Her Victory

1

The system of forethought by which he lived made sure that on the next watch, or by the morning after, he would find all necessary items for life and duty laid out in perfect navy order. Such drill, when working with a thoroughness too ordinary for him to admire, made existence easy, for sufficient preparation meant less to think about when the moment of necessity came, though he didn’t doubt that if assailed by an unexpected happening his training and intuition would channel him into the right actions. There was no other way of doing things.

Yet despite this eternal striving for perfection there were times when the mind had so much to think about that one essential item was missed in the too rapid litany of the restocking procedure. When he got out of bed and looked in the provision box he didn’t even curb the foul old clichés of the sailor’s trade used whenever something went wrong, that acted like a pinch of snuff to clear the head before remedial thoughts came in.

There was everything necessary in the box except sugar. The blue tin with the fancy lid was empty but for enough discoloured grains stuck to the side to show what the tin was for, but not sufficient to sweeten the coffee that he craved.

He switched off the moaning radio, and scratched his head at this contemptible proof of what ought to be feared as no less than an attack of premature senility. The habit of being prepared had come from a time when every happening could signify the difference between life and death. Such thoroughness didn’t matter any more, so perhaps he would stand easy and leave things in future to chance. All he had to do was walk to the nearest shop and buy sugar to put in his coffee, or go next door and ask whoever lived there to let him have a few spoons of the stuff till he replenished his larder.

He had done that sort of thing on a ship only occasionally, careful to indulge as little as possible, but on shore there seemed something lacking in a person who knocked on a stranger’s door to borrow sugar when he could easily go out and buy a pack from a shop, the inconvenience a way of paying for a trivial mistake.

In rectifying errors you created others, and therein lay the peril that could arise from insufficient attention to detail. On the other hand a number of errors might more or less cancel each other out, though accuracy was sacrificed if too much reliance was placed on such a system. But he wasn’t navigating through half-charted waters any more. His latitude was benign, his longitude comfortable, and he was in a country where quakes were unknown, tremors infrequent, fires rare, and floods didn’t reach this far from the river.

What would Aunt Clara have done in the present fix? He had never asked such questions, though thought of a few cases when it might have been wise to do so. He had stubbornly relied on training, tradition, his orphanage upbringing, and fragments of congenital sense coexisting so well with that triple grafting on to himself – which by now could not be spliced into distinctions.

To ask Clara, while she was alive, what he should do in such a situation would have opened him to an influence too powerful to be good. She might have told him to do the wrong thing as punishment for having had the weakness to need advice. He only knew that you managed better on your own, and therefore were never likely to be embarrassed by sharing mistakes with anyone else.

Clara considered that, no matter what purpose other people served, they were there to help her, and if she was in need she would respect their existence by giving them the privilege of doing so. Lacking even so lowly an item as sugar for her tea, she would ask for it with that presence which only those could object to who did not possess what she wanted. The notion that not to ask was mean-spirited would hardly occur to her, for she would do so without the thought going through her mind.

He ran the electric shaver over his chin, washed his face, and reached for a tie. To act as Clara would have done was a form of homage – for which she would no doubt call him a bigger fool than he had ever thought himself.

He unscrewed the fuel tap so that he could light the stove when he came back, then took up his sugar-tin and went out. He’d often wondered whether Clara’s gruffness hadn’t hidden a subtlety too deep for him to fathom, until he came to feel that much of the deviousness lay in himself. Acquaintances over the years had hinted at such qualities on seeing his obtuse and effective methods in dealing with difficulties among the men, but he had felt straightforward in what he was doing, and thought they were exaggerating his skill out of a wish to become friendly – a gesture which he hardly ever returned, on the assumption that people should mind their own business.

Finally, he decided, as he knocked on the door, you do as you damn-well like. Smells of breakfast came up the stairs. A crying child seemed unwilling to go to school. The place was a bit of a slum, and now that he had money he would get somewhere better. A smell of gas overpowered all others. Must have gone to work and left it on. He leaned close to make sure. People were careless, and he thought so would I be if I lit a cigarette while standing here.

There had been movement earlier, but if someone went out the slamming of the door was followed by a thunderous hoofing down the stairs. So much for his scruples about borrowing sugar. He would light the stove, and fetch his own, and might even get fresh bread instead of chewing damp biscuits.

A sensation of horror and alarm, against which he swore obscenely, caused him to propel himself from the wall in a heavyweight rush at the door, and he had knocked over a table and all that was on it in the darkened room before he stopped.

He ripped at the curtains. Strips of tape snapped at his wrists as he slammed the window up, the cut of icy air as welcome as a dash of cold water in the Red Sea.

She lay by the fire, like someone pulled out of a lifeboat after a shipwreck and left to take a chance on recovery while less serious cases that might survive were seen to first. He turned off the tap, but thought she was dead, and that if she wasn’t she ought to be, should be thrown out of the window, and then see what troubles she’d have – provided she landed in one piece.

She weighed enough to be in the next world already. Such a signing-off and homecoming was more than he could be bothered with. Leave her. Seal up the window. Turn the gas back on. Go out and lock the door. She’ll never forgive you if you don’t.

She was damp under the armpits. He hauled her along the floor. A shoe came off, and he stopped to put it back on. Her foot was warm. The fumes and effort gave him a headache. Your trouble wasn’t bad enough, or you wouldn’t have tried such a stunt. He worked ill before breakfast and, still holding her, rested to get breath, not wanting to fail with a heart attack and have two suicides found instead of one which, in view of the apparent methods of having brought it about, might at least get them a posthumous commendation for ingenuity.

Laughing at the notion, he closed the door and pulled her to his own room. Too cold to open the window, but she needed oxygen – if she was sufficiently in the world to profit from anything. He took off his jacket and put it on a hangar behind the door. Her face continually changed expression, as if she were having painful and vital conversations with herself.

She lay on the floor. He undid the top buttons of her shirt, then stretched her arms up and began to man the pumps, his head and face sweating after the first half dozen of north-south, north-south and north-south. She’s dead, but keep on, he said, keep on, and felt light in the head at having to work again, though it was such hard galley-slavery that if it took five more minutes he would stop whether she came to life or didn’t. If breath had been available he might have sung a ditty. The impulse to guffaw was hard to fight, as if it had been laughing gas instead of plain old coal. Pity the new North Sea stuff isn’t in yet. Must have known it was coming soon, so couldn’t wait.

She’ll need a bath after this. For a change we’ll have east-west, east-west and east-west, but if anybody asks what I’m up to I’ll say I might be performing an act of mercy or doing physical jerks as I do every morning like this on whoever’s willing, but thank God you’ve come to take over the pumps because I’m flagging at north-by-east, north-by-east and north-by-east.

He prayed, and bullied, and laughed at her, and swore at himself, and cursed his bad luck, berating his lack of endurance when the pump wouldn’t draw, and rocks were about to rip away the bottom of the ship on which she lay. He had made the effort with men about to peg out from drowning, and to the absolutely drowned – with undisciplined hope but diminishing strength.

In freezing air he steamed from the effort and called on God, and Clara, his father and mother, and anyone else who might listen, but most of all himself and the gassed woman under him till he heard her choke and gag and fart and bite more of the bitter cold welling in through the window. Disinclined to gentleness, he spun her halfway round the compass and hauled her with his last strength to the sill, pushing her over as if he’d had enough and would send her three decks below like a bag of dirty linen at the end of a voyage.

‘Breathe!’ he shouted.

Shirt sleeves flying, he took in air for himself and held her at the window, looked out from the dead centre on a hundred and fourteen degrees of great circle bearing pointing somewhere or other but right now too much was happening to bother where such a beam might go. A man got out of a car across the street and looked up at their lovers’ tiff, then shook his head and walked down the nearest basement steps as if on his way to collect a poor soul’s rent.

She gasped, and retched when he forced her to the sink. ‘Fetch it up!’ Only rough stuff could help in a matter of such life and death. ‘Or I’ll put my hand down your throat and pull it out myself.’

‘Leave me be!’ she screamed at the purple world that was killing her.

‘Ha! You’ve found your voice? No more blockages?’ He tugged her round as if to aim a deliberate blow at a baby to get it breathing – and sent her spinning into the room. ‘Don’t try and put one over on me, or I’ll hand you over to the plumbers!’

He was so much the old sort that he hardly knew himself. He hadn’t left it behind, after all. Should have known better than to think so. Wouldn’t it come whenever needed? You couldn’t save a life and follow the niceties of polite behaviour.

The whizz-bang circled her head, and the carpet she tasted was not her own. She was in London. A madman had broken into her room. She’d had a nightmare but couldn’t remember lock, latch or hinges bursting. Yet the door had come open. He tried to throw her out of the window. Water was pounding into a sink, laughter above everything. He’d made her sick. A pillar of bile had rammed to her stomach and she retched it out, sent it flying. Arms, legs and teeth shook from cold. A star ate into her forehead, while a hammer beat at the bones behind. The star burned. She choked. She had eaten pepper, chewed salt. She looked at grey rods and silver wires. I wanted to sleep. She tried to close her eyes but the burning rods forced them open. Knees came to her chin. What happened? You may bloody well ask, she heard.

He cleaned the sink and filled it. ‘Get up.’

‘Who are you?’ She couldn’t see him.

‘You’ll know, soon enough.’

She smelled sweat when he came close. ‘Don’t kill me, George.’

His laugh wasn’t George’s. Never could be, a sound from somebody caught in a trap she’d had nothing to do with. He exulted in his separation from civilized entanglements. The metal grip shook from her eyes.

‘Stand up,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll half-kill you.’

She tried. He saw that she couldn’t. She was lifted, and supported in a walk across the room, her head pushed into a block of ice. She screamed from shock. That’s better. Bubbles burst, then floated. He was torturing her, holding her head under water. She kicked him, arms pounding at cloth and bone. She was pulled by the hair.

‘No brain damage.’ He sounded gleeful, had saved more than he’d hoped for. Her feet kicked against ankle. A hand swung at her wet cheek and pushed her once more into the freezing mist. She might have known that George would catch her. Wrong again. He had paid his brothers’ friends to kill her. Never took on his own dirty work. The water leaped at her face till she felt him get tired.

‘Thank God.’ He sat her in an armchair, and took a clean towel from the cupboard. ‘Dry yourself. You might be all right. But no funny business.’

Vision was scarlet, changing to a steel grid, shaking into interchange. The pink face was surrounded by red. He lived in blood. Hands and legs would not stop rattling. Pieces of wood clattered, and a gong was calling the world to dinner, sonorously behind both eyes. She talked, but heard him say:

‘Can’t make out a word.’

‘I want to sleep,’ she roared.

His ear was against her lips, and he heard faintly.

‘I’ll tell you when you can go to sleep.’

He pulled her upright, too exhausted to be gentle. ‘Walk. First this foot. And now the other. Left-right, left-right, left-right. Come on!’

‘Don’t shout.’

He didn’t hear.

She stepped obediently, pushing against a cliff of indifference. She dropped.

‘I can’t go on.’

He caught her. She walked the room and back, then fell off the wall. He sat her down. No use. They spoke together, but neither heard. He put a kettle of water on the stove, not knowing what else to do. Then he walked her again. Shouting and cajoling, he was remorseless. He moved her at the waist, pushed her, walked her again until she clutched at the ceiling and heard a whistle that became a scream of pain. She sat while he turned the gas off and put six tablespoons of coffee into the pot. After water, the lid went on, and he walked her again.

The treadmill was unendurable. ‘I hate you.’

‘Walk,’ he said, ‘or you really will go out of the window – without a bloody parachute.’

She walked, though. ‘I tried to …’

She was inching back to life. He felt wasted to nothing, yet hadn’t known such elation since the war, when perils came fast enough to stop youth dead in its tracks – when youth was the ideal state to be in. Brought a whiff of it back, cordite and salt water. ‘Yes, I know. I know all about it.’

‘Free country,’ she said.

Bald, ugly, freckled, she saw him laugh. No devil without cruelty. ‘Tell me some more,’ he said, ‘it’s good for you.’

‘It’s a free country.’

He laughed.

‘Stop laughing.’

‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Free as air. You do what you like, and I do what I like. God works in many ways his wonders to perform, even in a free country.’

‘I don’t like it here. And I don’t like you.’

He held her, wouldn’t let go. ‘Talk, then you’ll have to walk less.’

‘I don’t want to.’ Stone on a piece of rope kept banging the back of her head. She asked him to cut it loose. She’d ask anyone if they were here. She told him. He didn’t care.

‘Maybe you’re going to live, after all.’

‘I shan’t do it.’

At the stove he poured hot stuff into mugs. He put spoons of white powder in. He was going to poison her. She ran at him but didn’t move. She told him not to kill her, but instead of her lips moving she felt more tears wetting her cheeks. He put white powder into his own mug as well, but it wouldn’t kill him, she was certain.

‘I want to go back,’ she heard herself saying.

He turned. ‘You tried to kill yourself, and that’s your business. It’s my business to bring you out of it. You’re staying here till you’re all right, and afterwards, if you still want to chuck yourself off the world, it’s up to you.’

He hoped she wouldn’t. But she was over twenty-one, and that was a fact. He snapped at the plug chain, and water ran out of the sink. She nodded. He was asking something. He couldn’t stand up, and shouted. He was insane. He was in a fit when he said: ‘I wonder if you could lend …’

She was alarmed. His head swayed left and right. Some new horror was about to be manufactured by his mad but versatile mind.

His laughter subsided, but silence gave him a dignity that didn’t fit. ‘I was going to ask if by any chance … you haven’t some sugar in your room?’

It was impossible to know what he meant or would do. She nodded. He was concerned about a matter which frightened her. He would murder her if she didn’t escape. The light pushed like a flame against her eyes.

‘Where is it?’

She tried to explain, but couldn’t tell what he wanted. He seemed to understand. She saw him as dead – and deaf as well as ugly. She wouldn’t return to George no matter how much he tormented her.

‘Don’t fall while I’m away.’

He returned with half a loaf of bread, some butter and cheese, and a packet of sugar, reasoning that with such a full cupboard she couldn’t have considered knocking herself out for ever – unless she had been too dead-set on it to care.

She was asleep, and he asked himself, putting spoons of sugar into each mug, and whisky into hers, whether he should call a doctor. He helped her to her feet. ‘Come on, more walking along the deck. You’re all right’ – wishing to God she was – ‘so twice to the window for a ten-fathom breather, then back to the coffee pot for a sniff at the bean.’

‘Don’t like it here.’

‘Oh yes, you will, or I’ll knock you for six.’

He held her waist, fearful that she might fall, that she’d faint and never recover.

She hated him.

‘Why?’

And she hated him even more when he laughed, and said: ‘I owe you some sugar. I’ll repay every grain.’

Impossible to comprehend. He led her to the seat. She clutched the mug for warmth, and drank blackjack coffee, watching him. At the mirror he fastened cufflinks, adjusted his tie, and put on a jacket. A comb from his wallet went through hair around his head, though she didn’t see any.

‘A sailor likes to look spick and span.’

‘Sailor?’

‘First officer – but harmless. I only came on earth to stop you doing yourself a fatal injury. Thank God for what’s left of my sweet tooth.’ He spread a cloth, and opened sardines over the sink. Knives and forks were in order. Two plates of different shapes and colours drifted from a shelf. He cut bread, split cellophane from biscuits, and set the kettle wailing again. She forgot where she was, and what she’d done or had done to her. Why was she here, in another room? A man was putting a meal on the table in as quick and neat a way as she had ever been able to manage.

Rather mannish and thin-faced, there was something good-looking about her, except that her eyes were bloodshot and her face whitewashed. ‘Sorry there aren’t any flowers. No funeral today. Let’s go once more to the fresh-air box.’

She stood. ‘I don’t want to.’

But he led her. ‘After six good breaths, we’ll risk shutting it.’

He closed the door, slammed down the window. ‘Do you think you can sit at the table?’

She tried to speak while he lit the paraffin stove, but her chin rested on her chest, mouth open. ‘You’re not very good-looking like that, though.’

He gripped her arms and shook, held her up. She sat like a sack of onions, he said. ‘If you don’t feel well, let me know. Be a pity if you fell and broke an arm after all this – or chucked up over my best bed.’

She longed to sleep in her own room until death came, or the headache stopped. A fire rampaged behind her eyes. She sat upright, facing him. He fed her pieces of bread and butter. ‘Welcome aboard! The ship’s all yours – while we’re floating along.’

Coffee tasted like boiled straw. One minute she knew how she had got here, and the next she didn’t. She wanted to go to sleep and find out, and then to forget why she had. He’d prevent her because he liked tormenting people, as if she had done him harm (though if she had, she’d forgotten about any incident she’d been through with him in times gone past) and he wanted to make her pay. Like any man, he was unrelenting and unforgiving, and she resented him eating as if the effort of stopping her going to sleep when she wasn’t strong enough to fight back gave him an appetite. Then she remembered having lain down by the gas. Couldn’t say why. She bit into some bread. Wanted to go to sleep and find the answer, but would she get it?

He talked, seeing that she could not, and believing that silence would be the death of her. He told her who he was, and what he knew of his life. She wouldn’t remember. But he talked his snotty drivel, as if she were fully alert, to make her grey unseeing eyes stay open, to stop her head dropping into the borrowed sugar, and to help more food and coffee – however little – into her mouth.

When he handed her a corner of biscuit with cheese, she took it like someone with neither sense nor feeling, and ate as if she were made of glass and he could see the crumbs and flakes going down through her body, the ultimate state of shame and embarrassment like one of those dreams in which you were caught walking naked in the street. She wanted to hide from him who thought he could stare at her: just because she wasn’t able to respond for the moment. Didn’t like him. She floated as if she were drunk. She felt like a baby which, though hungry, wanted most of all to sleep.

Her nose ran. She couldn’t feel it. Her lips threatened to stop moving. He trembled for himself. How could a strong enough woman like this try to get off the world before it shot her loose in its own good time? There was no saying. Maybe only the strong ones did it. He wanted her to fasten her shirt but was too shy to do so or ask. There was gooseflesh on her white chest, and an odour of skin from the faintest swell which was visible. The only procedure he knew was to keep her going till she dropped. He felt he’d need more sleep himself after this, though supposed an hour’s dose of air in Holland Park would get him lively. The coffee and food fuelled his talk.

When her eyes flickered in acknowledgement of some half-lost phrase he wondered what was in her mind. ‘Are you feeling better now?’

‘Help me.’

He caught her before she fell. ‘You’ll be all right after a day or two.’

‘I shan’t.’

He wiped her face. ‘What’s your name?’

She leaned against him.

He was afraid. If she slept she would die. He’d been a fool in keeping her from a hospital. His instinct had guided him and had never let him down. But he wondered, and worried.

‘I want to sleep.’

‘I know you do.’

Her eyes flickered. For a moment she was awake. ‘What’s your name, though?’ he asked.

Her smile turned bitter by the downcurving of her lips. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Better and better.’ Perhaps knowledge goeth before a fall, but he wanted to hear her say it. That and everything else. ‘My name’s Tom, if it’ll make it easier for you. Everybody uses first names these days, no matter what the circumstances. I suppose we can do the same.’

He spoke now so as not to frighten her. She pushed him away. He threw coffee dregs in the sink. She watched him wash and dry the mugs. He’d forgotten her. He poured fresh coffee. If an unexpected wave hit the ship out of an apparently calm sea, the fact would register yet give no shock, but his hand twitched at the surprising clarity of her voice: ‘What’s in that box?’

He went to the table. ‘Drink some more. You must be bone-dry inside. I certainly am, and I only got a few whiffs.’

‘Beautiful box.’

He opened it and tilted it to show her. ‘A sextant.’

‘And the other?’

‘Drink something, and I’ll tell you.’

‘I’m not a baby.’

‘It’s a chronometer.’

She drank.

‘On a better sort of ship there’s what you call a Decca navigator. If you want to know where you are in the middle of the ocean you push a few pearly buttons, and get three lemons. Spot on, every time, though there’s no way to prove it. You take it on trust, like so much else. It’s like having God on tap. But I was lumbered with these magic boxes to work out my daily destiny. Six months more, and I’ll forget how I did it. You get your position by sun-stars-and-stripes across the firmament, up to your knees in books of tables and bits of paper. Sometimes there’s neither stars nor sun to be seen, and you can’t even get a position-line on Old Nick himself. You ask the radio operator what he can do, though every bearing costs the company a pound or two, so you can’t ask for too many. But he has a try, and you end up in a worse fix – unless like one of our blokes you believe in the God of Israel! We go by dead-reckoning, when we’re not dead drunk. O yes, it was a sailor’s life for me all right, but not any more. I’m fifty, fit, and out of it for good, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but enjoy every minute, if and when I can.’

She drank the mug dry. He passed a clean handkerchief. She could wipe her own mouth this time. His intention had been to walk the four parks to Trafalgar Square, then stroll along Piccadilly to look in the shops. But he couldn’t leave. He might tuck her cosily in bed, and no sooner was he out of the door than she would try the same stunt again. And he was in no mood to leave. He filled his pipe and lit it. ‘Feeling better?’

She wondered whether the door was locked. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I don’t see how I can. We only met a couple of hours ago.’

The room was warm, and he opened the window an inch. He sat away from her. Life had been divided between a stifling cabin and the grinding wind. Oven or gale was the order of life. One without the other was impossible. Tears pumped from her eyes, another method of getting the poison out. ‘You should have left me,’ she said.

‘I had no say in the matter. I heard a distress signal, or sniffed it, rather, so answered it with my own feet and shoulder, instead of all nine articles of Rule 31!’

The world had no limits. If she stretched her arms she wouldn’t reach the outside of herself. She wanted to run. ‘Did George send you?’

His face was honest. If anything, he was amused at her fear and torment. He looked like a monk in a film. ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard him called that, though I must admit I’ve referred to him myself in some pretty wicked terms in my time. Who the hell is George?’

‘My husband. I walked out on him a couple of months ago.’

She was improving. ‘I’m sure you had to. But don’t cry. You’ll be all right. Every move is for the best. Always keep moving. Any sailor will tell you – that while you’re on the move, you’re alive!’

She knew. But she had no will, no strength. There was nothing left. She wanted to get out of his sight, but was terrified of dropping into sleep, then of waking up and never knowing again who she was. She clutched at the speeding circular wall when the pinpoint of the sky got smaller.

‘It’s hard till you get used to it,’ he said kindly, as if he knew all about whatever it was.

‘Don’t belong anywhere.’

He held her hand. She tried to draw it back. ‘I’m a doctor of the soul,’ he said. ‘I shan’t hurt you. None of us belong anywhere till we die. Most people don’t know it, but I always have. Moving across the oceans all my life and never being in one place for more than a few days was what I chose from early on. It was my work. Now that I’ve left the service I belong on this island, but where I’ll be tomorrow God alone knows.’

She thought he talked to himself. Her eyes were half closed. When she swayed he steadied her, keeping her from sleep as she became more of a weight.

‘There’ll be enough of that belonging when you’re dead,’ he told her. ‘That’s what I feel, so why peg yourself down and anticipate that zone of oblivion? Not to belong anywhere special while you’re alive is a blessed state. Well, maybe not for everyone, but I was set for it as soon as I was born, conceived on the sea by a sea-cook, no less, so it’s in my blood and maybe my ancestry on more sides than one for all I know, though that’s a tale I may never get to the bottom of.’

The morning light was fading, its promise gone. She fell. Cloud hovered low. He switched the light on. Bed was the best place for her, a horizontal state that even a spirit-level couldn’t quibble with. ‘You’ll be all right as long as somebody’s close to make sure you start eating when you wake up.’

What did she care?

He walked her next door, and pulled open her neatly made bed. He gently lowered her, and took off her shoes. Her feet were cold now.

She surrendered to a kind of peace. A hand lay against the side of her face. He wondered what the hell he had done. She certainly wouldn’t thank him. He covered her, and went back to his room for a roll of bedclothes, which he laid over her own.

A faint snore sounded as he shut the door. It had been as close a run thing as any storm he had been in. He had risked having a dead woman on his hands, and the police asking questions, and charging him with some arcane misdemeanour. The world of law and regularity would rush on to him and he would be no longer someone set apart from the rest of the people because he’d inhabited a closed order for so long. A juicy scandal for the papers! He’d left the sea, and Aunt Clara was dead, but there was still a polished procedure to follow in such emergencies. He was forgetting his training and habits. Or they were already abandoning him. Even now it wasn’t too late to get her tucked up in a nice clean cot with trained nurses to hover around.

Another few minutes, and who is to say whether she’d have come through undamaged? Or even pulled out of the black pit she’d dug pretty well for herself? He put a coffee-flask and some biscuits by her bed, with the thought that she would be normal in a day or two and that what happened then would be up to her. If she really had a mind to kill herself – no use denying the proper words – no one would be able to stop her. He respected her free will, providing it didn’t threaten the liberty of others – his especially.

A frown rippled over her forehead. He had an impulse to kiss her on the cheek before leaving, by way of wishing her a quick recovery, not to mention the luck she would need. He resisted, and fought off the sudden wrack of pure sadness, as if they had met at some forlorn beach after their separate shipwrecks, and might never see each other again. He went out quickly, imagining that on waking she wouldn’t even remember him.

2

At the bottom of the stairs he knocked twice on Judy Ellerker’s door. ‘I heard the first time,’ she said, ‘but like to make sure I’m wanted!’

He went into the room.

She told him to sit down. ‘I thought I heard you huffing and puffing up the stairs last night.’

The place was tidy, except for a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on the floor. ‘I do a bit every day, and break it up before the kids come home. But every day I get more of it done. I threw the box away, in case the picture made things too easy. Not that I have much time, but I manage the odd half hour.’

‘What do you know about my new neighbour?’ he asked.

‘Can I get you anything to drink, captain?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘She left her husband, or whatever it was called, a month or so back. Leads a quiet life, poor kid. Still got her brain-damage from an overdose of matrimony, which makes it hard to tell what she’s like. I suppose you fancy her, but if I were you I’d leave her alone. Give her a chance to pull round.’

He’d heard her distastes concerning men before, but felt they could have nothing to do with him. ‘She’s not well this morning.’

‘It doesn’t surprise me. We all recover in the end, though.’

‘She had an accident.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, let’s say she left the gas on by mistake, unlit.’

‘And you didn’t get an ambulance?’ She reached some coins from the shelf.

‘There was no need.’

Her face reddened. There was an expression in her eyes for which he knew no other name but panic. She pushed by, and took her coat from a cupboard, then swung to face him. ‘No need? Have you been playing mummy and daddy up there? What have you got against her? Why do you want to kill her? Never heard of the social services, you blind prick?’

He was going around Cape Horn with a vengeance, and would have felt more comfortable if mere cliff-like waves were crumbling against him instead of this swell of blind loathing, before which he found it hard to stay calm. Yet in the face of her determination to do something ridiculous he felt he had better explain. ‘She’ll be all right. Call an ambulance, and they’ll think it’s a hoax. And if you do get one I might be entitled to ask what you have against her. Go up and see for yourself.’

She hesitated. ‘You think you handled it, do you?’

‘I did what I could. My first thought was for her, not the authorities or whoever you want to run for.’

She took off her coat, sipped her tea, decided it was too cold, and slopped it down the sink. ‘Even so.’

‘Take a look at her in half an hour, to make sure she’s still sleeping. I’m going out for a while.’

‘You’re used to giving orders, aren’t you?’

‘Not to people like you, thank God.’ He had few charts for this kind of ocean, and what he did have were recklessly out of date.

‘I’ll see to her,’ she said.

That’s what he called for, he told her. ‘The door’s unlocked. I won’t be gone long.’

‘If I think she’s not well, I’ll call a doctor.’

‘I’d expect you to.’

He was past caring, and glad to get into the outside air, as if he too had caught more than a good dose of poison gas.

3

It was chilly on the landing but icy when she closed the door. Pam’s head was below the line of blankets, and there was no sign of breathing.

Judy lit the fire. She put her hand into the warm damp bed. She might wake up with pneumonia. On the other hand she would be all right, though so ashamed at what she had failed to do that she’d try again. They all did. But she would talk the message into the darkness of her pathetic brain that no man is worth extinguishing yourself for.

She sat by the bed, knowing that in herself there was a light that couldn’t be got at any more. It had almost gone out once or twice, but she’d never tried any such suicidal move as this poor thing, having always said she would rather cut a man up than do herself in, or that if she did think to end her misery it would be a better policy to take one with you, so that one of them at least wouldn’t get away with it any more. It was as good a reason as any for killing a male of the species, Phyllida had pointed out, for once unable to resist saying what was on her mind.

She lit a cigarette, and poured coffee from the flask. He had been playing house as well as nurse, and seemed quite good at it. He had never confided in her, nor tried to impress her as a man. Didn’t need to, she supposed. In answer to the question as to whether or not he was married he told her in a tone that didn’t want the matter to turn into a conversation that he was not, and as far as he knew, never would be.

They had remained friendly because he only came to the house every month or two, and regarded her more as a neighbour than a woman which, while proving that he could keep his distance, disappointed her because he was in no way influenced by her as a person. He prized neighbourliness more than he liked women, since he had spent most of his life out of their company. Because he was naturally reticent, it was not difficult for him to treat everyone as his inferiors, though she couldn’t fault his politeness, which was always well developed in those who really knew how to treat inferiors. She could read his bloody mind all right.

His speech and manners, and an ability to say little and still have a will of his own, reminded her of Phyllida. She knew nothing of his background, but assumed he had been to some minor public school and, not being bright enough for university, had been put into the navy by his parents so that at least he would be able to earn a living.

She was sorry for shouting at him, because he had, after all, tried to save someone’s life, in no matter how risky and left-handed a manner. She hated her own big mouth when it gave her no choice in what she really wanted to say. On the other hand such words as came out often had the right effect, and were what she’d hoped to say anyway, though to think so could only be decided by hindsight when she’d seen the effect on whoever was listening.

Being a sensitive person who could not resist allowing her thoughts to speak for her, she also craved the glamour of appearing enigmatic, and had not yet found a way of combining the two desires. Though you could be more than one person at the same time to yourself, it rarely worked with others. She regretted her outspokenness, and the harsh reactions of those who occasionally revealed her to be someone whom she had thought she was not.

Phyllida was quite the opposite, which was why they were able to tolerate each other. Or perhaps the similarities were sufficiently concealed for them to be able to deceive each other that they did not exist. Mutual but loving deception made existence livable, and men were unable to deceive, she had found, and wanted everything their own way. They hadn’t the time, the inclination or the intelligence for it, and they were, in general, too fearful of their own sex and identity. There was a positive side to deception when it was done to enhance a relationship, to build understanding. It became a creative endeavour born of love, and not to be used in a negative way as a weapon or with a view to damage – something you couldn’t trust a man not to use even if he was sensible enough to know about it.

Phyllida, who had taught her to be aware of such nuances, at the same time only spoke when she had something to say. Her talk was seldom interesting, though it might have been more so if she had let it out loudly and with a little of the peripheral junk that cluttered most minds. But she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. It was too deep to tell. Her speech was prim, measured and, inevitably, to the point. Being well brought up, well controlled, and well trained in her job, she never let go of herself, except at those moments when both choice and intention were taken from her.

Even at nearly forty years of age Judy had not learned how to be other than she was. Wanting to dissimulate and be more controlled, and knowing that she might never achieve it, caused her to appear more irresponsible and passionate than if she didn’t care how she felt. She was occasionally upset by it, though only for a moment or two, because such misery was at least something about herself which she never showed to others.

Either Tom had made the room tidy in his sailor-like way before going out, or Pam had done it as part of wanting those who found her body to realize that even in death she was still a housewife, and who by killing herself had known what she was doing. It wasn’t so. She hadn’t planned anything, must have realized there was someone next door who would find her before it was too late, otherwise she would have done it the night before.

Judy turned from the mirror and walked across the room to pick up a sapphire ring which glinted under the bed. Strips of sticky paper hanging at the window like streamers from a lost election indicated that Pam’s attempt had been more serious than she allowed for. The ring clattered to the middle of the table and lay still. Pam must have chucked it away in a rage before flicking the gas on. It still smelled of the soap she had used to pull it off. Or had she decided to kill herself after thoughtlessly getting rid of it, feeling so vulnerable that nothing else was possible?

Pam turned with a cry to the wall, saying words too garbled to decipher. In her dreams was a dark and frightening barrier. She jerked her legs, and the bedclothes slid towards the floor. Judy pulled them back and covered her, then held her cold pale hand to calm the nightmares, hoping Tom would never come back because it would be nice to sit like this for ever.

She had no work today, and would shop soon with the last couple of pounds till she got the children’s allowance, returning by the market stalls to pick up enough vegetables for a soup, an old stand-by when cash was short. She liked the peace of a room that was not hers, a solitude in which she could reflect intensely because another person was sleeping near by who had far worse problems than her own. She could always get money from her mother in Colchester, but disliked the idea of her father answering the telephone, or moralizing over her letter when he came home from the office. They sent clothes for the children, but she would take nothing else.

She couldn’t believe in what had made her marry the man she did, was astonished and appalled whenever she looked back on it. Every act had been swamped by a thoughtlessness which drew her to the lowest common denominator of what she then imagined her spirit required. The primal aim had been to brush aside all that her family and friends wanted of her, so as to find out exactly what it was she wanted of herself. She wouldn’t let them use her fate for the gratification of their inferior wisdom, and wanted to be free, so without any consideration for them (or for herself, as it turned out) she left university after a year and took a room and job in London. She was too stupid to realize that striving for independence was self-indulgence, and too young to know – which now seemed obvious – that self-indulgence leads only to self-destruction.

At a party she met a little androgynous middle-aged woman who owned a secondhand bookshop in a small country town. Both men and women seemed to fall in love with Judy in those days: but I should have known, she mused, that something was wrong, because I didn’t feel love for any of them.

Helen lived in peace, with two neutered cats, and whatever girl she happened to pick up for a few months. ‘Whether I’m a biological dead-end,’ she said on a winter’s evening after the shop was closed, and they sat by the upstairs fire toasting bread against the bars, ‘is neither here nor there.’ She relished her isolation and the power she felt from it, which made her interesting to any young girl.

Judy was fascinated by the way she kept busy compiling catalogues or writing letters, and she never saw her either bored or unhappy with the two rooms of books which made up the shop. Helen knew what to buy, and collectors would drive from London. The bell rattled, and a face showed itself. Sometimes a customer wouldn’t appear for two hours after the door was unbolted. At other times a browser would already be waiting on the pavement.

A man stayed for an hour, as if afraid to go back into the rain, looking at every book intently. She observed his medium height, pinkish face, well-lit grey eyes, and straight reddish hair cut fairly short. His open duffel-coat had special pockets, for the thieves’ mirror installed on the ceiling showed at least six books go in as he moved around the shelves, and it still didn’t look laden.

Helen had gone to a sale. Judy was supposed to call the police, and her hand moved to the telephone. Two shoplifters had been prosecuted before her time. He approached the desk. ‘I’ll have this.’

You might as well: you’ve had so much else. A copy of Middlemarch. He had taste – but had made a feast. ‘Four shillings.’

‘Lots of nice books here,’ he said, smiling.

His look intensified, for he guessed by her eyes that she had seen him loading his pockets, and he wanted to solve the mystery as to how she knew, when no one had ever rumbled him before. Yet he was prepared to sacrifice the pleasure of an explanation provided she did not try to stop him leaving the shop. She read the condition in his gaze, and when he became convinced that she had, he diminished its intensity but did not smile as pleasantly as before.

Civilization must have taken a big leap forward when the language of the eyes had finally been enriched by words. ‘There’ll be less now that you’ve been in here.’

‘Only one, I’m afraid.’ He handed his coins as if there weren’t too many more where they came from. ‘I’ll try to do better next time.’

‘We do sell quite a lot of books.’ He seemed to have doubted that many people actually bothered to pay in such an out-of-the-way place. ‘But not all that many to students, I admit.’

He fastened his coat-toggles. ‘Our grants aren’t much to write home about these days, unless to ask the old folks to top ’em up a bit.’

She nodded at his girth, which didn’t match his thinnish face. ‘You seem to feed quite well on it.’

‘We do our best.’ His head was close. He decided to turn prosaic, and get out as soon as possible. ‘We eat communally, fifteen to a pot, a yoghourt pot!’

The bell tinkled as he left. She had been bullied. She hadn’t been living with another woman long enough to know how to put men properly in their place. She was angry, and she should know, anyway. After dialling one digit, she replaced the receiver, a failure to act which, she was to recollect, fucked up her life.

She had allowed him to charm her into not reporting his theft, and in being disloyal to Helen. She was supposed to write the title and amount of every volume sold, even if out of the sixpenny box. Helen knew, or seemed to know, every book in the place, and when she missed them Judy wouldn’t be able to tell her how they had gone. Maybe Helen would think she had pocketed the money. She wouldn’t be trusted any more.

She put a card in the window: ‘Back in Five Minutes’, and went to the High Street to buy meat for their supper. Looking through the window of Silver’s Grill she saw the book thief reading his morning paper.

‘Remember me?’

His eyes were deadened by print.

‘I work in a shop.’ She stood by his side.

He put six spoonsful of sugar in his coffee, stirred, drank, and shuddered. ‘Woolworths?’

‘No. Nor Marks and Sparks, either.’

‘Did I get you pregnant?’

She took off her coat. ‘You might at least buy me a cup of something, after I allowed you to steal those six books.’

‘Seven.’

‘My reactions were slow, otherwise you’d have been in the copshop by now.’ His duffel-coat hung over the next seat, and the loot was, she supposed, in the cloth bag by his feet. ‘Was that the closest you’ve been to getting caught?’

His hand went up for the waitress. ‘I’ve had closer shaves. Two coffees, please. I’m eating into my profits, you realize.’

‘I could still call the police.’

He looked at her. ‘You could, but why?’

‘Aren’t you ashamed of stealing?’ She had never come face to face with a thief before.

‘You’ve got your definitions wrong. But then, uneducated people like you always do.’

He must have done his National Service already, and she also supposed he came from a very middlebrow home – if that – to accuse her of being uneducated. And if he really was educated – if that was the word (though she had every reason to doubt that he was) – such a slur would not have been thrown at her. If he really thought so, he would have kept the opinion to himself.

‘You’ve got your definitions wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve never stolen. All goods are produced at the expense of the working class, and wealth is property, and property is theft, so theft is the only way of getting property back into the hands of the working classes where it belongs. A mere redistribution of wealth. So don’t accuse me of stealing, you right little tight little – actually rather big – middle-class tart. You’ve blackmailed me into buying you a coffee, and if you insist on calling the capitalist property-guarding class-conscious gestapo-coppers I’ll have a long and very circumstantial tale to tell about how you connived in my removing those books from the shop – when they drag me into one of their illegal show-trial courts.’

He was sweating. She had frightened him, and was satisfied – for the moment. ‘But what is stealing,’ she asked, ‘if that isn’t? If you did it in a socialist-workers’ state you’d be in the equivalent of Siberia for twenty-five years.’

‘Stealing is only from the working classes, and I’d never steal from them because if I did and they caught me they’d kick me to death – ugh!’

He sounded so simple that she became more interested in him, and said: ‘But I work. And the woman I work for works, so we’re working class, aren’t we?’

At his laughter, people sitting around hoped they had ended their lovers’ quarrel. ‘Nobody works who puts goods on display. They sell, and make profits. They tempt people. They ask for trouble.’

She was convinced that his parents were shopkeepers, and learned later that she was right. ‘Somebody’s got to sell things,’ she said, ‘otherwise people wouldn’t be able to buy, would they?’

‘In my opinion,’ he said earnestly, as if his very soul were weeping for it to come about, ‘we should live in a utopian society where people wouldn’t buy, but earn.’

She shuddered. ‘But they’d earn money, and then they’d have to buy.’

He took the bowl of sugar from the next table, and began to scoop it up. ‘Only those who toiled would earn. It’ll take me a long time to explain it properly to you, and I only teach women who go to bed with me.’

‘Do you teach men in the same way?’

He looked more disturbed than when she had mentioned calling the police. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘when did you last toil in a factory, or a coal mine?’

‘I’m beginning to like you. I’m hitching back to Southampton. Want to come?’

It was easier getting lifts with a girl. ‘I bloody don’t.’

‘Suit yourself. I’ll be back this way in a month.’

‘Don’t call at the shop.’

‘I’m bound to. I love books so much I have to steal ’em. And I’ve taken a fancy to you.’

She lost her job. But he was loyal. When she got pregnant he married her, after her parents promised to spend five hundred pounds on the wedding and give them, which turned out to mean him, another thousand to get started.

It was a hell she would never delve into again. The planet hadn’t been big enough for both of them. She’d tried to poison him, but had made a mistake in the dosage. I dined out somewhere yesterday, he said to the doctor, and must have eaten something bad. I was too drunk to know where the place was. He had tried to murder her. She had a six-inch scar on the shoulder to show where he had missed. I fell down the steps outside the house and cut myself on the foot-scraper. He was a savage bed-sitter terrorist who gave her no peace because she was the nearest victim, but who modified his depredations after she had broken an earthenware pot over his head. The out-patients’ department at the hospital had known her well. During every separate minute she had felt she was living for ever. Now that such torment had long been over she still didn’t know who or what she was, but that uncertain condition was by now established as her true self, and accepted with enough equanimity for her existence to be tolerable, sufficiently enjoyable for her to know she would never gas herself as the peacefully sleeping Pam had done.

The struggle to stay alive generated the energy to keep going. Fighting against all hostilities created a pressure that did not allow her to contemplate such a way out. She reasoned, and became less despondent. With her free hand she wiped an eye that had become momentarily wet, and happiness at being alive caused her to squeeze the hand she was holding.

Pam woke.

‘Feeling better?’

She closed her eyes and lay back. Nothing to get up for.

‘You had a good sleep.’ Judy’s hand was held firm when she tried to draw it away. Her fingers opened in her anguish on seeing the mark of the wedding ring.

The room was as if shielded by grey blankets. ‘I can’t see anything. Put the light on.’

Judy smiled. ‘I will if you let go of my hand.’ There was an aroma of sweat and fear. He had bundled her into bed with her clothes on, but couldn’t have done otherwise, being the gentleman he was. ‘You should get undressed if you’re going to stay in bed. Be more comfortable.’

The light made the room dull orange rather than grey. ‘If I do I’ll never get up. I’ve got to phone my husband.’

She’d sent a letter saying what she intended to do, so he’d hot-foot it down and drag her back to the bijou den for a kitchen leucotomy. She looked for an unposted envelope, or screw of paper. ‘Why do that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nothing to hold. ‘What else is there?’

‘Did you tell anybody beforehand?’

She sat up, and turned her head slowly. ‘I must stand.’

Judy held her. ‘All right?’

The world was empty. ‘I did it without thinking. I can’t trust myself.’

Judy laughed. ‘Who of us can?’ She came from the window. ‘If you get some work, and mix with people, you won’t do it again. There’s no point running back to hubby now that the worst is over.’

‘Perhaps she does want to go back to him.’ The door had opened too quietly to be heard through her talk. She was meddling dangerously, Tom thought, though considered it best not to say anything further on the matter. He expected a raging come-back, but Judy was like the weather, in that what you anticipated didn’t always manifest.

‘It’s up to her,’ was all she said.

He was wet from the rain. ‘How are you?’ he asked Pam.

‘All right.’ She was morose – or she couldn’t recognize him. He had seen people close to death, and she didn’t look far off. But he felt an interest in her, though could ask no questions while she was still in the storm. He was repelled by what she had tried to do, and kept his thoughts clear in order not to condemn. Yet he had entered into her offence by doing what he could to save her. She had been caught by a death-dealing wave, and he had interfered with her fate by stopping it in mid-twist. On your own head be it, he told himself, but he didn’t want to let her out of his sight in case another stray wave took her under.

‘I bought food,’ he said. ‘After I get rid of these wet clothes why don’t you both come next door and have some lunch?’

Pam felt she never wanted to eat again; and Judy said: ‘I must go out and do my own shopping.’

He stood, tense and uncertain. ‘I have a screwdriver next door, and some bigger screws. I’ll fix the latch back on, that I snapped in my hurry to get in.’ There was no answer. He stayed a little longer so as not to leave too abruptly. ‘Anyway, the food will be next door, if you care for it.’ He expected no response, but heard Pam say, as he turned to go, that she would wash and change first.

She remembered a struggle, but couldn’t recall what had happened beyond his cruelty at pulling her out of a warm sleep that ought to have lasted for ever. She had seen his face at a time too far off to remember who he was. She had been drawn from that dream by a long scalding ache. This same man had stopped her going even further back into her childhood dream. In bringing her cold skin into more contact with daylight he had crushed the dream for ever, yet wakened her at the same time.

Some force to touch was missing at the end of her fingers, and her mind raced through thoughts like a millwheel in space. Memories created even thinner air. Nothing inside or out had substance. She looked around the room in the hope of seeing some solid attachment that would tell her where she was.

She shook her head angrily, crushing back fraudulent tears till they seemed to burn her brain. The day was unlike any other, an island unto itself.

She took off her blouse and threw cold water on her face, over and over again, like an unstoppable machine. Judy was frightened that she would never stop unless her arms were pinned back, and pushed a towel roughly towards her: ‘Use this.’

Pam rubbed her face too hard for her skin to stay pale. She would erase all features. Nobody would recognize her, not even herself, no matter how clear the mirror. Having woken out of life’s worst dream she did not know what part of her existence to get back to.

Judy held her till she became still, and hardly breathing, as if she had gone to sleep while on her feet. There was a tinderish heat about her, not humid and animal, but a temperature the body provided to keep her inner warmth unsullied by cold from outside.

Judy touched the back of her icy hands. The palms were hot. She stirred, but did not move, her face pressed into a compatible darkness at Judy’s shoulder. She would willingly stay, but it was an impossible hiding place. To rest in it for more than a few minutes might tempt her to lie in similar places of refuge. Nothing mattered. Her arms relaxed, but hung around the large comforting shoulders and felt the strong beating of another heart, suggesting a world that would have no interest in wrecking her peace. All she hoped for was to arrange a demarcation within which she could live, surrounding a place where she could flourish and work without pain. If it wasn’t possible she would be nothing more than a grain of purposeless dust in the universe.

Different feelings were taking hold of Judy at this long embrace, making her afraid of doing something which would involve them too closely with each other. Impatience and embarrassment urged her to ease Pam away, to say it was time she pulled herself together and got back to normal life. She didn’t want to play mummy to a person who would become dependent and give nothing in return. She had often helped, and would do so again, but not by starting a relationship which couldn’t but end in a very ragged way indeed.

Pam put on a clean blouse. ‘I must go downstairs, before I burst!’

‘You poor kid!’ said Judy.

She didn’t like her tone. ‘Thanks very much. I’ll be all right now.’

4

He could imagine Judy saying that like every man he was only waiting for a woman to come and look after him. She was right. He was. Yet she was also wrong, because he wasn’t. All his life without a woman’s company for more than a few days at a time, someone to wash his shirts wasn’t essential for him. And for sex, the odd affair would see him right.

He’d been to Salik’s Polish delicatessen and bought cheeses, smoked fish, loaves and pastries, and picked up two bottles of Mount Carmel wine at an off-licence. There weren’t enough plates, so some of the food would stay on paper. It was easy to live in London, with so many shops, pubs, launderettes and eating places, a cosy and civilized north European refuge in which you wanted for nothing provided you had paper money for it.

He tasted the wine. The fish looked good. He sat in the armchair and read his newspaper. She may not come. It was impossible to read. He stood at the window. He needed a housekeeper for Clara’s flat if he was to stay there, someone to caretake the six rooms and other nooks branching therefrom. He would use it as a base to go back to, no matter where he wandered. Advertise for a competent middle-aged woman who wanted a haven and a job.

He wondered whether his soul would always be that of a sailor. With no family life during more than thirty years on board, and none before that, the sea had been his mother and the sky his father, two elements not known for their especial concern for anyone sandwiched between. To consider a room or flat as his settled home made him want to run back to the roughest elements, which would soothe him in a way nothing could on land where whoever he might live among could give that sensation of danger which he needed in order to feel alive. He watched. He walked in limbo, thinking while on the street that everyone he saw was dead. The occasional exception was a shock to the heart, and so rare that it was hard for him to believe that he would live for long in this country no matter how comfortable it might seem.

He thought of George Town harbour, and the cable railway going up the green-backed hillside of Penang Island, that dazzling and incomparable paradise on earth. From the hotel terrace at the top he saw the mainland of Malaya with its grand escarpments and jungle-covered mountains falling back layer by layer into the distance of dusk, or growing more distinct at the onset of a storm, enormous sweeps of monsoon rain darkening the livid foliage. There was a place for any man to languish in!

But there were still wilder and more remote localities, far from everywhere even in this day and age: dense forest on a mountain close by, or the bare slopes of a distant volcano, and the roar of heavy breakers beyond his window, places where typhoons, eruptions and storms were so loud and violent that he couldn’t believe they weren’t intending to engulf the world. There was meaning in life. But he had to taste it by the mouth and feel in every part of the skin that first plate-glass metallic fall of conjoined waterdrops when the monsoon burst over palm trees and fell in such a way that it seemed as if God had singled him out for a spectacular drowning. The weight of the sky wouldn’t let him breathe. Everything smelled of water. He was cold yet not cold. He should have hated it but didn’t because it was something to feel, an intense wash coming down with a noise that wouldn’t allow a normal voice to be heard, and he felt in some perverse way that it was a protective umbrella put over him to stop worse befalling. He was awed, and that too was beneficial. Such flashes of lightning came that, though enjoying it, he didn’t feel safe. He could die any moment, though the chances were remote. But he knew only too well that he was alive.

When the ship far from land tipped and tilted its way through a monsoon he also lived. But here he was, and such a life was finished. The floor didn’t drop away, or even rock gently, and he stood with dry skin looking out of a window at a street under a plastic-seeming sheet of benign drizzle, wondering why the fierce bite of life had gone out of him.

Clara had died, and done no favour by leaving her money into his keeping, though he had no intention of grumbling at that. At least she had hung on till he was fifty, at which she may well have smiled to herself and known that such an inheritance could hardly ruin him.

His chronometer on the sideboard, attended to at twelve each day by Greenwich Mean Time whether at sea or ashore, had been neglected. He had let go of time by one hour. The ticking, lost in another compartment of his mind, stayed quiet, till something in his consciousness pulled it back again. Not to notice its measured marking of his and everybody else’s life suggested that something vital was worrying him. It was, and through his acute irritation he wondered why he had been foolish enough to believe that she would ever care to face him again.

The universal clock could not be forced. Alterations brought by the passing of time stopped or furthered all maturing hopes. A chronometer with accurate pacing was part of a scheme devised by God, but needed the hand of a person to build and keep it going. Even in the stormiest seas, when every next moment could tip you to disaster, he had been on hand to wind the chronometer at its set hour. The regularity had been too long part of his life for him not to be annoyed at his lapse.

On his penultimate run from Central America he reflected, while winding the chronometer one day, that whenever he was back on land this was something he would always do, to remind himself of what he thought he could never bear to leave but was forced to because he’d had no say in the matter. All changes had happened whether or not he wanted them. An alteration in the weather had nothing to do with him, but he often felt himself geared to the elements in too helpless a way to bear contemplation.

He did not like what had caused this condition, though knew that no master even of the biggest ship was ever captain of his fate. A lifetime at the mercy of uncertain sea and malign sky had emphasized his addiction to order and precision, and reinforced his scepticism that his own intrinsic self had ever been responsible for changes in his life.

For the sake of well-being he should put his chronometer and sextant out of sight, throw away log books and mementoes now irrelevant. To be tidy in the past had protected himself and others but, in having forgotten to carry out his daily winding of the chronometer, even if only for an hour, he needed such qualities no more.

He had wound it, nevertheless. Face down in its gimbal ring, he turned the tipsy key gently four and three-quarter turns, and the sound of the ratchet calmed him. The odour and movement of the sea was not to be thrown off so easily. Habits die hard – if ever – in a man of fifty, but in the process of change he felt more adrift than ever, and it was with relief that he heard a faint knock at the door.

5

She sat by the table, and he poured wine. ‘I don’t suppose a drop of this will hurt.’

She wore lipstick, eye shadow, face cream. That stuff on women does more harm than good, Judy had said before going out to the shops. I know, she answered, maybe it does. I feel better, though. I haven’t used it for a month. She wore no bra – don’t need one – a white blouse with an open beige cardigan, and a skirt. A change of clothes might give a new start in life. Anything was worth trying.

She looked at his pale face, freckles, tonsure of red hair, uneven teeth when he smiled, broad nose, well-shaped but pronounced lower lip, firm chin slightly squared: an attractive ugliness, a determined intelligence. Why him, and not somebody else?

He put smoked fish on to their plates, and observed her by glances, unwilling to embarrass by staring. With so much to look at, there was something to hope for, and a long time was necessary to take in what lay behind those angled, intriguing blue eyes. She laughed. ‘Do you think I should be starving because I tried to do something daft?’

‘I didn’t really think, except that you can’t have eaten since last night.’

She drank the wine. ‘You’re right, though.’ I don’t want to get drunk in front of a stranger. ‘I’ll give up my room and go back to Nottingham.’ She had nothing to say, but the silence, even for a few seconds, alarmed her. ‘I’ve got to do something.’

He refilled both glasses. ‘If you’re uncertain, don’t. Whatever’s going to happen will, without you interfering in the process. My experience suggests that it’s just as likely to be good as bad. The time to do things is when they start doing them to you, and until then the only worthwhile course is to take your mind off what problems you have, by eating something, for example.’

He spoke unhurriedly, a slight pause now and again as if to let her know that at least he thought before opening his mouth, a mannerism which made him sound very right indeed, and also wise, since each phrase touched similar words in her mind. He lifted his glass. ‘Let’s drink to a long life.’

She sipped.

Neither did he give her time to agree nor disagree with whatever he said. ‘In my job I learned that you could anticipate problems, but never create them. They came right enough – how they came, at times! – but it never did to brood about them.’

The room had a timelessness that only an unmarried man could create. The stove gurgled, and they were warm. The ticking of his special clock made it even more timeless. She was sincere, almost fearful. ‘I left my husband, and don’t manage well on my own.’

To have shelter in a fair haven, provisions and clothes, was certainly a start. ‘Do you have any money?’

‘Enough to be going on with. But is that everything?’

He put food on her plate. ‘Perhaps not. I’ve always lived by myself, but I suppose it’s difficult if you never have.’

‘It might not even be that,’ she said.

What the hell is it, then? ‘You have to ride a storm day after day, sometimes for a week or more. In life it can last months, but eventually it goes.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘everything goes.’ He didn’t understand, though his words were true enough, and comforting. It was all right for a man. The depths below her seemed immense, as if she still had a long way to fall. Beyond the room there was an emptiness which she couldn’t bear to think about, and whatever lurked out there wanted to annihilate her hopes and expectations.

He touched her hand. ‘Nobody understands anybody, but if you can look and listen and talk, and even laugh, then a glimmer of a solution might come through the mist. The only person I ever understood was my aunt, and I had little enough information to go on. In everybody’s life there can’t be more than one or two people they’ll ever understand, or be understood by. More than that is too much to wish for.’

She felt numb. ‘I suppose so.’ She hoped he was wrong. She had come from a land of big families, and couldn’t live like that.

‘The only reason for staying alive is so that sooner or later you’ll understand one person. Those who try to kill themselves do so only because they have given up hope of trying to understand one person in their lives. Or they don’t know anyone who wants to try and understand them. They may have tried, and think they’ve failed, and don’t have the heart to make another attempt. There are lots of duties in life that you’ve got to look sharp about. The only thing I was brought up on was duty, and I don’t regret it now. It often saved me from despair, and stopped me doing much harm to others. Or so I like to think.’

She nodded, content to listen, and wondered why he was trying to send her back to George.

‘But the main duty, bigger than all the others, is to go on living even when you can’t bear the thought of facing the world a minute longer. When you feel that way, just grit your teeth and live it out till the threat goes. It’s the one duty that matters. If you survive that, whatever else you want will come.’

He only ever spoke in such a way to himself, and feared he was being pompous, but words were taken from his control, and though he didn’t like it, neither did he regret it when he saw how she seemed absorbed by what he was saying. When the heart gave out its own words in the form of advice for someone else, that advice could also be meant, he knew, for oneself.

‘Put your decisions off for a while.’ He was glad Judy wasn’t at their lunch to accuse him of self-interest. ‘And get out of London for a day or two.’

‘You don’t need to be anxious about me.’ She hadn’t left George’s prison to walk blindfold into another. ‘I’ll be happy enough living on my own when I know what I’m going to do, and what I’m not going to do.’

He once met a second mate who, he told her, being dead drunk, related that when at home with his wife he always peeled her fruit. He called for a plate of Jaffas to demonstrate, and Tom observed that stripping an orange of its skin was like taking a globe of the world to pieces: cutting off the two poles, scoring with great precision along the meridians of longitude about sixty degrees apart, then pulling each segment off intact, much like an instructor at a navigation class demonstrating a theory of map projections. At the third orange the second mate fell on to the floor and had to be carried back to his ship, smelling as much of citrus fruit as whisky. Even though dead drunk one could be precise, though it was wise not to push the spirit too far.

She smiled, and watched his fingers dextrously working as he peeled her an orange in the same neat way. ‘You spoil me.’

‘You’re my guest.’ Responsibility for any other person but himself had been shunned, unless within the hierarchy of a crew. His relationship with Clara had been possible because she had been equally responsible for him. Half a packet of coffee went into the pot, and he stood while the grounds settled. It was a day for staying awake. One must never ask questions, but he’d got her back from the dark, and his curiosity was intense.

‘I’ll wash up, at least.’ She smiled, and thought he probably had a pinafore hidden in the cupboard.

‘We once had a steward,’ he said, ‘who threw the dishes overboard after meals. By the time we discovered it, we were eating off bare boards and old newspapers. He was flown home in a strait-jacket, poor chap.’

He put a tick against the question as to whether she would laugh. Its sound came as the first real sign of life. ‘An aunt of mine died,’ he said, ‘who left me a flat in Brighton, and I’ll be going there in a day or two. I haven’t yet sifted through the stuff she left.’ He came back to the table. From previously thinking he had nothing to lose by certain proposals, he felt that care was needed because something more was at stake. ‘I was brought up as an orphan, so I might find out a few things about my past.’

The food and wine made her drowsy. ‘Don’t you know enough already?’

‘Sufficient to breathe on, I suppose. But who knows everything? There’s a lot more somewhere. Wouldn’t you think there is?’

‘There might be – I daresay.’

‘I never asked my aunt direct questions, thinking that any information would come to me in its own good time. I suppose I could have, but now it’s too late. For some reason I didn’t have the burning curiosity about myself until now, nor to get through to anything even deeper than information, if you see what I mean.’

‘I think I do.’

He felt as if he had never spoken what was truly in his mind. ‘Young kids these days take drugs to blast a hole in the wall that they think keeps them from knowing themselves. Either it doesn’t work, or there’s nothing to know, and so they find they’ve turned into zombies when the smoke of the explosion’s drifted away. You can’t get through to something that you are not, or even into something that you might wish you were. I prefer to know myself in my own good time, at the rate my mind was born to move at. Maybe there’s nothing there, but if not then at least I won’t get brain damage trying to find out.’

She sipped her bitter coffee, thinking how lucky he was to be able to talk so easily.

‘There are other ways than by drugs.’

Perhaps he spoke like that because he’d spent years talking to himself. ‘I’m sure.’

He lit his pipe. ‘I know so. I’ve tried a few. But often the sea drained every possibility of personal speculation, except that concerning the existence of God. I don’t feel embarrassed saying that, because it’s a question which on still waters has no answer, and seems all too obvious during storms. One watch follows another, and such speculations soon lose any relevance they had on taking departure. Days drift by. A storm is one day, however long it goes on, and a calm sea likewise. Every minute is occupied by a routine of vigilance, even if it only means staring at a plate-glass ocean. Life is a drill, slow-motion sometimes, often too hectic for good health, but at least you don’t forget anything, or let yourself in for too many systematic, constant, random or probable errors, or fall into a dreadful blunder on getting too near land that sends you to the bottom like concrete. But on shore everything’s different, a matter of learning to live so that you don’t seem like a ghost to everybody as you walk the streets, and so that you don’t feel one to yourself. I don’t need shock or drugs to get me to a new state of being, as I read in the colour-supplement magazines that people often do. I have to get accustomed to normal land-locked life, and it’s like being born again, which I suppose is enough of a shock.’

Her face was encased in her long slim hands. She had not replaced her wedding ring. He was talking for a purpose. She wanted him to continue.

‘I was going to ask,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got time to spare, whether you’d like to travel down to Brighton with me. I like to look at the sea now and again, that cemetery of old friends, not to mention myself.’

He was surprised not to feel embarrassment at such disembowelling of the spirit. Sailors’ tales with mates or girlfriends had been different, and reflections like these had been kept secret in either fair or foul weather. ‘You can go your own way in Brighton, or come to the flat and I’ll show you around the old place. It’ll be a change for you, and a pleasure for me to have company.’

She wanted to say yes. His offer was too important to refuse, being the only one she’d had. Can I let you know later? I’m not sure how I feel. She didn’t speak, but vaguely nodded. To judge by his smile she had accepted. She was too exhausted not to. She needed freedom and ease, to sleep, but not to die any more because she wanted to know who he was. Coloured sparks were spinning in the space where her thoughts were losing themselves. No one had graced her with this kind of talk before.

6

In the dark, at five in the afternoon, she put on the light and got out of bed. Endless time was before her, but why didn’t her thoughts stop racing? She drew the curtains, and dressed. The room was cold, so she lit the gas. She listened for movement from next door. He had gone out. She pressed three teabags in boiling water to make a strong drink.

Every move is deeper into a prison when you are on your own. There is no place more secure than that of yourself, which those who are alone go further into at every step. She knew it, but was unable to make amends.

The rain had stopped, but it was cold and raw. She passed a lit-up police station and turned towards the Underground. The rush hour was coming out, pushing up the steps. Traffic was stalled at the lights. An old man clutching a plastic bag searched a dustbin.

She got rid of some tenpenny pieces in the ticket machine. Few people went down, but the up-escalator was packed. She wanted to walk in lighted places. She craved to be in the dark, on her own. She needed both conditions, and was glad to be alive.

She liked being wherever she was. A train came quickly. Stops flashed by. She missed Oxford Circus, got out at Tottenham Court Road, followed crowds into the fume-laden air, looked at faces behind the glass of Wimpys, Hamburgers, Golden Eggs and Grills.

The window of a sex shop was veiled. She saw books, tapes, films, vibrators, condoms, flimsy underwear that probably melted when you washed it, rubber suits and rubber dollies that perished after whatever was done to them, and contraptions whose uses she didn’t try to fathom. The men and few women had perhaps come in out of curiosity like her. There were young people, and the smart middle-aged with brief-cases. Film shows took place behind a curtain. Relaxed and unconcerned, people inspected goods on offer, read labels and sets of instructions, and bored young women at the cash desk checked items out like food at a supermarket.

A man gripped her elbow. ‘Will you come with me?’

She snapped her arm clear. There was no fuss. Would she have gone with him if it had been Tom? The answer was no, but he wouldn’t have done such a thing. But if he did? Don’t think. Don’t think.

She looked along more shelves and tables of the sexual-fun market that promised the unattainable. A tourist or passer-by was born every minute to fall for such unkept promises, moneyed customers who bought some mechanical spirit-killer to use in making love, goods to be put in Christmas stockings or to litter desert tents. Love is the last thing it can be called.

The district was a garish beast glutted on all that was false. People come to London and go home clutching some sexual gewgaw as they had once taken a stick of rock and a funny hat from the seaside. Whether they walked out with something in their mac pockets, or stuffed into pigskin briefcases, they had more money than was needed for life’s necessities. Goods had to be provided in exchange for floating cash, for they couldn’t be expected to throw their money into the gutter or keep it in the bank, though she supposed that most of the stuff ended in dustbins that tramps rummaged through looking for something to keep them alive.

Old Compton Street smelled of coffee, oranges and exhaust fumes. People were going to theatres and cinemas. Dirty-book shops flourished. Strip shows did good trade. She had to walk along the roadway because some cars blocked the pavement. Cafés and restaurants were full. Those who lived on their own must feel better at seeing how many others also lived alone. Life went on, which was no doubt an improvement on no life at all.

George, wearing a hat, and his heavy olive-drab rainproof overcoat belted at the waist, looked at a showcase of illuminated photographs. A hand at the side of his face indicated that he was about to go into the cabaret place. The man at the door was cajoling, and George said something inaudible, changing his mind, jerking his head aggressively to make the words plainer. He walked along the street, away from her. The man in the doorway swore after him. When George looked back he still didn’t see her. Misery had made him fatter, and made her thin. In bed together, their combined weight would no doubt be the same as before.

He turned the corner into an alley. The right angle of the wall seemed as if to fold over her, but she waited, and hoped it wouldn’t, her fingers opening on the brick surface. A woman looked as if she would kill her, then moved on, swaying a handbag like a piece of plate-glass.

She changed her track for Piccadilly Circus. She could have said: ‘Take me home. Let’s go, for God’s sake, and get it over with.’ But she hadn’t. The sight of him confirmed the pointless existence she had given up for good. Fear that he might have seen her made life in her room seem like a blissful prison in which she could hide when necessary.

Shaftesbury Avenue concealed her. She pushed, and made headway. Four jet engines whined in from a place Tom had no doubt been to. A man in overcoat and cap had the same predatory jaw and fixed grey eyes as Bert. She stepped aside without reducing her pace. She expected him to reach out but, his mouth set in cunning, he pretended not to see her. The banging of machines and the dull jingle of coinage came from an amusement arcade as big as a garage. Perhaps Alf and Harry were among the flash of coloured lights, having sponged George’s small change.

She walked in the road to avoid a cinema crowd. When a taxi horn blared she jumped back. Popcorn sellers and hot-dog vendors shivered in the drizzle. Wastepaper clung to the feet as if it were magnetized. She knew the streets better than George and his brothers. The four of them must be out on a spree, or as a last effort to help George find her before giving her up for ever. Women with figures contorted beyond all credulity showed up in vivid lighting. Men came out, and men went in. She walked quickly from juke-box noise and traffic, and people ceaselessly on the alert for something they would surely never find. She wasn’t one of them, because what she wanted did not exist where people could never meet or understand each other no matter how many times they gyrated. The area to her was an artificial flower, blazing with light, and rotten to the middle of the earth. The only certain road from it was to cut a straight line for as far as she could go.

Her mind had never been so clear nor her eyes so sharply focused. She had seen George and his brothers, and it was necessary to flee. A young man with flowing auburn hair and a rucksack held high in one hand, ran through traffic to the Eros statue. A girl followed, her laughter screaming above the noise of motor cars. Pam pushed against the tide of people coming from deep under earth, holding the rail as she descended the steps with such determination that a way was made for her.

Her last tenpenny coins went into the machine. Yes, I’ll go to Brighton with you, she would say, and if he’d changed his mind she would take a trip on her own. As unobtrusive stalkers there were none better than George and his brothers, therefore she got on the Piccadilly Line so as to change to the Circle Line at South Kensington and do a devious if not zigzag walk from Bayswater. In spite of such crowds in Soho George’s brothers may have kept her in sight, she being one against four. Yet knowing the system, where she assumed they did not, decreased their advantage. She was a free person, but if they found her lair she would get no peace.

Instead of South Kensington she went to Earls Court and then changed north as far as Edgware Road, when she crossed platforms and came back to Notting Hill Gate, switching on to the Central Line for Holland Park.

She had lost them, if indeed they had lasted beyond the first interchange. But she couldn’t be sure – feeling that she had been followed up Ladbroke Grove. In any case it was time to abandon London, look for work in a place with better air, where George and his tracker-dog brothers would never think to hound her down. She would buy a map, but would it be of England or of the world?

7

George sat in his car, looking up at her room. She walked by with Tom. George stared, and rolled the window down as if to speak. He didn’t. She was with a person unknown to him. His round face under the usual trilby hat pleaded with her, but she had severed contact, and wondered why he couldn’t leave her be. Her life was her own, and he didn’t yet know it. When her fear came back she regretted not tackling him, but with every step it was less possible. To delay such a matter would build up a dangerous mood in him, a process she knew well. The day was ruined before it had begun.

Tom waved a taxi in Ladbroke Grove, and put down the small seat to face her. He wore a cap, a brown suit with waistcoat and watch-chain, well-polished shoes, and an overcoat. His leather briefcase was of the kind used for carrying sheet-music. He was freshly shaved and smelled of soap.

She wondered who had taught him to dress, supposing it had been necessary, or who had influenced his choice. Perhaps girl-friends had put him right on harmony and colours, just as she had tried to smarten George by persuading him to get at least one suit made at the best tailors but who, when he had, was too shocked to wear it because of the cost. In the matter of ties, socks, shirts and shoes he had no matching sense at all.

Neither had she, on occasion. If she felt happy, she could achieve a plain sort of smartness with what she had in drawers or wardrobe, but there were also times when a clash of styles showed her unsettled state of mind to the most casual eye on the street. The only way to avoid this was by devising simple permutations at more confident moments – clothes she could put on without thought. But no matter what her mood, she’d always had a sense of judgement regarding George’s appearance. While he resented her criticisms, he was careful to act on them, though his training had lapsed, to judge by the odd tie and pullover he had been wearing in the car.

She would forget him, if she could, for today at least, feeling smart and comfortable in her grey skirt, white blouse, heavy cardigan and walking shoes. There was nothing of fashion, but she didn’t care for that. Her coat was longer than it should be, but in such weather it seemed an advantage. A headscarf and woolly hat in her bag would help if it got any colder. She wondered that young girls in London didn’t perish considering how little some of them wore.

Tom looked out at the overcast sky. The park was dull under its pall of winter. A piece of paper scooted along the pavement when the taxi paused at a crossing. ‘Should be clearer on the coast,’ he said briskly. ‘Still changeable, though. You might need that umbrella.’

He then fell silent, but she didn’t feel threatened, didn’t have to talk in order to defend herself, or attack him before he sent verbal shot at her. Such thoughts ruffled her ease, but she fought to stay calm. When the taxi came into the station forecourt he slammed up the seat so as to get out first and hold the door open.

He bought single tickets on the assumption that no one could say when they would be coming back. Pam waited by the bookstall, looking over the paperbacks. He had no expectations, no plan except to sort out the family junk, no sense except that of happiness at not going to the flat alone. He looked at the departure boards. ‘The fast one leaves in half a minute.’

‘Let’s run!’ She took his hand and pulled him along.

A naval man never runs. Run, and you fall. You can’t see what you are doing. You injure yourself, or send others flying. Such accidents might prejudice the safety of the ship. So never run.

But he ran now, cutting through queues and dodging trolleys. The black man at the gate said: ‘You’ll be lucky, mate.’

The train was moving, and he helped her in.

Clouds flowed, and blue gaps appeared after Croydon. He had forgotten to buy a newspaper, he said. ‘Shouldn’t have run,’ she taunted him with a laugh.

‘Often I didn’t see one for months. Didn’t much hear the wireless, either, though the Sparks kept us informed. With a good wireless operator you never lacked news. Even in sleep they’re glued to the set searching the ether! When I came across a newspaper again it seemed as if nothing had happened.’

They wanted breakfast. ‘I’m ravenous,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Bring everything for both of us.’

There was countryside to look at beyond Gatwick. She remembered the waiter in the train from Nottingham, tall and handsome, long since gone.

He held his knife and fork almost at the top of the handles, which gave him a fastidiousness that hardly matched his face. Why had he asked her? Out of kindness, she supposed. It was good to be on a train while you looked at the fields floating by. The world was another place. The worst was outside, and changed with surprising ease. ‘Marvellous,’ she exclaimed, telegraph wires lifting and falling.

He felt like a youth of twenty because she had agreed to come with him, a competent person who, in spite of her gesture of despair, should have known better than to bother. She was abstracted, as if controlled by a mystery he would never be able to unravel. He was happy. Things rarely worked in conjunction, but today they had. His image in the window-glass was that of a worn and battered man of the world who had experienced too few of its many parts.

There was something untouchable about her spirit. He knew little except that she had been married, and had a son, and had broken the connection, an act which, judging by her sensitive but rawly outlined features, had needed much strength of purpose. She was emerging from the hardship, and he wondered how she had done it, but his need to know could not matter, because such a person never voluntarily explained herself. She seemed to live on an island, surrounded by reefs and sandbanks, that no one else would be allowed to explore. It wasn’t important now that she was with him, and he knew himself well enough to realize how inaccurate his impressions might be. He felt as if the weight of his own meaningless life was being taken off his back.

They walked from the station, streets freshened by cold wind. They told each other it was good to walk. Gulls squawked over the roofs, and he wondered how he had lived even for a few days without their sound. He had to get used to not hearing that mocking cry of freedom. In every place he had been the noise had an edge of malice, the over-zealous mimicking of the free calling to the unfree when in fact their sounds were signals to each other and had nothing to do with him. Yet he loved their cries, as if he’d once had the voice-mechanism for making them himself but had at some time been struck dumb.

The noise of the gulls over the seafront was less piercing, their calls were poignant, however, because he was with someone who made him feel unimportant but happy. He saw breakers rolling up the shingle and battering the walls, the tide rushing in like flocks of swans trying to escape destruction. Each wave seemed dead-set for himself, and he wanted a rest from such never-ending force. The sight of their unwearying remorselessness exhausted him.

It was hard to believe he had tolerated the sea-going life for so long – now that he had given it up. But everyone had to earn a living, and he had taken the way of least resistance after looking out of Clara’s window and deciding that on the sea he would find both vocation and a living. He was young and, much to Clara’s relief, who wouldn’t otherwise have known what to do with him, had asked no questions. From an orphanage on to a ship hadn’t been much of a big step, and once he had paraded his decision, youthful stubbornness turned it into an obsession.

Few choices had been possible, but when looked back on they formed obvious landmarks whose positions never varied from the place in which the years of life had set them. The big changes of choosing the sea, and leaving the sea, had left him feeling sufficiently elated to want as many more variations as there would be time for in his life, though to consider probabilities would ruin the clarity of the first choice that came along. Perhaps it had already been made, and only lacked recognition, and a gentle altering of course by a few points. At his age such changes could be made with less disturbance than before because they tended to stay more concealed.

‘This may be what is called bracing,’ she shouted, ‘but I’m frozen!’

He gripped her arm. ‘Let’s go this way. We’ll soon be out of it.’ The wind blew strong from the sea, and she tasted salt. They went back to the comfort of shops and people. ‘It’s better to see such water from the inside of my aunt’s flat.’

8

He held open the door, and she went in, to a smell of musty cushions. The clock striking twelve seemed that it would never stop. He pulled the curtains open on their rails, then took off his hat and overcoat. ‘Make yourself comfortable. There are about fifty bottles of sherry knocking around, if you want a glass. She liked her tipple of sack from sunny Spain.’

‘Nothing at the moment.’

They were silent. When she was with another person she felt even more like herself – vulnerable and defensive, isolated and unable to feel she belonged anywhere. She walked around the room. ‘What’s that picture?’

‘An uncle, killed in the Great War.’

She had not seen such a flat before. ‘It’s a nice place – grand.’

‘I’m glad you like it.’

She didn’t, particularly, but he followed her as if it was something special. She had meant that it was nice for him, though wasn’t sure he liked it either. The atmosphere weighed too much. When in a strange place her first impulse was to leave, but such hasty feelings were a screen behind which true impressions could form, if she had any, or if she gave them time. She opened one of the side windows, and fresh air pushed at the curtains. ‘Is it your home now?’

He nodded, and sat down. ‘Good job I kept the central heating on. Everything’s as my aunt left it. I’m torn between keeping it exactly like this, and altering it so that I can really call the place mine.’

‘I suppose you would enjoy that.’

He walked impatiently up and down the room, as if he were embarrassed, she thought, or felt trapped. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘I could sell it, and buy a house in the country.’

‘That sounds a nice idea.’

He stopped under the portrait of his dead uncle. ‘I like being close to the sea, on the other hand.’

‘There must be a cottage,’ she said, ‘near the coast.’

She followed him into the kitchen. ‘Was your aunt married?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Did she have any men?’

It was a stark, almost unthinkable question. He had never even wondered. Clara had seemed old and staid when they first met. Yet she had been younger then than he was now. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Funny if she didn’t.’

He poured sherry for himself. ‘I suppose so, but it needn’t be.’

‘I’ll have one, then.’ She wondered whether she felt easier only because she was in the kitchen. ‘I like her furniture.’ She sat at the large table, remembering her own plastic, formica-topped or stainless-steel equipment, all sparkling and clinical, wipeable, washable, dustable and swillable. In this place you had to scrub properly to get things clean. There were rows of wooden-topped spice jars, huge spoons, old-fashioned saucepans and colanders, zinc buckets, beautiful cups and saucers – all solid and homely. The place was tidy, yet hadn’t been done thoroughly for months.

He laughed. ‘It’s antiquated, and needs replacing. Rip it out, put new stuff in.’

She had opinions, backed by a stare from her grey eyes. ‘Don’t do that. It must be comforting to live with.’

‘If I don’t make up my mind quickly I’m inclined to do nothing. Let’s take our sherry back to the living-room.’

There was something tentative, almost stricken about him. She had never been in the flat before, but was sure she felt less of a stranger than he did. When he stood in the large bay window and looked at the sea there was no unit of distance by which she could measure his separation not only from her but from every person in the world, and especially from himself.

He gazed as if he had never been close to anyone in his life, never wanted to and never would be, whereas George had always been impersonal and distant when talking to her, though much closer in his silences. She was angry at comparing every man to George, and wished she had known more men in her life. She went close, and said quietly: ‘You’re here, you know. You’re not out there any more.’

He turned. ‘No doubt about that. I’m where you are. Otherwise I couldn’t be so certain about my geographical position.’

‘It’s good to be useful.’ She was flippant. ‘Can I see the rest of the flat?’

She followed along the corridor, which needed a light even during the day.

‘This is where my aunt slept.’

The room was gloomy, but impressive in its bigness, combining the safety and isolation that she would feel if it were hers. She stopped by the door. The wide bed had a bolster across the top of its deep yellow counterpane. Drawers from a chest had been taken out, and stacked at all angles. ‘I’ve had neither the time,’ he said, ‘nor the inclination to go through her things, except to get at the necessary legal papers.’

There was a dressing-table by one wall, and a bureau against another. ‘It needs time.’

He was close, but did not touch, afraid to narrow the gap, or perhaps wise in knowing that the time had not yet come. ‘There’s so much stuff, but this is nothing: there’s also a boxroom full from floor to ceiling.’

‘You don’t sleep in here?’

‘I have the room she always kept for me. No matter how much shore leave I had she never let me stay more than two or three days. Thought it would spoil me to rely on a ready-made bolt-hole. I understood. She didn’t like men in the place. Not even me. Or maybe especially not me. That’s why I don’t think she ever had a boy-friend – as the awful phrase goes.’

‘What did she have?’

His smile was almost sour. ‘If there’s someone you respect you simply block off enquiries about particular areas. She never asked questions beyond a certain limit about me, so I couldn’t put any to her. It was easy for me. On a ship you listen to stories, and maybe tell one or two, but you don’t ask questions.’

‘Women would,’ she said. ‘Why don’t men? I can’t understand it. Maybe men aren’t so friendly with each other – unless, I suppose, they’re as thick as thieves – though even then they probably don’t get personal.’

‘Well,’ he said firmly, ‘it wasn’t done with Clara, that’s all. In some situations people satisfy your curiosity if you have patience and know them long enough. But with my aunt, it was sufficient that she existed, and that she condescended to know me. Hard to put it more accurately than that, but it’s true enough that without her I would have been nothing.’

Pam sat on a stool which he must have brought in from the kitchen to reach some high built-in cupboards. ‘She liked the fact that you were an officer in the Merchant Navy, though, didn’t she?’

He thought about it. ‘She would have preferred the Royal Navy.’

All the same, she couldn’t understand his lack of curiosity, and considered that he and his aunt must have looked a weird pair when they were together. ‘Don’t you want to know what she really thought?’

He sat on the bed. ‘Not particularly.’

‘I’d go through everything with a fine-tooth comb,’ she said, ‘and find out what I could.’

‘You sound more interested than I am.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I’ve had a more sheltered life.’

‘Not more than mine, I’m sure.’

‘And you make her sound so mysterious.’

Her curiosity was flattering, and an improvement on her apathy of a few days ago. ‘I didn’t intend to.’

‘I mean to yourself.’ His own room was half the size of Clara’s, with truckle bed and plain chest of drawers, wash-hand stand and flowered bowl-and-jug set, though there was a small sink in the corner. There was also a table with books, an armchair, a framed map of the world on one wall and an oil painting of a sailing ship in full bloom on the other. ‘You were probably the only person she loved,’ Pam said, ‘though I don’t suppose you needed to bring me here to hear that.’

He leaned against the wall as if he had drunk too much the night before, and was only now feeling the alcoholic distortion break into his system. ‘Perhaps I did.’

He had meant to reveal something more, but held himself back. There was always the danger of falling and, once started, the death of never stopping. He shook himself. What was there to tell, in any case, except that there was chaos in his mind? All he ever said was superficial, while anything vital was too insubstantial to be put into words. There was no certainty as to final truth, nothing on which to fasten emotions which racked him, because whatever wires there had been were rusted, and would snap at the least touch.

She thought he was going to faint. ‘Are you all right?’

Common talk over the years, had he lived in a normal family, would have put all praise and scandal in its place. He had missed the benefit of such revelations which, he thought, was just as well. ‘Seems I drank too much last night. There are certain things one ought not to tell oneself, though I suppose there shouldn’t be. Clara once said: “Whatever you do, don’t have any regrets. Regret nothing – but at the same time never do harm to anyone, and always try to behave yourself, so that at least you don’t have regrets of that sort.” She was strong, plain, generous and, I sometimes think, sentimental to the core.’

He had to get away from a place which was only tolerable because he was here with a person of whom his Aunt Clara would have disapproved. Or would she? He had known better than to bring anyone in those days, and Clara had appreciated his tact. She’d had enough to do in putting up with him.

Pam hoped he was right in the summing-up of his aunt, while wondering whether she was as all-powerful as he made out. ‘It doesn’t really sound as if she was sentimental.’

Clara had probably deprecated his lack of courage in never bringing anyone to see her. So did he, now that it was too late. ‘Let’s say she was wise, then.’

Shelves in the spare room held cartons tied with string gone brown with age, and cardboard boxes were piled on the floor. ‘It’s no use staring,’ she said, after they had laid them along the corridor, ‘and not doing anything to sort every one.’

He could think of better ways to spend the rest of his life, wanting to throw the lot out for the dustbin men, with a suitable tip for their trouble. He didn’t care to know what might be gleaned from so many dusty boxes, each with the year clearly pencilled, and splitting under the weight of albums, diaries, bundles of letters, journals, theatre programmes, receipts, bank statements, tourist brochures, railway timetables, Harrods’ catalogues, menus, scrapbooks, newspapers and magazines, drawings and photographs. An investigation of such material would spoil the purity of what Clara had ordained for him. He preferred the rosy miasma of endless speculation to information that would fill the gaps in Clara’s life and his own, and even that of his mother’s.

‘You’ve lived out of a suitcase all your life,’ Pam said, ‘or even a kit bag for some of it, so I expect you’re a bit scared. Maybe I would be.’

He had never been afraid of anything. If she thought that, he told himself, she didn’t understand him. But why should she, when they had known each other such a short time? To inspect Clara’s boxes, and relate whatever he found to himself, would be a surrender to the forces of continuity and order, the taking of which path he could hardly be expected to find attractive after a life at sea.

Whoever you were, you sooner or later became part of deaths and departures over which you had no control. It was not fear, he said, but inconvenience, and the distaste at being controlled by the uncontrollable which he had formerly been in a position to put up some fight against. Facing the unpredictable sea, you had training, experience, luck, intuition and native-born sense to match its antics, and so rarely felt total helplessness.

‘I once knew a man,’ he said, ‘who at sixty years of age went to Australia for a two-month holiday. At the end of his stay, while he was still there, he wrote to an estate agent in England, and signed the necessary papers for them to sell the house he owned and auction all the furniture and inherited possessions. Anything not saleable was for the junk man. He never saw the house again, and was not unhappy, with his two-roomed shack near Sydney. He got work, though he wasn’t short of money. It would be sensible for me as well, to go somewhere pleasant to live, and forget all this.’

The idea chilled her. He had made the story up, she decided. ‘It’s none of my business what you do.’

He was startled by her brusqueness. They sat in the living-room. ‘I’ve never known anyone who had much more than what they stood in.’

‘You’d better grow up, then,’ she said. ‘You always had this flat to come to, didn’t you?’

‘I know, but it’s hardly the billet for a seafaring man!’

She was irritated. His argument seemed silly. ‘What is?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.’ He was aware of what he wanted, but couldn’t say it. There was nothing to do except continue talking, until she divined what he needed her to say, said plainly to him what he could not say to her, and mean what she said, till all certainty was gone and he was then able to say it for both of them. It was a perilous course, for though she might know what he wanted, she would strongly resent the onus of choice he put on her. In the meantime she might get bored or annoyed, and walk out, never to bother with him again.

She said ironically: ‘And where would you be, then?’

‘I’m a realist. I suppose I would be where I am at this moment.’

If he doesn’t search through the stuff now, she thought, he’ll never do it. Without knowing why, she felt it imperative that he look at the papers, because something important must be among them. He was aware of it also, which was why he felt an almost irresistible urge to discard the boxes. So much clutter was intimidating. They reproached him for a wasted life, or so he might have thought.

Whatever the risk, she must persuade him to get on with the process which could only eradicate the icy emptiness that took him over when he forgot for a few minutes that she was in the room. She didn’t like such a mood in him. It was threatening, almost frightening. She sensed it as much for him as for herself. She was aware of the risk if he opened them, however, and swung to thinking that whether he looked at his papers or not was none of her business. Why was she getting into a thing like this? Was she treading carelessly into a continent of misery? But she had learned something in the last few months, summed up by the fact that it was better to say yes than no.

His hands were cold when she turned and held them. ‘You won’t have much peace of mind till you get going on that so-called rubbish. I’m sure I shan’t.’

Her palms and fingers folded over the top of his fists. He may not have wanted such friendliness, but as far as she was concerned there was no substitute. Little as the gesture might mean, she had no control over making it, and if her motion could be described as letting herself go, she had the strength of mind not to be ashamed or draw back, but held on in all innocence for both of them because there was something he had to do, and she was determined that he do it.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be tackled’ – knowing that if he hadn’t brought her to the flat he would have slung the lot out with no thought of what was in them.