: ‘Don’t ask me.’

Carla: ‘I do. Who else ask?’

Judy: ‘I know, but not yet, please.’

Howard felt their pain overwhelming whatever had been in him, and could hardly bear to listen. Their plan had misfired, been smashed. What was fate playing at?

Judy: ‘I can’t wait for the Azores, though. Big thing.’

Carla: ‘You no say about that.’

Judy: ‘Yes, I know, but I only say it might because I want you to come as well.’

Carla: ‘I don’t think it possible.’

Judy: ‘Love you, Carla, but I can’t help this situation. It’s killing me.’

Carla: ‘No kill. We meet soon.’

Judy: (as if she will weep) ‘But when?’

Carla: ‘Soon. In London maybe we meet.’

Judy: ‘I long for it. But I have to go now. The skipper’s found out about me using the radio, and he’ll be back soon. He doesn’t like it. I’m for the big chop if he catches me. I’ll call you tomorrow, but only for a minute. Nobody will notice that.’

Carla: ‘I listen, then. Call you anyway.’

Judy: ‘And I’ll pick up your wonderful voice, even if I can’t answer. Love you a lot, Carla.’

Carla: ‘Love you, Judy.’

At least he knew what she looked like, had enough details to sketch out a vivid comic-book picture. Tall and well built, with fine features, shiny blonde hair ponytailing down her back, a loving woman who liked a good time with her girlfriend. She wore pale grey trousers and a white blouse with a colourful silk scarf casually knotted, leather sandals on elegant feet, a gold buckle the colour of her earrings. After signing off with Carla she would smoke a thin black Turkish cigarette, and pensively wonder what direction her life could take now that their plan to meet had gone for a burton. Perhaps the cigarette made the roof of her mouth hot, and called for an ice-cream — another human touch to her appearance.

He couldn’t deny how slipshod she was to think nobody could overhear her conversation. She used the radio like a telephone, with no notion of its vulnerability. Most people were similar in their faith, if they weren’t wireless operators, and knew nothing about radio, looking on the phenomenon as a kind of magic, and as if their words went securely from one ear to the other. No wonder the skipper had told her not to do it, though such carelessness with regard to radio could only make her more interesting.

‘We’re wasting our time in Boston,’ he said. ‘I heard her on the radio. She’s still out there. Something went wrong with the crewing arrangements, and she couldn’t make it.’

He was infatuated with her, though she supposed detectives often were with their prey. Stalkers would be certainly. ‘Shall we stay on, then?’

‘I don’t see any point.’

‘Let’s have another night,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll go back. We can drive to the Wash tomorrow, and hear the birds. We brought the binoculars and the book so I’ll tell you what they are. I’ve also been looking at the map. There are some curious names for sandbanks — whole families of them.’

‘Like what?’

She spread the map on the bed. ‘Oh, there’s Bulldog Sand, and Pandora Sand.’

‘I expect they’re married. A right couple they must be.’

‘Perhaps brother and sister. Then there’s Roger Sand, and Old South, not to mention Westmark Knock. You couldn’t find better names on your radio. There’s Peter Black, and Thief Sand, and Gat, and Trap, and Hook, as well as Stubborn Sand, and Macaroni Channel.’

He laughed. ‘You’re right. What I wouldn’t give to hear names like that,’ wondering if somewhere among them he would find a clue to Judy’s antecedents, though it could be she wasn’t born of the area, only connected to it by some branch of the family. Not here now, maybe in two weeks she would be, walking the streets, haughty and set apart among the stay-at-homes yet glad to be in a place known since infancy. He would be on the south coast, the radio blank because she and her girlfriend were in Boston. He ached for a sight of her, but fate was as blind as he was. To beat the painful tension he must assume they would never meet, though in his imagination he would keep her a prisoner behind a jumble of kilocycles, locked in an electric cell, pristine and never aging, a picture for himself alone, no one able to release her from his radio hideaway.

But if ever he did get close, and he had to foresee the possibility so as to live in hope, he would touch her face in recognition, establish a memory in case he should meet her a second or third time, would guide a hand from nose to lips, over the contours of the chin and around to that tactile place at the back of the neck. Then she would be his.

‘We should go to bed,’ Laura said from her seat at the dressing table. ‘I’ll help you get your things off.’

The promise of her body between the sheets had never failed to displace even the room he was in, but now, shamming enthusiasm when her fingers began their work, the word ‘Azores’ lit his mind like the flash of a beacon, repeating itself across the shining water.

He saw himself performing self-destructive actions of which he would normally never approve, tried to ignore the word ‘Azores’, pull away from its dangers, and get back to being the person he had always supposed himself to be, but he was no longer in control and, happy enough in such a state, was helplessly pulled along.

EIGHTEEN

‘I don’t want to do anymore of this,’ he would say to Waistcoat, who was sure to come back with: ‘I’m afraid you have to, yellow belly. Nobody retires from this game till I press the buzzer. If they do it before then they are likely to find themselves up the creek without even a teaspoon. In Essex most likely, face down in the ooze. Or you’ll be a waiter for the rest of your life at the Scarface Hotel — as I myself might if I wanted out.’

He knew it, so would keep the cosy chat to himself for some time yet. In any case there still wasn’t enough in his Malta account to provide a comfortable beachcombing life till he popped his clogs, and he hadn’t the right to go poor due to moral scruples, whether or not he assumed that Amanda would stay with him if he did.

All the same a few more trips and he would be justified in hinting that the job was too hard, and it was time a younger man took his place. He was too loyal, he would say, to allow his body to let them down in a crisis. And his present loyalty could be proved by blowing the gaff on that big gorgeous Judy yapping to her Spanish girlfriend. Love isn’t only blind, it’s dangerous, and she ought to be put down.

He stood by the gate at the end of the garden, a heavy two-two air rifle sighted across the meadow, ready for the next plump rabbit to come sniffing out of the hedge oh so full of the joys of life. Amanda had gone to put in some time at the hairdressers, and he would surprise her with a stew for supper. The only time he liked to cook was after skinning, disembowelling and cutting up what he had killed himself. Howard’s morse letter had arrived with the morning post, showing on second reading that the old telegraphist was going even more off his trolley, in spite of his precisely rhythmical sending. The clicks of the key were audible behind contacts which were slightly more apart than usual.

Not one, but two rabbits. Let them play. Plenty more where they came from. There were ten born every minute, and he could take one whenever he liked. If they were lovers — and what two rabbits weren’t? — he saw no reason for them not to enjoy life a little longer. They chomped the grass, came together and nuzzled prettily. A shame, really, but where was the morality when you wanted something to eat? Their flesh was even fresher than at the butcher’s, and probably cleaner.

Talking about drugs the other day, Waistcoat said that bringing them in was part of the excitement, a perk of the trade. ‘Look at it this way,’ he smarmed, ‘if it’s not us channelling ’em onto the streets to keep the dregs under control, the government would have to provide something else.’

‘It’s good to know we’re doing a public service.’ Richard smiled.

Waistcoat puffed on his long thin cigar. ‘And you’re well paid for it. Don’t forget there’s something big coming up in the Azores this autumn. A lot of cash and carry, a spin-off from the eastern trade. The Russians are getting greedier. Too many on the take. It’s getting easier, though, in some ways too easy.’

He was right. They were living close to the clouds, business for everyone, so that at times you would think everyone was in on it. The organisation was getting ragged at the edges, because here was Howard, as unknowing as that prime rabbit gambolling in the sunlight as if its life was going to last forever, obsessed with the notion of tracking down a voice on the radio. If in his madness he made contact God knows what might pass between them.

The weighty two-two lead slug sent the rabbit spinning, kicking in the air till Richard locked its back feet, held it level, and sent the blade of his hand on a blow to the neck. Amanda hated to see him kill them, was even more sickened during the preparations for the pot, but she was always happy with the meal that followed.

After a long day in London he came home to see her packing two suitcases on the bed. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘I can’t take it any longer.’ She sat on a stool, her face ugly with despair. ‘I didn’t marry a commuter, nor a dope smuggler, either.’

‘Bit sudden, isn’t it?’

Her laugh was pure vinegar. It wasn’t, but no use telling him. ‘Not for me.’

The Azores operation would be the most profitable ever. For all concerned, Waistcoat added. The length of time planning it told Richard as much. He went to London every day with energy enough, but the work of going over and over the minutiae of organisation wore him out. After every recent trip, when he’d thought to pack the trade in, he recalled the frequent saying of his father: ‘Can you tell me one thing that thought ever did?’ All the same, after the Azores trip he would.

The arrangements still had plenty of holes left to plug. Everything depended on planning and security, and though he had never known a lack of either, watertight was no way to describe the care they were taking. Yet what boat had ever been watertight, and what plan either? The crew was made up of freebooters to a man, in rough weather or smooth, brothers in arms no less, all of them tight lipped for fear the tighter rope they walked on would snap. You either ended in jail, or cursing the sky at fifty when an ulcer burst. Richard wanted neither option, though none of the others, as far as he knew, were glued into his kind of wedded domestic relationship. And now he wasn’t to have it for more than a few minutes longer.

He lit a cigarette, watched her opening drawers to decide what was worth taking. Whenever a wife or girlfriend left the reason was never the one they threw at you, but he was too tired to figure it out. It was light and tranquilly green across the garden, the birds still musical, which would have been soothing if she had been glad to see him. He couldn’t understand why she had chosen this particular hour to leave, instead of during the day when he was absent. A note on the kitchen table would have served, unless she was making the gesture now because she hoped he would argue and plead, though she ought to know that wasn’t his way.

‘I’m absolutely unable to put up with the so-called work you do. It’s not work at all. It’s horrible.’

‘There’s nothing I can do about it. Not yet, anyway.’

‘I know there isn’t.’

‘The next trip will be my last. I promise.’

‘You always say that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘It’s too late already.’ She put layers of clean and newly folded knickers over her dresses in the second case. ‘Anyway, it always was.’

‘Then why did you wait?’ He had never known she had such quantities of underwear, and wondered who it was for. The sight made him want her in bed. ‘Is there somebody else?’

‘You know why I’m going.’ He would ask that, wouldn’t he? Walking cocks can’t imagine you don’t want to be bothered with a man anymore, not for the moment anyway, and never again with one like him. ‘I’m off to Doris’s. She’ll put me up, till I decide what to do.’

So that was it. You couldn’t win ’em all, though it would be gallant to ask her not to go, even if only for the sake of her self esteem. As if she needed it. And how egotistical could he get? They used to joke that when they were rich they would each have their own house built, a grandiose back-to-back, one for him and one for her, each residence with its separate door. The only communication between the two would be via a false bookcase, as in the old movies, to be used by prior telephone agreement when they wanted a romantic meeting. The rest of the time they wouldn’t be so intolerably close.

He smiled at the memory of better days. Let her go. Best not to argue. Even so: ‘Why don’t you stay? I love you, you know that.’

‘It makes no difference anymore.’ She remembered how, not long after their first meeting, he did funny things with a razor blade while sitting at the kitchen table. Looking closer, she saw he was dividing each match into four, hadn’t seen him so diverted before or since, and wondered where he had learned the skill, not to say the technique. It wasn’t long before he told her, and now she thought: ‘Once a jailbird, always a jailbird. I’m getting out while the going’s good.’ She closed the case. ‘I don’t want to stay with you. I can’t take it anymore.’ She began to cry, which he didn’t know whether to take as a good or bad sign. ‘I’ve had more than enough.’

He went to comfort her, knowing she would say, as always when he did: ‘Keep away from me.’

They had given each other so much during the best times that at parting they owed each other nothing — a perfect separation. He was going to tell her, but didn’t because it wouldn’t stop her going. Living in Dropshort Lodge was over. He offered to carry her cases to the car, and when she agreed he knew it was final. She had been on the verge of leaving him from the very first day, so he had grown to assume it would never happen. Now it had. Her car bumped gently over the ruts to the road, then accelerated ferociously to the left.

He pulled the plug out of a bottle of wine from the fridge. Nothing like a glass or two to settle the gut. The ring on a tin of sardines snapped off, so he opened it with the ordinary tool and jagged his finger. He sucked the globe of blood, and popped a slice of bread in the toaster, then settled to his first course. Leftover rabbit stew did for the second, with fruit and cheese to follow. Luckily she’d always believed in having plenty of food in the house. Because he was hungry even iron rations tasted good, but in what commodity would he find the poison? Into what dish had she poured a distillation of her dislike? Coffee, a glass of Cointreau and a cigar erased the devastation, yet kept him in a mood to think about what had happened.

Luckily he was too engrossed in providing for himself to suffer annihilation at her scarpering. Time enough when he got back from the Azores, though it might seem old news by then. He switched the telly on, then off. Cointreau as always blended ambrosially with the cigar. A tape from Howard had laid on the table since the day before yesterday. The silly bugger took the game seriously, kept pumping them out, though Richard knew it was a plaything for them both.

Howard had the perfect life. Being totally dependent on Laura was a small price to pay for his blindness, even much to be envied, though envy wasn’t — Richard considered — one of his especial sins. But to have a wife of Laura’s calibre must be a wonderful comfort. He carried his glass upstairs and plugged the tape in, stretched himself in the armchair to listen.

‘Dear Richard, my life has been full of incident lately, full of thought as well, though where to start and tell you about it is the difficulty. You’ll remember I was listening to those Mediterranean yachts. The woman called Judy was due to go to Lincolnshire on leave, and I got Laura to drive me to Boston so that I could make contact. The plot thickens, you might say, and though I didn’t actually get to her it was a worthwhile trip, because I found out quite a lot. You might wonder why I wanted to talk to her at all, and the reason is that, apart from other things, I had to put her wise about the Azores, the big event (if you know what I mean) coming off soon, which she and maybe even her girlfriend Carla will become mixed up in. It’s not so much the text of her messages I’m going by as the tone of her voice. She’s certainly not ignorant of what’s afoot, and what it could all mean, but I suspect she’ll go into it nevertheless. There’s a fecklessness about her that’s almost enviable to someone like me. All the same, I wouldn’t really want her to get into such a venture up to, or even deeper, than her neck.

‘Who she is I don’t know, but I’m in thrall to her. It began out of curiosity, but now it’s gone close to infatuation, so much so that yesterday I went into a travel agent’s and asked about prices and services to the Azores, thinking it might be possible for me to head her off, meet her there, and get her away from whatever danger she could be in. Of course, it’s out of the question because Laura would never let me go on my own, so I’m left with one possibility, which I really don’t want to pursue. Or I can’t make up my mind whether to or not because I could never be sure of the outcome. I want to get her out of the fire, not land her in a pit of dung.

‘Being blind I love a plot, but I seem to have landed in one that’s hard to get out of. You’re the sort of person I can confide in, being a fellow wireless operator (a member of the fraternity, as Laura told me you said) because who else could understand the extent to which one can become involved in some chance interception? The decision I’m talking about is whether or not to drop a suggestion somewhere — Interpol, maybe? — as to what’s going to happen in the Azores. Whether or not it would do Judy any good is another matter, which makes me hesitate, and hence my feeling that the best thing would be to fly out to the Azores and see what I can do. That she’s in danger I can’t doubt, because smuggling is a wicked and perilous occupation, from all points of view. I just feel I ought to try and do something.

‘I apologise for worrying you with my problems, but at least I have something to communicate instead of just talking about the weather in the Gulf of Mexico. I could ramble on, but won’t because I’m sure you have your own problems. Everyone does, and that’s for sure. I can’t see the point of tapping the key simply to fill up the tape. So — signing off. Yours Ever. Howard.’

Richard reached into the cupboard for his special bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and poured a good glass, thinking-cap stuff, considering the state he was in after hearing Howard’s letter. He sweated and shivered, and swore. Anxiety was too mild a word. The lid was falling shut on him and all of them. Howard couldn’t know what problems he was making for himself.

He laughed, but wasn’t amused, sorry not to be dreaming. The reasoning of the letter was full of holes, yet the whole fitted together, deliberately plotted by the cunning devil who had nothing better to do and all the time to do it in. He sounded as if he knew even more than he let on, but whether he had guessed, or had pulled in piquant extras from the radio with more shit-hot skill and instinct than Richard could ever muster, was hard to say.

He certainly wasn’t giving his sources or methods away, just letting drop by worrying drop fall into his letter and cause maximum anxiety. Perhaps he was part of a subtle law-enforcing plot to put the kibosh on the biggest drug transaction of the century (as Waistcoat liked to brag) and had been in it from the beginning. Laura had played the decoy by putting a knitting needle in her tyre at the lay-by, knowing he would be passing on his way home from the pub. A policeman in a bush across the road would have been there to witness that all went well. Either it made sense, or a fit of paranoia was coming on — or both. Such a trap was easy to imagine, and tempting to dismiss, but it would be unwise to do either.

He was sweating again. Someone had fed Howard just that little bit of information to make his letter convincing, or at least disturbing. What a fuck-up he was in. Everyone. Or they might be. Whatever way you looked at it something needed to be done, or discovered, or confirmed — and quickly.

Another wouldn’t help, but when he poured and swigged off half, it did. He knew what to do, would call Howard in the morning and say he’d take him for a pub lunch — if he was free. Talk to him, it was the only way, though Howard obviously knew so much that no amount of gabble would set anybody’s mind at rest. At least Richard might get some idea of the situation before confronting Waistcoat and the men in London and telling, rocking back and forth as the shit hit the fan, that their security had been cracked.

No aches, no pains, but Howard felt weak and weary. Being blind made you quickly tired. He smiled, nevertheless. Listening to startling and fascinating words from the radio was no longer the cure, unless to hear the divine voice of Judy. His magneto didn’t provide enough energy to work his fingers at the typewriter.

And yet, out of the house, only a cap between his head and the sky, he was sufficiently clear — brained and wide awake not to care about whatever had reduced him to impotence at the radio. On such walks he was more at peace than when in the house with Laura. No reflection on her, but the lid was off, was how he put it. He sometimes wondered if she wasn’t yet born, had stopped living or being herself from the moment they were married. She had either been fixed for all time by his so-called helplessness, or there had been an event about which she had never told him. There sometimes seemed as big a blind spot in her as in him, though the notion was hardly credible, such a thought leading him to doubt any wisdom he might have. He shook his head, and a passing man must have said to himself: ‘Oh no! not another bloke off his chump due to the stress of modern life!’

Even so, he was learning to see more and more with his own unseeing eyes, and went as fast as was safe back to the radio for fear of missing Judy. Some singing’s going on that I can’t hear; I only know it’s singing but the meaning won’t come clear. He sang to himself. A flick of the wheel, and it stopped on gobbledegook. Radio roulette was a favourite game. A fervent whistling bled away, a tormented soul free-falling into the inferno. He could imagine himself a turtle that the Indian government had let loose into the Ganges to clean up corpses from the ghats of Benares. Wasn’t he a turtle who did that voraciously to whatever was heard on the radio? His spirit ate all the material with such greed that he consumed himself as well, never knowing when to stop.

His position in life was cocked up by three bearings closing on nothingness. The captain of the spaceship told them calmly they were lost. You could only find out where you were by going in a straight line. Avoid circles or any deviation, no matter what. But there were no straight lines, and even less in space. If you didn’t want to lose yourself you must never let the ever-diminishing circles pull you into a maelstrom. Doubting that either earth or space existed, he wondered how he had got where he was. Nothing could be worse than being drawn into a fatal whirlpool without a bottle to put your last message in. Whatever happened, or wouldn’t, he must get away, make distance, find a new space for himself and his body to inhabit.

An unknown station on the upper reaches of eight megacycles sent only numbers, perhaps the morse equivalent of the German Numbers Woman. Her employers had sent her on a course to learn the trade of dots and dashes, and she was happier now that she had a lover, and more money to spend on her children. He was chasing phantoms, as if he might be blessed with ordinary sight should he meet one of them. Being on the Flying Dutchman might bring him close to what he was looking for, whatever that was, but the vessel never landed to let him climb aboard.

How can what you think have any effect unless you act? He wanted to go on a boat, a small boat, smell the raw sea, hear the hull bump against wave after wave, feel water splashing his face, be terrified at the awesomeness of the ocean, be the first blind man ever to solo around the world. Such an adventure would quell his inner turbulence. He yearned to head for a point of no return, and come back as someone he would recognise as more of himself than before he set off. It had happened in the Lancaster bomber, and he hadn’t returned as the person who had gone, had come back no longer young, because whoever lost the use of his eyes was suddenly turned into an old man, or quickly grew into one so as to go on living.

You couldn’t break out of yourself, become someone you were not. Fantasies were all the better for staying in the mind. A blind man couldn’t hoist sails, or shoot the midday sun with a sextant, or plot the position on a chart. Even with eyes you had to learn, and yet — the yearning was unremitting. He wouldn’t be useless, would hear beacons on the radio, steer by them, guide and navigate. In the midnight of the ocean all men were equal. He imagined countless feats to be performed, his imagination playing with possibilities till the Black Dog leapt disappointed from his back — though leaving the marks of its claws.

And then he heard, the voice more remote, less confident: ‘Hello, Pontifex, can you hear me? Carla, are you there?’

Carla: ‘Yes, no problem. Don’t use names anymore.’

Judy: ‘I know. Can’t talk long, in any case. I’ll be in big trouble if I do. Did you have a good day?’

Carla: ‘Boring. On small island. Seven on board. I try to get new job, big yacht in Malaga.’

Judy: ‘Better not leave me.’

Carla: ‘You crazy? In September. He need Spanish crew.’

Judy: ‘I’ll come with you.’

Carla: ‘Maybe. Give me a kiss. Dream me this night.’

Judy: ‘Love you too. Had a dream about you and me in Boston.’

Carla: (laughing) ‘What I do?’

Judy: ‘Everything.’

Carla: ‘You dream again, then.’

Judy: ‘I will. I want more than dreams. But I must go now. Somebody’s coming. Maybe we got shopped. In fact I’m sure we did. The skipper was livid. I denied it black and blue but he only half believed me. So I can’t talk anymore today. Same time tomorrow, though. Just a one-minute burst, all right?’

Carla: ‘I understand. Adios, carina.’

He saw them going to work about their boats, Carla the competent deckhand and stewardess, and Judy the cook, provider of food and comfort. Someone who had been listening, apart from himself, had betrayed them. Yet it was hard to believe in unsolicited malice, for betrayal always had its reasons. If the usual shortwave enthusiast heard the lovers how would he be able to inform the skipper of Judy’s yacht? He wouldn’t. Such eavesdroppers, as he well knew, culled secrets only out of a dispassionate sense of curiosity and perhaps power, but wouldn’t do anything for fear of revealing their illicit pastime. Satisfaction, as they sat in the entrancing half dark of a desk lamp, came from knowing they could while being aware that they wouldn’t. The ordinary shortwave scourer, with its effective decoding equipment — the sort that Howard could neither use nor afford — locked onto newsagency, embassy or weather and shipping traffic, and would pass the gabble of telephony voices with contempt.

Anyone who found such unregulated traffic morally distasteful could inform the Post Office Telephony Authority, and get the lovers stopped, but Howard thought it unlikely that such trouble would be taken. In any case what listener would have the know-how to guess the real importance of Judy and Carla’s talk, as he had done? If someone had given their game away they should be dropped out of a plane minus a parachute, except that such a fate would be too good for them.

Judy would converse for a precious minute with her lover tomorrow, against all common sense, and Howard was only sorry that longer chats were no longer possible. Caution had come too late. The two boats were heading for the Pillars of Hercules bumping through a grumbling sea (according to the latest forecast) from one landfall to another, across to Sicily, by the rugged coasts of Algeria and Morocco, and along to Spain. They might pass within fifty miles of each other yet not be able to meet or even talk.

He could easily believe he had been the only one to hear them, so who could the informer be? The droning of the German Numbers Woman led him to wonder whether Laura had done it out of pique. She hadn’t liked his infatuation — and who could blame her? — therefore you could say she had a motive. On the other hand you could say she was aware that the women were too involved with each other for her to feel jealousy, so would hardly think it worthwhile to betray them.

An account of his interceptions had almost filled a morse letter to Richard, who was the only person able to stop their shortwave trysts. By sending extended telegrams on tape, the medium of morse had put an ebullience into Howard’s revelations, which excluded all caution. Richard must have known this would be the case, and like a fool he had fallen into his trap.

He recalled solving his first simple jigsaw as a child: thick wood, bright colours, not too many pieces, and all too obvious joinings, an easy and satisfying picture to put together, of the Big Bad Wolf chasing three little piggies from their burning straw-roofed house. He felt angry at not having thought of the explanation before. The time scheme fitted. Two women chatting, and giving hints of their future shifts, could be threatening to someone, possibly fatal, and Richard wanted them stopped because such talk pointed to criminal activity he also was involved in, or people he knew were involved in, matters to do with small boats going around Greece and the Middle East which, as Howard already knew, signified smuggling.

The forlorn inexorable tone of the German Numbers Woman mocked his obtuseness, but she had put the edge back into his thinking, and was no longer needed. He wanted to hear Vanya’s erratic and slapdash morse on the Moscow frequency, an operator who would find Howard’s mistake easy to say never mind about, but who was doubtless in some downtown bistro knocking back the vodka with his radio cronies. All Howard heard were hideous crackles of static, no help to a mind in turmoil.

When evil creeps up on you, ignorance of its power is no excuse. Stupidity is alarming, unknowingness worse. The damage had been done, but the lesson could be learned, provided it wasn’t too late and no one paid for your lapse.

All the same it remained to be seen whether or not he had made a mistake. Perhaps the subconscious which had led him to act foolishly would yet take care of him, since he had fitted together the puzzle connecting Judy and Carla to the skippers of their yachts, and now with Richard, who also went on small boat trips for a living.

The fatal tape letter had revealed most of what he had assumed or concocted, and if Richard read it carefully — he certainly would — Howard expected him to telephone and say that they had to meet. When they did Howard would appear certain about his solution of the puzzle, but play the amateur who did not know the importance of what had come into his ken. The theme to choose was that which would not put Judy into more peril than she was in already. Other than that the conversation would have to follow its own rules.

He had sent the tapes, and awaited the response. Perhaps it was no more than his unworldliness and isolation that had led him to fabricate such an outlandish plot, but if that was so, he reasoned, it was because a blind man must try in every way to enrich and extend his life.

NINETEEN

A call came during breakfast, the old post-office bird chirping MMM between cornflakes and the cooked part. ‘Thought you might like to come for a drink,’ Richard said. ‘About lunchtime. We can have a bite in Rye or some place. That is, if Laura can spare you an hour or two.’

‘Sounds good.’ The thongs of the web were firm, its spider working sufficiently to draw Richard in. ‘I don’t have anything on.’

‘Pick you up at twelve-hundred hours?’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

‘Who was that, dear?’

He sat at the table, cut into his food. ‘Richard’s coming to take me out to lunch. Says he knows a nice place, though I think he mainly wants to talk.’

‘About that woman you heard on the wireless?’

Judy must be on her mind all the time. ‘Possibly.’

‘He knows about it, then?’

‘I mentioned her in a letter some time ago, but I can’t see how it can be of any interest to him.’

He was still on the woman’s track, unwilling or unable to leave his plaything alone, but Laura was consoled by knowing that his pursuit couldn’t go on forever, though it was hard to know why she hoped for the demise of something which kept him so enthralled. It was touching, when he had little else. ‘That’s as maybe,’ was all she could say.

‘She’s hardly on the wavelength anymore,’ he went on. ‘Only for a minute or so, and not always every day.’

‘I expect you’ll be sorry when it’s finished.’

‘There’s always something else. Anyway,’ he sensed her disapproving mood as she stood to collect the dishes, ‘it’s only a pastime. You’re my rock and my staff. Nobody else but you, my love.’

She kissed him on the back of the neck, which he liked, looked at him enjoying his sausage, egg and tomato. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we have a pact, and it’s a wonderful one as far as I’m concerned.’

‘When we went over Germany in the war we got a fried egg for our breakfast afterwards. That’s why they always taste so good to me. Every time I have one, even now, it’s as if I’m eating the one I didn’t get when I came back wounded. Even better, because you know exactly how I like them cooked.’

He ate well, always enjoying his food, and ever hungry for meals, as if wanting to show that while such an appetite prevailed there could be nothing wrong or devious about him. Even so, the unease that had lately come between them proved that something unusual was happening, and to separate the warp from the weft and make sense of it was impossible for her.

Richard was on time, to the minute. He half apologised for the inconvenience of being punctual: ‘Naval habit, I suppose.’

‘A good one,’ she said, stepping aside. ‘Howard’s in the bathroom. He won’t be long.’

He felt the same shock at being half in love with a robust haughtiness he would relish breaking down. Her staunch beauty, concealing a passion she seemed afraid of, turned more ordinary at her smile of welcome. ‘It’s terrifically good of you to take him out. He has so few opportunities.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll bring him back in one piece, never fear. I’ll be driving, so shan’t drink much. Never do, in any case.’

‘Oh, I know you’ll take care of him.’

‘Why don’t you come as well? You’re certainly welcome to.’

The offer was tempting. ‘I have things to do.’ The response was a little too sharp, so she added: ‘Reading, mostly. I like to keep up.’

Show an interest. ‘Oh, on what?’

‘It’s a funny Kingsley Amis novel. I’ll read it to Howard when I’ve done. He’ll like that. I read him books from time to time because he prefers my voice to an actor on tape. I suppose I’ve become quite good at it.’

He had no doubt that she could act tragedy to good effect, wanted her to go on talking, would rather listen to her than hear what Howard had to say. But here he was, a kiss for Laura, and they were on their way down the hill.

Driving towards the coast, Richard was too preoccupied to describe the scenery, as he had heard was Laura’s custom, while Howard was happy to interpret winds and smells drifting through the open window, enjoying the rush of air as the road turned inland. Richard seemed anxious in his silence, in a hurry either to eat or talk.

The unseeing figure beside Richard seemed more like an exhibit meant for an art museum than a person of flesh and blood. At the most he might be a wise Buddha too all-knowing to speak. The phenomenon made him feel more alone in the car than if he’d been on his own, and he said when approaching Rye: ‘Be there in a few minutes.’

‘Going northeast, I think.’ He moved from arms folded to hands on knees. ‘It’s a long time since I was in Rye. Another of the Cinque Ports. Crossing the Rother, are we?’

‘That’s right. We’ll soon be at the trough.’

‘Makes me hungry, this sea air.’

Small talk was necessary to start with, though there was no saying how small it could ever be with Howard.

‘Up the cobbles, and onto the High Street,’ he said.

‘You know it, then?’

‘Laura’s brought me here a time or two, though not lately. The place pullulates on market day, and in the summer holidays.’

‘Here we are.’ A few steps to the door, and Richard cleared a path to the bar, feeling strange being a blind man’s minder. ‘A pint first, and then to eat. Will that suit you?’

Howard gave a little laugh, almost feminine. ‘More than all right. You get thirsty, living in the dark.’

They sat by the window, light gleaming in. ‘I must say, you’re a skilful listener at that wireless of yours, the wonderful things you pull in.’

Howard drank, wiped his mouth, an unnecessary motion but it kept his tone neutral, surprised the subject had come up so soon. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘I do. It’s been a real treat, getting your morse letters. I always look forward to ’em.’ It was like talking to someone dumb as well as blind. Must be living with him that makes Laura so noble and enigmatic, though a woman of few words would seem that way.

Howard said something at last. ‘I think you know Rye much better than I do.’ The voice was unfamiliar, almost caressive, as if not certain of being heard, putting the onus on whoever he was talking to. ‘I expect you’ve made a few trips, in and out.’

‘One or two.’

Silence again, until sitting at the table over their pâté and toast, when Howard said: ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to be taken out and treated so handsomely. I’m certainly enjoying it.’

‘No special reason. But I did think it was about time we talked at our leisure, without the inevitable morse code between us.’

A touch of mischief wouldn’t come amiss. ‘You mean with no one else to listen?’

He seemed uneasy. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’m not very good at conversation,’ Howard put in. ‘I sometimes wonder whether it’s because I’m a wireless operator, or because I’m blind. It could be both. A wireless operator listens all the time, so doesn’t have time to talk, or feel the inclination to. A blind man can’t see, and so has less to talk about what he’s heard, which often isn’t much, and he’s not supposed to reveal most of it, in any case. A blind man has only what’s inside himself to draw on, and he sometimes finds great difficulty in doing so because it’s too complicated to disentangle.’ He pushed his plate aside with a laugh. ‘You seem to have got me talking, and maybe that’s what a friend’s most valuable for.’

You’re not saying much, all the same, Richard said to himself.

A little more than you, so far. Howard went on: ‘I could ask you, of course, what it is you want me to talk about.’

‘Anything that comes to mind. What else?’

Richard was a man who always lit a cigarette between courses. Or was it only now, with Howard, who wasn’t surprised that so much was on his mind. ‘And if nothing does?’

‘I know, it takes two to talk. The only thing that’s happened to me recently is that my wife’s left me.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

Or was he? There was a slight envy in his tone, at the ups and downs of other men, of men who could see and had to take all that was thrown at them. ‘Don’t be. She’d been meaning to do it from the first moment she saw me and, since I’d been waiting for it, it came as no surprise. Life’s calmer, which is no bad thing.’

‘Is that the truth?’ Howard said. ‘Has she really gone?’

‘Ah, here’s our steak and chips.’ He pressed out his cigarette. ‘She certainly has. Nothing like it for clearing the decks. I’d been dreading it every minute for years, but now it’s happened I feel light-headed with freedom. The only thing is, if I get too happy I might not do my work so well. I could get careless.’

‘I shouldn’t think there’s any chance of that with you,’ Howard said. ‘Happiness takes more care of a man than misery.’

‘Ah! You think so? In my trade it’s better to have neither one thing nor the other. Nothing to think about except your work.’

‘Do you have much these days? Will you pass me the salt? If I search for it myself I might knock it for six.’

‘A certain amount. Time goes by when there’s nothing, and suddenly the big trip is on. Shall I put the salt on for you?’

‘I can do it. You’ll be going far?’

‘Maybe. It’s a millionaire’s yacht, a hundred-and-fifty footer, with good engines, and I’ll be part of the crew.’

He was a quick eater, Howard surmised. ‘It sounds a good life, but I suppose dangerous at times.’

‘I’m used to it. But you’re right, though I wouldn’t want to do anything else. Nothing else I’m fitted for.’

‘That’s a blessed state. At least you’re fixed in your purpose, and know where you stand.’

Howard felt him smile. ‘You could say that. I’m handy of course with the radio on such trips, and you can understand how they appreciate it.’

‘You mean using beacons for navigation?’

‘Oh, all sorts of things. I listen out for the good and the bad, you might say.’

‘If I’d had my sight I might well have gravitated to the same sort of work. I’d certainly give at least one of my arms to do what you do.’

Richard felt pity for him, though only for a moment. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘As much as I can be sure of anything.’

‘You’d have been good at it, no doubt about it, with all those juicy items you pick up.’

Time again for a little silence, Howard decided, even if only to eat. He turned his head as if to look around the room, then concentrated on getting food from plate to mouth. The room seemed full, which explained Richard’s low tone while talking. He wanted no one to overhear. Well, neither did Howard, who felt comfortable in the controlling role of the conspirator.

‘For instance,’ Richard said at last, ‘these women you were hearing.’

‘Judy?’

‘You seem to base a hell of a lot on that contact.’

‘Well, I got in on the picture, didn’t I? But you had my report, and know as much as I do.’

Richard seemed to think about it. ‘Perhaps. But it was like a story you made up.’

Howard laughed. ‘Exactly. That’s what I told myself, and yet it all dropped into place. I imagine you would have come up with the same story, based on the evidence I got. Your intuition would have led you onto the same track.’

‘Maybe. But how right would I have been?’ He tapped his glass. ‘Another drink? I’m having one.’

You’re going to need it more than me. ‘Half a pint, then.’

He went to the bar and, while waiting, Howard surmised he was being looked at, so went on eating as if knowing he wasn’t.

‘But how much of a story do you think it was?’ Richard put the tankard into his hand.

Howard set it down, quite capable of picking it up himself. ‘Don’t think I told you one half.’

Richard’s pint clicked against his plate. ‘You mean you could make up an even more fantastic tale?’

‘Certainly. One which might get a good deal closer to the truth than fantasy. The more my mind worked on it, that is.’

‘I wish I’d waited till your next letter then. It would have made another of my days.’

‘I dare say it would. It might have made several.’

‘Well, tell it to me, if it won’t wait.’

‘Oh, it will wait right enough. Me having so little meat to put in my letters, I prefer to spin them out. That was certainly a nicely cooked steak. And the chips were just how I like them. You picked a good place.’

‘I sometimes come here with the crew, when we’re back from a trip.’

So he’d been more than a few times to Rye, and bringing in what? ‘You can read me the dessert menu, if you would.’

He seemed glad of a hiatus in their indeterminate chatter. ‘I can recommend the hot apple pie and mince tart, with cream.’

‘I’m ready when you are.’ Howard was also calm, and happy to wait for confirmation of his ideas about the future. He tasted his beer while Richard gave the order. Soon enough there would be time to tell Richard what he knew, or thought he knew, which was the same, or it would be in the end. Loud talk came from the door, and a clash of cutlery from the bar.

‘I need another drink,’ Richard said. ‘But that will be my last. How about you?’

‘I could run to the same again.’ Maybe he couldn’t, but he lived on two levels as far as drink went, alcohol kept in one compartment and clear faculties in another. Unless he had too much, which he never would. To be abstemious about his drink might bring suspicion, or distrust. All the same, much of him regarded Richard as a friend, a fellow sparks, a comrade in arms who’d had the generosity to invite him out, and who in the last months had made his life more interesting, probably more so than since he had been blasted into sightlessness. He liked him as much as you could like someone you would never fully know, and probably never be able to trust. A certain density of friendship had settled around them, in a situation so fraught with unknowingness that it could only strengthen the connection.

He put the glass into Howard’s hand. ‘Here’s to your health.’

‘And yours.’

They forked at their dessert. ‘I have a liking for sweet things,’ Howard said. ‘And this is delicious.’ Certainly more palatable than Laura’s often too health-conscious food. ‘It must have been good, coming here when you had landed, after all that salt water.’

Richard laughed. ‘Yes, we had plenty of that, smack in our faces at times. But about this woman talking to her girlfriend?’

‘There’s no more to tell than I’ve let on already. She was on a boat called the Daedalus. You know who Daedalus was, in the old Greek mythology?’

‘I’ve forgotten.’ He hadn’t. ‘A blacksmith?’

‘Something like that. Artificer. He had a son called Icarus, and he made them both a pair of wings to fly to Italy. The father told the son not to go too close to the sun in case the wax melted. Of course, the bloody silly youth did, and he falls into the drink. Father flies on. I love those old legends.’

‘So her boat was called Daedalus?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Still is. I must have heard her say it fifty times. And the other woman was — is — the Pontifex. Which means pope or priest. But what’s in a name? Judy and Carla had a natter every night, until recently. They were sweet on each other, you might say. But from the few hints I got they were involved in some very funny business, going from one place to another.’

‘What business, do you think?’ He had finished his dessert, and lit a cigarette. ‘Did you get any idea?’

‘You seem to like the story. It’s got you hooked.’

‘I’m just interested.’

‘So was I. Who wouldn’t be? You can see how it would grab me, can’t you?’

‘Here, have one of mine.’ He passed a cigarette, and held the match. ‘The whole thing sounds fascinating, just the sort of storybook thing to talk about over lunch. And you said you weren’t very good at conversation!’

‘The thought of boring people horrifies me.’

‘You’d never do that. But what business did you decide they were in?’

‘It isn’t what I decided. It’s what I gathered.’

‘But not definite?’

‘Oh, definite enough for me. They go smuggling, from one place to another. Unloading stuff from Turkey and the islands. The cargo comes from Russia and places in central Asia. Or maybe from the Far East. The Golden Triangle, isn’t it called?’

The silence was heavy, didn’t last, though long enough for Howard to know that he had scored: a bull’s-eye, with buckshot.

‘That’s a lot to assume, all the same.’

‘You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d heard what I heard.’

‘But what, exactly?’

He shifted in his seat, as if to get closer. ‘Unfortunately, I didn’t have my tape recorder on, otherwise I would play it so that you could hear why I knew they were working the rough powder trade. Opium maybe, mostly.’

‘Opium? Did they say that?’ Anything more specific, and Howard would be lying.

‘As far as I heard.’ Keep it indefinite. ‘Tons of it. More than you could get from all the Flanders poppies put together, it seemed.’ The fact that Richard kept him on this topic, as he had known he would, told Howard more than he had been certain of before the meeting. ‘I suppose if I was a right thinking law abiding citizen I might put a word in somebody’s ear about it.’

‘And why didn’t you? Don’t you, I should say?’ It’s because he’s still not sure, or he’s lying. He’s in the airy realms of yarn telling. But if he isn’t, and his intention is hinted to Waistcoat, there’ll be a contract killing on his head before he can find the Belisha beacons to cross the road.

Howard felt hot ash on his wrist, a bit of cigarette paper attached, but let it burn out — Richard noticed — without flinching. ‘It’s because that isn’t all. I could be waiting for something more to develop.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like what? Something so big it gives me palpitations.’ He regretted more than at any other time that he couldn’t see Richard’s face on coming out with: ‘The Azores.’

‘I’d better get the bill.’ Richard knew that if he couldn’t stand the heat he had better get out of the kitchen. The blind man was playing cup and ball, and scoring every time, the only good being that he didn’t see the jolt of his hand when he said Azores — though he recovered sufficiently to say: ‘We were made to recite a poem at school about the Azores. Didn’t it go something like: “At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay” — I forget the rest. I hated it.’

‘Tennyson,’ Howard said.

‘Yeh, the old bastard. But what about the Azores?’ he went on, calmly now.

‘Oh, yes, well, there’s going to be the biggest pick-up of the lot from there. Isn’t that enough?’ He stopped, feeling a fly on his hand and waiting to swat it. It flew away, as if disturbed by the tension in his veins. ‘Very big, all lined up.’

‘You heard that?’

‘In no uncertain terms.’

No more fucking about, he decided. ‘When?’

‘In September, late, towards the end. But even they don’t know the exact date. Not yet. I’ll find out. I’m glued to the radio every night.’

‘They’re still talking?’

‘Why shouldn’t they be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They’re in love, you see. Indiscreet, perhaps, but not too much so. It’s just that someone like me can put the bits and pieces together, and come up with the right answer.’

Richard had to play the only card possible, though with little hope of winning. He lit another cigarette, in spite of a sore spot in his chest, sent the smoke drifting over Howard’s empty plate. ‘Supposing I were a detective putting all the pieces together. I have to assume so, to be part of the game.’

‘It’s certainly absorbing us,’ Howard grinned.

‘Well, it’s such a good story. The end of it all for me would be that, finally, I wouldn’t believe there was any reality to it. Absolute garbage. I’d like it for the story — who wouldn’t? — but not for the truth.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I wouldn’t believe two people chatting on the radio would be so careless, and give away a scheme that might put them and a few others away for twenty years.’

Howard moved spoon and fork around on his plate. ‘You could be right.’

‘I’m sure I am — would be, I mean.’

But why so sure, on any terms? Truth was often, as he had heard, stranger than fiction, and instinct a sure guide to sort out both, the final lock on what was what. He was tiring of the cat-and-mouse zig-zags, ‘And yet.’

‘Yet what?’

‘My deductions are spot on. A few holes left, but not many. When they’re filled in I shall know what to do.’

All was lost for a moment, with knobs on, forcing Richard to say: ‘Will you promise you won’t do anything until you’ve talked it over with me?’

It was hard at times when you were blind not to think that others couldn’t see either, so Howard’s smile was more than ruthlessly put down, Richard only catching a figment of pain on his lips. He knew now all he needed to know. ‘If you’d like me to, out of friendship, yes. I’ll keep it to myself.’

A laugh was necessary, to cover the fact that he felt a mere child. ‘Not that. Why should it be? I only ask because maybe the final story will be more finished if we put both our heads together. It’s such a good one. I like talking about it, that’s all.’

‘All right. I’ll keep to that,’ regarding Richard’s request as an attempt to save face.

Which promise was the best Richard knew he would get out of such a subtle antagonist, at least until he had spoken to the others. ‘Before going back, let’s drive down to Dungeness.’

‘I’d like that.’ He knocked a chair over while standing up, which Richard righted in an instant. ‘We can watch the fish swimming in the warm water from the power station. Laura told me about them when we were there before.’

TWENTY

On the way to town Richard thought he would listen, for entertainment, to the latest morse letter from Howard. Each note’s absolute regularity could almost have been made on a machine, but after the initial greetings, and enquiries after health, he realised that the forthcoming text would be special and create no laughter. There was something eerie about the self-assured patter of his sending.

He spun the tape back several times to check that he had heard correctly. Can I credit it? he asked himself, and a solid no was the response. The aura of a bad dream was hardly calculated to calm his mind. Certainly a fantasy on Howard’s part, though he couldn’t deny that it was one which cemented their relationship even further.

He had been thinking, Howard said — he certainly had — but what he proposed, what he in fact demanded in a way not much short of blackmail, must have been in his mind far earlier than the time of their lunch together. That Howard had a unique mind compared to his own he had never doubted, though whether it was because of his affliction — so called: he was beginning to wonder — or because he would have been that way as a perfectly sighted man, he didn’t know. All he was sure of was that the association might land Howard in such a quantity of drek that it would bury him even above his unseeing head.

As far as Howard went, and Howard was more than acute enough to know it, he had nothing to lose or, being as blind as a bat, assumed he hadn’t, but Richard, as far as he himself was concerned, had everything to lose, which could also be said for the rest of the crew. Howard must obviously realise as much, but didn’t bring the factor into his calculations. Had he been normal, and sent a handwritten letter, there would have been something to hang him by, but the dear and imperious morse, which only the two of them in the local circle could read, enclosed them in secrecy and implicated Richard also, which Howard well knew, in his peculiar and illuminated ruthlessness.

Richard didn’t know what to do, yet there was only one thing he could do. The sentences came clear and pat, no more dissimulation or hiding what Howard wanted. And what he did want was preposterous. It was unbelievable. ‘I seem to have the whole key to your expedition in my hands, even down to the details.’ He was lying, but that wasn’t significant anymore, though a blind man lying could be alarming enough to set the klaxon shrieking.

Howard would know that Richard would know that he was lying, which was all part of the net he was casting. ‘It is up to me whether or not to blow the gaff on you and the rest. I could do it at any hour I chose, whether you go on the trip or not. Nothing would be easier. As you know, however, telling what I know to the police would put me on the wrong side of the law for listening, an anomalous position with regard to my conscience, but I expect they would forgive me for that.’

What a mealy-mouthed old bastard! though Richard admired his subtlety and dexterity, especially when he went on: ‘Informing a third party would in any case allow me to get used to being against the law, so having contemplated such a course I can feel no qualms by going even further, even the whole hog, you might say. In my life a little chaos, and even danger (though I don’t anticipate that) can do no harm. Rather, it has an attraction which I find hard to steer away from.

‘What I propose then, want, demand if you like, is that you somehow or other take me with you to the Azores, on any pretext — I don’t care which you have to choose — but get me on that boat. If you want absolute secrecy from me as to why you are going then I can guarantee it hand on heart. After all, what can a blind man be witness to? That I go with you is the only condition for my silence, and from then on I will take my secret to the grave, as melodramatic as that may sound. I’m all set for it, nothing will stop me, and you have no other way out except to make sure I go with you.’

Oh, yes there was a way out, but it was one which Howard’s imagination seemed not to have thought of, unless he just wasn’t saying. He lacked one of his five senses already, but could be deprived of the others, could lose even the use of his legs, or his hands or, worst of all, his ears, which could cut him off from life and mischief altogether. Maybe he knew this, well aware of the odds but, as before, thought he had nothing to lose, and because of one paltry affliction was prepared to gamble his empty life away.

In the tape he went on to indicate — and Richard even in his mind saw the rather large but delicate fingers manipulating the key with a certainty that he would get what he wanted — that since he poured all his thoughts on the matter into such a message his obsession would have to be satisfied. He ended by saying that on the kind of trip he envisaged — a little sugar on the pill — he could act as second radio man and tune into any station whose information might be vital for making the trip safer for all on board. He thought of everything, this final snippet at least giving Richard a line to suggest if Waistcoat’s reaction turned out to be rougher than he hoped.

Richard regretted getting to know him, yet if he hadn’t he would not have won his confidence, and found put what he listened to. Also, it would be a godsend for the others to be aware of a break in their security. A man with the use of his eyes may have thought little of the chatter going on between two women, but the one in a million chance of a blind man hearing it had let him put clues together and figure the whole thing out. Richard had been on hand to know, luckily, but he hardly saw himself being thanked for the priceless information that had been hammered into his brainbox.

Going into the flat on Harley Street, he couldn’t imagine the redecorations had been done specially for the penultimate countdown briefings, though Waistcoat may have had such an object in mind, since he would be coming on the boat with them. He never thought he had much aesthetic taste (having left it to Amanda, who had) but puke yellow in the recesses, offal white for the ceiling, and snot green for the rest, obviously seemed more than all right to Waistcoat, who stood by the mantelpiece beneath the fake ‘Last Supper’ with a finger in each lower pocket. Such bizarre choices didn’t much matter to Richard, whose stance was bolstered by a little private knowledge about the forthcoming expedition, something they would learn soon enough.

Waistcoat was as close to an affable mood as he could get, as he poured white wine, even though he thought it much too good for them, since they wouldn’t know mouthwash from the best Bordeaux, or a vintage from recently established vineyards in the north of England.

Richard glanced around the room as if seeing everyone for the first time, a villainous lot of proficient seamen whose faces he hoped belied their true character. On the other hand it was often difficult to decide whether the face showed its true self, or whether the true self was hidden by the face. All he knew was that the right behaviour was guaranteed in a crisis. He had sailed with them before, had no qualms, and supposed it was likewise, their glances so quick as he came in that no optical instrument could measure them.

Killisick’s large head and small body made him look frail, but Richard knew him as a strong little man, in that he had once slung a vat of boiling stew over someone who, he found out, had taken his false teeth — resting in a mug on the bread bin — and wouldn’t say where they were hidden. Bald and fair skinned, always with a smile while working at his stove, he was known as so ingenious a cook that if need be he could produce a cordon bleu blow-out in a force nine gale from a couple of seagulls and a bucket of kelp.

Richard was so engrossed in weighing up his shipmates’ qualities that for some moments he wasn’t aware of Waistcoat talking, though didn’t suppose he had missed anything important.

‘It’s a long time since we had such a big job on, and I’ve called the six of you together just to make sure you know it, and how vital it’s going to be. We’re taking a big boat, which signifies you’ll be in the lap of luxury. But I’ll need all the hands I can get, so I’ll be on board from start to finish. You’ll have to watch yourselves, that’s all I can say. We don’t want any fuck-ups this time.’

Waistcoat’s choice of language made it easy to know what ran through his mind — a cross as he was between a panther and a south London slum kid. A certain tension among the members of such an organisation — if you could call it that — was healthy enough, and Richard had no difficulty plugging into it, knowing that in any emergency they would fuse into an acceptable unity rather than the other way round — except that introducing the matter of Howard’s demands right now might have a spectacular effect, Waistcoat’s temper always fragile when any grains of sand fell into the meticulousness of his Swiss watch arrangements.

‘There’ve never been any fuck-ups,’ Scuddilaw said. ‘That’s not what we’re here for. Never have been.’ Richard had seen him do the most backbreaking work for longer than anyone else, without complaining. He had a squat compact body, thick ginger hair low on his brow, and grey glinting eyes that gave nothing away. All they knew about him was that he exercised several hours a day to make himself look more and more as if he had nothing inside but concrete. ‘We all know well enough what to do once we’re at sea.’

‘I know,’ Waistcoat said, ‘but we’re motoring a long way this time, and I’m not telling you where it’ll be yet, because of security.’

A belligerent murmur came from George Cleaver. Over six feet tall, wary and erect, in his conventional three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain leading into a waistcoat pocket, he always stood by the door of whatever room he was in, as if ready to jump clear at a sudden inrush of police. He spoke little, but when he did those nearby listened, especially at sea when they wanted to know where they were, because he was known as the best Atlantic navigator in the trade. ‘We aren’t a bunch of school kids.’

‘Nor old women, either,’ Scuddilaw said. ‘We don’t just want to know where we’re going the day we get on board.’

Cannister, an ex-trawlerman who, Richard smiled, seemed to have polished his earring, and shampooed his ponytailed hair to come to the meeting, backed him up.

‘All right, then,’ Waistcoat said. ‘I know I can rely on you lot as far as security is concerned. But I’m only not telling you yet in case there’s a change of plan. I don’t expect there will be, but you never know. All I do know, though, is that none of you will be disappointed. When this trip’s behind you, you’ll all be plenty satisfied.’

Since Richard had been told a fortnight ago he wasn’t much concerned whether the others knew or not where they were going, but he didn’t want to openly announce that security had already been cracked by a blind man at his wireless. He must wait for an opportunity, meanwhile hearing Waistcoat say they would be crewing for him on a pleasure cruise, but that the boat on the return trip would be packed with four hundred kilos of cocaine in watertight kitbags which, Richard reckoned, would be worth something like forty million on the UK market. If they were caught with such an amount they would never walk on daisies again, but if they brought it off the pay could only be called retirement money — though it was hard to imagine any of them getting out of the game. They would go on for more, and more, and still more, not solely out of greed, but because buccaneering was in their blood.

‘It may be,’ Waistcoat was saying, ‘that we’ll be shorthanded on such a big boat, so I might ask Oswald Beck if he can spare a couple of weeks from his posh pub, see if he can’t tear himself away from them ivory-handled beer pumps, and his barmaid with the big tits.’

Hard not to laugh, or be seen not to. ‘He won’t come,’ Cannister said. ‘I called there for a pint last week. The bastard made me pay for it.’

‘He’s gone soft,’ Paul Cinnakle said. He paused in filing his nails, a man whose clothes almost matched Waistcoat’s expensive style. Richard had heard him scornful of those who in their gear could mix freely and unnoticed among people on the street — at least they could these days, with so many weirdoes about. Maybe for such an attitude Waistcoat sometimes seemed suspicious of Cinnakle, though he had no reason not to trust such a proficient engine man, unless he regarded him as being after his job, or at least that he would like to give it a try, though Richard knew there wasn’t a hope of him coming to within a sniffing distance of a skipper’s aftershave.

‘That’s for me to decide,’ Waistcoat responded, his look as if to say: ‘And don’t you forget it. In any case, it’s no business of yours, fuck-face.’ He came over to Richard, who held out his glass for a refill. ‘You look like you’ve got something on your plate.’

The others were talking among themselves, as if no longer interested in the trip. ‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Any comments on the arrangements?’

‘They seem fine to me. We’ve been through them often enough.’ He drank, more to be sociable than for the quality: Waistcoat’s posh wine merchant had filled the bottles with acidy plonk, and stuck fancy labels on them. ‘I’d prefer a word with you afterwards, Chief, if that’s in order.’

‘With you it always is. Anything serious?’

‘Could be important, though I expect it’ll be all right.’ Might as well let him have an indication, though the momentary shade on Waistcoat’s face showed that he suspected something disagreeable. A man who had pulled himself out of the mire to become more than a millionaire was alive to every nuance. The only thing in his life was a controlled drive for the visible yet unattainable object, not seen by anyone else but to their cost if they knowingly — or unknowingly for that matter — stood in his way. So he kept ahead of others with an energy common in those who had dragged themselves from the lowest of the low, the sort who thrived on the versatility of his malice (which was as close to evil, in Waistcoat’s case, as a person of limited intellectual ability could get) and also luck, as well as a certain off-hand skill when dealing with someone more powerful in the game.

‘I’m dying to hear about it, so I’ll get rid of this lot,’ which he soon did, for there was no one who wasn’t glad to go. ‘All right, the show’s over — but finish your wine first, if you like.’

Richard’s problem was how to begin.

‘Sit down,’ Waistcoat said. ‘The hoi-polloi’s gone to the steak house, so tell me what’s on your mind.’

He pulled his chair close. ‘You know I’ve been sending in wireless signals over the years, from various places?’

‘You’ve been well paid, haven’t you?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What the fuck is it, then?’

‘I struck up an acquaintance a few months ago with another chap, who does the same thing as me. He just listens, but does nothing with what he gets. Out of interest, you might say. It was a chance meeting, and just as well it took place. I kept tabs on him, got to know everything he pulled off the air.’

‘Yeh, well, so what?’

‘He didn’t only get Interpol and such things. He heard small boats, yacht traffic, people chatting to one another. He also got Russian planes on the eastern runs, and much else. In short, he’s cracked our whole operation. He knows we’re going to the Azores, and has a good idea of the date. He also knows why we’re going. He’s more than clever at putting two and two together. I’m sure nobody else could have done it. But he’s priceless, and we’ve got to take him into account.’

Waistcoat’s complexion was far from rubicund at the best of times, but this revelation downed it a notch or two towards the wedding-cake colours of his interior decoration. He unpeeled a cigar, twitched flame out of his lighter. ‘Does he know your line of work?’

He’d been expecting the question, though not so early on. ‘No chance. He hasn’t a clue. I know more than anybody how to hide such things.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

Richard would take no side from him, chief or not. ‘Yes, you can bank on that.’

‘Well, who is he?’

‘An ex-RAF chap. He lives on the south coast. He’s the best wireless operator I’ve ever come across.’

‘Apart from yourself.’

‘You could say that.’

‘Even better, by the sound of it. But what are we going to do with him?’

‘There’s no chance of him giving us away.’

‘You mean he wants paying off?’

‘We could kill him,’ Richard said quietly.

‘You keep your suggestions to yourself.’

It was a reasonable one, but good to dispose of before the notion came to Waistcoat. ‘I may be able to come up with something helpful.’ Calmness was the only way to keep Waistcoat from your or anybody else’s throat.

‘That’ll be the day.’ He snapped the cigar in two and prepared to light another. ‘The whole fucking trip jeopardised. It’s all set up, and there’s no way out. I can’t credit it. You’re the bringer of bad news.’

Richard lit a cigarette, glad to note that his fingers were steady. ‘He’d be a first rate hand on the boat.’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything, but there’s going to be a lot for me to do at the wireless, and standing watches as well. Precautions are going to be necessary, and I’ll have more than a job on. I can’t attend to everything.’

‘Does he have a sheet?’

‘Clean as laundered snow.’

‘Would he be willing?’

‘He put it to me himself, but I had to turn him down.’

‘Stupid bastard. Always keep people on the hook.’

‘How was I to know? I couldn’t give him any sort of go-ahead, not without talking to you first. But he’d be willing, I know. I could soon win him back, talk him round. Wouldn’t cost you, either. So much a day maybe, and a bit of bonus when we got back.’

Waistcoat appeared to think, unusual when with someone else, afraid the workings of his face would show too much. He looked beyond Richard, into the wall, as if seeing to the horizon beyond; much as he must have done to while away the days in his prisons of the past, hoping his endless animal stare would burn through concrete. There was no disturbing him. Leave him alone, let time and the information take its toll. Don’t offer a way out but rather allow his brain to grow its own ideas, the more the better, and whatever he comes up with, imagine the choice is his — if you’re happy for your judgment to be based on his apparent cunning.

If Richard’s mind could be compared to the circuit diagram of a radio set (as unfortunately so could Howard’s, which had started all the trouble) you could base Waistcoat’s on the cruder mechanism of a one-armed bandit. A radio set, though more complex, could throw you half across the room with shock if you made a mistake while powering it to the mains. A one-armed bandit might fall and crush your foot after a too-enthusiastic pull at the handle, but at least there might be a river of money in its wake. As a piece of engineering it was far simpler, and more old fashioned, less useful from a worldly view than a high-powered multiband radio.

‘I’ll have to leave it to you,’ was all Waistcoat could say. ‘But you say he’s all right?’

It was the moment to faint, or run screaming from what looked like becoming the ruination of his life, but an inborne sense of destiny, which he in no way liked, forced him to say: ‘I’ve never known a man more like one of us who isn’t in it already.’

‘That’s all right, then.’ Waistcoat seemed almost happy, as Richard had to be, but he added: ‘It’s your skin as well as mine. If I didn’t know you were one-hundred-per-cent reliable I’d see him myself beforehand, but we’re too close to the day, and I’ve still got a lot to do.’

The glint in his eyes never died. Even when he slept their piercing tipped beadiness was live under the lizard lids, burning into his dreams, the eyes of a killer, and whoever they were turned on in anger knew the threat they posed, and felt lucky to walk out of the door unharmed. Richard wondered whether he had been born with such malevolent eyes or they had developed out of a lifetime of circumstance. One thing he knew: Waistcoat had a villainous soul, and Richard wondered about the state of his own in that he recognised it so clearly.

Driving through the rush hour of south east London, in fits and starts from one set of traffic lights to another, and jammed in a queue to get through New Cross, he surmised from what he knew that Waistcoat had been a south London youth, brought up in the sharp brutality of its ways. He had been through the hardest time any kid could, was maybe one of seven or eight, with the old man on and off in prison, at which times his mother would go on the game to make ends meet, and savage treatment she got for it when the man came out.

He pictured Waistcoat bright and innocent in appearance, but eternally on the lookout for anything of use or value, holding back from outright muggery through fear of retribution at the copshop if caught. Even so, he was kicked around by his parents when they were together, so knew what violence was all about, until he learned to avoid such trouble. At the age of eleven or twelve, when his father stood up to boot him, he took out a flick-knife lifted that afternoon from a stall in Bermondsey — and was never threatened again. Whatever tolerant softness had been in his eyes — and it could only have been enough to cajole, wheedle or deceive — faded on knowing he had to be in charge of himself before he could control others.

Thus Borstal was a better school, where he absorbed the rules quicker than any of his intake. To know something was better than not to know, or to pretend not to know; and promised an easier time than if you were ignorant or resentful. To be more aware than others was an advantage. The more you knew the better. Those who ran the place had power, and if you didn’t try to break yourself against it they made life easier for you because then they didn’t have to work so hard, and a better time was had by all.

In any case, in the phrase of the time, he had never had it so good. Such assurance of food on the dot, clothes and a roof made it a doddle to tolerate a place where he could look after himself with no trouble. Not that he liked the screws or the governor. He didn’t have to. He wanted to get out as soon as they would let him go, and meanwhile learned new ways of thieving, though not so useful because how come those who gloated over them had got caught? They were only useful in pointing the way to tricks that would be more successful.

In prison — where Richard had met such characters during his fortunately brief incarceration — Waistcoat would have learned many things that were more profitable. He made connections, got into the real world and found advancement on going free but, even then, had to come back a few times before falling in to the drugs trade. In twenty years he had become rich, changed his name, appearance and accent (as far as he could) and certainly his style of living, which had helped him not to get caught so often.

Traffic smoothed its way more freely beyond Sidcup, but he held back from driving too fast. Keep your distance, sideways as well as to the front and back. A scarlet biscuit tin on the starboard bow overtook, came on as if pulling a wall of rain with it. The wipers conducting like a metronome, he lit a cigarette. Shit’s creek without a paddle would be paradise compared to the Howard connection. Hard to know how serious the old bat was about getting on board, though he seemed determined enough. He hoped so, because if he backed out the best to be expected would be driving an ice-cream van for the rest of his active life with half his fingers missing.

Then again, if he did manage to inveigle Howard onto the boat his time might be up when Waistcoat realised he was blind. Richard had no enemy as far as he knew (except Amanda, and she had flitted) and decided that if he must have one it might as well be Waistcoat, who wouldn’t be difficult to deal with because he regarded everyone as his enemy, and of no particular importance unless that person had something specific against him.

Howard had to come on the trip because he knew too much, but if Waistcoat found out he was blind he would be done away with before he could get on board. Or he would find a grave in the water soon afterwards. Orders had ever been orders, but he didn’t want to see Howard damaged, a man who represented everything that was the opposite of himself, a probity so thick you could scoop it up with a spoon and sell it in jars. He didn’t envy Howard, or think he could ever have fitted into his sort of character, knowing from early on that such a moral life was not for him. Howard had moral quality, he decided, and could never be anyone other than who he was.

And yet there was enough of Howard in him for him to know that he could never be Howard, and what there might have been of Howard in him at the beginning had been overridden by an impatience forever nagging at his vitals, till it had landed him in a fix so tight he wished he had got out of the drugs game years ago.

Approaching the end of the Maidstone bypass, the notion came to him of saving himself even now, of turning the car round at the island and making his way northwest to call on his father. He would stay and look after him, a safe place to hide in any case, and let the Azores trip go to disaster, or success if they were lucky, which they probably would be without him or Howard on board.

He wasn’t the sort to run away like a frightened rabbit, knew himself to be the keep on keeping on type, having at least that much of Howard in him which said that a contract was a contract and must be kept, even with the worst of people and for the worst of reasons. You didn’t desert when things got difficult, and nor would he expect Howard to let him down. If either made a run for it Waistcoat and the others would pursue them into everlasting hell.

Such a gridlock could not be broken. He was so much part of one that there was no decision to make, nothing but to go on; unless to tell Howard, who had probity and fine sense, that he had been playing with a dream, and should be satisfied to keep it at that. Men of probity were made for dreams, such visitations sustaining them on their straight path. Howard would call to say he couldn’t come on the boat, it would be impossible to cope, he would be a hindrance, and so would like to keep the idea as a dream. Out of friendship, his lips would stay clamped. He would give nothing away.

Richard laughed on rounding the island, to drive across the Weald at dusk. Such an outcome could be little more than a dream he himself was having, as if trying to snatch one from Howard. The dream was going to happen, and he was giving in to it, a thought which did not help, since he realised, turning on his headlights — and in their beams saying goodbye to bellies of cloud overhead — that he did not know anything about Howard who was as complete a blank as if he — Richard — was the blind man. Howard was a code he hadn’t so far cracked.

TWENTY-ONE

Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries. Judy had sent her final message, as the yachts closed on their routes. The boat would stop at Gibraltar for water and provisions, before leaving for you-know-where. She would go by hire car to Malaga for a day to keep a well-planned tryst with Carla.

The frantic, one minute burst ended by her saying there would be no radio contact for an unspecified time afterwards. Howard taped their talk to use as encouragement for making his way onto Richard’s yacht. His spirit floated in suspense, but with the confidence of a compass needle always sure where north and therefore every other direction was to be found.

The tension in him resembled the adolescent state of mind before he had gone blind. More than halfway in thrall to that previous existence, he felt the unacknowledged emotions of a young man, forever impatient to get from one minute to the next no matter what would occur. Life had been normal then, exciting but tolerable, above all easy going, the play of uncertainties utterly different to the present routine which he would learn to live without, by letting the past come back and help him to face the changes that came.

He leaned on the gate, pausing in his ‘constitutional’ — Laura’s word, which he disliked, knowing she would see nothing tired in him when he explained where he was going. Walking made up the mind with a firmness that would not be undone however she objected. The exercise stilled his secret fears, after years of not needing to make up his mind about anything. Though there had been no final yes from Richard, an illusion of increased visibility in his dome of darkness convinced him there would be. For the barely imaginable to become reality meant climbing out of the pit he had inhabited for so long, like a mole in its comfortable burrow, and going into the second great trip of his life.

The gulls told him he was on his own. One squeal a yes and the one that followed a no. Either way, he lived in an indifferent universe, and smiled at the notion that the universe itself might mirror the complexity of a single human being — if there was anything to it at all — and by giving himself up to it he became the controller of the earth and every star and planet, if only for a second in astronomical reckoning. The gulls would be fixed in the swoop and circle of their intimidating cries till the end of time, and because Fate cared nothing for either him or them he enjoyed their eternal disputations.

A steady downpour of warm rain came from the direction they would chop towards when the boat motored into Atlantic spaces. The homely smell of the house would be hard to leave, yet less so because of it, a break to be welcomed whatever his adventure led to.

After checking that the table was laid in the dining room he followed the smell of cooking into the kitchen. Laura noted the increased confidence of his approach. He stood by her side:

‘We’ll have smoked mackerel and toast,’ she said, ‘to start with. Then new potatoes, with cauliflower and a thick lamb chop. I’ve put a bottle of wine in the fridge, which we can share. I’ll serve the first course now, while the rest finishes on a low light.’

He had noted her concern, how she provided an extra newspaper for reading aloud in the evening, set out nicer treats for his meals, gave unsolicited embraces and kisses. What else could she do? There was nothing worse than not knowing.

He heard the apron coming off, for a more formal meal than usual, as if knowing he had something to tell her, though how could she? She held out the chair, but he pulled it under himself. Over the years they had developed an idiom of signs, graded by the subtlety of pressures from one to ten, you might say, shades of the heart’s wish easy to express, yesses and nos without the help of words. An unacknowledged lexicon of smell and touch had built between them, by now of a certain bulk. Misinterpretation was a call for laughter, though not this time. His brooding staled his appetite, but she gave him the sound of cutting into her fish and toast, and was not pleased by him pouring wine which came exactly to the brim. He held the glass towards her: ‘Let’s drink to having lived so long together.’

She fought the tears, as if he might see them. Making no sound would deceive him, but the touch of their glasses covered the catch in her voice. ‘Yes, I like that.’

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’ve decided to go on a trip. Richard has asked me to go with him to the Azores. I might be away for some time.’ He sighed, not for himself, but for the thing completed. The darkness seemed to have opened, a faint glow shimmering where his sight once was, so that he had less feeling of being blind.

Half his wine went in one swallow. ‘Richard wants me to help with the radio.’ He ate so easily, as if he told her such preposterous news every day. ‘It’s a big boat, a motor yacht, a hundred and fifty feet long. There’ll be a crew of seven or eight, so I’ll be well looked after.’

The fork fell against her plate. ‘How long have you known about this?’ She needed no special faculties to realise that his behaviour had changed since their outing to Boston. He tied himself less to the wireless, had become impatient with all activity, sat at his dials for no more than half an hour of an evening, not always that long. A change of habit when she didn’t have one of hers to vary was disturbing. He sat for hours as if half asleep, but she picked up the intensity of his thoughts, knowing he would never tell her what they were. Now he had. She was frightened that such snapping of routine meant the end of their life together, but to question him would solve nothing. She must let him talk further, as he certainly must, though the suspense put a stitch in her side.

He filled another glass, spilled some this time. ‘Oh, I’ve told you as soon as I could.’

No post had come today, no phone calls either, so he had known for a while. Or was it another fantasy, like the pipe dream that had led them on a wild goose chase to Boston? Richard couldn’t be such a fool as to take a blind man to sea.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘Do you? Can you?’

‘Well, what’s strange about my plan to have a little outing? It’ll take two or three weeks, that’s all. I’ve always wanted to see the Azores.’ He heard her go into the kitchen, to stop the chops scorching, no other response possible, though he couldn’t think why, since he only wanted to go on a sea trip with a friend instead of with her.

Topside, they were a little overdone, but their celebratory meal had gone into the wilderness. Draining the cauliflower steamed the glasses as she tipped it into a colander. If the trip had been with anybody but Richard the scheme might have sounded feasible. ‘What sort of people will be going on the boat? And what is the real reason for the voyage?’ she asked, back at the table.

Howard poured another drink, as if it would be better for her to comment that he was becoming an alcoholic. ‘It’s a rich man’s yacht, and he’s cruising for pleasure, to the Azores.’

She put her unfinished mackerel aside for the cat. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘I’m not sure at the moment, but I’ll tell you as soon as I find out. It’s all open handed and above board, so I wish you’d stop worrying.’

‘Worrying?’ she said, with an anger he’d never heard before. ‘Don’t you know I worry about you every second of the day and night, especially when you go down the hill alone each morning on your walk? Don’t you know it’s been the same since the day we were married? Always hoping you’ll be all right, that you’ll come back safe. Maybe it was unnecessary — it obviously was — but it’s been a lifetime of anxiety nevertheless. And here you are, suddenly announcing that you want to go away for weeks on a small boat into the Atlantic, with people I know nothing about. And you don’t seem to know anything about them, either.’

‘I wish you would eat your food before it gets cold. All this is rather unnecessary. It’s even irrelevant.’ She would have made the same fuss if he had been going on a bus trip to Brighton, because by having gone everywhere with her he had dug his own grave into absolute dependence. In spite of her disapproval he found the silence benign, though not unaware of his callousness.

‘Has this got anything to do with this woman you were hoping to meet in Boston?’

His tone was flat. ‘No.’

It was a lie, at least a half-truth. She knew it had started then, and that this voyage was another stage in looking for her, and said so.

Easy to slump back into ease and go on with no event to mark the time between now and death. Is that all life would be? Those glorious moments of feeling the laden bomber lift sluggishly under him from the runway as a youth couldn’t be all there was to it. He had paid for them over and over by vegetating ever since, and now he must get into the world again. He didn’t need anyone to tell him whether he was doing right or wrong: not even the German Numbers Woman, or Vanya, and not Judy either. He was alone with his own voice saying that not to go would pitch him into a living death till the end of his time, unless he weakened and soon enough died by cancer or a blow at the heart for his pusillanimity.

‘All I can do is repeat myself. Richard has worked hard to get me this place, and it’s an opportunity that won’t come again.’

She laughed with such bitterness that he wondered what part of her it had come from, where it had been hiding all these years, and why. He saw no reason for bitterness. Parts of her she hadn’t shown before, having no reason to, though there must be more to it than that. He also had zones never revealed, but that he found encouraging.

‘I thought you’d be happy to let me go, and do everything possible to help me on my way.’

‘Why,’ she said mockingly, ‘do you intend to make a career of it? Surely not!’

‘Would to God I could. But no, I don’t.’ He laughed at such an idea. ‘I’m not going off into the blue forever. There’ll be radio facilities on board for me to call you every day or two.’ He wasn’t sure this would be the case, didn’t much care, though hoped it was possible so that the separation wouldn’t hurt her for too long. On the other hand the disturbance of calling would break into his sensation of being free.

She wanted to lie down, from weakness, out of shock, in total surprise at his ruthlessness, at his denial of everything they had lived by, marking the end of their world, a confession as if he had announced he was going to live with another woman, nothing less than a stark betrayal of trust, destroyed by one plain announcement. ‘Do you think it will make me happy, knowing that every minute might be your last? I don’t suppose there can be any worse position for someone like you being on a small boat in a rough sea.’

If it meant getting killed, what better way to die, though it was only her unreasonable fear that suggested such might happen, while his premonition of danger was due only to a childish dread at being apart.

‘You’re denying me a holiday,’ he said. ‘It’s as simple as that. I’ll go away for a few weeks, and then come back. We’ll have something to talk about for a change.’ It was impossible to do anything without being cruel. He was seared, but unrepentant and more determined. If Richard called to say it was no go, this anguish would be for nothing. Yet nothing was for nothing. Everything that happened was good in a life where nothing happened, and no more so than to a blind man. She disliked him, therefore he was noticed, more real to her, a more separate person than he’d ever been. He said as much, assumed he was becoming like the man he would have been if he had come back from the air raid with no injury. She was the only obstacle to this progress, but the power of his infatuation with Judy wouldn’t let her stop him going to sea. Judy was the glow drawing him on, and no amount of resistance could deflect him from the beam.

‘It’s not so much that I mind you leaving me, though I do, wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, but it’s what might happen. You surely see that.’

He touched her hand, but she drew it petulantly away. ‘Nothing bad will happen. I’ll have a wonderful time. I can’t tell you how much it means to me, how much I’m looking forward to it. You’ll have to trust me.’

‘It’s not that.’ There was steel in her tone. ‘I just can’t let you go. Won’t. You can’t go. It’s not a matter of you leaving me on my own. Anywhere else. But not to sea. I couldn’t bear it. I won’t let you go.’

‘Well, I shall.’

‘I’ll talk to Richard. He’ll understand.’

‘It was his idea.’ Lies had become easy because the limits to his freedom had fallen down. ‘He wants me on the boat. He thought I needed to get away for a while.’

‘I don’t believe it.’ Richard was man enough of the world. He would never make such an outlandish offer, but if it were true she had only herself to blame for having introduced them. And if Howard was lying, which he probably was, how could she hold it against him when she had married him to escape the pain of what she could never mention, thus lying to him by omission? It was as if he guessed, or definitely knew, and felt free to crush her with this kind of revenge. The possibility of him having found out gave her more strength. ‘You can’t go, though. I’m quite determined. You’re not fit for such an adventure. There are ways of stopping you. I’ll discuss it with a social worker, to see what we can do.’

‘The cat’s going to eat well today, if you don’t finish your meat. He’s putting on too much weight as it is. Everything balances out. How can you think anything will happen to me, or that I won’t come back? I don’t see it.’

Her instinct was as good as his. The journey might be easy to set out on but hard to get back from, or perhaps the obstacles to going were so difficult that the return couldn’t enter the mind. Departures for her were fraught with terrors and desolation, while with him they stimulated and filled with joy. Her despair was understandable, always worse for the person left behind.

If he fell in love with a woman on the street, say, and she showed a sudden (though unaccountable) passion for him, both knowing it was forever and that a break must be made with their present lives, say, for instance, that he met Judy and they went away together: Laura would feel the same when he told her he had found someone else. She would have preferred that, as being more understandable according to her views, while he felt the same whatever it was, a liberation from which no one could deter him.

‘I understand how you feel, my love.’

‘You don’t. You can’t possibly.’ She clattered the chair back and saw herself whitefaced from surprise and chagrin, from a powerlessness which must be caused by more than his announcement. She should smile, indeed she should, and kiss him, arms around his neck; ‘Yes, do go. It’s an opportunity not to be missed. It’ll be so wonderful for you. It’ll do you good to get away from the house and dull old me for a while. I know Richard will take care of you.’

‘I do understand,’ he said, ‘but I still can’t think of a valid reason not to go.’

She couldn’t respond. Wouldn’t anyway. There was every reason for him not to go. He was in the coils of some madness. God knows, she felt close to it herself, but with his obsession pulling her more deeply, words could do nothing, though there was little else to use. No doubt she ought to talk calmly, like a doctor perhaps, or the kind of guru people went to when they were in spiritual trouble. A guru would only confirm him in his determination, tell him to live it through, such people so unscrupulous. ‘I don’t understand.’ She sat down to face him, hands and legs trembling.

‘There’s nothing to understand. It’s all very plain and straightforward.’

‘No, it’s not,’ she said sharply, ‘and you know it.’ She couldn’t get the right tone into her voice, the effort almost strangling her. The windows shivered in their sockets from the gale, rain smearing the panes. ‘How would you survive, in weather like this?’

No problem. A lightness of spirit made him a different person, reconnected to his youth, as if that youth had led a conventional life all these years. He wasn’t certain what had done it, only that some kind of magic must have fused him and that other person together, finally mysterious, as if the seed had been there all along and waiting only for certain factors to enrich the soil from which the unity could flower. He felt irresponsible, accountable only to himself. What you can’t see you feel, and when you feel you act, and when you act you see more than if you had stayed still.

‘We have a radio to warn us,’ he told her. ‘You go around the worst of the weather. And there’s always a harbour to run for. I’ll get the atlas out soon, and show you where the Azores are.’

‘I don’t want to see. It’s the end of the world for me. You’ll never get there. I feel it. Or if you do you won’t get back.’

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you’re talking nonsense.’ He sometimes felt he would never see the place, either, but supposed you always did think that before you left for somewhere, confident he would feel differently after the first day at sea.

‘I only wish I was. I’m in a bad dream.’

‘And I’m in a good one, and wish you could share it.’

‘I want to wake up from mine.’ Hard to believe she wasn’t going to. ‘But let’s not talk about it anymore. Not for a while. I can’t think properly while we’re talking.’ She was hungry but unable to eat, farnished but didn’t know for what, in an altered mental state to an hour ago, isolated, floating in uncertainty and misery, everything that was comforting and familiar blown away. She began to cry.

We’ve woken up, he thought, into the real world, and it took so little, an announcement that I intend setting out on a trip without her. Her crying was muted, made dreadful by her fight to control it. ‘Please, my love, it’s no big thing. I’ll be gone and back before you know it.’

Not one word of concession, of giving in on a single point. ‘I can’t take any more. I can’t listen to you.’

‘Yes, I see that.’

It must be a practical joke, a test of loyalty and love. Perhaps he had found a way of getting into the locked drawer of her armoire and read the diary account of the times with her uncle, and all the details of the abortion — but how could he, without eyes to see? She had kept a diary as a solace to her distress, written through tears. At the worst of times she recalled the scratching of her pen, the speedy turning of pages, words scribbled so fast that some lines were a jumble impossible to make out whenever she was forced to look at it again, trying to still her mind. She ought to have known that nothing in the past could be buried.

She had always assumed the book to be safe, because even if she forgot to lock the drawer, and Howard looked inside, the words were braille only to her, though maybe he had secretly taken the diary to Richard, who had read everything to him in his measured uncaring voice. Or Richard, with new-found malevolence, which she supposed every man to have, had tapped out the choicest excerpts in morse and posted the tape back for Howard to run and re-run.

He was bringing up this detestable stunt of a boat trip by way of revenge for her lifetime’s silence, not knowing that in doing so he was parting them forever. And yet revenge wasn’t part of him — no matter by how much he seemed to have altered — because even if he knew he would understand and forgive. There would be nothing else for him to do.

Such a fantasy showed how low one could fall in the face of the unexpected. Her mind raced cruelly, not letting her alone. It wouldn’t from now on, a horrifying thought. Even if he suddenly laughed that his plan had been a joke, and he wasn’t going on any such trip, the damage could never be made good. Out of the blue, just like that, he had blasted their lives. ‘I don’t think you’ll ever be able to understand,’ she said.

Nor would she. He felt young enough to no longer know himself, laughed at his severed connection from whoever he had been a few months ago. The mechanism of how it had come about was clearly part of him. He had been two people most of his life, even before the disaster of going blind, and the dormant person had emerged at last from Sleepy Hollow, the two fusing into himself, not knowing how or why it had taken so long, a transformation impossible to explain.

‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘I understand very well. But I would rather go with your blessing than without it.’

‘I know.’ She noticed a blackhead on the left side of his forehead, couldn’t think where he had got it in the clean sea air, but decided not to tell him. ‘And you never will.’

‘I’m sad about that.’

‘Give me time,’ was all she could say. ‘I’d like to lie down’ — being as sleepy as if she had taken a drug.

‘We could have some coffee.’

‘That won’t do it.’ He had been well looked after for so long that the reason for her being upset was beyond his power to comprehend. How long would they have stayed together if he hadn’t been blind, and if this was what he was really like — making up his mind on such an important issue without any discussion? Not very long. The storm had slackened, birds whistling in the bushes, glad of better weather. ‘I’m your wife,’ she said. ‘I have rights in these matters.’

If the modern trend of women’s liberation hadn’t passed her by they might not have argued like this, and he would have been on his way with her approval. But any article on women’s lib in the papers, or something mentioned on the radio, had always brought scornful remarks — he would never understand why, though now he did. It was loggerheads, and no mistake, neither of them with any more to say, until:

‘I’m going upstairs to sleep, though don’t suppose I shall.’

But she did, fell off immediately, every corpuscle so weary she didn’t even dream.

Planes weren’t calling for Vanya’s electronic pinpoints, so no hope of playing ‘Spot the Bomber’. The German Numbers Woman was having her day off, and Portishead told of front after front coming in from the grey Atlantic. On Judy’s wavelength the crackling mush was interrupted by a Russian operator sending widdershins in morse.

He hoped for better weather when the boat set out, wondering how he would take to the turbulent water, since he had never been on a small boat. At moments he had wanted to tell Laura he wouldn’t go, to forget it, he was sorry, I love you, and everything’s all right, so forgive me if I’ve tormented you, and let’s carry on as before.

No one could say that he would still be going. Things went wrong in any enterprise. He could tell Richard that such a jaunt was out of the question if it meant the end of his marriage. And Richard, knowing he must come on the trip because of all he knew, would make whatever obstacles disappear. Some ingenuity in persuasion could do no harm, even if not really necessary. To cause Richard worry was an exercise in power, and he felt no shame in stating it. Let him also believe nothing was certain. He couldn’t think of anything to prevent him going, but if some factor did arise, there was a pressure moving him forward that couldn’t be resisted.

When Massachusetts tinkled in he found the sounds banal, couldn’t sit still, paced up and down the familiar room, picked up books and earphones and various pieces of equipment, wanted to go this minute, saying no goodbyes, oblivious to objections or tears, get his stick and walk down the hill with a song on his lips, relishing a madness that was more to him than life itself.

On Judy’s frequency again he found, as expected, nothing. Emptiness. She was with Carla in Malaga, and he could only hope they were happy. He missed the throaty richness of her voice with an intensity that almost made him faint.

TWENTY-TWO

‘Richard?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Howard here.’

‘I was going to get in touch.’

‘Beat you to it. I’m in a phone box on the front. I got a woman to punch in the numbers for me. Could have done it myself, I suppose, but I didn’t want to take any chances, or delay matters.’

Bloody fool, to let a passer-by have my unlisted number. She might have been following for just such a clue. ‘Why all the urgency?’

‘I have to talk to you.’

‘Don’t say a word about you know what. Somebody may be listening in. You never can tell.’

He managed a laugh, to reassure. ‘Who would know better than me?’

‘That’s right.’ Who indeed? ‘Me as well, you might say.’

‘We’re two of a feather.’

‘As long as you like to think so.’ Let him talk, even though time was crucial. He had to be pulled on board, with no argument, otherwise the trip might be called off. It would be like walking into prison if they left him behind. ‘Are you ready for the big sea trip?’

‘Well, you see …’

‘All I see,’ he monitored the pause with his watch, ‘is that I’ll pick you up at thirteen-hundred hours on Monday the fifteenth, and take you to the boat.’

‘I was going to tell you. I can’t go. It’s off.’

Richard had always known how to be the king of silence. The mouth moved so that only you could see it. The voice box boomed but only you could hear. He looked around the room, naming every gewgaw and object of furniture. When that inventory was finished he glanced at the window, and lit another cigarette at a distance from the telephone to keep the line quiet. He would stand all day if necessary, waiting for Howard to say something further, would drag the bastard out by the short and curlies if it had to be that way.

Waistcoat had told him to get the potential danger on board or he, as well as his old and upstanding father, would be scuffed off the surface of the world without ever knowing they’d been on it. Waistcoat had a way with words, but one day they would choke him. In the meantime he had to wait for Howard to say something, and though Howard was just as capable of waiting in silence till the end of time he didn’t think more than a decent interval was necessary for what he had to say.

‘The reason is, that Laura objects to it.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Well, it’s something.’

‘Amanda used to get like that, all bossy and tearful. I understand how you feel. But she lit off, and a good thing I think now. Women shouldn’t be allowed to interfere without reason with what men want to do.’

‘Agreed. All the same, they need to be considered.’

‘But not obeyed. I have to tell you I haven’t much time.’

‘Neither have I. I’m putting another fifty pee in.’

‘Do you want me to hang up, and then I can call you?’

He saw through that one. ‘I’ve plenty of change. The main question is whether or not you still need me on the boat.’

‘You said you wanted to come, didn’t you? Almost insisted on it. So I made arrangements. They’re expecting you. I’d look a right charlie if you didn’t turn up. The idea is that you help out with the radio. I sang your praises so much they’re counting on it.’

Another pause. ‘All right, I’ll be there. I just wanted final confirmation.’

Show a little more anger. ‘How much final confirmation do you want, for God’s sake?’

‘No more, but Laura’s still got to be dealt with.’

‘I have to leave that to you.’

‘My problem, is it?’

‘Well, it’s not mine.’

All Howard wanted to know was whether they were definitely going, without him or not. ‘The trip’s on, then, and nothing will stop me.’

Richard tried a bit of Air-Force slang. ‘Good show. Zero hour’s not far off. You’ll have an interesting time, believe you me.’

‘I know I shall. She may contact you, though, come to see you.’

‘I don’t mind.’ He’d expected it, hoped for it, knew she’d be on her own. ‘As long as you’re ready on the day.’

‘You can depend on it.’

‘Bring what you think you’ll need. A kitbag and a hold-all. There’ll be plenty to eat and drink on board.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘You won’t have to. I’ll pick you up, and all your worries will be over.’

‘I owe you more than I can say. It’s as if I suddenly had a brother. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.’

More crazy than you think, though Richard shied at a fitting response, felt none of the right emotion. At the same time wondered what sense or truth there was in it. ‘It’s a favour I knew you wanted. Wasn’t easy, but we were friends.’

Howard had said no more than he felt. He was going on a drug smuggler’s jaunt, inviolable because blind, and assumed he could depend on Richard to get him on board, from which moment he would be at the mercy of so many unknown factors that it didn’t bear thinking about — an adventure not to be refused. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

‘And I’ll be there to pick you up.’

The sign-offs were simultaneous.

Richard wondered what he had done, but knew he could have done nothing else. He had taken responsibility for another human being so completely that part of himself had been cut away, and he didn’t like it. Nor would Howard, no doubt poking his way back up the hill for another bout with Laura. Not hard to know who would win, though that part of the scheme was no fight of his. He had drawn Howard into his web, and Howard had lured him into an equally tangled snare.

It was unusual for Richard to be discouraged by success, because he suspected — being no fool — that anything as easy as getting Howard to come with them couldn’t fall out well. Such self-indulgent worry was more intense than the trip deserved, and who had entrapped who, and how it began, was no use going into, must be accepted and forgotten, but he was nagged that something could go wrong. Their laybrinths had met and started to blend, a messy and embarrassing process which set off a twinge of alarm as if, when two such forces collided, control would be lost and all power extinguished.

He enjoyed walking about the empty house knowing that no one might come back into it at any second. And nobody would. Even so, blessed isolation was little help to his thoughts. A man in a house alone was incomplete because he was more at the mercy of himself. He couldn’t tell who or what brought such irrelevancies to mind, but perhaps the world of the house was too small, only seemed big when other people were in it with him. He didn’t like the sensation of being so far off his normally firm centre.

A car sounded along the unmade track. Maybe Amanda had got tired of sulking at her girlfriend’s, and was coming back to more comfortable accommodation. She wasn’t the sort who would be happy to share the living space of a small flat — if she was ever happy, that is. He had treated her well, but was aware of never having done his proper duty as a husband, such as being there to hear her thoughts and wishes every minute of the day and night.

He liked to think there was nothing wrong with her in wanting such constant attention, that it was mainly due to him that she disliked being herself, which led her to dislike him even more. On the other hand there were times when she made an effort to love him, or at least endure him without rancour, though perhaps only as a way towards thinking better of herself.

Whatever it was, it had been too much for him, and now that she had gone he could only think they had been in no way made for each other, which he had said from time to time and which she hated to hear, as if it might be true. Yet if two people weren’t made for each other they weren’t made for anybody else, especially when they ought to feel made for each other, which they did at the best of times, however rare those times were. In any case with him she had a house, and a car, and enough to live on, so what more was needed except patience and tolerance, and a certain regard when they didn’t exactly feel made for each other?

Going to the window he saw a magpie fly from the trees and skim the top of Laura’s Peugeot, a black and white warning of a hard time as she turned by the derelict barn and parked on the open space of grass before the garden gate. She manoeuvred to face outwards, as if a quick getaway might become necessary, though maybe it was her normal habit. He went to meet her at the door.

On the way there she had been wondering how to tell him that Howard wasn’t fit to go on a small boat trip out into the Atlantic. He wouldn’t be allowed to, she would say, would only go over her dead body, and if that was the ultimate sacrifice she wouldn’t hesitate to make it. But if she could win Richard to her side such a sacrifice wouldn’t be necessary.

She noted the orderly living room, everything in its place, not much used, now that his wife had gone. He intercepted her gaze, glad that he had, by coincidence, bumped the vacuum cleaner around only that morning, always a man for keeping the old ship tidy.

His wife’s departure had obviously not bothered him much, which made her less sure of what she had to say. He had the same caring though distant expression as when they met by the roadside. ‘I suppose you know why I’m here?’

‘I’ve been expecting you.’ He pointed to an armchair. ‘In fact I was going to call you later today. Let me get you a drink.’ He was still amazed by her youthful and untouched aspect, though helped by the dull light of the day.

‘I shouldn’t drink since I’m driving,’ she said, ‘but I’ll have a sherry.’

He found some Tio Pepe in the cupboard, halfway down and hadn’t been used for months: shot a whisky in for himself. ‘Pity you had to come all this way,’ for nothing, was his meaning.

‘Oh, I don’t mind the drive. The countryside’s so pretty around here.’

The fixed smile showed the force of her worry, then was crossed out by a flash of uncertainty. ‘I’m glad you caught me in.’ He was, had been about to drive to the pub, anything to escape the weight of the house for an hour.

‘You know what I’ve come about, I’m sure.’

He sat in the other armchair. Amanda had spent over a thousand pounds having them reupholstered — totally redone — and she had scarpered a week after he had written the cheque. But they were damned comfortable, and the one Laura sat in suited her wonderfully. ‘About Howard, of course. You must be worried. I know I would be. It’s a funny situation, and I don’t know how I got into it.’ He wasn’t going to tell her point blank that Howard had to come, or even admit in any way that he was on Howard’s side, unwilling at the moment to fight another man’s battle, at least directly. ‘How either of us got into the situation I’ll never know.’

They had talked it up like a pair of schoolboys, probably suggested by something in one of those ridiculous morse letters. ‘Well, you did, it seems. Howard’s deadly serious. He’s all ready. I have to stop him, and you must help me.’ In the excitement of feeling her task would be easier than imagined she drank her sherry — and a good sized measure he had given her.

The idea of getting her half seas over made him smile, and as if in encouragement he swallowed the last finger of his whisky. ‘I’d like to, but I don’t think anybody can.’ She indicated no, but he refilled her glass. ‘Sorry, leave it, then. A stray tomcat comes around and I’m sure that if I pour it into a saucer it’ll lap it up.’

She was supposed to laugh, but felt no reason to: ‘You’re the only one I can turn to. I’ve no one else,’ forgetting the other arguments in her mind before coming down to this.

He put on what Amanda called his ‘irrecoverable silence’, knowing they were only at the beginning. Was she trying to beat him at his favourite game of saying nothing for as long as possible? He refilled his glass and she, unaccountably, took a swig at the sherry. So far from the road, the tomb-like quiet of the house was broken only by the tapping of raindrops.

‘I never thought Howard was serious,’ he said, ‘but when I knew he was, I put out feelers, to see if someone would let him come with us. Maybe I was too persuasive, though it’s hard to believe, but the skipper thought it a benevolent act, to take him. I think that was because he had a brother who was blinded in a flying accident with the Fleet Air Arm in Korea, and he’d often taken him on boat trips. He enjoyed them no end. The men looked after him. They took exceptional care, though he rarely needed it. The various crews thought it lucky to have a blind man on board. A bit of a novelty. Took their minds off the harsh reality of separation from land, you might say. I went on a couple of their trips, and there was never any instance of danger or inconvenience. In fact Old Blind Harry, as we referred to him, always looked — and felt, I’m sure — in absolutely top form when he stepped back on dry land, saying he’d never had a better time in his life. He gained no end of confidence. Movement, coordination — that sort of thing, which can’t be bad for a disabled man, if you’ll forgive me using the term. He even volunteered for the washing up, and always gave a hand with the sails — though Howard’s trip will be on a motor job. He was almost as useful as the rest of us in the end. Mind you, we joshed him around a bit, teased him, but that seemed to please him as much as anything. He took it in good part when one of the men put a sextant into his hand at midday and told him to take a sight on the sun. Made him feel more like one of us, when he was teased. There was the time when we went cruising around the Shetlands and Orkneys, and ended up in Iceland for a week. We had a brilliant time at the hot springs. He particularly took to Iceland because the people were so interested to meet a blind sailor. They were really kind to him.’ Especially the girls, they were all over him, he was going to say, but thought better than to add such a touch to his fantasy. ‘He was singing pop songs on the way back. We all were. Getting into Aberdeen was hilarious.’

He went across to a carriage clock on the shelf and wound it as if to bring the tightness of its spring to the same tension as her heart. Tension was good for her, even necessary if she was to have some kind of release. It would do her good. He came back to his chair. ‘Then again, I can put myself in your place, and see how the idea disturbs you. If you and Howard have never been apart, as I understand you haven’t, the prospect can’t be very appealing. I don’t suppose Howard should be allowed to go scot free on such a trip if it’s going to distress you. That’s the last thing I would like to be responsible for. I’ve too high a regard for you — and for Howard, come to that — to help him make you in anyway unhappy.’

Surprised by such an easy win, she wished he would stop talking. Another swallow of her drink could do no harm. ‘You’re very kind and understanding about it.’

It was wonderful what breathing did to a woman’s bosom, at least to hers. Her breasts, even at the faintest movement under her thin blue sweater, were as well shaped as those on a girl of twenty. They positively invited him to touch them. A one-second glance took everything in, and he wondered if she was aware of it. ‘Thank you for saying that, because I know how important it is for you.’

‘Of course it is.’ She was a skinful of emotion, and he would have said anything she wanted merely for the pleasure of being close. If Howard envied him being able to see whatever went on in the damned and for the most part dismal world he envied Howard for being married to a woman like her. ‘I’ll do whatever you like,’ he said. ‘If you say he ought not to go, then he won’t.’

‘It’s true that I don’t want him to, but you’ve taken trouble, and made arrangements.’

‘Well, yes, I have. They’re expecting him, looking forward to it, you might say. I gave my word even. But I’ll willingly throw all that to the winds. I simply thought I was doing a favour for a friend in getting him out into the world, on a voyage he would remember with pleasure for the rest of his life. But it’s off now. Say no more about it. I’ll phone and tell them as soon as you’ve gone. I’d do it now if I didn’t want to break off the pleasure of your company.’

Every word was making her more uncertain, but did he know it? She didn’t think so. He was open and honest, and what did it matter to him, after all, whether or not Howard went? During the car ride from home she had intended saying that if he thought the only way to stop Howard going was not to go himself she would meet his salary for the aborted trip with whatever amount he would be paid. Even as far as that, but the notion shamed her now that he had relented like a gentleman, made it possible for her to tell Howard that Richard wasn’t going to take him, that the trip was called off.

‘I’ll never forget our first meeting,’ he said. ‘Such a memorable encounter for me, being able to help a lady in distress. I suppose it sounds very corny, to put it that way, but I have such admiration for you at having got Howard through so many difficult years. He’s a terrific person, and it’s been quite an experience knowing him.’

Did he mean that after this he wouldn’t be knowing Howard anymore? Yes, my dear, he said to himself, and I’m letting you know it. Nobody fucks around with Richard in the way you’re doing. Howard is coming with me whether you like it or not. He smiled, drank a little. ‘I’m prepared to help all I can. I’ll call Howard this evening, and tell him the score myself.’

The picture of Howard at sea, bare-headed in the sun, as if looking into the distance from his stance at the front of the boat, going through the supreme enjoyment of his life, cared for and cosseted by a group of men who never let him out of their sight, as if he was their sacred charge, wouldn’t leave her alone. He would love it, be absolutely in his element.

Richard walked to the telephone, by her glass on the table, even if only to be closer while lifting the receiver, and to show how sincere he could be, to get the side draught of the emotional reasoning he supposed was going through her. ‘I’ll call the skipper now. No point keeping him on the hot plate,’ and he pressed the first three numbers.

‘No,’ she called.

‘Sorry?’

‘I want to think some more.’ Two creases across her brow, a third trying to get born, complexion showing her turmoil. She finished the drink, and he poured another. Three had to be her limit. He was already hoping she wouldn’t crash on the road back, and pull Howard out of the trip that way. Besides, he’d like to see her again. And yet even if she had an accident Howard might not see it as a reason to remain. People were funny that way. He’d stay just long enough to see her buried, though what thoughts are these? It was love he wanted, not death, but at least they brought mind and therefore body back to life. All in all the day was going nicely, and he lifted his glass for a toast. ‘I wish the two of us a good few years yet.’

‘Thank you.’ She drank, needing to break the shock, because the last time she had heard such words for a toast came from her uncle, after he had forced her (she still found it hard to use the word rape) to have sex with him. The tremor stayed, till she went on: ‘You know I can’t stop him, don’t you?’

‘You can, with my help, willingly given, I might say.’

‘No, I don’t want it.’ Uncertainty had given way to pride, which conquered her fear of letting Howard go. ‘It wouldn’t be fair, but thank you, all the same.’

‘I feel very brotherly towards him’ — might as well put that to some use.

‘I know. And it’s wonderful you do. But from what you’ve told me I know I must let him go. I’d have no future if I didn’t. Never forgive myself. And I couldn’t go on living with someone who wasn’t able to forgive me. Oh, I’m sure he would, and yet how could he, really? If I was in his place I don’t think I would. But he’ll be all right?’

She had been charmingly disarmed by him giving in so easily to her concern for Howard, and now he had the pleasure, far from malicious (though not too far) of hearing her accept his plan. He felt the self-satisfying warmth of altruism. Whether she would go back on it he couldn’t say, though it was unlikely, being a woman of her word. Besides, there was more to her giving in than his persuasive eloquence, and he wondered whether he would ever know the extent of it. No one was as simple as they seemed. At least he had learned that much from Amanda. ‘I promise to guard him with my life.’

What tosh. If she believed that she’d believe anything. Nevertheless the words seemed ominous, though meaningless for coming out too easily. The notion that a promise was a promise to be kept and honoured came starkly to mind, but all he conceded for the moment was that Howard would go, and Howard would come back, and that would be the end of the matter. What more could anybody want? — Though he needed Howard on the trip, more than he cared to admit, he had never thought himself cut out to be anybody’s keeper, not even his own, come to that, having always lived happily enough within the unity of one. Why he should take on such a load at this late stage puzzled him, though if it had something to do with this oh so morally upright woman sitting oh so primly and self controlled before him he could have no regrets.

‘I can’t,’ he added with a laugh, ‘see any such sacrifice being called for. It’s not that kind of issue.’

‘I’m sure not,’ she said, ‘but he’ll be in your hands.’ She wanted to make sure, though there was no need. Trust was the essence of the affair, and she would suppress all anxieties, settle herself down to the everyday worry of waiting for a loved one to come back from an extended vacation. Her last remark called for no reply. Everything had been said, and it was time to leave. But she couldn’t make up her mind to stand up, as if the last half hour had passed in the hardest kind of work. Drinking the rest of her sherry was no help, but she had to get up, even so.

‘Maybe you’d like some coffee?’ he said when she did and, without an answer, added: ‘Let’s go into the kitchen, and I’ll make a pot strong enough to put you on the right road. I could do with some as well.’

She accepted, as he had known she would, taking his lack of an answer as a kindness, for she hadn’t thought of coffee. He flicked the kettle on and poured beans into the grinder. ‘I’m looking forward so much to getting to sea. I know Howard will like it.’

She didn’t want any more talk about what had been settled, but supposed it would be normal parlance for him now. He was no longer trying to reassure her, so no response was necessary. She liked his forthrightness, and indeed kindness, and thought she might even have fallen in love with such a man if she had never met Howard. It could easily have been, though she tried not to smile at the idea.

Perched on their stools to sip the scalding black coffee, both enjoyed a friendly and it seemed to him intimate silence as if, he thought, we’ve been man and wife for a long time. She was older but it didn’t seem by much, especially with that figure, a little fuller since they had first met, which improved the breasts he so wanted to touch. Her stockinged legs hung from the stool, as if on getting down she would run joyfully to her lover. The impulse to take her in his arms and kiss her was almost overpowering, and if she did not resist they would go upstairs. He imagined them lying naked together on the bed. He was aroused but well controlled, as he knew he had to be, at such an infamous and unlikely picture, though in previous situations with a woman he’d had to tell himself it would be impossible to get her to bed before he could devise the means to do so.

‘Good coffee,’ she smiled. ‘You knew exactly what I needed.’

‘I made a guess.’

‘I’m happy it was the right one.’

‘Not all my guesses are, as you can imagine.’

She was sorry for him, with his wife gone, and being alone in the house. Hard to know how many people in the world were happy, whatever happy meant. It was easier to say when you weren’t happy, which was the most one could expect. Any happiness you experienced was gone in a mere flicker of time, as when he must have been guessing what she wanted, while a state of not being unhappy was only good for helping the years along, in a situation you had been engineered into by events more powerful than yourself. He had said Howard would be happy from setting foot on the boat to getting off at the end, a matter of two or three weeks, so she had him to thank for that. Such tangible happiness for so long ought not to be denied anybody. Between them they had made such a thing possible for another human being, and one so near to her, which brought her close to happiness: ‘I have much to thank you for.’

He wanted to say: Save it for when we get back from the Azores — but didn’t care to alarm her, though couldn’t think why, because he expected they would turn up at the house all sound in wind and limb on their return. ‘Not really. But I have to tell you that I would do anything for Howard. And also for you.’

The last sentence turned him into the enigma all men were, because there was no reason why he should do anything for her. ‘Thank you again. I don’t see why you should, for me, though.’

His passion declined, and thank God for that, he said to himself. Lust it may have been (it most certainly was) but there was so much depth to the feeling he could hardly believe it wasn’t love. At the moment he thought that making love to her would put the final meaning to his life, and that he would tell her so, if the opportunity came. The faintest sign, and he would see no distance between them. He would edge across the space, on his best behaviour, and draw her in as she would by then have been drawn to him.

She was pleased to know that he would do something for her alone should the occasion arise, but she didn’t trust herself to relax in the way he seemed to think was appropriate. She had done so once, but never again, even though to stand by the rule now would be no more than to punish herself. Resolution was losing all meaning, however, as his blue eyes looked so intensely at her. ‘I think I had better be going. You’ve been very good about everything.’

He stood, though she didn’t. ‘Yes’ — I think you should.

She felt weak, finally enlivened by the coffee, drowsy now, happy and relaxed as he came and held her hands. She knew at last what sort of thing he was going to come out with, but he drew back a step. ‘I just wanted you to know it,’ he said.

There was no surprise, finally. He hadn’t put anything in the coffee, or the sherry, so maybe she had come specially to hear him say such things as much as to talk about the other matter, now so unimportant. After all, she was her own woman, and had known he was alone in the house. ‘To know what?’

‘That ever since I first saw you,’ he said. ‘You must forgive me. I shouldn’t have said it. But I couldn’t bear you not knowing how I felt.’

She smiled, and put out her hands to be warmed and comforted, the pressure telling that she had done right to come to him. ‘I think I knew.’

He could do nothing but kiss her warm lips. Her stupefaction was washed aside as he drew her from the stool into an embrace, her bosom against her shirt. ‘I love you, is what I’ve been trying to say.’

When her arms came around him, some form of agreement in her action, he let a hand roam under her sweater, and pressed it against the warm flesh of her back. Any moment he would relax, leave her, step aside, and they could amicably part as if nothing had taken place. They would say their polite goodbyes, and he’d give a last heartfelt promise to take good care of Howard — she assumed. But the move was postponed, scorned in fact, ignored because such kisses would never allow it. With other women he always wondered what the hell am I getting into? — but the question didn’t come now, as if he had been waiting for such a woman all his life. Her forehead was wet with kisses, everything happening without words but with more surety.

She was a woman who for some reason hadn’t evolved to the age she was supposed to be, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, as he might with anyone else — crude assumptions as they had always been. It didn’t matter. She acted out of her body, all reflection gone, otherwise why with him who, though feeling love, was never to be loved or trusted?

She only knew she was letting herself go, be carried wonderfully away, as if she had waited for it even before Howard turned up at the station dance, even before the encounter with her uncle, feelings from so far back there was no resisting or holding off. I love him, she told herself, hardly knowing she loved her freedom more.

He knew nothing more piquant, more profoundly erotic, than hunger in a woman for what (never mind who) was strange and morally forbidden. What magic button had he touched? He’d give a lot to know. At this stage there was nothing you could do with them, because they were hungry beyond what you could provide, yet hoped you might satisfy. He felt it, and knew he wasn’t wrong. ‘I love you, I love you,’ she muttered, bringing such a tight response from his arms that, if it increased, she would break as she deserved.

‘We can’t stay down here.’ He loosened his hold. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘Oh, I know.’

He licked her tears away, and led her by the hand, nothing else for it, all the signs there of her wanting to be with him and no one else. He brought her to the double bed in Amanda’s room, a happy thought that Amanda wouldn’t be needing it anymore. They kissed by the window and he thought let the cows on the hillside see, as he lifted the sweater up and off, and unlatched the vital clip at the back, lips to her warm breasts. He broke away, the drill to get out of his shoes first, unclasp his watch, while she unzipped the skirt and let it fall, as if she had done it many times before though he knew she hadn’t.

Naked on the bed, she said with a young woman’s smile from oh, so long ago: ‘I’m sending my husband and my lover out to sea!’

I’ll be back, at any rate, thinking how hopelessly naive to mention her husband, whom he had no difficulty in blotting from his mind. ‘This is like being in love for the first time in my life’ — something they always liked to hear.

‘And I want you both safe and back, though I shouldn’t be thinking about that now, should I? Because I love you more than I can say.’

Her nipples were almost flat on the surface of her breasts, till his caresses brought them out. ‘I want to see you again and again.’

No hurry, he said, let’s have no hurry, none of that. Kiss her in every place — she deserves as much — until she doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going, and then make her come.

She gasped and bucked, then mostly lay unmoving, so he halted halfway through his travels, kissed her closed eyes and ecstatic lips, and went slowly in.

TWENTY-THREE

Howard fixed himself at his desk to tap out a letter to the police, as satisfying a task as he had ever been set. They would find someone to transcribe it, or they wouldn’t. If they didn’t, or thought it was a hoax, or a joke, or a mysterious nothing to be thrown aside, the expedition would be a success for what he knew to be the criminal fraternity. But if it was interpreted properly and passed to Interpol, or whatever agency was mobilised to take action, his adventure would enter even further into the unpredictable.

He polished the brass parts of the key with a square of yellow cloth, the metal angles and edges sharp or smooth under his fingers, a solid piece of the best British mechanism, with its springs and narrow gaps to spark the longs and shorts of intelligent incrimination, a telegram to stiffen the lips and set the heart to bump, if it got to where he hoped, and if they knew what to do with it.

Hot breath went like the best polish onto the slate base and across the maker’s mark, sliding and smoothing to bring out a shine for anyone but himself to admire. A sighted man might see his face in the glow: mirror, mirror on the wall, who is going to play the most dazzling morse key of all? He saw it, even more glistening than buttons on parade, so the time was for feeling good, because all things bright and beautiful were coming his way. Laura had unaccountably fallen in with his going to the Azores, because Richard had converted her by a matter of fact account of a safe and happy life on the boat. How Richard had done it he would never know, though his was not to reason why, only to be glad he had somehow managed to talk her round, though more than one visit had been needed to convince her.

When the winged steeds of retribution descended from the sky onto the open sea — a mountainous island in the background — or when the police surrounded them on getting back to a lonely estuary in England (the crew thinking themselves safe, and about to cook an evening meal of celebration) the customs officers would not be able to include him among the guilty, because how could a blind man be one of the smugglers, and who but he, having appended his name and address, could have sent the morse-warning which had put them on the alert?

A foolproof coup was the order of the day, and if Judy happened to be caught up in it, as well she might, and was taken with the rest of the crew, at least there was a chance of his getting close and proving her innocence, though he hoped, and had good reason to suppose, that the boats would be far apart when the crisis came. While no plan drawn up before battle could be expected to look tidy after victory or defeat, one had to be made nonetheless.

The first requisite for good sending was to be comfortable, so he drew up the chair and adjusted the cushion behind him. A spoken message on the tape recorder would be easier to make, and more facile for those to understand who received it, but sending in morse was a more difficult medium, thus more memorable, more intriguing, giving the message a patina of importance which other methods couldn’t have. That which was more difficult was more believable — or so he hoped. They would need a few days to find the appropriate person to transcribe it, though little would be lost, because the boat would be just out of the Channel.

Long experience told him that in sending morse the upper arm should be vertical, the elbow resting against his side, and the forearm going horizontally towards the key. He adjusted the contact gap a tenth of a turn and, putting his fingers on the key, sent a few flourishes, like the soloist tuning his instrument before the orchestra can begin. His elbow remained stationary, movement a mere up-and-down flexing of the wrist, and never more than an inch or two. Thus he could send for half an hour at twenty words a minute in near perfect morse without making a mistake, so that whoever read it, if he knew his job, would find it simple to transcribe. The last thing necessary was to set the tape recorder going, and hope for as little outside noise as possible.

What he proposed saying, and went on the express, had been rehearsed for days. He had played and replayed his recorded logs to extrapolate dates and positions, names of boats and people, movements from day to day, and whatever was gleaned on future intentions to fit into the collage based on evidence picked up from correspondence with Richard and whatever he knew about him, whose tapes he ran through over and over so as to mull on them and miss nothing. The satisfying acuity of his intuition allowed him to put such evidence together as would convince anyone. If his element was darkness, where conventional vision was of no use, the advantage to him was multiplied in that he saw what no one else could when it came to creating a shapely web from a scattering of loose ends, threads drawn so neatly to the centre that the picture would be plain for all to see.

Two boats were setting out on a certain date and on a certain course, and at a certain speed, for an island of the Azores, where a significant transfer of drugs would take place. He gave the radio frequencies his messages had come from, in case they had also been picked up by the authorities, but who hadn’t been able to make the same interpretation.

He would have been a detective if his life had taken a different course. Joining the police on leaving the Air Force would, he thought, have been a more acceptable move, and fighting against those who profited from selling hard drugs a good enough cause. Whoever fecklessly used such psychic dynamite to blast away any vestiges of sense would be helped in spite of themselves. Reducing physical pain was one thing, but imbibing drugs so as to extend the limits of perception, or reach a state of mind thought to be otherwise unreachable, which the mind would in any case reveal in its own good time, was an admission of inferiority, a denial of hope. Young people might take them out of curiosity or, because they were mentally ill and not yet medically diagnosed, in an effort to forestall the onset.

The use of drugs to calm or stimulate was bound to lose its power, but people went on taking them in the hope that more would work this time, or next time, or the time after. And after a while it seemed to — easy to think such help was needed forever. He supposed many indulged out of bravado, or for the experience, imagining themselves strong enough not to be damaged by what even the worst could do, and assuming they could stop when they liked because sufficient willpower would always be available. Perhaps that was so, but many suffered torments which called for more and larger doses, so that what began as self indulgence ended in despair and maybe death.

However much he suffered mentally there would never have been any such drugs for him, not even if they had been offered free. The mind anguished for a reason, and was not to be tampered with, all wounds being curable by time and endurance, and respect for its processes.

Great wealth was made by those evil-doers who transported and sold drugs, people who had no moral or human feelings because they considered life to be cheap, and were convinced that those who bought drugs, often with what they stole or mugged — thus lengthening the chain of distress — were the lowest of the earth. The more drug distributors who went to jail therefore the better. Argument was useless, and if action meant that Richard was put away for a long time then he, Howard, would see himself as the instrument for saving his soul. And perhaps even Richard would then so regard it when he’d had time to reflect and repent.

He knew his views could be thought of as reactionary, yet they reinforced his purpose. The message’s melodic chatter eased his soul, oscillations concatenating into the microphone of the recorder, a text distilling into morse the computerised manifestations of his intuition. Speed and rhythm were as perfectly matched as he could make them, but when he had finished, and signed himself off, he wondered whether his story hadn’t after all been assembled from a farrago of false assumptions, that he was no more than a madman enslaved by the talk of two lovers, infatuated by one of their voices.

He pushed back the chair and searched the table for a miniature tape recorder often used as a standby. He put the larger one close, wound back the tape, and set the mini going to make a copy of the letter, so that in the future, if nothing came of his denunciation, he would know that he had made it.

The tape to be sent slotted into a case, and fitted the shape of his pocket, to lie there till stage two went into operation — thinking in nostalgic service terms as if to bolster himself for doing what he had no option of carrying out. Fat chance, he smiled, of me not dropping it in the postal box.

When Laura called from the front door he went to help, but she bundled the plastic bags into the kitchen, unable to pretend he could be useful anymore. ‘Don’t bother.’

Maybe it was part of her willingness for him to go away and enjoy himself. If so he thought it a fair bargain, change being good in anybody’s life. She was touching him again, kissed him more often, laughed at the slightest thing, resentment unaccountably gone. He wanted to ask a question, but since there had never been any need for answers in their life he didn’t, knowing the answer to be that it was Richard who had changed her mind, set her at rest regarding all fears, though without giving away the real reason for the trip, as indeed how could he? Richard also knew how to be devious, though Howard had much to thank him for, because who didn’t want peace of mind at home? The left hand rarely knew what the right hand did, so that no one could see behind your eyes, or guess what you were thinking, or know that whatever you did express could be the basest lies. As for body language, tell me another, for who better than a blind man could disguise it, muffle the signs, or make so many that no single one could be picked out?

‘I’ve bought you a new duffel bag.’ When she took off her coat he caught the ravishing odour of her body mixed with the new perfume, glad she had bought something expensive for herself. ‘I got it from the camping place in town. It’s in the plastic bag. You’ll get most of what you have to carry in it. The rest can go in the hold-all you took to Boston.’

Even the name of the place could now come out in normal parlance, without vindictive overtones. She hadn’t told him what Richard had said, but it would be ungentlemanly to question her surrender to him. He was more than satisfied that she had. ‘That should just about take care of my luggage allowance,’ he said. ‘I can’t see us being away all that long.’

She shot the coffee grinder into action. ‘Yes, but you’ll need clean shirts.’

‘Only three: one on my back, one in the wash, and one to spare. We managed that way in the Air Force.’

‘What about sweaters?’

‘Two, I would think. It’s not a sailing boat, where you have to work at the mercy of all weathers. A spare anorak, and that should be it, apart from the usual socks and underwear.’

She kissed him. ‘Well, darling, we’ll lay it out tomorrow, then go over the list.’ You could cut the unreality with a knife but he seemed not to feel it. For her also the rarified air of release took some getting used to. Hard to tell whether she was in love with him anymore, though he was certainly a factor in her life. But she loved Richard carnally and therefore, she thought, more truly.

‘I’ll take the morse key and oscillator,’ he said. ‘They can be stuffed between clothes to keep them safe. I’ll need a couple of spare batteries as well.’

‘Will you have time to play with that?’

‘Who knows? But Richard and I might want to have a secret exchange of views while on board. Or I could do some sending to keep my nerves in trim. It’ll be a pastime, if I get bored.’

She imagined them a thousand miles from land, sitting on the deck in the warmth of the evening, Richard tapping out a long message saying he had made love to her, and giving all details. She had encouraged him (and she felt that she had) and when such a text sank in Howard in his despair would tumble into the depthless water and drown. Her flash of nightmare had Richard laughing at the ease of how it had happened. That’s all she would need to release her, and a new life would be hers. She saw no need for such pessimism.

In any case Richard would do no such thing as tell Howard. It was in his interest not to. He would guard Howard well, because he would rather have his friend’s wife for a mistress than some bewildered disconsolate widow who might become a millstone of responsibility. ‘What do you mean? Why should you and Richard want to keep anything secret?’

Shouldn’t have said that. He had waited for her query. Subtle though you be, liar that you are, silly words escape. Judging by those who would be on board there might be every need to communicate secretly with Richard. ‘No one, of course. It was only a silly schoolboy remark.’

She couldn’t believe him or anyone, though must give the impression that she did, and laugh at his funny ways, at how like a child he must have toys to take away with him. She was sufficiently relaxed to say this. Nothing threatened to blight her frankness anymore.

‘I don’t mind that you find me so silly,’ he said lightly. They embraced, and she felt him wondering why she had changed her perfume from the common scent she had used before. ‘I’m strong enough to let you go without any worry, though I shall miss you terribly.’

He was flattered. It was good to feel cared for. At least she wasn’t tearful in her assertion that she would be bereft. ‘Everything will be fine. I know it will.’

‘There’s a change in my life,’ she said. ‘It’s a step forward, and I have to think it’s for the good.’

‘So it must be. It can only make me happy for you.’

‘It’s taken me long enough.’

‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘that it’s happened since Richard came into our lives.’

She was glad he couldn’t see the wash of crimson that must have gone over her. ‘You could say that. If not him, then something else. Or someone else. I like to think it would have happened anyway. A change is a way of absorbing the shock of your going. That’s what I think it is.’

Such uninhibited talk was more interesting than otherwise, worth it for whatever reason. He wanted to say that Richard isn’t all you think he is, but that would let a very sprightly cat out of the bag, and the old argument about him not being let off the leash might be resumed. ‘He’s a good old friend, that’s all I know.’

‘Very true,’ she said, ‘which is why I don’t mind you going. He explained everything.’ She put the cup before him. ‘I have no qualms. All we have to do is decide what you’re taking. Another thing is I called at the library, and found a couple of books about the Azores.’ She wanted to know what Richard would be seeing as well. ‘I’ll go through them. There might be something interesting.’

After lunch he said he would go for another stroll into town. ‘Twice a day now, to get my legs into shape. I shan’t be able to walk much once I’m on board, but I’ll need to be halfway fit.’

He wanted to go faster than usual, but speed could be dangerous. He counted the steps, tapping the cassette in his pocket every moment or two to make sure it hadn’t gone walkabout, the most important thing in his life at the moment. He must go with care to avoid falling smack on his face; worse if he rolled and damaged the tape. He went with purpose nevertheless, the gulls crying about their hardships in the world. God would look after his own, but even they howled enviously, as if aware of his purpose.

The tap-tap of his stick lost its usual rhythm, and he didn’t wait the normal time before getting over the road. Brakes failed to disturb him, as did shouts and hooters disputing his passage. ‘You silly old bastard! Are you blind or summingk?’ a skinhead crowed, half out of his van door.

Two young lads were shouting, but why bother cursing back? — though the impulse was there. When the end came, however it did (and it came for everyone) there’d be only blackness, nothing, a clean finish, neither them nor anyone to be met again.

He walked along the High Street without smiling, counted the shops till he came to the post office and stationers. Back at the wireless he would write the weather from Portishead, build a picture of what sea and sky would be like when they set out from Plymouth.

He stood at the counter and pulled the tape from his pocket. ‘I’d like a Jiffy bag for this, please.’

She knew him, as who didn’t in town? ‘Not your usual time, is it, Howard?’

‘I fancied a walk.’

She fitted the tape in. ‘Is it your favourite pop group?’

He tried to smile. ‘A little thing I found on the beach this morning. I expect somebody dropped it, so I’ll post it on to lost property. Some poor young person might be pining for it. So will you write for me — Chief Superintendent, Police Station, Sharbrooke Road? Honesty is the best policy I always think.’ He was surprised at how little it cost when the scales had registered, a mere few pence for such a time bomb, if anyone was able to diffuse it.

‘You’re right there. It’s good of you.’ She stapled the envelope, and he joined the queue at the stamps counter. Slow and cautious on the way back, he felt nevertheless as if he didn’t belong anywhere, wasn’t part of the world, more in tune now with the squeals of the gulls, whose noise told him they were waiting to be taken to a land of peace and plenty where they would shriek and manoeuvre no more. On the boat he would know where he belonged. Waiting would have been a torment whether blind or not. Too late to pull the packet back.