Her Victory

1

‘You look as though you’ve been down a coalmine.’

‘I wish I had. It would undoubtedly have been cleaner down there.’

‘Do you feel bitter?’ she asked, after he had related his findings.

He picked up his grandfather’s death certificate, tore it casually in half, and let it drop. ‘Everybody’s gone, so how can I? Getting to know your past for the first time at fifty makes you feel young again, but without the hope you might once have had.’

He pushed a box under the table with his foot. The curtains were closed and all lights on. The shelf clock struck midnight. Traffic noises came from the seafront. She drew the velvet curtains to one side and saw three ships lit up on the sea. When he pulled a book towards him she looked over his shoulder. ‘What kind of writing is that?’

The letters were solid and black, as if they would remain long after the paper had disappeared. They lay in packed lines from top to bottom of the large page. ‘It’s Hebrew,’ he said, ‘the writing of the Jews.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There was once a radio officer who had a theory that the British people were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He read the Bible, and was learning Hebrew. I saw him practising the script.’

‘Can you read any?’

He ran a finger from right to left across the lines. ‘It’s all Chinese to me. But I suppose my mother must have known what it was.’

She touched his shoulder. ‘You’ll have to learn.’

His features were bare and prominent under the light, and he stared at the writing as if the meaning would be made clear, like trying to read hopeful signs in the weather from gathering clouds. She had never seen anyone who seemed so tired, so emptied. There was nothing in him to make life livable except the spirit of his inner self that might or might not revive. Even the sea had gone from him, all the strength he had acquired with so much effort and will. He looked up from the print. ‘I must begin again, unless I’m to die. There’s no other way. I have no option.’

He had been on a longjourney, and had told her about it in order to decide what of value would be preserved from the rubble of the past. She had been of some use, and was glad. One good turn deserved another. What more could he want from her? But she didn’t care to get into a situation from which she might lose the desire to escape. If she began such a life again she would die in captivity. ‘I think I have to go home.’

He jumped as if stung. ‘Home?’

She was frightened at beginning to feel that she lived here. ‘Back to London. I must have some clean clothes at least!’

‘It’s too late to get a train. I’m afraid I lost count of time, which is strange, considering how obsessed I’ve always been by it. When I first studied navigation I discovered that there were ten different kinds of time. I’d chant the words to get them into my brain: solar, apparent solar, mean solar, sidereal, lunar, standard, summer, Greenwich Mean, watch and chronometer time. Lives depended on them perhaps, and to lose track of time seems either a disaster or a luxury – I don’t know which. Searching through oceans of vacant time with landmarks that I’d either forgotten or not known about made me lose all sense of something I thought even my bone-marrow was made of.’

He wanted to sleep, but felt that his body would never rest again, that his brain would fragment and he’d spend the rest of his life raving like a madman at the conspiratorial emptiness of the world. He ached as if his joints were giving way. ‘It’s shameful to ramble on like this, but I can’t feel any good reason not to. I can’t help myself. I never met anybody before who I was able to talk to.’

‘Talk, then,’ she said, thinking anyone would serve. She would listen for as long as he could go on, because he was a person stricken down, and she already knew the symptoms.

‘I don’t want you to leave, train or no train. If I spend the night here with the ghosts I’ve just rumbled, and wake up to face the morning alone, I might do something I won’t even live to regret. I don’t know who I am, though I know I don’t belong here. Not even in this country. There’s nothing for me to stay for. Until I know where I want to be, I won’t know who I am. I’ve seen most places, but the vital one has eluded me. When I see the name I’ll know it. I’ll know what it is, and what I am, when it comes. It’s been a long wait so far, but no time is too long, because if you die before you get there at least you haven’t made a false choice! There’s a hand in the way things have turned out that’s not my doing, or anybody else’s either, and everything indicates that I should leave here, and the fact that I’ve no idea where to go isn’t important. Moving over the world in the last thirty years has been the same as standing still, but now the real move ought to begin. Not only my own, but some other voice tells me it must.’

‘It’s as good a way of making up your mind as any.’ She wanted him to stop talking, because his eyes, from looking firmly at some point beyond, were turned even more intently on her.

‘I’ve used all methods of making up my mind,’ he said, ‘of deciding when to alter course to avoid danger or reach clear water, but what mattered was always suggested by a force outside myself, which isn’t a way I like, but there’s little you can do except ride it as you ride the waves – when they let you.’

He opened a smaller volume from the pile of books. The same Hebrew script on one page faced English on the other. ‘Perhaps one of my long voyages would have led me to puzzle the language out. I’d have got a key and navigated my way through it line by line. The reason Aunt Clara didn’t tell me anything was because she thought I shouldn’t be deflected from my simple life. She didn’t send one of my mother’s Hebrew books because she wanted to keep her sister’s things close to herself. Who needs questions? I want answers, but they’re safe inside me and won’t come out, nicely marbled together like stones on a beach, all numbered and precisely catalogued – or they will be soon enough.’

They stood. She would find a blanket and sleep on the wide sofa. ‘You should go to bed.’

He held her gently. ‘Without you I wouldn’t be able to breathe.’

She smiled at his close face. ‘Any other person would have been just as useful.’

He shook his head. ‘Two people like us have been through enough to know that we met in the way we did because neither of us is just any other person. Everything is ordered in the universe, as far as the length of a human life is concerned. When you find your latitude and longitude by heavenly bodies at sea they’re always in the place in which you expect to find them. They never let you down. Nothing is left to chance. We’re individuals, like the billions of stars. But fate is the great leveller, and all is fixed. No other person would have done but you.’

She put her hands on his shoulders. ‘I’m even more exhausted than you look, believe it or not, and would like to get some sleep. But I must go to London tomorrow, because I have unfinished business there.’

‘I’ll go with you.’ He surprised her by a light kiss on the lips. She regretted moving away because she did not know the reason for it. He stood like an island. ‘I’ll give up my room in town, then move down here.’

He took her unwarranted shift from him as one of those blows of life that you must always be braced to expect. He poured two glasses of whisky, his normal tone making her happy to be with him again. ‘Maybe these’ll do for nightcaps!’

‘I feel frightened about going back to London.’ What was she saying? How can I confide in him like this? ‘It’s something I can’t explain.’

‘It’s when you don’t feel dread that something dreadful really happens.’

‘I wish I could believe that,’ she said.

‘So why go?’ It would be impossible not to. She felt as if pulled by the scruff of the neck. He drank his whisky, then poured another. ‘Learn to follow your heart.’

‘Have you?’ A bit too sharp, she felt. Still, he shouldn’t say words he couldn’t mean. ‘Don’t drink any more after that.’ She sat down. ‘I have things to settle. My husband wants me to go back to him.’

After a few moments he said: ‘Well?’

‘I shan’t. He’s been in London with his three brothers. They’ve found out where I live.’

He laughed. ‘Are they such dangerous monsters?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She couldn’t, until what she dreaded happened. They were known more clearly by her than any other group of people, yet their presence threatened her with the unknown, to which she couldn’t trust herself not to respond.

‘Get rid of your room as well,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, wryly.

‘Why not?’

She moved towards him, then stopped. ‘I like it there because it was my first refuge from a life I couldn’t stand, and from the rest of the world that made me think I was a fool for not feeling I was the luckiest person. I can’t let my husband or my own fears drive me out, so I must get a job and exist on my own.’

‘Being a sailor has taught me,’ he said, ‘that no one can live without other people. The independence you’re thinking about is only possible providing you don’t want to stay human. I’ve been in and out of that state all my life, but never for too long.’

He was accusing her. After trying to stay silent, she said: ‘I’m the only one who knows what’s good for me.’

‘Yes, I realize that. But we did meet under rather peculiar circumstances.’

She didn’t like being reminded, and wondered whether she really was lucky to be alive. Where was she? Who was she with? The room was dimly lit. She wanted to see everything with eye-aching clarity. What had been revealed during the day had pushed her life to one side, but now that it was coming back there was nothing promising about it. Only the effort she would have to make appealed to her, because there was no other way of knowing she was alive. ‘The light’s too low.’

He went to the switches, and the table lamps turned dim in the white dazzle from overhead. ‘Is that better?’

She nodded. It was different.

‘I’ve been thinking of putting an advertisement in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘It’ll go something like this …’ He reached for a pencil and spoke the words as he scribbled: ‘Woman aged thirty to fifty wanted as personal secretary and assistant to help ex-Merchant Marine officer with business affairs. Possibility of travel. Must be independent. Ability to drive an advantage. Fair salary offered. Living-in optional. Own television if desired.’

He passed her the paper. ‘I don’t want to deprive you of your previous freedom, but you have first refusal of this dazzling situation!’

The writing was impossible to read. She would be nobody’s servant. To go to an office every morning from her own room and work for a business firm would be acceptable, but to be a runabout for someone with whom she was friendly was not her notion of a proper job.

‘There’s work to be done,’ he said, ‘but the hours will be irregular, though you’ll get enough time off. You already know what the premises are like. You’ll have a room here, and be absolutely private, I promise you. I know you already, and I like you, though I’ll say no more about that. Maybe you know what I’m trying to say, in any case. And I might not get anyone who’d fit the job even if I did advertise. I’m not trying to do you a favour, as much as one for myself.’

She wanted to say yes, but such a way out of her dilemma would be too easy. It would be wrong to take advantage of his loneliness and incoherence. She felt close, yet separated from him as by a high wall. ‘I’m helping you already, so why do we need a contract?’

He smiled at her simple notion of the truth. You sign on for the voyage and sign off at the end. Old habits led him to expect regularity. The signature was everything. Such articles were the nuts and bolts of a disciplined service, but they obviously had no place in love. Compartments were not divided by watertight doors, below the Plimsoll Line or not. Now that he had found her he couldn’t bear the prospect of being alone, but considering the way they had met there was no certainty of her remaining. Such unpredictability disturbed him. But she hadn’t said no, and he would have to be satisfied with that.

2

Her watch said half-past nine and for a few moments she wondered where she was. She had forgotten to get a pillow with her two blankets, and by the time she had undressed and lain down she was too sleepy to look for one. What would George say if he knew she had spent the night in another man’s flat – and ended up with a stiff neck? Maybe one of his brothers had followed them to Brighton and, posted outside, observed that she had been there all night, and that she had – he could hardly deduce otherwise with his kind of mind – slept with him. Let him think. She wondered why she hadn’t. He’d surely expected her to. She liked him enough, and could easily imagine how pleasant it might have been, but she had been too exhausted, either to allow any move or make one.

She pushed a curtain aside. A gleaming estate car with its lights on moved around the square. Neither of the two pedestrians resembled George or his brothers. The bleak sea was ruffled with feather-tops. She came back to the couch. Yesterday had been like ten years, but as time going in reverse, so that she felt a decade younger. It was as if she had already spent a honeymoon which had been perfect and glorious: she had come out of a long tunnel, exhausted but unhurt, and with a strange feeling of happiness. She looked out of the window again. The car had found a space and parked.

She emptied her bag to get clean pants and a blouse. Having expected him to sleep most of the day, she scooped up her clothes and went to the bathroom. The door was locked. He called that he wouldn’t be long. Using her coat for a dressing-gown she went to the lavatory, then into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Not being used to alcohol, her head ached, and her mouth was dry from thirst. She thought of what she knew about him. He was a man, as they said, with a past. So was she, and it was called prison, a long slumber of the unknowing until the bars were suddenly behind instead of in front, and never to be stepped back into by returning to someone of George’s sort. They had to cut free.

She resisted singing in her freedom. She was with another man. She liked being with him. She was sparing with words, even with herself, yet didn’t want to care. She swung open the huge curtains. An enormous patch of sun from the sea warmed her face. There was no movement in the square. They hadn’t traced her, after all. She would stay for as long as it wasn’t the beginning or the end of anything, but knew she mustn’t hope for too much.

The kettle whistled. Before it reached full shriek he had taken it off and was opening the tea caddy. He was dressed, with tie on, face shaved, shoes polished, fresh-looking as if he had slept deeply, looking different to last night when his agonized face in the shadowy light had given age no chance to mark his features. He seemed free of whatever weight the long search through his aunt’s leavings had heaped on him, though on a further glance she noticed that more than a trace remained in his eyes. She wondered what he saw in her face. She was uncertain as to what was there herself now that she speculated on him, wishing she had merely said good morning and then gone in to have her bath.

‘Did you sleep well?’

‘I’m still coming up for air,’ she said.

‘Sorry it had to be in the living-room, but I did offer you my bed – I mean, on condition that I took the sofa.’ They drank in silence, as if a treaty had been signed not to bother each other unnecessarily. She laughed at the thought. He didn’t, and looked up from his cup. ‘Someone once said that a person who laughed soon after getting out of bed was hungry. Shall I boil some eggs now, or do you want to dress first?’

‘I don’t know.’ And she didn’t. She wanted something, but didn’t know what, except that it had to be everything. She couldn’t be still, left her tea and walked into the living-room. The light of day made it hard to breathe, but she didn’t try, kept her lungs shallow, as if a good breath would fill her with something she did not want, and cause her to lose the feeling of desire. She felt restless and ashamed, not entirely under her own control, yet uncaring. On no other morning of her life had she been so fragmented in her sensations.

She went back into the kitchen and said to him: ‘I can’t answer questions first thing in the morning.’

He frowned, so she didn’t doubt that he was wide enough awake to answer any question put to him. But she had none to ask. Questions were finished, for the moment. His intense gaze suggested he hardly knew what to say for fear of uttering useless and puzzling words that would push them apart.

There seemed an absolute end of talking. She took off her coat and folded it over a chairback. He looked, but did not move. She had no wish but to be as close as it was possible to get, as a way through what complications might needlessly build up between them. Any less action seemed destructive. She gave reason no chance, but pulled her nightdress over her head and went to him, thinking as the cool air rushed at her body that since she wanted him so much it didn’t matter what was in either of their minds.

3

Her body had decided, so her will was free. Yet the course her body would take had been decided long ago, though she was not aware when the agreement had been reached. It had grown in her, but she had so far ignored it, a half deliberate neglect that had given the fragile plant a possibility of survival.

The inevitability of their becoming closer began during the total preoccupation with his aunt’s documentary belongings, a task which had taken him too far into the area of a peculiar past for her to follow. She had been left alone long enough and in sufficient ease to reflect on her feelings, though she was careful to deny any force which they threatened to assume.

Knowing what she wanted to do, she had been afraid on waking that she would feel some old-fashioned twinge of shame should the event take place at his convenience. If anyone knew that they had been together she wanted to be able to say that she had not allowed anything to be done to her, but that she had started whatever they liked to call it herself, out of the need of her own pride and unsurfaced dreams.

Guided by her own will, all sense of the tawdry had been sidestepped. Having nothing to lose by beginning, neither had she any of the shame which she would have dreaded had it been he who had taken the first step. No one could reproach her. Feeling love, a move had been made, and what came afterwards would be his reaction to the thing she had started, and so could never be a matter of regret to her. She would not be in any way demeaned if he couldn’t bear the sight of her and they parted never to meet again, though because her initiative had grown out of the ease she had known since their first meeting, such action on his part seemed unlikely.

His instinct, to wait until what he most wanted happened so that neither would appear to think about how to begin what seemed impossible, had indeed been right. He reflected while holding her warm body that they had mindlessly given in to their need for each other. But all in their lives that had led to it had been by no means mindless. The transition was impossible to detect, a fusing spark that was never to be defined and isolated but which had brought them together.

His regard for her had bred the necessary patience, and had been the true guide of his action. The only value received from his orphanage schooling, and throughout a long age at sea, was to know when to wait and how to bide his time, and he considered that the power of this virtue had not disappointed him now that the first real call on it had been made. Thus every move was a combination of calculated choice and inherited need.

His shirt was wet with her tears, and she smiled at the thought that at least they were old enough to know what they were doing. He held her tight but his kisses were tender. He moved away. His cultivated indifference had succeeded, like everything else, at a cost. But his arms relaxed as he kissed the tips of her breasts. ‘It’s only a few days, but it seems that we’ve waited years.’

Her eyes opened. ‘There’s plenty of time now.’ She felt like a child, not yet a woman, an unexpected innocence which had nevertheless been hoped for. Was it only an infatuation which people often said such feelings were? She did not admit the word. There was too much cruelty in it, and for herself it was impossible to use. She smiled that she had only ever held her son with the same affection – when he had been a child.

He watched her bend at the bed in Clara’s room to pull down the covers. She was thin, flesh firm at her stomach. It was fitting that they should make love here. There was a small mole on her left shoulder. He held her from behind, and kissed the nape of her neck. She fought off the thrill, and turned. ‘I must go to the bathroom.’

She closed the door and sat down. She felt relaxed, yet the body was tense. Had she ever been in love, even when George had fixed her bicycle chain by Wollaton Church all those years ago? He had played the gentleman, and ever after called his bike ‘The Courtship Special’. Yet who could say what words had passed, or how much the atmosphere had been in control?

Later, when he had asked her to ‘be his wife’, they called it love. She couldn’t remember, but they must have done. The memory was a torment throughout her marriage. All was distortion. Their difficulties had been fixed and pervasive, nonetheless. There was nothing worthwhile to remember, and little to regret. When considering events from another life, memory was fickle and dubious, and hardly the word to use – or blame. The sensation that remained was one of damage. Being held by Tom could easily be called love, for it eradicated whatever might have been thought of as love yet could in no way have been. Love only came once in life, she had told herself while stroking his chest and shoulders under the shirt which tears had dampened. In those far-off days she had been taken up by the slavery of expectation and mistaken it for love.

A pull at the cord set a two-bar heater on the wall glowing at her back. She turned to the mirror, and though she looked pale, a smile held weariness at bay. Her breasts were small but shapely, reflecting the likeness of a skimpy model, she thought, in the long mirror.

He stood at the window looking towards the sea. The coppery midwinter glow drew back as a cloud closed off the sun. He didn’t doubt that it would show again. The sea looked after itself, he thought, as softened footsteps sounded on the carpet.

She came to him, her breasts flattening against the coarse hair on his chest. His expression seemed solemn. Did he already regret what had not yet happened? She hoped not. She was no longer that sort herself, and doubted that she ever had been. ‘We’ve landed ourselves in an unexpected honeymoon.’

He kissed her lips, and answered that they were in the perfect place. She wanted no tomorrow and, passionately kissing him, closed her eyes, legs weakening as if about to fall.

His gentle support moved her towards the bed. He kissed the delicate skin that closed over her eyes. The words that said he loved her were torn from him by forces beyond his understanding.

No loving had ever been so slow and harmonious, yet she still did not finally want it to happen. While knowing that she had committed herself, and that any further struggle was useless, and unjust to them both, she could not let go. It was like the objections to being born. Not to contest the change would have denied its value. She pleaded, and then fought, and closed her eyes to the lack of understanding in his expression.

But as if in her thoughts, he held her, giving in to what she didn’t dare ask for. Her silence drew him on, conferring a passion without hurry, going against both her will and his as he touched. She seemed to be at the edge of life, about to fall into a trance before death. Is this what fainting was like? She had never lost her consciousness. She was trapped in a private world of love, and didn’t care. They seemed as familiar with each other’s interchange of pleasures as if they had been together for years. But he was a stranger, no matter what she knew of his past. His fingers played at her and, keeping her lips on his, she held his hand firmly so that she gave in, and went on until she heard herself.

The shock diminished and spread, and he knew sufficient to stroke her for as long as the pleasure lasted. She felt her tears loosen. His free hand flattened her breasts. He sucked and soothed the nipples. She lifted him and looked at his face. He looked at her, but she didn’t care whether or not he saw an intensity that had never taken her so completely – whether or not it made her ugly. She opened her legs, and putting out her hands she drew him in.

4

After ripples of sunlight, rain beat from the sea and the air grew dark. Hail flashed and pattered the glass. She turned to press against him but, feeling weightless, hardly knew where she was. He kissed her down the stomach till he brought her back to consciousness. His tongue would not let go. She tried to get free. No one had done this before. She protested, then gave in to her shame, and in a few moments felt no shame at all. He held her to the pleasure that seemed drawn from outside, and as it began he moved into her with an ease that allowed her orgasm to run its course before she felt his own explosion deep inside.

The dreams floated, and she drifted in sleep. He got out of bed, and drew the clothes over her shoulders. A match scraped, and there was a smell of tobacco smoke. She couldn’t move, curled in hiding from the rain which fell against the window. She hadn’t slept for years. Yet she wasn’t sleeping. His weird battering left her sore. She didn’t know him, yet wanted to. His intense and purposeful love made him unknowable. He was a stranger home from the sea and she was a woman in from the storm. He touched her shoulder. ‘Here’s something to eat and drink.’

‘I can’t move.’ She leaned on her elbow. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

The light was on. ‘I want to know.’

He held a cup for her to drink. ‘My watch has stopped. And I didn’t look at the kitchen clock.’

‘I feel like a baby.’ She sat up, and took the cup. He put the tray down and sat by her. ‘You must have been dreaming.’

‘What did I say?’

‘Couldn’t make it out.’

She ate a biscuit. ‘I haven’t slept at this time of day before.’

‘Sometimes at sea you catnap at all hours. Never in a bed like this, though.’

‘Did you have hammocks?’

He wore trousers and shirt, but had no shoes on. ‘Once or twice. I slept in one four weeks on my first trip to Singapore, and then four weeks back. They were comfortable.’

She brushed crumbs from the sheets. He kissed her breasts. In friendship she felt accessible, and liked it. ‘I must get dressed.’

‘I’m getting used to you with no clothes on.’

She was not embarrassed, and wondered why. Such freedom had been impossible with George. She felt a remote but friendly pity for him. They had existed, but had not been made for each other. Familiarity and time had failed to bring it about. Yet with someone so new she didn’t mind how he saw her, or what they did. She kissed his hand, and placed it between her legs.

He stroked her hair.

No words could explain her feeling of ease and helplessness. Did you have to go through the stage of being with no clothes on before getting to know someone, and was making love also part of it? She knew him, yet did not, but felt there was no need to consider it. She wanted to slide back into bed and dream, but drew the eiderdown around her and stood up.

‘We’ll go out for a meal,’ he said. ‘I know a place where they serve food upstairs. It’s nice and casual.’

In the street a wind blew the umbrella inside out, and he fought in a doorway to right it, while she stood in the rain and laughed. He held part with his foot and worked systematically to get the circle of spokes into place, but by the time he had gone fully around, the ribs shook themselves out again. He tried to do it more quickly, but the spokes still would not jump back into a firm circumference, so she held half the circle with both hands spread wide, using all her force, and they passed it round and round to each other till the umbrella was usable again. People looked at them as if they were mad. Swinging the umbrella high, rain clattered against the cloth, then he held her arm as they walked.

The room was smoky and warm, with a piercing smell of cooking that either made your mouth water, she thought, or drove you back into the street. She noticed him hesitate at the threshold, as if unsure who should go in first. Perhaps the only places where he had ever felt secure were the orphanage, a ship at sea, and his aunt’s flat.

The prolonged love-making in strange surroundings had sharpened her perceptions as if she were at the beginning of a cold or the flu. She was glad to sit down. The candle flame shook whenever the door opened. She took a napkin from the wine glass. ‘I feel as if I’ve been rolled down an endless slope in a barrel. My thighs ache, among other things.’

He touched her wrist. ‘I’m not surprised. We must have been three of four times around the world!’

The waitress gave them a folded card to look at. Pam didn’t know him. He didn’t own the flat at all, but had obtained the key while whoever it belonged to was on holiday. And was he really a retired naval man? Judy Ellerker had confirmed it, though perhaps he had deceived her as well, and the story from his day-long sorting out of the lumber room had also been fabricated. The documents matched his tale, though they could have been assimilated from somebody else’s. Maybe he was a man out of prison or back from abroad who had perfected his tricks for living off the land. He brought people into life again, and went on his way. His brown eyes looked dully at some far-off scene, until he sensed her attention. Then he came back with such immediacy she felt nothing but tenderness. She knew so little of the world that anything could be true, though in this case it wasn’t, and she decided not to retail such thoughts but say what she would like to eat.

He asked the waitress what champagne they had, and Pam let them sort the matter out. ‘It gets around the clubs of Nottingham,’ she said, noting what he chose.

‘I once took a case of it on board, to bring back for my aunt, but the captain sniffed ’em out, so Clara only saw one bottle. She opened it the first night, took a sip, gave me a swallow, then poured the whole lot down the sink. It was counterfeit, Clara said. She was right. It was worse than vinegar. God knows what it was. But the captain quaffed off eleven bottles without even a murmur. Perhaps it just didn’t travel.’

The door opened, and he looked towards the sound. He flinched before turning back to his soup, having seen that raven-dark hair, parted at the middle and smoothed tightly back, in some other place. The skin of her cheeks was fresh, like that of a doll still in bloom, and he remembered her from the time of his aunt’s death, and the hour they had made love in the bed-and-breakfast place near the station. He hoped she hadn’t seen him, but cursed a large mirror along the wall which made the room seem endless and damned all privacy. He lifted his glass to Pam’s. ‘Here’s to us.’

Beryl came close, and he felt a tap at the shoulder.

‘Hello, sailor! A different one every night, is it?’

He stood up. Pam noticed his eyes harden. The woman was good-looking, but brazen. Tom indicated whom he supposed to be her boy-friend standing some yards away: ‘Would you both like to join us?’

‘No fear,’ she laughed.

‘Boy-friend?’

‘Who else?’

He touched Pam’s elbow. ‘Let me introduce you.’

Pam said: ‘Hello!’

‘He’s good,’ Beryl said. ‘Aren’t you, sailor?’

Maybe she’s drunk, he thought. ‘Am I?’

‘But I must go.’ She nodded. Her boy-friend looked left out of things. ‘He’s not so bad, either, sailor. So long!’

Tom sat down.

He must know scores of girls. ‘Someone you met?’

‘She was the nurse on duty at the hospital when Clara died. Is the fish all right?’

She felt stupid at having her mood spoiled so easily. He sensed the weather-change, but there was nothing to do except regret the barometric pressure and curse his luck. ‘The sky’s turned foul for no good reason.’

She nodded, then drank. ‘The sun’s still out as far as I’m concerned.’

He called himself a fool. He had swaggered off such a close call more than once, but now felt clumsy and vulnerable, unable to speak for a while – till he noticed a newspaper on an empty seat saying there would be a rail strike as from midnight. ‘We won’t get back to town tomorrow unless we take a bus, and I don’t feel like fighting for a seat. It’s inconvenient.’

‘Strikes usually are,’ she said.

‘My pay for the first ten years was enough to bring anybody out on strike, yet it wasn’t even thought of. I’d have felt ashamed creeping off a ship and saying I’ll do no work till I get more money. But times have changed. Your work is your weapon. Everyone can go on strike now. It’s bad for the country, of course, but who cares about that? It’s like chipping bits of wood from a raft in the middle of the sea. Sooner or later you sink and become food for the fishes. It’s a pity there’s nothing anyone can do, because it’s rather a good raft, and I’ve grown to like it, having done some of the work to keep it afloat.’

She thought of George’s brothers, and surprised herself by saying: ‘I’ve known people who found it hard enough to live on their money. But even if they have enough not to go short of anything, they want more – on the principle that they can never have enough. If others have it, they must have it. They see the easier lives of others on the telly, so you can hardly blame them.’

He dissected his fish. ‘It’s more than envy. It’s restlessness, and a craving for change without any spiritual values. People who could set an example don’t care to any more. They’ve lost their nerve, perhaps.’

‘People want to be happy,’ she said, ‘and they’re persuaded it costs money.’

He was as close to bitterness as she had so far seen him. ‘But happiness never comes. They’re poor, duped fools. When you have it, you don’t want it. Often you don’t even notice if you do have it. That’s probably the best sort. But as soon as you think to want it, it goes out of the window if you already have it, and becomes unattainable if you don’t. It’s a tricky kind of balance, all in all.’

‘I’m happy now,’ she said.

He held her hand. ‘So am I. But it doesn’t come by pursuing it. Nor by going on strike for more money.’

She had to agree, though after a while asked: ‘Do you want to go back to the world of your grandfather?’

‘Not really. It only led to the one we’ve got now. But I do feel there are values one ought to hold on to. When I wake in the morning I thank God I’m alive. Every birthday I’m grateful for another year of life. I was brought up to believe that if you didn’t work you didn’t deserve to eat. When the sea was calm and empty there was time to mull on things. You were blessed with two minds, one concerned for the safety and progress of the ship, and the other taken over by thoughts of what was going on in the world, but rarely with what turmoil might lie within yourself. It’s very effective to contemplate the state of the world from the bridge of a well-run ship. But things can happen at sea, all the same, and you live with the thought that your life is not your own, being divided between the company you work for and the sea itself. Your life only belongs to you when you set foot ashore. Not even then, for if there’s one thing certain it is that our life doesn’t belong to us alone. Get to thinking that it does, and someone else then assumes he has a right to take it over. Self-assertion comes before slavery. If every man believes in God, or at least has infinite respect for a humane and unassailable system of ethics, then no other man has the moral power to subjugate him.’

It was more agreeable when he talked than to be caught in the singular deadness that dominated his silence. The evening was pleasant now that the aura of the nurse’s disturbance had gone. But she wondered what was the beginning and end of all he was saying, for didn’t he belong to himself, rather than to something like God? She certainly did, and especially so in the last couple of months when she had moved from a lifetime of torment after having been attached body and much of her soul to somebody else. Even in the most enduring union you had to be your own property first, before any satisfaction was to be got out of allowing part of you to belong to someone else, she told him during dessert.

‘Without wanting to seem unduly religious,’ he said, ‘we all belong to the unknown, which I call God. By believing in God we are given the authority for our equality with regard to each other. That’s all I mean.’

She didn’t like the word ‘equality’. ‘Everyone is different, not equal. If they were equal you wouldn’t have been an officer.’

He smiled. ‘They may not be equal in everyday life, but they are in the sight of God. It’s vital for everyone to think so, for the proper running of society. Under God and under the law we are equal, and that’s as it should be, otherwise you get the barbarism of dictatorship, as in Russia, where people can’t even leave the damned place until their spirit’s broken, and mostly not even then. Law on its own can be tyrannical, but if you have God then His law, which we must assume to be good and beneficial for humanity, helps to keep human laws civilized. It hasn’t always worked out, but it’s still the only hope we have. And in the best countries it has more or less done so.’

He was embarrassed. ‘I’m talking too much. Sailors are known for it, once they get ashore, though Jonah talked on board ship till he got himself thrown into the sea, and then talked in the whale’s belly till God got him spouted out again. Not that he was a sailor.’ He tapped the empty bottle. ‘There’s time for another drop.’

She put her hand on his arm. ‘I’ll get tight if I have any more. Let’s go.’

He signalled for the bill.

‘I’ll pay half,’ she said.

‘You bought the food yesterday.’

She looked astonished. ‘Yesterday?’

He laughed. ‘Yes – yesterday.’

He was right.

‘We ought not to get too particular about such things.’ He picked up the chit. ‘I shan’t go broke over a few quid.’

At the seafront he looked up the Pointers to Polaris. There was no more rain. The wind was backing north-easterly. ‘We’re in for a change to dry and cold, so the train drivers will stay snug in their beds with toast and tea, and who can blame them, unless it’s those poor chaps waiting on platforms for non-existent transport?’

They walked a mile towards Shoreham, then turned back. Lights twinkled in the Channel. ‘Do you wish you were on one?’

He held her hand. Why did everyone assume so? ‘I see no point in thinking about the past. Life on shore makes my existence out there seem emptiness itself. After what I learned about my family I suppose I’m still the same person who worked his whole life at sea, but the connection feels slender at the moment, walking along the front with you. I expect the two lives will merge sooner or later, but it’s amazing to think I lived so long as someone I wasn’t.’

‘Maybe you didn’t,’ she said.

‘I agree. It’s hard to be final about it. But if I’d been brought up in that kind of family I imagine I’d have gone to a prep school as a boarder, and then to a public school as a boarder. Being passably bright, and with a bit of luck, I’d have made some sort of university, and become an engineer like Uncle John. By the time I was fifty my mother and Clara would have died, and I’d be where I am now, living in the flat with the money they’d left. On the other hand I might have been an idler, and broken my mother’s heart – or some such thing.’

‘I don’t think you would,’ she said. ‘And yet – you might have done!’

He stood by the rail. Light reflected from behind, as breakers thumped and grated at the shingle. ‘I still think it’s all a dream.’

She wanted to hold him and kiss him. ‘Is it a bad one, though?’

Where was the calm impassive sailor she had thought him to be? He looked at her in the half light. ‘While I was in the kitchen this afternoon I remembered an incident from just after the war that I’d not thought of until today. It was the sort of thing that might happen to any sailor in a foreign port. My ship had docked in the East River in New York, and I had a day to spare so walked into town. I got something to eat in a Chinese place, then went up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. I’d been there before, so knew my way. Passing a Moorish-looking synagogue near 43rd Street I saw a tall old man with a long beard, wearing a black broad-brimmed hat. He was shouting a greeting to somebody behind, as I thought, but he came up to me, and babbled in a language I didn’t know from Adam. He held my hand and called me by a name, and seemed to be asking questions, his eyes glittering with smiles, and I thought what the hell does this silly old bugger want? What’s he trying to tell me? I was young and all stuffy-English, and wanted to push by him and carry on walking, but he was so amiable and familiar that I saw he had taken me for someone else, though it never occurred to me to wonder who it would be. I only wanted to make the most of my day in New York. He realized he’d made a mistake, so waved his hands in the air, almost pushed me out of the way, and walked on. Bumping into someone in a town of millions of people happens all the time, but what I didn’t know then, yet know now, was that that wise old man, even in his understandable error, saw more closely into me than anyone else. And when I suddenly recalled the incident his face was so vivid and close that I could have touched him. I was about to say something, but realized I didn’t know his language. I thought it a pity that we couldn’t understand each other.’

The recollection calmed him, and they crossed the road to the square. She didn’t want to break into his mind. Each had their privacy, and she was content to guard hers, thinking that her past life would be uninteresting to him. The loss was hers and nobody else’s, and there was no one to blame for it but herself. As soon as you cut yourself off from the people who were responsible for your loss, any thought of blame becomes ridiculous. The twenty years that had slipped by so emptily filled her with rage, and she stood for a moment unable to move for fear of being sick. After a day of such loving, the wasted years became a devastation of centuries.

‘We’ve both mis-spent our lives,’ she said when they were in the flat. She envied his having discovered a whole new landscape of the past, but knew there was no hope of her doing the same – so became glad for him instead.

He poured a whisky. ‘I suppose nearly everyone thinks so. But they weren’t useless lives. Would you like some?’

She would make herself a pot of tea before going to bed.

‘My life was futile,’ he said, ‘only in so far as you weren’t part of it, but we’ve met now, and I’m able to feel how wonderful it is. It’s bad for my self-esteem to worry about having been unlucky or stupid, or a victim of circumstance. It simply wouldn’t be true, in any case. Life has been good to us in that everything has led to our meeting. We can enjoy it better. It’s more important to think about the future than to worry about having been diminished in any way by the past.’

The fact that neither seemed to know where they were in their lives united them so effectively that the bond was, she felt, doubly painful. She wondered how much he really knew of himself, in spite of what he had discovered about his family. When he’d had time to absorb the information – for what it was finally worth – would they still have anything in common? She wasn’t able to bring these nagging queries into the open, which worried her because he, without difficulty, said whatever was in his mind. Warped by years of marriage, she felt deficient in not trusting someone she loved. The emptiness surrounding their encounter would indicate, if it persisted, that life was hardly worth living. She ought not to think, but to act instead, and do things. Wasn’t to say better than to think? Twenty null years had robbed her of the ability to say and to do out of her own will when with a man. Yet she had acted this morning because no other course was possible, a daring and positive approach which was not easily undone.

A lamp illuminated the open book. ‘I’ve found an alphabet which gives the key to this writing, so it won’t be difficult to get the hang of it. I can exercise my brain – like being back at school, but with the lines going from right to left.’

He was as relaxed as a child with a new toy, as if the imbibing of a different script could change him fundamentally. A spark of mystery gave renewal of life, and put light back into his eyes. ‘It’s like learning a secret language. There’ll be nothing to it when I get a proper start.’

He closed the book. She found it easy to kiss him. ‘Secret from me? I’ll learn it as well. But it’s time to go to bed, unless you intend studying all night.’

‘You’re right.’

She had disturbed him for no reason, when she should have left him peacefully at his task. He had a future, whereas she could see none, having jettisoned hers by leaving George. With George she’d had a perfect future, of calm and predictable days forming a congealed block of years that would go by until disease or old age carried them off hand in hand. Oh yes, there’d been a fine future there right enough. But she had broken free, and now had none at all, which at the moment she felt was the best kind of future to have.

Nor did she want any share of that which Tom might see for himself, preferring to live until a future formed for her – or not, as the case might well be – even if the desolation should become unbearable. And really, who had a future? At forty, as Edward once taunted her, ‘you’re over the hill’. Only the young had a future, and then not for very long. After forty the shutters began to come down. The string that held them could wear through and snap any moment, leaving you in the dark for ever. At such an age you were lucky to have any life at all. Every day was a gift, every month a victory, but she didn’t care, as long as she breathed, and had nerves to her fingertips. She had come back to life by crawling through a tunnel, and was more alive than when she had started the process. ‘Don’t go to bed. Stay at your work.’

He stood. ‘I have all the time I need.’

‘Really?’

He smiled. ‘Life seems as if it’ll go on for ever.’

She took his kisses. They were meaningless. ‘I don’t need to feel that. I hope you do everything you want to do. If so I’ll feel good knowing there’s at least one person I’m acquainted with whose life is working out according to plan.’

She was alarmed at his optimism. He was scared by her lack of it. There were dangers that could affect them both. She drew her hand away. He wondered why, but she could not explain.

‘We need sleep,’ he said. ‘A bit of the old cure-all of oblivion.’

No doubt he was right. She felt sickened and weighed down. ‘I’d like to be in a separate bed, if you don’t mind.’

She fought not to mumble words of apology. Her deepest wish was to be alone. He could stay reading into the night. She found his disappointment unbearable because he knew too well how to conceal it.

‘You have the big bed, then,’ he said, ‘and I’ll use my old room.’

She ached to sleep with him, but it needed too crucial an act to change her mind. It would also break something she did not yet want broken, and extend their intimacy whether he wanted it or not. Things soonest done are never mended.

She fell asleep after the most wracking agony of tears. She was glad he couldn’t hear. He did. He lay awake, trying to read, steeling himself against going in to give comfort. She wanted to be on her own, so to disturb her would be pure self-indulgence on his part. The muffled noise of sobbing made him realize that he was no longer alone in the world, and never would be again, so he wondered whether that was the reason for the sound being so precious, and the reason why he did not go in to comfort her and put an end to it. His last thought was that whatever the reasons, weeping was a bleeding of the spirit. People needed it. He understood perfectly, because he had never been able to do it.

5

She had taken a shower and dressed, and made breakfast. One minute she felt as if the flat was her own home, and the next she seemed like a trespasser waiting for the real owner to come back and say that if she didn’t get out the police would be called. Such an idea made the morning interesting. The weather forecast promised dry, but cold.

She spread butter on the remaining pieces of bread, and set it with a mug of black coffee on a tray. There’d have to be shopping done, unless they ate out again, which would be more pleasant than staying among boxes spilling papers and dust all over the place.

He turned from his book as she opened the door. She was convinced he saw a strange woman. He had not even known someone else was in the flat. Distant noises came from underneath. Or she’d been hired to get his breakfast and clean up afterwards. If she had slept in his bed she would have been a slave from an agency with sex thrown in. Better to be mistaken for a servant than a tart. Wouldn’t that be his word? She didn’t care what anybody took her for.

‘This is more than I deserve, or expected.’

She kissed him and passed the coffee. ‘It’s time you got out of bed and faced the day. There’s clearing up to do.’

‘There aren’t any trains to catch.’

When he got up to dress she saw that he wore the golden Star of David found in the box of his mother’s belongings. Hanging at his chest it made him look like a swimmer about to put on his clothes and set off on an arduous dry-land trek. He treasured it like a talisman that would stop bullets or make wounds vanish. But she wanted to hear why he wore it.

‘As far as I could gather, it was the only wish my grandmother, and then my mother, had for me. I’m happy to wear it for them – which also means, of course, that I feel a need to wear it for myself.’

‘It looks good on you,’ she said. ‘I like it.’ He seemed less starkly conventional, more human. She thought that making love would bring them together before beginning the day, but he got into his pants and vest, then sat on the bed to eat breakfast.

‘I intended getting up early, but got lost in what I was doing. It’s part of a sailor’s pride not to turn into the sort of a man who can’t look after himself, though I’ve never known a sailor who said no to being spoiled occasionally.’

‘Well, I’ll do my best not to mummy you,’ she said.

He looked at her, as if the more he knew her the more mysterious she would become. She decided it must be so, because she often looked at him in that way. She didn’t like him ‘weighing her up’ so obviously. She did it to him every moment they were together, which he no doubt found equally objectionable. He must smile inwardly at such times. Yet what did two people do if they weren’t continually judging one another, and trying to find out what the other thought, or forming opinions which they wouldn’t say aloud for fear the other might not like it? The mind raced with words unspoken and unspeakable. More often than not they looked at one another and said nothing, only giving an affectionate smile to signify a truce between their warlike curiosities when they caught each other out but knew they needed to stay friends, which she realized was essential, at any rate for her, while hoping he assumed it was beneficial for him.

The process of his dressing eliminated her thoughts. He put on a white shirt and did up each button beginning from the bottom. Her observation amused him. For order and neatness he took his time. He opened the wardrobe and brought out a pair of grey trousers, held them in both hands, and bent slightly to draw them on, covering the white scar on his lower leg which, he said, had been caused by a piece of shrapnel.

She hadn’t seen a man dress for years. George had done so while she lay half asleep, sitting on the edge of the bed to get his trousers over his knees before standing to pull them to his waist.

Tom fastened his belt. ‘You haven’t told me whether you’re going to give me a hand in sorting out my affairs.’ He pulled his socks on while standing up, then took a pair of brown shoes from under the bed. ‘The offer still stands.’

He probably polished them the night before. ‘I seem to be doing the job already.’

He stood at the mirror, and double-knotted his tie. ‘It’s stupid of me to want the matter all wrapped up. Old habits are still dying too damned hard.’

‘Maybe if they do die there won’t be much left,’ she laughed. ‘You want to be careful!’

She felt herself trembling to kneel and tie his shoelaces. The physical check on going forward needed all her effort, and she coloured at the thought that he might have noticed. He glanced, then sat on the bed to fasten them himself.

‘If I’m to act as your secretary, general factotum, or willing runabout, I suggest we get the boxes you want to save back into the small room, and take the others to the dustbins. Don’t throw anything away that you’ll regret later. You’ve got plenty of storage space.’

The arrangement, with no definable boundaries, had many uncertainties, but after existing so long under the terms of a too rigid contract, such a state satisfied her. She could be everything to him, or nothing, just as she liked. She would have fled from a firmer liaison. The unknown force of any emotional ties would have to be dealt with sooner or later, but the undeniable fact was that she liked him, whether or not he was also laying down snares for her. As long as everything remained uncertain between them she was not afraid.

6

The weather promised dry. They bought picnic food and got on to a bus which took them beyond all buildings and traffic. She hadn’t wanted to be left in the flat while he went to draw cash from his bank, and once in the fresh air he suggested they go on to the Downs and walk.

He held back so that she could come level. The sea was far off when they turned to look, a midday haze over the town. White gulls swooped the woods to their right as if to pounce on food. He liked the sound. They met ships far from land. The noise of gulls from the English coast had a distinctive sound. Their squawk was shriller, more demanding than in other places. They knew their rights, and would see that they got them. English gulls, sure enough – the epitome of the Australians’ ‘wingeing Pom’. But they flew more gracefully, performed more subtle aerobatics, and if enough food weren’t thrown over the side and sent bobbing around in the wake they shot-up the window of the wheelhouse and made the most unholy mess. That was English gulls for you, he said. They picked up their characters from the land they guarded, and from the air they breathed when reconnoitring Romney Marsh or the Sussex cliffs.

He talked all sorts of nonsense, she thought, glad because it saved her saying much. She felt happy at being with him in the winter landscape. From Ditchling Beacon they looked at sheep stippling the steep banks, and the village of Westmeston tucked at the foot of the hill, smoke coming straight up from cottage chimneys. There was a car parked nearby whose occupants had gone walking along the ridge. Inside another car were people eating so that, Pam said, they might just as well have stayed at home to watch the scenery on television. The tinny noise of a radio came from their metal tomb. She put an arm around him: ‘I’m hungry.’

‘For food?’

‘It’s too cold for anything else.’

They ate sandwiches. ‘I haven’t walked so far for a long time.’

‘At sea I used to pace the deck, and in empty moments dream of doing twenty miles a day or more with a rucksack, sleeping in inns or farms, going through Switzerland, or trekking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Probably my feet would pack in after a week, but I liked to think of moving under nobody’s steam but my own. We must do it together.’

Who could blame him for making such a casual suggestion on a day like this? But life was too uncertain for plans, or even the haziest of expectations. ‘Maybe we shall.’

He kissed her, yet found it difficult to reconcile the stern set of her face with the passion that gave it such life when they were in bed. Passing other people, he carried the knowledge of their lovemaking, however distant she seemed by his side. ‘We must eat the cakes,’ he said, ‘if only to lighten the load. Then we should go, because the weather looks like closing in. It doesn’t rain up here. It snows.’

The cold air penetrated to the bone when standing still. The camel-hair coat, as well as scarf, woolly hat, gloves, woollen stockings and lace-up walking shoes seemed flimsy. Occasional beams of sun shone on woods across the narrow road.

After a mile she was warm. He held her gloved hand as they went along. Few cars passed. The gulls’ cries were muted against air threatening to turn into a mist. She felt they were the only two people alive. The land was dark and ungiving, and there was nothing to do but reach the shelter of buildings.

She licked icy drizzle from her lips, tasting salt one minute and soot the next. They stood under a tree to finish the cakes. She folded the plastic bag and put it into her pocket. ‘The weather forecast got it wrong.’

Her heel was sore. When a car passed they stood in the wet grass to avoid getting splashed. By the time the first houses came in sight they were soaked. She inwardly raged because she had succumbed to his suggestion that they come up to this hellish place for a walk. He felt her mood, but couldn’t tell whether her cheeks were wet from tears or raindrops. The misery of one became the wretchedness of the other, but he endured it as he knew she had to. The sky always cleared sooner or later.

They stood a few minutes till a bus drew in and drove them back to town. By now she had conquered her anger, and reminded him that they still had to buy food to take home. The shop was about to close but he put his foot inside, and the bald, thin-lipped, dark-complexioned owner demanded to know what they wanted, because didn’t they realize that even a shopkeeper had a wife and children to go home to? He didn’t think they would forgive him if he were late, but since they looked like a couple who were starving he might relight the showcase under the counter and let them see what was there.

He smiled at last. Did they want ham from Poland, pickles from Hungary, pate from Belgium, cheese from France, black bread from Bradford, sausage from Italy, not to mention olives from Greece and honey from Israel? They spent ten pounds and filled two bags, and went down the dark street as if such food would cure the needle-bites of rain deadening their faces.

Her skirt and shirt were saturated. She shivered, laid their coats over a chair in front of a radiator, and never wanted to go out of doors again. Tom drew the curtains, and gave her a half tumblerful of whisky. She poured most of it back into the bottle, not wanting to be wasteful. ‘Nor do I care to get tipsy.’

He drank. ‘Long life!’

She swallowed the remainder as if it were water.

In the bathroom she turned on the hot tap, and took off her underclothes. Chilblains ached her feet, and gooseflesh showed at the midriff. She found his aunt’s dressing-gown in a cupboard and put it over her damp skin. From the bottles she took a container of bath salts. Steam coated the mirrors and gave a layer of warmth. She carried his dressing-gown from the bedroom. ‘You’ll get your death of cold if you don’t use this.’

He sat down to resume his reading of yesterday. ‘I will, in a moment.’

‘You’ll be no good with pneumonia.’

The heat was painful, her legs and torso turning pink as she let herself into the water. She soaked, adrift in the heat, then soaped herself, mulling on this strange existence in which every day was as long as a month. Tom seemed weird, not because she had met him so recently, or because he was ten years older, but because he had never been through the defining process of marriage. She didn’t know what exactly to expect from him. She hardly knew what to expect from herself. In many ways he was like a youth of eighteen, but with the worldly experience of his proper age, a discrepancy which put her on her guard when she felt herself succumbing too readily to its attractions. She tried not to let such wariness disturb her, because she similarly felt herself to be a young woman again, backed by the protection of her past marriage and middling age.

They were fresh territory for each other, perilous only in that they clung without realizing they did so. What his advantages gave to her she was able to hand back to him, and as long as he knew it, and she sensed that he did, she didn’t feel herself lacking in spirit. She felt easy whenever he was physically close, but out of his sight she was assailed by an embarrassment which would not leave her until she properly knew him. In his presence it did not matter, but she wanted to feel free of such thoughts when away from him.

Nothing mattered. Equality had to be continually considered and, if necessary, untiringly fought for. It was like being sixteen again and meeting someone of the same age for the second time. You worried because you were still too young to know any better. She was surprised at herself. But her thoughts were her own, childish as they might be, and she would deny none. She saw him smiling at her through the steam, but was too drowsy to respond. He put a cup of lemon tea on the broad edge. Wash my back, she wanted to say. He took up the soap, and his smooth hands made her feel large as he wielded the sponge around her. ‘Why don’t you take off your dressing-gown and get in?’

It was a suggestion she had never made before, but she thought there was no point in not occasionally capitulating to whatever came into her mind, and pandering to what the body needed.

In laying the table and setting out food, he still lived alone, inviting her to share whatever he did for himself. At the moment there was no other way. She was glad, and drank the wine he poured. He had swilled the glass, and not dried it properly. A drop of water hung on the outside like a tear, which she pressed away with her fingertip. Perhaps we will stay this way for ever, each mind our own and never to meet, he with his thoughts, me with mine and wondering what his are. But he spoke, whether she could or not, as if he had been brought up to believe that it was impolite not to fill in the silence with conversation.

‘The world doesn’t want us unless we contribute,’ he replied, when she asked if this was so, ‘and I suppose that’s quite right. In company, people like to hear about your work and what you’ve done in your life, or what you intend to do. They’re interested in what you think, and in the places you’ve been to, and any amusing stories attached to them. It all comes out of your work. As long as you have a purpose or an aim in life, you can justify yourself.’

Perhaps the director of the orphanage, or some passing notable who had given the children a lecture, had instilled examples of how to get on in the wide world. Otherwise how could he have known? ‘My grandfather must have been certain that the place would set certain standards,’ he said.

They talked, and finished the bottle of wine. ‘I feel deficient at the thought of your adventurous life. I worked in an office before I was married, though I helped my husband with his business affairs afterwards.’

We’ll go on travels to other places, he wanted to say, but felt it was not the time. She would rightly suspect him of wanting to ensnare her. There’ll be plenty of adventures one day, he would add, though I don’t yet know exactly where. She saw it in his candid and affectionate stare, till she laughed for no reason and turned away.

Talking was easy. Everything was easy for him because he knew how to make it so. With all the inhibitions that might have been created by his upbringing he was not afraid to say what was in his mind. He suggested that this might be because those who had lived alone never found it difficult to chatter away. Not that he minded releasing his thoughts, for what they were worth. All his life he had, as you might say, been a man of action, albeit with little enough for long stretches, and such an occupation had certainly made space for reflection to enter.

They were closer together when they talked than when they made love, but after supper it seemed natural that they should go to bed without discussing the matter. When they were so tired that they could no longer stay awake she walked into the bedroom, and heard him switching out the living-room lights behind her. She lay in bed with her arms around him, listening to the sea’s roar between traffic noises.

7

She said to herself: yes, I want; and: no, I don’t want. So eventually she wanted, and said yes because she hoped to grow through another zone of understanding. You’ll get nowhere sitting in your own room while your life rots like a dead bulb in a flowerpot. She said yes, and could only marvel, full of curiosity at his gladness when he heard her decision to stay with him.

He telephoned a garage and hired a car. ‘I have a lot of luggage to bring from town, but we should get everything out in one go.’

A fat young man with pale woolly hair parked the hire-car on a yellow line and, when giving him the keys, said he had better not delay driving away or a warden would do him with a fine. The blaring radio stopped Tom hearing what was said. The young man hadn’t turned it off because who in this age would want to be deprived of its frantic jingle? When Tom reached in and stopped it the young man looked with half a smile and half a jeer, as if he had expected a tip but now thought he wouldn’t get one.

Tom signed a paper, and gave him a pound.

‘Cheers, Captain!’ Another car waited on the corner to save him walking back to his garage up the road.

Pam came down. ‘The flat’s locked up.’

He turned northwards from Worthing, intending to cut into London from the south-west. She had watched him map his route by compass directions instead of road numbers and the names of towns. Land and water on the earth were reversed. All around England was land, which he knew like the back of his hand, while England itself was a sea he could steer a boat across, in spite of it being filled with rocks, wrecks, shoals and reefs – in the guise of islands, towns, villages and woods.

‘We’ll be on the road all day,’ he grumbled, six cars nose-to-tail in front. The way was narrow and twisting, part bordered by a brick wall and high hedges, as if they were in the bottom of a drained canal. Then one of the cars forked left, the leader stopped for petrol at the next pump, another turned off, one broke down with smoke coming out of its bonnet by the fistful, a Rover overtook the car in front on a straight bit at last, leaving only a final slowcoach which Tom, slotting down to third, drove immediately beyond into clear road. You were eternally blocked by a convoy, and then all opposition melted away! You were free, and at last could do more than forty, except that it would be incautious due to ice on bends and mist that hung from trees in unexpected places. A BMW came up on the starboard bow and shot by on a bend, splattering his windscreen with muddy water. He hadn’t driven for months. ‘I’d feel much safer in a rough old sea.’

She felt secure. He was competent. They were going along the road together, which was all that mattered. She had said yes, and there was no way out. A no could always be made a yes, but a yes was more difficult to alter, in this case because she wasn’t entirely sure what she had said yes to. A well-defined yes by clause and contract could not possibly have been as final. What made it so binding was that she was content with her choice.

Little time had been necessary to agree, and he had made it easy by not mentioning advantages. If there were any, they were unimportant. It was the disadvantages that influenced her. She would no longer have her own room, losing everything she had come to value. She was surrendering, as if that much-desired state had cost her nothing, had gone against all that she had thought best for herself, as if it was her nature to do so.

People with the best intentions would have said she ought never to have left her husband, and they might have been right. She could have said it was foolish to give up her freedom now, but sometimes you had to go counter to your best interests if you wanted movement in your life. Any explanation for her decision was better than that which said she was doing it because she loved him.

It was impossible to tell whether day glowed or night shone. Dull cloud came almost to ground level, and what scared him stiff, he said, as much as he had ever been scared in his life, were those little dark cars coloured like the sky or road which, with only the dimmest of side-lights, seemed to appear out of the mist when he was half-way through an overtaking manoeuvre. Their murderous drivers are so stupid, stingy, or just consumed by the killer instinct with their lights so low, that you would think they were saving money on the slot meter they’d installed for economy’s sake in case they should wear out their bulbs or batteries too quickly. It was as if they had been on a criminal job, and were sneaking home hoping not to be seen, lacking the imagination to realize that they weren’t the only people on the road. They were living in that pristine state of unconsciousness which no amount of persuasion could take from them.

She laughed at his fulminations, but he thanked God for his survival when they crossed Hammersmith Bridge and were threading the last mile of traffic before landfall.

The façade of the house was uneven. Cement had fallen from cracked places, and Pam wondered how much longer it would stay aloft. A note on the shelf inside the hall said: ‘I have a letter for you – Judy.’ When Tom went upstairs, Pam knocked on the door opposite, and heard a shout for her to come in.

The fat-smoke of frying sausages thickened the air. Judy shuffled them in the pan with a spatula and stirred a saucepan of beans with a wooden spoon. Hilary and Sam sat at the table. Judy turned: ‘Back from your honeymoon?’

She smiled. ‘Is that what you call it?’

‘I’ll give you some tea if you sit down. Where’s lover-boy? Sam, open that drawer and get Mrs Hargreaves’ letter, will you?’ She scooped stuff onto three plates, and set them on the table.

‘Can’t find it,’ Sam said.

She pulled him away. ‘Incompetent bloody male! Get your tea, then, and let me look.’

‘You bollocks,’ Sam said, flinching. ‘You’re always on at me, especially when somebody else is in the room.’

He wants a father, but Pam daren’t say it aloud. ‘I’ll come down later. It can’t be that vital.’

Judy began to eat. ‘We had your husband here after you flitted with Tom. He came twice, in fact, then left the letter with me before going back up to Nottingham.’

‘He gave me a pound note for sweets,’ Sam shouted. ‘I like him.’

‘I’m not surprised you packed him in.’ Judy carved bread. ‘I hope your sailor-bloke’s a bit better. I didn’t like George’s mood when he left.’

She wants to start an argument, Pam thought, but felt sorry for her. A half-way sympathetic man would certainly make her happier than she is now. He would have to be strong to deal with the children, and willing to allow her a girl-friend now and again. She supposed that if by any chance he existed, the possibility of them meeting was a long way this side of nil. She put an arm over her shoulder. ‘It was nice in Brighton. Perhaps you’ll come down some time.’ She and Tom would pay their fares, and entertain them for the day. They’d lay on food, or go to the beach for a picnic.

‘I can’t imagine anybody bothering with a gang like us,’ Judy said wearily. ‘If these two go anywhere nice they take the place apart.’

‘Tom will see they don’t.’

‘We’ll go out with George,’ Sam said. ‘He promised to take us somewhere.’

‘To the Waxworks,’ said Hilary.

Judy brought the saucepan to the table for second helpings. ‘Don’t bank on it.’

‘He gave me a pound note as well.’ Hilary held out her plate. ‘Will he come back soon, mum?’

Judy banged the pan in the middle of the table, and raged: ‘Be quiet, both of you, or I’ll throw you into the street.’

Pam recalled how good George could be with children. Edward had adored him, up to the age when he realized that his father was merely living his own childhood again through him. George made it as perfect a childhood as love and money could, but Edward wanted only to be left alone, presumably, Pam thought, because with George anticipating all his desires he found it impossible to know what kind of person he was likely to grow into.

‘Well,’ Sam said, ‘he was nice. He gave you twenty pounds, mum. I saw it on the shelf after he left.’

Judy smacked him across the face, though the blow lacked her usual gusto. ‘I told you to keep your mouth shut about that, didn’t I?’

‘I’ll leave home,’ he said, ‘if you do that again.’

‘I can’t wait.’

Pam felt as if she herself had been struck. ‘You mean he slept with you?’

‘Doesn’t matter to you, does it?’

‘Oh no. Certainly not.’

‘He looked as if he was dying with misery,’ Judy said after a while, ‘so I asked him to share our supper. One thing led to another. He was too upset for me to be of much use, but I managed to soothe him in the end, which is probably why he was so generous. He needn’t have been, for all I cared.’

‘Twenty’s a lot of money,’ Sam said.

Pam had nothing to say except: ‘When did he leave?’

‘Three days ago. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he came back. Men usually do, before they go away for good. They hate you, but can’t leave you alone.’

‘Aren’t all men different?’ Pam asked.

‘Yes, they are. But they’re all the same, as well.’

Pam stood. ‘Burn the letter if you find it. That’s what I’ll do with it, after all.’

Judy took it out of the drawer. ‘You’d better have the bloody thing.’

She put the envelope into her handbag. ‘Thank you for holding it.’

‘No hard feelings?’ Judy seemed miserable, and it wasn’t necessary in the least, Pam thought, saying: ‘No, none, really,’ though finding it difficult to say anything comforting. ‘We’ll be off tomorrow, or the next day at the latest.’

‘Are you sure about going away with Tom?’

‘Absolutely.’

She cleared the table. ‘That doesn’t sound very sure. It’s too definite. See me before you go, though. I’ll want a goodbye kiss and a hug.’

Pam went upstairs thinking how gloomy the place was, but on going into her room felt a tremor of affection for her refuge. She put her bag down and lit the fire, no time between the first hiss and pushing in the match-flame. There was a smell of ice and decaying whitewash. A noise next door caused dread till she remembered who made it. When he put on the radio there was music. The house seemed inhabited and safe. She set a kettle on the stove. Under her happiness was an apprehension that she could not explain. There was no reason, which made it worse. She breathed deeply and became calm, yet the anxiety persisted.

She took George’s letter from her handbag, and began to read. ‘You are a prostitute, and I’ll get my own back for all you’ve done to me. I hung around waiting to see you, but you had gone off with that bastard, whoever he is. I spotted you, and you wouldn’t look at me, but I’ll get you for it, doing it on me after all I’ve done for you, and looked after you all these years. You don’t know right from wrong, or you went off your head, I don’t know which. Or you just wanted to lead a life that you’d hankered for all your life. Or maybe you’d been doing it before you left, while I was at work. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t, would I? How could I? But I do ask myself why we had to be married twenty years before you show your true colours. I can’t think why, and I wonder if you can. I do know though that if you want to come back you can, and I’ll forget all about what you have done to me. I love you, you know that, and always shall. I always did, didn’t I? I only want to live with you because life’s not worth living without you. I don’t know why, but it isn’t. I haven’t told Ted (Edward) yet that you’ve left me, but I said you had gone to stay for a time in London. So when you come back he’ll never know you’ve been away. I wouldn’t like him to, even though he is nineteen now. He won’t think much of me if he gets to know. So if you come back it’ll be the same as it was, except I’ll take you out more. There’s a new nightclub just opened down town, and we can go there. Business is good at the moment, I don’t know why because it doesn’t seem good everywhere else. I’ve got a new secretary and she’s a real worker and looks after things fine. So how about it? If you give me a ring I’ll be down to fetch you, or you can come up on the train if you like. I don’t mind. You always did as you liked. I can’t wait to see you again. It seems years, but it’s not much more than a couple of months. You’d do well to come back though, I’m telling you, because if you don’t you’ll be leading the sort of life that’ll do you in, because I know you, and when it does don’t come crawling back to me. That’s why I say you’d better come now, because that’d be best, and try to make up for all you’ve done, because if you don’t I’ll give you no peace. I want you back, I know that, and you know it, and if you don’t you ought to, so you have got to come, and if you don’t, me and my brothers will come and give you a good talking to, and you know what that means. And if we see that bloke of yours he won’t be much to look at after we have finished with him. He can’t do what he’s doing to our family and get away with it. He’s playing with fire doing what he’s doing to us, so if you’ve got any sense and don’t want anything to happen to you or him you’ll pack up and get the next train north, and if you’ll phone me beforehand I’ll be at the station in the car to meet you. Believe me, it’ll be the greatest day of my life because I love you and have never loved anybody else, and never shall. So pack up and come back to me, there’s a good girl. I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll never love anybody else. Love. Love. Love. George.’

The paper shook. Better to have followed her instinct and burned it. She understood why Tom had wanted to do the same with his trash. George would not accept that there was no going back, nor know that she did not live in his world anymore.

She shivered from cold. His letter paralysed her spirit. Anguish set her trembling because he was part of a trap from which escape was impossible. She had gone from him, but his refusal to realize just how far terrified her. The singlemindedness that had set him up in business was now beamed on her, threatening to pull her back into his tyranny and madness. His hungering drive would last for ever. She didn’t know where to go. She was her own free self, but he would drive her from any safe place.

She took a carving knife out of the drawer, and ran her finger along the blade too lightly to cut the skin. It would thrust itself into her. She was afraid, and put it back, intending to throw the vile thing away, or give it to Judy with other belongings that she wouldn’t take with her. She would deal with George without a knife. The shriek of the kettle startled her back to the life she had forgotten. Music on the other side of the wall reminded her. They would start getting their few things together, and be away by tomorrow. She dreaded any unexpected delays.

She made two cups of tea and took them to his room. He leaned over a sheet of paper, still wearing his overcoat and hat. She wasn’t sure he had heard her. His pen shaped a black curve to join a half-line of dots and angles, symbols fixed as if they had been cut out with scissors and stuck there.

‘Keeps me warm,’ he said, ‘coming into a freezing room. It seemed natural to light the stove, draw the curtains, and copy a sentence as if I wanted to send a letter to my mother or my grandmother. Maybe I’m writing to myself. It’s like learning for the first time, straight from the heart.’

She stood and watched. ‘What does it mean?’

He read the translation. ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us in life, and has preserved us, and has enabled us to reach this season.’

‘Beautiful.’ Her hand was on his shoulder for comfort. ‘We want a new life, and a new way of seeing things – or a new way of looking at the old things that gives them fresh warmth and love.’ She had felt it for as long as she could remember, but had never told herself until now.

He pushed the papers aside, and returned the pen to his pocket. ‘You’re part of these letters because you persuaded me to search that roomful of stuff, when I really was about to throw it out. You began the process that can’t be reversed, so I never want to be away from you.’

She kissed his hands. ‘They write such beautiful letters!’

‘I saw a page of manuscript on parchment that shines and dazzles,’ he told her, ‘which must have taken weeks to copy. When I was in the orphanage we had to read the Bible every day. For years I didn’t like the sections dealing with a man who was said to have died on a cross for my sins. I couldn’t believe that such an event could have anything to do with me. Somebody had got it all wrong, I thought. My sins are my own, such as they might be, and God will either forgive them or he won’t. But it’s up to God, not the man who was killed by the Romans on a cross – a piece of barbarism of which the twentieth century has more examples than any other. I could believe in God, and those parts of the Bible which weren’t about Jesus. It seemed that God had already had a lot to do with my life, if things had any explanation at all. The so-called Old Testament stories made sense. I had a good memory and learned whole chapters, though I later forgot them. In the navy I hardly opened the Bible, except in some hotel when I might – if I was sober – read a few verses before going to sleep. Later I carried one with me from ship to ship, until somebody walked off with it. It’s strange to realize that much of it was written in the script I’m learning to write, and that one of the books which came from my mother is the first five books of the Bible in Hebrew.’

‘They’re part of you,’ she said.

She sat opposite, did not care to say anything without thinking first. It was no use blurting the words so as to save the anguish of a decision. Those days must surely be over. She must trust herself to say whatever came to her, otherwise there was no way of knowing whether the thought was false or not. She had surfaced after a life under water, and felt the miasma of self-deception clearing. If what she said meant nothing to him, then her words were at least justified by what was in her heart.

They had seemed more united in his aunt’s flat, together but without that seriousness which, in the cold rooms of this half-way house, pushed them apart. She no longer pertained to herself. Nor did he belong to himself. Neither were they primarily attached to each other. Yet even to think so implied a more than possible unity. They belonged to this world but were detached from it, though only by such feelings of separation could the real connection ultimately be made. It had to start somewhere. ‘I’m in love with you,’ she said simply.

He couldn’t tell her that he had never heard a woman say so before, but was silent with a silence that was also part of her, just as she thought that her silence must by now belong to him. He shook himself, as if he had been asleep. His eyes showed an exhausted spirit, that seemed to have received an unendurable shock. She had said that she loved him, and he tried to smile, wondering when she would say it again.

8

She was in a wood but sunlight flowed between black-and-yellow trunks, smooth and tall with no leaves or branches visible. Her head wouldn’t turn upwards to look. There were bushes and flowers, and gnarled roots half covered with soil that hindered her walk. Sleep showed as if through a window. Her dream, packed on to the head of a pin before it pricked and woke her, kept out the cold. The sunlight was still hot between the trees, and something was about to happen. She stroked one of the trunks, and caressed the mark of its Hebrew letter. Her tongue went forward, and a root at her foot became a cat which nudged her ankle and leapt up the tree before she could touch. She walked a straight line between trees till sunlight drew off, and darkness came. A muffled bang sounded far away as she was climbing, an easy ascent to follow the light, going towards the inside of an umbrella that had a hole where the centre should have been, floating weightlessly up the inner funnel of a parachute without any thought for the earth, arms and fingers straight above her head so that she could steer through and into a light that would last for ever.

A noise deepened into thunder and tore her eyes open. A mass from the outside world threw itself at her. She sat up. Light came through curtain slits.

‘Open the fucking door.’

She hurriedly put on shirt and slacks, buttoning and zipping. Her fingers wouldn’t work. She felt sick, and choked back her dread. ‘Go away.’

A piece of paper had been pushed in as if it might save her life. She snatched at it. ‘Gone out for a while.’ George must have watched him leave.

‘Let me in, you whore.’

‘I’ll see you downstairs, at Judy’s.’ I won’t see you. Keep out of my life. I’m finished with you. She shouted, but he banged at the panels, then ran at the door with his broad shoulders, shot latch, lock and bolt apart, and was in the room.

She would not let him see her terror. ‘I told you: I’d meet you downstairs.’

He had grown stouter, as if in the habit of boozing heavily. He trembled as he leaned against the doorway. ‘Pack your things. I’ve got the car outside.’

Say something, but don’t argue. And say it quietly. He was strong and agile, but his skin was blotched. He was grieved, and full of violence. ‘I’ve only just got out of bed. You woke me up. If you’d let me know you were coming we could have met somewhere and talked things over properly.’

The clock said nine. He had set out in darkness, full of energy and purpose, see-sawed with love and loathing, till loathing got the upper hand, as it always did. His eyes had hardened during the long stare of a hundred and forty miles of road, impacted by tar and dazzling light thrown back.

‘Pack your stuff. We’ll talk in the car.’ He looked around the room. ‘It wain’t take long.’

She stood with hands together to stop them shaking. The only way to evade him was to die, or pray for his instant obliteration. She remembered that for the first time in her life there was something to live for.

He moved closer. ‘I ain’t got much time. The lads came down with me. We’re to be back at work today. There’s no time to waste.’ His fist banged down and tipped her clock, as if angry that she looked at it and not him. His previously contained insanity was erupting. There was no one else in the world but himself, and the person that he wanted to control – which is me, she thought. No will or object could stand in his way, certainly not an instrument for the marking of time.

In such a way he had been insane since she first met him, and she must have known it, and been ensnared because his maniacal sense of possession had left her with no possibility of refusing whatever he wanted. Her presence during their marriage had kept him on the proper side of normal life. And if much of the time she had seemed out of her mind herself, it was only because she was taking the madness from him so that he could function properly. She would have no more of that.

He pulled at her. ‘You will get in the car, if I have to kick you in.’

She looked around.

‘He won’t help you.’

He had been drinking, kept a bottle in the glove-box. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Alf, Harry and Bert are waiting downstairs for that git. Our family stands together, you should know that. Twenty quid each, and extra for petrol. A good day’s pay, but they stick by me, all the same.’

To pack was easy, and then to unpack. ‘Let go of my arm.’ He had worked out his plan, so there was no one to help. ‘I don’t want to come with you.’

‘You will, though, let me tell you.’

She opened the drawer. One thrust, and she was up for murder. No one would believe her. He attacked me. Where are your marks? ‘And what are you going to do when we get to Nottingham? Do you have a room with bars at the window?’

‘Ah, no, duck.’ His mood altered. ‘Once you’re back home, and you see how nice it is, you’ll be your old self again. It’s warm and clean up there, not like this freezing pigsty. You’ll be as right as rain.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had breakfast yet,’ she said.

He sat down, resting on his knees, looking more alone than he could have thought it possible to be. ‘We was up at four. I’ve given them two days pay – double time – and a bonus after we’ve got you back home. This little lot’s costing me nearly two hundred. So just get packing, or I’ll block your throat with your teeth.’

‘It’s a lot of money,’ she said, ‘just to get me home.’

His brothers had fed him the filth. ‘It ain’t right for her to do it on you like this, George, after all you’ve done for her. I’ll bet she’s having a real old carry-on down in London. God knows what she’s up to, but she’s finding plenty to keep her busy. A woman can allus find a man down there when she wants to. Thinks she can get a lot more from him than she can get from her husband. I expect she can, as well. You was never one for giving her a lot of that, was you, George? Too busy at your factory, though we can’t blame you for that. I suppose she even cracks jokes about you to her new bloke. Wouldn’t be surprised, I wouldn’t. If I was you I’d go down and give her a bloody good pasting. Bring her to her senses. Get her back home for a dose of you-know-what. That’s all they want. If Mavis played the same stunt on me I’d give her such a smack in the chops she wouldn’t wake up for a week. She’d be as right as rain, then. That’s what you ought to do with your Pam. Do you both a lot of good. We’ll help you to find her and get her back, wain’t we, lads? Mind you, we’ve got a few jobs on at the moment and time’s money, ain’t it, George? You’re allus saying so, but we know you’ll make it right with us if we give you a hand. After all, brothers have to stand by one another.’

He threaded the fingers of both hands together, so that a whole series of cracks ran along the knuckles. ‘I can’t wait much longer.’

She dodged as he tried to grab. ‘I’ll come in my own time.’

Terrorist force was on his side, his unreal calculations taking account only of himself. He lived in the vacuum of his own needs, which admitted nobody else’s because he thought his desires were also the world’s. His clenched fist flashed at her face. ‘You’ll come now.’

He was quick, and the room was small, but she avoided all but the close-winded rush. She had nowhere to go. The refuge that had taken weeks to construct had turned into the perfect trap. ‘I’m not going by force.’

She spoke whatever words would stall him from one moment to the next, but despised herself for uttering such phrases of surrender before the threat of his fists. His eyes, and the brain behind them, assumed she belonged to him because he was stronger, and that she had no life of her own.

He stood back, as if he had won round one, and could afford to wait. ‘Take your time. Have a few minutes if you like. I don’t want to rush you.’

She was wary. He closed the door. She wouldn’t get it open in time if she ran. Tom had no doubt been waylaid by his brothers. Three to one was their style.

He lit a cigarette. ‘Want one?’

She shook her head.

He acted like a friend, but was not very good at it. He smiled. ‘Go on,’ and held the packet towards her.

‘No thank you.’

She put a suitcase on the table. She should have accepted the cigarette. Lull him. She took a dress from the wardrobe, and walked to fold it in the light of the window which gave a view up and down the street. Tom wasn’t in sight, but neither were the others. George’s car was in a meter-bay a hundred yards away. Maybe he had only put enough money in for an hour, and wanted her out quickly because he didn’t care to overstay his time. Like most ambitious men who lived in their own small area he was law-abiding, for while he had the born energy and skill to do his job well he did not have the ingenuity to break the law and feel confident that he would never get caught, especially in London. Nor did he have the necessary panache to bend the regulations and not care whether he was found out. Therefore he had put in enough money for the maximum of two hours in case something went wrong.

‘I must get some fresh air into the room after sleeping in it all night.’ She opened the window. Impossible to jump before he grabbed her. His hands twitched, as if afraid she might try. Perhaps he wouldn’t care. If she flashed out of his sight it would make a respectable end to his troubles. Or he would hire someone to push her around in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the room does pong. You must have been drinking. You never did booze, though. The odd shandy now and again. But I expect you’re on the hard stuff every night, with the sort of company you keep.’

He looked wretched again, and threatening. A real woman would have sympathized with his suffering – and been destroyed. But she wouldn’t. He could plead as much as he liked. Every word he spoke ate into his self-esteem. Then he became quiet. She too had better say nothing. Yet silence could only mean surrender. He called the tune. The leader led, but where did he take you? You didn’t follow. So he was no longer a leader. But the rules he made her live by were so deep in him that he wasn’t even aware that they existed. Lucky man. All men were lucky – though they might not know it – by much more than a head start. Yet it was best not to think so, because that too was only part of their unspoken rules and the effect they had on you. How could you be yourself, or know yourself, if you were under that kind of domination? You didn’t follow. You did anything but follow. A man with no one to follow him was finished. He was beaten. You just did not follow.

He smiled at her silence. Won again. He didn’t even need to say it. The damp air that came coldly in might stir her sufficiently to think properly and find a way out of her peril. Still holding the dress, she went to the chest of drawers. ‘I don’t drink half as much as you imagine. I can’t take it. Do you remember when we went to that club? I had, two small gins, and was ill when I got home. All I drink is a glass of wine, and then only with a meal.’

Using her dress as a cover she opened the drawer and gripped the knife in her right hand. There was no other way. The more she spoke the more silent and depressed he became. He pulled back into the bleak spaces inside, his familiar manoeuvre being to retreat with set mouth and glazed eyes, and surround himself with a broken-glass zone of resentment that could only be entered by those who admitted to being the cause of his distress, even if they weren’t. It was a trick he had often used, of blaming her for the dark moods that would occasionally envelop him for no reason. She was long used to his expressions. To comfort him was to accept the blame for the way he felt, and not to comfort him was to be blamed because her very presence made him feel worse. It was as if she were back home already. Futile emotional competition once more enmeshed them. Her months of freedom vanished in a moment.

Air from the open window pushed at the small of her back. Her face burned but her body stayed cold. The dress fell to the floor and she held the knife in front. She knew him too well not to love him, but it was the love of pity, not the love between equal human beings. Despair pierced her so sharply that she lunged.

He leapt from his chair and staggered away. The point tore his coat. What she needed to tell him fused into a mass and would not be said. There was nothing to say any more. If he wanted so crucially to lead anyone, let him lead that remnant of himself which might yet redeem him as the good person he could well be in some unreachable part of himself. He saw clearly what she demanded from him, but he would not do it. She lifted the knife again.

He stared at the razorsharp blade in the hope perhaps that she would stare back long enough to be hypnotized into losing her determination. His lips were about to say something. He would try to argue, but if she replied with words it would weaken her stance. Words were finished. When in his presence they seared her too painfully.

He darted, speedy as a cat, to grab her arm. She stood aside and brought the knife against his hand. He squealed. It was real. He went back to the door, afraid to turn and open it in case the knife burned into his back. He held his wrist high, and blood came from an opening cut. The insanity was in her own eyes, and she prayed he would leave. But she would neither ask nor order. He had to go without words. Words were finished.

She flexed her body. He saw the movement. His cry suffused him with shame at having to plead, but it was a shame which gave him courage to stay where he was. He would fight for his life. He shifted as if to come forward, but it was hopeless because he could no longer take her by surprise. He noted her knuckles whiten at the grip, and her left hand come out as if to give a firm balance.

His smile was a sign of wanting to placate her, almost of surrender, and stopped her hand lifting for its final drive. His features, bunched like a baby’s about to weep at some primal disappointment, caused her to brace herself for a sly attack. His life was saved. She lowered the knife, but lifted it not quite so high. She hadn’t lived with him twenty years for nothing. No sudden attack was possible, because the gleam of the blade was sharper than any eye.

There was a rattle at the door. Inside or out, she didn’t know. His unwounded hand clutched the knob. He didn’t want to go, needed to speak, to plead, to get the knife clear and batter her to death. She watched the flicker of his eyelids when he tried to look directly at her. He wasn’t able to, as if he would go blind should he succeed. His hand motioned for peace, while his head was fixed at an angle that only allowed him to see the floor.

Her terror was in abeyance while she waited. However abject, he could leap like a tiger, but the cold air kept her alert, and if he ran she would kill. He wouldn’t force her. She would force him. The rattling of the door knob was to distract her. His eyes looked up, and she swung the knife.

The sleeve of his suit was soaked. The twitch of his face and the sway of her knife came out of the same impulse. An ache pained him. His eyes pleaded for her to speak. Any words from her would have been balm, but she couldn’t trust him. Trust also was finished. It was an all-or-nothing game, and she hoped to die rather than have it go on by his rules.

She knew what he wanted. Her whole being told her to soothe him with a few words so that he would go away as a human being and not some animal set on revenge for his humiliation. That too was another of his tricks, and she wouldn’t let it take her over. He would lead her no more. Everything that would be to his advantage contained disaster for her. She must stand where she was and stay alert, eyes never ceasing to look in his direction no matter what the effort.

He made croaking sounds, held up his arm and patted the patch where it was wet. She stepped towards the window-sill till the wall was close. She found it hard to prevent her hands laying down the knife, or letting it fall out of the window, or rushing at him in an unstoppable fury and thrusting the blade again and again into his body till she crumbled under a final desertion of strength. Either course seemed overwhelmingly desirable. It was harder to stay silent and ready. The uncertainty of each second was impossible to bear.

The unexpected touch of the sill at her back was a signal. All air seemed ripped out, either as if she would faint, or as if she had infinitely more strength than she knew what to do with. She advanced towards him with unmistakable intention.

He opened the door and ran.

She shouted at the top of the stairs for him never to come back. The front door slammed, shaking the balustrade.

She gripped with both hands. The knife, hurled after him, had clattered on to the landing below. She went down to pick it up, thinking to run on to the street and shriek so that he would know he had reduced her to the lowest common factor of his imagination as far as women were concerned. This couldn’t be the end. Wanting to kill, she was still part of him, and so needed more than ever to destroy him.

After picking up the knife, she stopped. If she maimed or murdered she would be part of him for ever. She felt only humiliation and sickness. If she killed him she would not be part of him. It was a lie.

9

With trembling hands she laid the knife in the drawer. Looking in the mirror, there was nothing new in her face except fear. She leaned against the glass and cooled her forehead. She forced a smile, but tears were falling. The grimace mocked her. Setting the clock upright, she saw that only twenty minutes had gone by since her dream had been riven by his banging at the door. She wiped the tears angrily, and felt jubilant.

But she curbed her exultation. It was unworthy, a madness too similar to his. There was much still to be considered. The fight was only half done. It would never be done. She didn’t know where they were.

His car was still in the parking bay. She closed the window. Why hadn’t he gone? A middle-aged woman walked with a dog along the street. Low clouds were about to spill rain from a darkening sky. A man in the distance already wore his umbrella, and a car went by with small lights on and wipers going. They’ll have a rough trip home. She cursed the motorway that put them only two hours from London. It used to take at least double, coming through all towns en route. Maybe he wouldn’t be so ready another time. He would bandage his cut by using the first-aid kit in the car, nursing the ache every mile north. One of the others would no doubt drive, if he was conscientious about earning his fee. What year did they imagine they were living in, to think they would get her back with them? Their Neanderthal bellies still thrived on the Wars of the Roses. In this day and age you had to fight with a knife to beat them off. She could hardly believe what had happened.

The door would not lock, but she closed it to begin packing. The sooner she fled the better. She should get properly dressed, go out, and walk back and forth by the police station. But even that might not do any good. She had to live without safety. At least in Clara’s flat there was the obstacle of London to deter them from a quick foray. She washed her tears at the sink, unwilling to let them turn her into the animal they wanted her to be. There was no need to despair, she said, looking into her long mirror.

The window tempted her again, but she was afraid of being seen. She looked, and saw their car had gone. Conscious of victory, she felt proud of having got rid of them by herself. Tom would be back, but there’d be no need to mention her struggle, since both she and he would soon be in a place where such struggles would not occur.

She packed shoes and dresses, folded skirts, blouses and underwear into her case. How many more times would she do it? The oftener the better. It didn’t take long. Say goodbye to Judy, wedge their things into the car, then go to the estate agent’s to settle the rent. The picture was clean and beautiful. They would drive away. Let the rain come. There would be occasional sunshine from now on. Didn’t expect it. Didn’t care. A thunderous noise sounded on the stairs.

The door banged against the wall. All four were in the room. She cried: cunning bastards. But she spoke quietly. ‘Get out, or I’ll call the police.’

Alf took her case and was off with it downstairs. George threw her coat into her face. ‘Wrap this round you.’ He smiled: the leader had won. ‘Come on, you’ll need it.’

When she refused he crammed it under his arm, and sent two driving blows, one into her ribs and the other at the side of her head that flung her against the wall. No messing this time. She freed herself from one of the scarves that decorated it.

Harry and Bert pinned her arms. It was no dream. They pulled her out of the room. She kicked till Bert fell at the wall to nurse his bruise. Her shoe had flown with him. From the top of the stairs she screamed for Judy, her voice like a noise that rushed out at her from another door. George snarled. ‘She isn’t in. Gone to get her National Assistance, I expect.’

They had waited downstairs, impatiently smoking their fags to the stub while George made his first attempt. You didn’t bring her? Why, you dozy bastard! You’re as soft as shit, George. She had a knife? They laughed all over the pavement. And you let that stop you? Bleddy ’ell! Do you want to get her back, or don’t you? Don’t cry about it. She ain’t worth it. You do? Come on, then, there’ll be no pissin’ about this time. After all, George, this trip’s costing you a bomb. You might as well get summat out of it, even if it’s only a bit of you-know-what!

Harry alone was left to help him pull at her, and she struck his face with her clenched fist. She’d never hit anyone in her life before. He must have got out of bed too early to shave that morning. ‘For God’s sake give us a hand,’ he called, as his own hand slipped from her. He stumbled half down the first flight and continued on his way. She kicked again, but a blow landed at her face that sent her back through the doorway into her room.

She leapt at the chest of drawers. When George clutched her from behind she kept her grip on the knobs. His wrench was tigerish, an effort which pulled the drawer open for her, so that she took the knife and swung towards him. He let go. All three were back, and then at various points of the landing.

‘You don’t need to use that,’ Bert wheedled. ‘Does she, our George?’

She tore Alf’s suit at the lapel. Thinking she had stabbed him, he struck at her face. The wall spun and she was on the floor, still gripping the knife. She kept her eyes closed against the stained carpet, and waited for her chance. A shoe stamped on her wrist, the pain grinding all breath away. She held to the dark as if it were a big foul blanket to crawl under. It comforted but did not strengthen her. She felt herself going, but did not know where. Someone kicked her. Two yellow sparks came together from opposite ends of darkness, then shot apart, and slowly moved towards each other, over and over, forcing her into a tunnel without even a pinpoint of light at the end.

A voice was toned with rough animal-like anger at the fact that they were too long at their simple job. She dimly noted the manner of subdued rage at their stupidity in not being fit to do something which the power behind such a voice obviously would be able to accomplish with no bother at all. She had given in. There was only silence and stillness left in her. She forced back her sobs, all future existence dependent on what pride she could muster. It was the only force she could draw on. Years of dust scraped her face, the detritus of centuries. When the foot ceased to crush her wrist she waited for the last blow to descend, hoping there would be nothing more in life to come.

‘What’s going on?’ The words were distinct, not violent or loud, though they had a promise of becoming so. The voice kept her alive, free of final darkness, not from hope of salvation but out of curiosity, for it seemed hardly human, rang up and down the stairs in a sort of commanding bark that she had only ever heard from someone talking to a pack of dogs. She trembled with dread, but would not move, even if he killed her.

‘She took a knife to us,’ Alf said.

A dizziness faded into and then away from her. Why should he apologize? she wondered, as she battled against the sensation of fainting.

‘Shut your mouth, or I’ll take my boot to you.’ The same voice, an island unto itself, seemed to come out of the roof, with a stridency that had little to lose and nothing on earth at least to be afraid of. The dominating ugliness struck even her in the face, a voice accustomed to making itself heard, understood and obeyed against the noise of engines or the elements, or both – not, perhaps, the voice to command from the throne of absolute authority, but that of someone expounding the law of good behaviour which had been passed on to him. He was finding it no easy task, but in a crisis there was nothing else to rely on, and because the odds were so much against him the transference had to succeed. ‘What are you doing here? There’s eighteen months inside waiting for the lot of you.’

‘It’s none of your business,’ Alf shouted. ‘She’s our brother’s wife, and she’s coming back to Nottingham with us, where she belongs.’

George threw her coat on the floor. ‘It’s no bleddy use. Let’s clear off.’

She looked, and listened, and waited for the ability to get on her feet. He was holding her suitcase as if it were weighted with iron, and he would swing it against them. His reddening face seemed about to burst with a rage she could never have mustered in herself no matter what they did, and that she thought was containable in no human being. She had not known him before. His head was held back, as if to see above any level they would reach.

‘Let them go away,’ she said.

‘Not likely.’ He put her suitcase by the wall, seeing Bert making signs to push against him. ‘Keep back, sailor!’ he shouted in the voice she hoped never to hear again.

‘Fuck off!’

His knees lifted, and the sharp smack of bone against Bert’s face was followed by a colder thump. Bert was taller, and Tom fell grunting with two dull blows at the cheek, but he recovered, and boxed, and edged himself around, and suddenly Bert was heeling down the stairs. George sidled by, and was out of sight. She couldn’t tell how it happened, pressed herself in a corner to stay clear.

He maintained his attitude of defence, knowing that Alf would try to avenge his brother. Because there was something funny and pathetic about his two fists, which seemed childishly deployed, she wanted to laugh – despite her tears and the sharp aches. His fists would shield him, and her, from the world threatening to burst through their puny guard. She couldn’t laugh. But there was something comical in being defended.

Alf made one last savage attack, but it ended in a circular kind of scuffling around the landing, occasional jabs going out from both. The skirmish seemed to go on for ever. When she looked it was to see Alf go sideways across Tom and follow a pathway down the stairs.

Tom pursued them below the first landing. ‘If you come here again, I’ll break you in pieces!’

He breathed as if an engine were locked inside, a weird and distressing effect when he tried to smile. He seemed far away from himself, and separated from her by the agony of breathlessness and pain. The front door slammed, and he walked cautiously down to make sure they were on the right side of it, pressing himself close to the wall on one flight, and against the banister on the next. She supposed he had done such manoeuvres often to be so adept in them.

They had swung at his shopping bag on the way by, all of it spilled and scattered. He thought it cheap at the price. Half a dozen cardboard boxes telescoped into one, which he had brought from the supermarket to serve as containers for their belongings, stood by the door, hardly damaged by their boots in the hurry to get out.

10

She stood in her room, unable to move. Her will had gone. If she sat or lay down she would never get up. She would die, because this was no kind of life. Neither her imagination nor her pessimism had envisaged direct assault. A person could not be secure with such people loose, who felt she belonged to them like a slave to be taken back into bondage.

She didn’t, and never had. Never would. She was not connected to them in any way, but they would have killed her rather than let her stay free. He spoke, in his familiar and soothing voice. ‘Come into my room, and let’s have a look at you.’

‘Leave me alone. I feel wrecked.’

He put his arm around her. ‘You’ll be all right.’

What did he know about it? Her stomach was made of iron when she pressed her fist there. But she went with him. He brought a bowl of water, and washed her face while she sat in the armchair. The rancorous note of his authority was still apparent. ‘If I telephone the police they’ll catch them going up the motorway.’

‘Leave them.’ She was unable to stop her hands shaking. ‘I’m not really hurt.’

His face was also bruised, the lower lip cut. ‘They’re a rough lot. But you’re a bit of a fighter yourself, to hold them off so well. You just left me with the mopping-up!’

‘I didn’t think I could do anything.’

He took two pieces of cotton wool soaked in cool liquid, and held them to her bruises. ‘You never know what you’re like till you get pushed against a wall. But I’m sorry I took so long over my business. When I came back and saw this type coming out of the house with your suitcase I thought he’d rifled our belongings. He gave me some talk, so I put in two quick ones and got him to tell me what was going on. For all I knew, your life was at stake. It certainly sounded like it as I came up the stairs. You get rough lots at sea, even these days, so it wasn’t a new situation for me. There’s often no hard feelings afterwards, though I didn’t like the look of that gang.’

‘It had to happen, but that part of my life is finished. If I was in any doubt about it I couldn’t go on living.’

The pain of her weeping doubled itself in him. Such an incident could brush anyone. He had known rather more of the world in that respect than she had, but decided that, since it was now up to him, she really had seen the last of them. ‘We’ll be away by this evening. I went to the estate agent’s and settled everything. We’re to leave the keys with Judy.’

‘I could have paid my own account.’

‘I did it to save time. All that’s left is to hump our belongings on to the pavement and load the car. It’ll be like quitting a wharf we’ve been tied up to for too long.’

She couldn’t stay, yet didn’t want to go. Every move was a bad dream. She had agreed, and the idea thrilled her, but her one-time family had spoiled her with dread where before she had been optimistic. She felt unable to eliminate such gall from her soul. It was impossible to imagine the kind of freedom from them that she craved. But the gorge rose as if to vomit them out even against her will. It was a matter of time. She would not let them blight her spirit.

She padded the corners of the case with underwear and socks, and folded his uniform while he emptied the cupboards. ‘We must leave things ship-shape, though Judy said she would give a final sweep in exchange for whatever goods we won’t be taking.’

He put half a dozen out-of-date Pilot Books in a box, and protected his deckwatch and sextant with newspapers. His short-wave radio was placed by the door. There was a record-player, suitcase, roll of charts, and a kitbag of oddments – the tools and toys that had gone all over the world, moved by ship, rickshaw, taxi and human back, belongings as much part of him as his own fingertips.

There was no hurry, he said. It was best that way. She still wasn’t fit. He topped whisky with water and gave it her to drink. He sipped from the flask. They smoked and talked. He took off his jacket and unloaded the shopping, cutting away damp bread where the eggs had broken. He set things on the table and they sat down to eat. She felt better. The stove kept them warm. ‘I’ll leave it for Judy,’ he said, ‘and five gallons of paraffin in the cupboard.’

She was in pain on trying to smile. ‘With so many things she’ll open a junk stall on the Portobello Road. It’ll make her a pound or two.’

They cleared away the meal and finished at the sink. All his life he had moved. He still hadn’t stopped. But she was about to begin. After such a send-off by George and his brothers it was impossible to imagine the future. She was exultant from the whisky, but fought to stay calm and not show tears. Men hated to see women in tears, she thought, though not more than she hated them in herself. She had struggled for her life, and won. Even without Tom they wouldn’t have taken her. Because it was her victory she could go with him and feel safe, as much out of her own will as because she was in love. Funny sort of love. But it was all she was left with.

Neither knew where it would end, and that also made the prospect acceptable when all through her life there had either been nowhere to think of going, or a straight road on which it would be intolerable to travel. She did not feel that he would be hard to know, or that to fathom him would lead her to a lake of pitch from which there would be no escape. It did not matter whether or not she got to know him. He was not difficult to be with, so it didn’t seem important. The fever of wanting to know a man in order to find out whether he loved you or not, or whether you loved him, was a sure way of destroying any love that existed, or cauterizing any regard out of which love could grow. She had learned her lesson, reflecting that it had taken her long enough – if it actually turned out that she had.

In some ways he was foreign to her, though she couldn’t say exactly how or why. Didn’t want to. She was also a foreigner to him, she didn’t wonder, and a foreigner even to herself much of the time, which was maybe why she had been able to stay alive through much of her past existence. She hoped she would continue to, no matter what happened between them. She flattered herself, she said, in imagining that she could be a foreigner to anybody apart from herself, but no doubt she might be, at her time of life and with the foibles that had surfaced after abandoning her funny marriage. That she felt like a foreigner to all and sundry seemed the first good fact about herself and their relationship. It thinned the emotions, gave them less importance when in operation. Not being ‘made for each other’ meant there were sufficient novelties of behaviour for affection to fasten on without generating painful antagonisms. Because they were not familiar by temperament and background everything had to be said before the meaning was clear, and so only those meanings were made plain that clarity considered absolutely necessary. So they could be almost uncaring, a mood in which all revelations would come, if they must, in their allotted time.

Because they felt foreign to each other she sensed that it still might be possible to love and yet keep their separate identities. Many couples who lived together for a long time took on the worst traits of the other (and in her case she blamed herself as much as George) and so could not help but enter a battlefield from which neither could get free, an inbred fight in which, the longer it went on, the more impossible it was to call a truce or separate. Two people with common frontiers should cross them with circumspection, or by invitation only.

They talked well into the afternoon, as if unwilling to leave such a haven before emptying their minds of what thoughts it had bred in them. A conversation with long silences went on till she could no longer sit up, and the walls swayed towards her.

She lay on his bed, and was immediately asleep. He pulled up a chair and sat as if to guard her, knowing that they would need the whole world’s space before their spirits could be contained. He looked at her relaxed face, which seemed younger than before her experience of the morning. He would provide space, but the word, as he observed while putting her hands under the blanket so that they would not get cold, had no precise meaning except in the picture of a blue ocean and a white sky that were empty for as far as the eye could see, but about to be filled by the first star of the morning.

11

A warm spring wind from the sea ruffled the curtains. He had drawn a six-pointed star on a sheet of cartridge paper, using a red biro and a long ruler, one triangle superimposed on the other so that all six points became small triangles of equal area.

From each point he ran a green line to the centre, and pondered on the diagram. Counting the indentations between the points, twelve directions could be marked off. Aristotle was said to have suggested a circle of twelve winds. The six-pointed star was the Star of David, the Magen David of the Hebrews, the Jewish Star, the sign on the flag of Israel. He wore one around his neck, under his shirt, two triangles of gold within a circle. It had belonged to his mother.

A box of instruments was open on the table. The drawing fascinated him, as a Euclidean object, a geometrical conundrum, and as a religious symbol with secular properties. He wondered if it had been used in ancient times as a surveying device, a mathematical instrument and angle-measurer for designing temples or building pyramids. The six points coming out of the centre and reckoned as parts of a circle could be used in finding latitude at sea, the sixty-degree divisions conforming to the sixty-degree angle of a sextant.

Each point could be part of a timing system to mark off the segments of the day. If a cord was suspended from the middle, as a gunners’ device with a protractor, and a weight attached, it could have calculated calendars. In a land survey, a complete triangulation could have been based upon it. Science as well as art was cultivated before the Flood. He had read that Josephus ascribed surveying to the Hebrews, who were said to have derived it from the Patriarch Abraham, who brought it to Egypt from Ur of the Chaldees. The Star of David was mystical, yet scientific and rational.

She only half understood what he told her. He didn’t seem altogether sure himself, except for the mathematical intricacies. On a desert island, armed with the double triangle of six points, he could within a week, he said, produce an accurate map of his territory. A Magen David was a star, a symbol for the spirit to dwell on, a design to exercise the brain in all kinds of technical beginnings. A spaced-out baseline would begin his survey, angles subtended by a fabricated tape to get the perfect equilateral. He rolled the words over and over, wrote them and crossed them out as if he had been born recalling them, from the moment the umbilical string snapped, or on first seeing the golden Magen David between his mother’s breasts.

With such an inheritance, who needs anything else that the world has to give? A Star of David as the basis for a navigation kit could steer you a course through the heavens or over the surface of the world, keeping clear of hell and high water. You could periodically sell your expertise to the highest and most tolerant bidder for laying out irrigation ditches or building trireme canals on which boats with burnished thrones that queens sat on floated at dawn or dusk. Or you could check the sun’s zenith, calculate heights and distances, make contour maps never found four thousand years later when the first marauding Europeans opened the pyramids. Or you made Portolan charts of the oceans for mariners to steer by in their ships towards empires only now crumbling away.

Jafuda Cresques of the school of Majorcan map-makers had his observatory in Portugal for Henry the Navigator, and made the first charts of the oceans, as is common knowledge among seafarers ancient and modern. Joseph of Spain brought the Arabic numerals from India. On his Great Voyage of discovery Columbus took with him Luìs de Torres and four more bearing the Star of David in their hearts. They had prepared astronomical works and made scientific instruments for navigation, and were otherwise intimately concerned with and connected to the guiding star seen also by Columbus, who knew that without such people the Great Voyage would never have started.

Covilhão went to the land of Prester John; Abraham de Beja to India; Wolf to Bokhara; Isaacs to Zululand; Palgrave to Arabia; Vambéry to Turkestan. The race of travellers and star-followers spread far and scattered wide, others ever in their wake. Tom knew that he too had been one of them all his working life, though too ordinary to be noticed, because every ship in the middle of the ocean needing to ascertain its position to within a few hundred yards was in effect (and as far as the navigating officer was concerned) there for the first time, since in the nature of things there could not be the marks on the water of who might have been there before.

With no country of their own, the Sons of Aleph (and of every other letter of their Divine Alphabet) looked at the stars for guidance, and the stars answered with their trust. Astronomical tables of practical utility were drawn up by those without country but to whom Jerusalem was the centre of the world. Prophiat Tibbon produced the quadrant to replace the astrolabe, and Bonet de Lattes invented an astronomical ring. Herschel surveyed the heavens. Beer drew his map of the moon, and Loewy invented his elbow telescope.

The world was a pitfall but the heavens were benign and gave their knowledge to whoever observed their mystery with penetrating reason. In the beginning were the stars, and among that unaccountable number were six which, when the points were drawn together in the mind’s eye, became two triangles of guided light superimposed, making the Star of David. But those six stars were never mentioned by name nor delineated as such, though they were known and indicated by some sequential cabbalistic sign in the Book of Tables. They are known yet unnamed, and no one will claim to know them, but they exist and are eternally in their places.

She caught one word in ten as he laboured among his heaps of books and charts: reading, drawing, writing, staring out of the window and pondering on some problem which, he said, seemed useless but which delighted the mind and could not therefore be futile. He constructed a frame of two triangles and covered it with letters and figures to test his ideas, fixing sights and strings, and aiming it at the moon, the sun or the first star of the evening, covering sheets of paper with calculations, or pecking at the keys of an electronic calculator till he obtained answers that either satisfied or sent him back into more hours of frenzied reckoning.

She looked up from her reading, and realized that as far as he was concerned she did not exist. Yet he was happy because no obligatory companionship was necessary, no sense of either of them feeling deprived because the other wasn’t ready to vibrate with good or bad emotions at a mere glance. They were cut off from each other, and she was glad, able to sit undisturbed and be herself.

She had prayed many times for such separation. When with George, he couldn’t leave her alone. Her silence robbed him of his right to exist. Silence alarmed him, but it wasn’t so much the actual silence – only that from within that silence she failed to provide the emotional contact he needed in order to feel alive. As he saw it, by cutting herself off she left him to float in a torment of disconnected space, as if to punish him for something which he knew he must have done but could not remember. He implied as much when union had to be resumed over some mundane detail of running the household.

From her side, she had craved solitude, a moment’s peace in which to inhabit a world where she would find no one but herself. It wasn’t selfishness, much of the time not even dislike of him, simply a part of the desired tranquillity that true love should have been able to encompass, but which in their case it could not, since love of any kind hardly existed.

She realized that by occasionally severing herself from George’s zone of influence she had acted like a man. He became fretful and at times nasty because her detachment had robbed him of that soothing mother-like consolation which he had grown to regard as necessary and obligatory from her. When she was out of his mental area there was no feminine succour for his masculine needs. By his insistence on permanent comfort and care he had driven her into separating from him in order to avoid what she saw as tyranny.

For a man to withdraw his spirit into pastime or business was normal enough. She didn’t object, but considered that such retreats were necessary for her also, and didn’t see why she should not have them, though while she had been with George it wasn’t feasible unless the house were to be consumed by a deadly aura of resentment that threatened to wither both his soul and hers. No wonder he had tried so wickedly to get her back. It must be difficult nowadays to find someone to fill the place on his terms – though she imagined there might still be plenty to suit him.

Her son also, as was only to be expected from a child who screamed whenever she did not give him full attention, had been a replica of George in his soul, and the image of all children when it came to dominating the mother. They had left her no way out except to find a corner into which she could retreat, a golden space where the light was her own for the peculiar but deep need of the moment.

12

A line of intensely white clouds low on the horizon formed a wall of crenellations as they walked arm in arm along the seafront. When she told Tom about it, he asked why she needed this area of quiet and peace for herself. He didn’t disagree that she should have it, but wanted to know out of curiosity, and in order to learn something about her from the answer.

She couldn’t say, really. Didn’t know. She just needed it so as to stay alive. That’s all. There were reasons, obviously, but she couldn’t be absolutely clear about them at the moment. When she could, she would, he could rely on that. She preferred to talk rather than answer questions.

He laughed. ‘Take your time. There’s plenty of it.’

‘I will.’

‘Enough for both of us. It’s something we can keep for ourselves, or we can share.’

‘I like the idea,’ she said. ‘It has promise.’

He did the talking. He told her about the wireless officer on one of his ships who had been a British Israelite, and described the hobbies he had seen men indulge in to save their sanity and occasionally their lives.

She liked his stories. For a man who had spoken little to those he worked with he must have done more listening than most. He had observed without seeming to. In the presence of the garrulous he had only to scratch his nose, or adjust his cap, or light a cigarette for that person to set out on long and perhaps intimate confessions. It was human nature, hardly worth remarking on, except that everything was worth comment. Thanks for the education, she said.

He laughed at her. ‘One learned more by keeping quiet, but now, for obvious reasons, I no longer believe it. My talk is unlocked, you might say, though in those days I would occasionally nail someone, and let go a few distilled drops of myself when on shore. I was never an island: more like a peninsula!’

The horizon, a narrow black band from end to end, changed towards the shore to an equally narrow seam of blue. A light green stretched left and right at the beach, where creaming tongues of snowy foam licked at the shingle. Above the horizon a wide cone of rain came from the low sky, while to the west a dim button of sun prophesied more bad weather.

They walked on. She liked people who told stories, she said, even if they were liars. George always said he had none to tell. Everyone had something to tell. He simply hadn’t had the gumption or energy to say much. He was too locked into himself. Some people had to be shaken to the roots before they would open up. Not that she blamed George, though she had, she supposed, merely by thinking about it, and felt ashamed at doing so. He had simply not been born for easy speech, and it was no reflection on his intelligence.

The last shekels of sunlight rippled on the sea. Two ships seemed to have been there since she had first looked out of the window at Clara’s flat. He held her arm. ‘They’re not the same ones, though!’

Smoke from Shoreham power-station made a scene of beauty. She had no reason to blame George for not telling stories, because neither he nor she had ever spun them off in the bright tone that any normal person might have expected. When the spirit was willing all problems vanished. To learn slowly was always to learn too late. The only advantage of such learning, it seemed to her, was that it enriched your reflections when you later mulled on the experience that your learning had been too late to profit by.

There was never any reason not to scintillate, not to say something, at least. Her head ached? What if it did? She was deathly tired? Poor thing! She hated him? No excuse, either, unless you hated yourself as well. If you lived together fifty years and hated one another like hemlock-and-pumice-stone there was no reason not to amuse – unless you hated yourself more than you couldn’t stand him. Interesting to see that what had gone wrong was lack of energy, congenital self-hatred, a dose of self-pity, a proneness to self-ruination. What was the point? You learned slowly, or not at all. But she wished she had learned more quickly than she had.

She had fallen into the man-trap again, because didn’t you, after all, have to protect your own silence, safeguard your own personal and particular retreat so as not to go totally insane when you couldn’t stand even yourself a moment longer? Hadn’t a man that feeling as well? What one craved, the other must also, in which case if she and Tom lived together, and loved each other, then the treaty to be alone whenever they felt like it should be ratified from the start.

He needed his silences for reading and study. He sat for hours with books and papers, and when she spoke she felt she was taking him out of some weird dreamscape that he cared to inhabit alone. She loved the fact that, being in it, he did not mind that she at the moment was not, though she would sometimes have preferred to be there with him, and occasionally picked up a book from his pile to read, after the battle to admit it to herself had been won. She was beginning to believe that what was good for a man was good for a woman, but that what was good for a woman was good for them both.

He never stayed in bed later than seven, even if they didn’t sleep till after midnight. He liked the day, and woke up so as to get the best out of it. He did a few jumps and press-ups, then spent half an hour bathing and dressing. She got the table set. For breakfast he liked boiled eggs, yoghourt, black bread, cucumber and salted fish. She had grown to like the same meal, which she took in her dressing-gown, and he fully dressed. They talked about the day that had gone, and the day still to come. When nothing had occurred, or looked like happening, it was amazing the talk that could be got from such pleasant vacuity.

She asked, while he filled their cups: ‘Could we invite Judy and her kids down for a day?’

‘Why not? Next Sunday, if you like.’

‘They’d love it. I used to feel sorry for them cooped up in that crumbling room, though she wouldn’t like to hear me saying so.’

He pushed the egg-shell aside, and reached for the fish. ‘The children wouldn’t mind, I’ll bet. We’ll lay on some food, and take them out. Be nice if the weather is good.’

‘They’re always broke,’ she said.

‘I’ll send twenty pounds for their fares.’

She touched his arm. ‘Let me do it. Judy might prefer it to come from me. I’ll write to her this morning.’

‘We’ll devote a day to looking after them,’ he said.

She was surprised at how quickly their existence had become easy – and said so. The only words she could not speak were those which jumped into her mind too quickly to be crushed back. ‘Make the most of the situation before you go home to George. One day soon, when I tell you, you’ll walk out of the flat in what clothes you have on your back, and set off for Nottingham. You’ll have no option but to do it, to obey, because I’ll know that’s best for you, just as George did when he came down – and still does. You’re not cut out for this life. It’s false. It isn’t you, and never can be. Admit it. Give it up. Get out of it. Who are you to think you can be happy? What right do you think you’ve got to escape your fate? Or even to embrace it? Grow up, and get back to where you belong.’

Uncontrollable orders held themselves in a secret lair and, when least expected, shot venomous barbs to destroy her happiness. Impossible to guard against, not part of anybody else, they came from within, signalled to appear without her knowledge, so that she was helpless with panic at what might be done with no connivance from her.

He didn’t notice. Her mind could be in a state of devastation, but a smile would hide it all.

They stayed in, and cleaned the flat together, and put what he called his ‘archives’ back into their place. At dusk he switched on the lights and drew the living-room curtains. ‘With you I’m happy. My life is changing all the time. It’s enriched by you. But we have to change our lives together. Will you go along with me in that?’

She sorted out what to say from too much that suggested itself. She certainly preferred his questions to her own. His were positive, direct, constructive, and concerned, she knew, only for her good. ‘There’s no proper answer. Is that good enough for you?’

It would have been easy to say ‘yes’, but caution, although she despised it, held her back. To go with someone through their transformation wouldn’t be difficult while you too were changing.

‘It’s all right.’

He didn’t look as if it was, though knew he could expect nothing better. He could no longer cover his nuances of expression, which encouraged her to be frank. ‘I have this terrible voice in me which says I shall go back to George one of these days.’

‘How can I fight that one?’ He winced, knowing that he had to. ‘I will, though. I’ll fight it every possible way. Would you willingly return to the House of Servitude? I came from the same place, and know I couldn’t. We have a common journey to make, to get away from what we have left – in spirit as well as in space and time, and without each other it’s a break we can’t make. Neither of us are out of bondage yet. We’ve left the old places, but haven’t arrived anywhere. We shall, though.’

He was right. She couldn’t go back. Nothing would drive her to self-destruction. But why did she still think it possible? The only safe way was to go forward. ‘I’ve become even more of myself since I met you. I’m an individual again. I can’t say more than that.’

He stood up. There was no need to make promises. They would share the adventure. There was no other way but to live with uncertainty. One day passed, and another took its place. That was enough for him.

As long as she woke up with him she did not care. She received answers even before thinking of questions. She had formerly carried a string of questions like chains that became too heavy to let her move, until she was driven half mad, fixed into a nightmare that nearly killed her.

He went to the refrigerator. It was time for supper. She had never seen a man enjoy his food so much. ‘For most of my life meals came at all hours. You ate when you could. On board you were too stunned to worry, and no plate of food had a name. When on shore you were often too drunk to care. I thought of regular meals as only possible in a reign of freedom and order.’

He held up a bottle of white wine. ‘There’s nothing better than this to help our food down – on April 3rd 5737, or however it can be put.’ He fetched three glasses and a corkscrew. ‘Today we celebrate our release from the state of slavery.’ He held her hands, and they were cold, the knuckles more prominent than his own. His hands were also whiter.

The cork was tough, but he wedged the bottle between his legs and pulled. ‘We only have each other at the moment, but let’s praise God for that. So many people don’t even know they have as much.’

He was trying, and his blatant attempt to capture her so that she could free herself made her happy rather than guilty at her own pusillanimous fears. He was from a different world. You persisted in the face of all opposition, persevered in spite of any discouragement. You didn’t take either yes or no for an answer in case whatever you accepted served only to divert you from the one real path.

The wood was packed stonily hard against the spout of green glass. When he pulled, with hands clenched, the reddish hairs along the back trembled with effort. ‘I’m a bit of a Jonah,’ he said, ‘but fresh from the whale’s belly and full of life. I slept like a stone last night, after we made love. I knew when I woke up that this evening was going to be special, even without looking at the calendar.’

She stroked his wrist for a moment, as if to console him at not being able to get the cork out of the bottle – or perhaps to give a reward in advance for when he succeeded. She didn’t know. It was a gamble as to whether or not he would get the cork out. She looked at his struggle, unable to speak.

His elbow shot back against a chair, and the pain must have stung his bone. Bits of cork went spitting on to the carpet. She expected him to curse at the difficulty, if not the impossibility. ‘We’ll toast and talk,’ he said, ‘and feast our release from useless bondage – if you’ll join me in the celebration.’

He went back to work. It was an engineering problem, as if it were a matter of solving a prime conundrum of Archimedes, an equation of force pitted against the seemingly immovable reinforced by the almost certainly indestructible. Neither was it an uncommon situation, he supposed, given the plastic composition of ersatz corks.

‘Why don’t you take it to the sink and push the cork in?’ she suggested. ‘You won’t lose much of the precious wine.’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No half measures. That wouldn’t do at all.’

He put the corkscrew in down the side of the cork instead of through the centre, leaned the bottle at an angle and, using the spout itself as leverage, pulled perpendicularly until, she saw, he was first red and then almost blue in the face.

She laughed, but watched the cork slowly drawn out of its green constriction. When it came free he filled three glasses. He took one to the door of the flat, and she saw that he returned without it. ‘What did you do?’

‘I left it outside for the unexpected guest.’

She smiled at such formal generosity. ‘That’s a funny idea, though a nice one. But who are we hoping will call?’

‘If Elijah passes, he sees the wine, and if he feels inclined, he comes inside.’

‘Is that the custom?’

‘It’s the custom.’

She still wore the coloured headscarf that had protected her hair from dusting and cleaning. The novelty of a party for such reasons as he gave was hard to resist enjoying. ‘I should change into my best clothes, then.’

‘You’re in them already. To our life!’

She drank to life. The wine was icy. Being sweet, it should have been warmer, but its slender cold shaft went down. He tapped off the shells of two boiled eggs and sprinkled them with salt. ‘We must eat, as well.’

She took some dry flaky biscuit, and a spring onion. It was good with the wine. His brown eyes glowed. She didn’t know why he was so happy, but smiled and felt glad to be alive with him. ‘I will,’ she said, ‘and then I’m going to change my clothes. I hope this celebration includes that activity.’

He sat down in the armchair, legs crossed as he looked at her. ‘Anything you say. We’re out of servitude.’

With food spread, they came to the table, a solitary candle lit. He was right. Some line had to be crossed, so much left behind. His celebration defined it, a festival to make and mark a new beginning. ‘It’s a feast for family, group, tribe, nation, or for the whole world if ever it became so enlightened. My grandmother would have approved. It’s quite possible that yours would, though it lacks the finer points. But it’s all we can do at the moment. It affirms our getting out of slavery, and living properly with each other. Most people live in self-imposed servitude, or in the slavery they allow those nearest to impose on them. They feel comfortable in the House of Bondage, and don’t want to come out and face the terrors of the unknown, which to them is the strongest barrier there is. But it’s really the Great Knowing, because when you step into it the fetters fall away. We can find love, respect, work, adventure, and we can thank God for giving us the Jerusalem of the spirit, and the Israel of our strength and consciousness. I say this out of love for you, and love for myself. You look back on servitude and think it was a safe and orderly life, and imagine that the way you’re living now has no future, but in servitude the future was blank and the certainty dead, otherwise your suffering spirit wouldn’t have brought you to me, who wants you by me for as long as we live.’

She was afraid of his weird outpouring on an evening that was not like any other. The only time she was unafraid was when he lay between her legs and buried deeply in, his hands under her buttocks and her recalcitrant orgasm building up almost against her will and she thought she wouldn’t come though was dying to, and sometimes she didn’t but at other times she decided not to care and then it rose within her and she clutched him, out of control and as far in love as she thought it possible to be.

Thank God he had stopped talking. She couldn’t stand it. She liked him. She loved him. She looked at him. If only he would fuck her, and not talk. She was ashamed at such a thought, and felt herself flushing in a torment of self-reproach. Every day he was different. She didn’t know him. Then she looked, and for a few moments knew him better than she knew herself, which made her despise herself, then feel sorry for herself, then love herself more than she ever had, then wonder who she was and where she was, till she finally grew calm in the exhaustion which followed, then held his hands and pressed them, and looked at him for minutes that seemed like years, while she fought back tears whose significance she did not want to know.

‘When I came up the stairs a few weeks ago and saw the danger you were in from your husband and his brothers,’ he said, ‘I felt that the Angel of Death was close. I reverted immediately to the raging bull, and would have killed to get you free. But I felt the Angel of Death pass over us, and was able to do what I could which, thank God, turned out to be sufficient. Both of us were blessed at that moment, by being released. When we came down here, I knew that we had left our troubles and started our wanderings together.’

‘We haven’t come far, my darling.’

He poured more wine. ‘We’ll leave the country soon.’

‘I’ll be seasick!’

‘Haven’t you ever been on a ship?’

‘When I went to Spain, I flew.’

‘With me you’ll go by boat.’

She sat stiffly. ‘And if I want to go by air?’

‘Don’t you want a new experience?’ he laughed.

‘Depends where we go.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I can’t think of tomorrow, let alone next week, or next month. Do you mind?’

‘We’ll stay a bit longer, then.’ He lifted his glass: ‘To those beautiful blue and oblique eyes of a queen! – and to all else about you.’

She sipped, then had an impulse to embrace him, but didn’t. She held back, not knowing why. For no reason – not wanting to make things too easy for him, but most of all not easy for herself. Everything was wonderful, but it didn’t seem right. She was happy, yet felt oppressed. The weight was impossible to bear. She felt as if she belonged to the world, and was no longer afraid, but the very idea of fearlessness frightened her. She wanted to go to bed, yet wanted to walk in the streets with him. She wanted to go to Nottingham and sort things out with George before coming back here for good. She wanted to do nothing but what she was doing, which was rushing to his arms and kissing him with a passion that burned them both.

He pushed the headscarf back, and moved from her lips to kiss the damp skin and hair that had been covered by the headscarf since before dusk.

13

The sea rose like a hillside when she looked back. Bitter cold had teeth, wind trying to eat the empty streets, so the parking space at the station was empty. They had bought a car. Choose a colour, he said. She nodded at white, a serviceable estate model for five thousand pounds. We’ll go a long way, as long as there’s petrol. She was almost afraid to step into it, wanted to put newspaper down for when there was rain.

A door banged open against the carriage before the train had properly stopped. Sam jumped on to the platform. Hilary was not so daring. A satchel roped to her back, she had the replica machine-gun which nearly pulled her arms to the concrete, as if she had to pick up a golden coin before running to the barrier. A dark young man flinched, and walked quickly away from her. The ticket collector patted her head and advised her to wait for her ma, but she told him to leave her alone or she would phone the police, then pushed through and went skipping towards the newspaper stall. He shouted: ‘Hey, where’s your ticket?’ He asked Judy as she went through: ‘Are them kids yours?’

She shivered after the heat of the train, and showed him a ticket. ‘They’re bloody not. They’ve been terrorizing everybody all the way down. They should be done away with, the little bastards.’ She pointed to an elderly woman in furs coming along the platform, a chauffeur carrying her luggage. ‘I expect they belong to her.’

‘I’m glad you were able to come,’ Tom said.

‘I’d have taken any chance of a trip to Brighton.’ She looked full of cares, but her eyes smouldered with haughtiness and resentment. A mischievousness about the shape of her mouth set her apart, and might warn anyone to keep out of her way. She wore slacks, and a three-quarter coat. Pam thought she looked more mannish than when they had last met. ‘I don’t see why I should pay anything for those two little drag-bags. They’re going to enjoy it too much to have their fares paid as well. They ran in at Victoria, and ran out here. If a collector gets on the train going back, they can jump off and thumb a ride home. Got to learn what life’s all about. When it happened before, they came home in a police car. They’d been given tea and cakes, a mouth-organ and a doll. I clouted them as they came in the door, and told them not to get lost again – even though it had taken some initiative. I nearly died of worry, I said. I’m not sure whether the copper was convinced, but for the next few days they were threatening to leave me and go and live at the police station.’ She turned, shouting in a voice which, Pam thought, must have carried for miles: ‘Come back here, or I’ll tear your goldens off!’

There was a car to get into, so they rounded themselves up without trouble. ‘Listen to the seagulls.’ Sam snatched at his sister’s machine-gun which was pointed at their noise. ‘Don’t shoot ’em!’

‘We’ll go to the flat first,’ Tom said. ‘Not much opens till midday.’

The children settled in the back with Judy. ‘I want to see the sea,’ Hilary called.

‘It won’t run away,’ Tom said, ‘not very far, that is.’

Sam leaned forward, and said into his ear: ‘You mean that the tide’ll be out. How far does it go?’

‘We’ll look at a book of tables that tells you all about it.’

‘I want to be a sailor,’ Hilary said. ‘Will you take me on a ship, Tom? I want to go to Australia on a ship with sails.’

He laughed. ‘They have engines now.’

‘With an engine, then.’

‘Women don’t go on ships,’ Judy said. ‘Unless you whore yourself out to the captain, or work on a liner as a skivvy.’

‘You’ll get sea-sick,’ Sam jeered.

She screamed into his face: ‘Yah, yah, yah – and I’ll spew all over you!’ She unclipped the magazine, and ammunition thudded on to the floor. Her legs in the air were reflected in Tom’s rear mirror, shaking around while she found the bullets. Then she came up, fitted them in, and levelled the gun at a car behind. ‘I don’t want to whore. I’ll dress up as a man. I’ll borrow your trousers, mum.’

‘Maybe by the time you grow up it’ll be different.’ Tom was encouraging. ‘A woman could do any job on a ship if she was trained.’

It amused him to imagine a crew of women and men, and said so.

‘I expect there’d only be as much fucking around as there is with an all-man crew,’ Judy laughed.

‘Less,’ Sam said, looking at the seafront.

Hilary lowered her gun. ‘More, I’d say.’

‘What do you little mistakes know about it?’ Judy asked.

‘You haven’t lived,’ Sam told her solemnly. ‘I go to school, don’t forget.’

‘You’ll go to a fucking orphanage if you don’t shut your fat little trap. I didn’t come down here to bicker with kids on the facts of life. Just look at the wind and listen to the sand, then you might learn something.’

The boy groaned. Hilary laughed, but they sat quietly. Tom winced with disapproval at her swearing. She would make a rough sort of captain, he thought, and no doubt keep any crew in order.

Hilary ran up the stairs with the gun, inspired by the liberty of being able to enter an unfamiliar building. Sam followed, and it seemed to the adults coming behind as if they were a storming party to get terrorists out. ‘They eat too well, and too often,’ Judy said when milky coffee and a plate of cakes were set before them. ‘The town won’t be safe today.’

The dining-room table had five places laid. Yesterday had been for shopping, and today getting the meal ready. A soup was to begin, and a trifle to end. Tom peeled potatoes before breakfast, scrubbed carrots, cut cauliflower, and washed for three different salads. A piece of beef was on a low light. He bought cakes, bread, chocolates and half a dozen cheeses, enough to feed twice as many. The larder and refrigerator were stocked as if they were on a ship about to steam across the world, or as if a catastrophe would force a long siege on them.

He wondered how long it had been since the noise of such mayhem had bounced from wall to wall. They leapfrogged up the corridor and down again, and chased each other in and out of the kitchen. Probably never. There had been no children here except himself as a boy on parole from the orphanage, and his voice had never been audible from more than a few feet. He had a vision of himself as a trapped insect, afraid even to jump. Shameless. He rubbed it away.

Judy sipped black coffee. ‘I hate the sight of ’em, though I wouldn’t be without ’em. You might not believe it, but they’re doing well at school, after I gave ’em a good talking to. “If you want to beat the system,” I told them, “pass your tests and exams better than anybody else. Do it for me. Learn all you can. If you don’t work for me, I won’t work for you. You’ll have to live on bread and water then”.’

She expected to be complimented on her determination and sagacity. ‘You’re a good mother,’ Pam said.

‘Not really, love. I’m only their guardian till they’re big enough to fend for themselves. Then, it’s out into the snow – the deeper the better.’

Tom thought they were lucky. Judy knew that life was a battle, and was teaching them to fight in a world which, contrary to what everyone thought, got harder and rougher. But everything had its price, and the contest seemed to be wearing her out. He only hoped that her philosophy of living off the land didn’t encourage such bright children to go too far, and get into trouble with the police.

He led her and Pam into the main bedroom, and showed them the wardrobe of Clara’s clothes. Judy stood back at the heavy taint of mothballs, then went forward and ran her hand along the dresses. ‘They look gorgeous.’

‘She was about your size, in her heyday,’ Tom said, ‘so help yourself.’

‘You mean it?’

He nodded.

Hilary pushed through: could she have a skirt and a blouse? Judy held her. ‘Maybe I’ll get a stall, and sell them on the market.’

He had intended throwing them out, he said. ‘But if you can make some money on them – fine.’

Judy looked at Pam with an expression hard to fathom, a smile that was an invitation. To what, Pam didn’t know – unless it was simply to be without the kids for half an hour, a desire she could well understand. ‘Why don’t you take the children to the beach?’ she said to Tom. ‘Then Judy can try one or two dresses on. I’ll stay with her.’

He got his overcoat, scarf and hat. Why not? Get the kids off their hands. And took up his binoculars. ‘I’ll do my best not to get them drowned, or run over, hauled off to the clink, or otherwise missing presumed glutted on ice-cream.’

‘Not as easy as you might hope,’ their mother called.

A wind blew, cold and sharp, and Hilary played at being thrown back inside the door, till Tom and Sam were half-way down the square, and then she followed. Sam went in front, sliding himself by parked cars, using the handle of each door to draw himself along, but putting on a pressure to find out whether or not the doors were locked. He would not, Tom felt, go inside and take anything at the moment. It seemed more like a practice run for when he was on his own. He called: ‘Come here!’

Sam turned, pale and scared. ‘You mean me?’

‘And quickly. Run!’

He walked towards him, upright but as if expecting to dodge a punch.

‘Listen to me,’ Tom said. ‘And stand still! While you’re out with me, I don’t want to see you trying to open car doors. Do you understand? If I catch you at it again I’ll knock your head off, and then hand you over to the police station. And what’s more, I don’t want you to do it even when you’re not with me, because sure as hell somebody else will haul you off. Do you hear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never, at any time. Not only will you be for it, but your mother will get it in the neck as well. And you don’t really want to hurt her, do you?’ Damn, the poor kid was about to cry. But he had to put the fear of God into him. It’s not his fault, because he sees his irresponsible mother getting up to stunts that can only land them in trouble. When they go back tonight I’ll put them on the train with tickets, to show it must be done. He held his arm, and spoke quietly. ‘We’re going to look at a ship, and if it’s ten miles away these binoculars will bring it down to a mile. Do you want to try?’

He nodded.

‘We’ll have a good time. But don’t forget what I told you.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘I take that as a promise. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. OK.’

He tapped his binocular case. ‘Carry them for me.’

Hilary held his hand.

‘You can take turns looking at ships or birds,’ Tom said, ‘and I’ll tell you about ’em.’

‘I want first go,’ Hilary said.

‘We’ll cross the road before getting them out, then spin heads-and-tails for it.’

‘She can have them,’ Sam said.

‘The coin decides,’ said Tom.

They waited for cars to pass, then he let them go, over the grass to the railing. There was a blue hole in the clouds, with towering cumulus close out on the Channel. Ships were outlined: tankers, ocean freighters with enormous white superstructures so that Sam wanted to know what those buildings were, and a few coasters which seemed almost to disappear in the swell. Tom looped the binocular strap around Hilary’s neck, and told her to look. Visibility was good, but rain would soon hit the seafront.

14

Pam sat on the edge of the bed. Clothes were spread over the floor, draped on chairbacks and stacked on the dressing-table. Judy laid aside the last twenties-style suit: ‘I’ll start a new fashion in West Eleven if I get this lot on the barrows. Wouldn’t mind wearing a few myself.’

Pam hoped she would try some of them on. She’d be sure to look marvellous in such clothes. There were shoes and handbags to complete the picture of a new woman.

Judy took out silk blouses with pearl buttons, elaborate garments with lace cuffs and collars attached. ‘I wish the rich hadn’t loved mothballs so much, though.’

She pulled off her sweater, and unbuttoned her shirt. ‘They’ll fit you, as well. You’re nearly as tall as I am.’ Her breasts were oval-shaped, well-fleshed and only slightly hanging, nipples facing upwards rather than out. She smiled at Pam looking at her without knowing she was staring so intently. ‘I had a bath last night so it’s all right, as long as you can stand the carbolic smell of a woman who doesn’t bother with men!’

Dark hair showed at the crotch of her flimsy red knickers. She took them off, and rummaged in a drawer for underwear, holding up camisoles and stockings. ‘What delights! Come on, you change as well.’

Pam wished she had taken her clothes off earlier, because Judy had already put drawers on and a slip, a blouse and a long skirt. ‘Don’t worry, love, it’s just that I like seeing another woman. You do too, don’t you? But how do you keep that slim figure? The trouble with me is I eat whatever I can. I feel like the character in that N. F. Simpson play who calls at houses to finish off leftovers because it’s her job. Whenever I’m offered anything on my charring round I never say no. I eat when the kids come home from school. Then again when they’re in bed, and at breakfast with them in the morning. I never stop.’ She opened a cupboard and inspected more drawers. ‘Here you are, get this lovely underwear. It makes me feel sexy. See what it does for you. I feel like a schoolgirl just wondering how to … I suppose not having kids around helps.’

Pam saw her mistake, if such it was, which had led her into becoming trapped at a game she didn’t want to play; but it had been her own idea and there was no getting out of it, so she took off the rest of her clothes and searched among the underwear. Embarrassment was stupid. There was nothing to lose with someone as friendly and easygoing as Judy.

‘There are even hairpins in the bowl.’ Judy untied her ponytail and sat at the dressing-table to put up her hair. ‘It’s a treasure-house. I feel as if I’m stealing things.’ She stood to finish buttoning the cuffs of her blouse. She was tall and straight-backed, and would become stout if she didn’t take care. Pam couldn’t stop herself saying: ‘You look beautiful.’

Her figure was verging on full. She had been going to say: elegant, handsome, even dashing in an old-fashioned way. Strange what clothes could do, though she suspected they did little enough for her. She looked in the mirror, and found it amazing how they both resembled women of the period.

‘I’m not bad for nearly forty, am I? You look quite fine yourself, though.’ She lit a cigarette, and passed it to Pam, who hesitated, then told herself not to be so rigid, smiled her thanks, and tasted the damp end when she put it between her lips.

‘Come here,’ Judy said, ‘and I’ll finish fastening your buttons for you.’

She smoked, then gave it back. ‘It’s nice to play at dressingup.’

‘We’ll give the others a surprise.’

Pam held out her arms. ‘I wish I had hair as long as yours, that’s the only thing.’

Judy laughed. ‘You can have it, if you give me your figure.’

‘Your figure’s …’ She was going to say ‘lovely’.

‘Don’t go on.’ She grimaced, and Pam didn’t know what she had expected. ‘Do you love him?’

‘Who?’

‘Your ex-sailor man,’ Judy said.

‘Can’t you call him Tom?’

‘Tom, then.’

She was going to say: it’s nobody’s business. But: ‘I think I do. Yes.’ There was no one else she loved, and if this wasn’t love she thought she would never know what was – but wouldn’t speak of it, hardly aware as to why, except that she felt such a declaration would sadden Judy, or – and the words flashed at her without warning – as if they would imply some kind of disloyalty towards her, a form of gloating, perhaps. She was hot with an embarrassment she couldn’t explain, hoping it would go away before Judy noticed. She was sure she already had. Judy noticed everything.

‘Don’t blame you. He is pretty good – for a man. I hope you’re sure, though, because he’s the sort you’ll have to follow. He’s got lots of firm ideas behind that brow of his.’

Pam was surprised at this opinion. She wouldn’t follow anybody. Or would she? She would if she cared to. If she did it would be out of her free will, and nobody’s business but her own. ‘How do you know?’

‘He’s the type, isn’t he? Does things, rather than thinks them out. Forceful and secretive, I suppose you’d call it. My husband was the opposite. Nothing but talk. Never did anything till I pushed him into the street. His parents wouldn’t have him back, but he soon found someone to iron his shirts and make his bed. Men always do, even these days. But Tom’s different, I can see that. I once went upstairs for something or other, and through the open door I saw him ironing a shirt. I’d never seen such a thing. A man ironing a shirt! I’d always thought it was impossible. I just stood and looked, till he stopped what he was doing and shut the door in my face. Well, I suppose you’ve got to admire a man who looks after himself in that way. Though I don’t know why. I don’t think it strange when a woman irons her things. You’re certain to be better off with a man like that than with most others.’

Pam was amazed at how coolly she had analysed him, and how much she admired him. It was unmistakable. A tremor of surprise went through her. ‘Did you ever have an affair with him, then?’

She could tell lies to a man, though she’d never found it easy, but not to a woman, which she considered to be one of her weaknesses – while having the strength to know that it was one worth cherishing. ‘I wouldn’t call it that. I once kept him company for a night or two between voyages, a couple of years ago. Nothing since, absolutely. I didn’t want to. Nor did he. We stayed good neighbours.’

Pam knew she could never be a free woman in that way, but was pleased to feel no sense of jealousy. Its effect was rather to make her more affectionate, though a faint diffidence kept her from saying anything at the moment.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,’ Judy said. ‘But there was really nothing in it.’

‘Don’t make it worse! I’m glad it happened to you both. Why shouldn’t we be fond of each other?’ Pam stopped herself going too far, though it would never have occurred to her to say much, being so close to Tom, for it would seem like betraying him. She expressed this to Judy, who said: ‘You’ll have to stop thinking like that. I suppose he wonders the same about you. It’s only natural. No man is a cabbage. Nor any woman, either.’

They finished the cigarette. ‘How’s your life?’ Pam asked.

‘Personal, you mean?’

She nodded.

‘Smashed. My prissy little civil servant girl-friend took umbrage when she saw me with a woman I used to know, and imagined the worst. Or the best, except that there wasn’t any best about it, and the worst didn’t happen, not with her, anyway. But I’m too busy looking after Sam and Hilary to go in for much philandering. We’d better change back into our everyday rags.’

‘Oh no, keep yours on. You really do look marvellous.’

‘It’s nice to be praised.’ She went to the mirror. ‘I’ll play the drag queen today – but what a let-down when I get home. Do you fall in love easily?’

Pam sat on the edge of the bed, and felt obliged to say: ‘I sometimes see a man in the street I think I could go for. But I’m attached to Tom, and that’s love, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t have affairs when I was married, so I feel a bit lost regarding experience, though I don’t really feel a lack of it.’

Judy sat at her feet. ‘I’ve had quite a bit, but I’m not sure it’s done me much good. I suppose it’s better than not having had any. It’s impossible to have just enough to equip you emotionally for getting the best out of life, but not sufficient to ruin your feelings.’

In her new dress Pam saw Judy as if she were younger, calm, without children, and able to talk properly instead of swear like a villain, almost as if they had met in some hotel far from their normal lives. It was restful to talk to someone in this inconsequential way, and she wondered if it could happen with any person other than Judy. The distance between them narrowed. She felt far closer to her than when she had been with ‘normally married’ women in the past. With them she would turn stand-offish, especially if the acquaintance threatened to go in the direction of a heart-to-heart talk, as if there was something shameful in their similarly closed lives, much like two prisoners talking in jail and forgetting that a free life existed.

The narrowing gap generated more intimacy than she seemed to want. A resonance in Judy’s voice was pleasant yet disturbing, at times irresistibly caressing. She looked down on elegantly piled hair, at the flushed face pressed against her thighs. ‘My feelings weren’t finally spoiled,’ Pam said. ‘As soon as I left my old life they began coming back, though it was so painful that I thought once or twice I wouldn’t be able to make it.’

Judy looked at her. ‘I know. It’s like a diver coming up for air from a long way down, after the air-pipe’s not been working properly. You get the bends. But gradually the agony goes, so I understand.’

Who but another woman would acknowledge that she had been right to abandon a man? To her, such understanding could only be termed affection, and she laid a hand against the side of Judy’s warm face.

Judy looked up in pleased surprise. Her larger hand took Pam’s, and she kissed the opening palm, her tongue warming across. They stayed silent for some minutes, then Judy’s long fingers went slowly under her skirt, and though Pam’s face burned like fire she could not turn them back.

15

After Tom had put five .22 bullets into the black circle, Hilary wanted a go. The man in charge of the rifle range said that children had to be fourteen, though he would stretch a point if she could get on tiptoes and stand high enough to lean on the counter at least. Tom opened the breech and drew back the bolt so that she could slide the round in. He pulled the butt tightly into her shoulder. ‘Now, squeeze the trigger, here – but gently.’

The sharp noise of firing startled her. Then she blinked, and pushed her hair back. ‘Did I get the bull’s-eye?’

He pulled the bolt open, and the empty case came out. ‘Fire the other four, and we’ll see how you did.’

Sam waited. Each bullet cost five pence, and he trembled at the amount being spent. Hilary fired more quickly. Between the noise Sam heard waves coming through the pier supports and shouldering against the beach. He collected the empty shellcases for trading at school. Money flowed like water into the hands of the attendant, for he and Hilary had thirty shots each before Tom reckoned their smarting shoulders might tell them it was time to leave. But Hilary’s headache came first, and she had to get out. Sam was so pale it seemed he would be sick either from excitement or the peculiar powder-like smell of the airless place. They took their cardboard targets, to compare scores at the end of the pier.

He watched their zigzag antics on the Dodgem Cars. There was no straightforward life for them or anybody, even though they were looked after to the top of Judy’s ability. He supposed there was intelligence on the father’s side as well, yet they were being brought up as if they would one day have to function like bandits in the hills. They weren’t getting what they deserved. It wasn’t easy to say exactly what they lacked. A father, most likely, though he found it difficult to believe there was no better solution than that. But it was also true, as he had occasionally found in life, that the most obvious solution was often the only one possible, and in many cases the best.

He bought them ice-cream with a stick of flaky chocolate. Flickering cold rain made them fasten their duffel coats as they trekked against it to the road, each holding one of Tom’s hands as if they would belong to him for ever.

16

Pam closed the door, no click to the latch, unwilling to feel guilty or ashamed. She had forestalled Judy’s pleading. Did I? Was that how it happened? Impossible for her to have initiated it, or to deny such a thing with her, so out of an exquisite regard which was now a vital matter to them, and of no concern to anyone else, she had let her.

They had their secret, and she was not unhappy. No one could know how much pleasure they had given each other, and as for having a secret from Tom, what love had value which was without a secret to give it depth and solidity? It could not wreck their love, though if he knew, would he consider it a danger? If it had been with a man he no doubt would, and if he didn’t she would be hurt and amazed. She could only hold back those thoughts which threatened to bring shame, guilt, and self-condemnation on every count. She’d had enough of that.

Surrounded by dresses, skirts, blouses and underwear, Judy slept as if she hadn’t rested for months. Among scattered clothes she seemed dismembered, though her spirit, reflected in her face, was as calm as if set in stone. She needed peace, love, money, or a job she liked, Pam thought, unable to break the gaze at her whose transposition to calmness was more complete than that given by a change of fifty-year-old clothes.

There was a noise as if a sack of apples had been thrown against the front door. She opened it at the bell, and the children fell in, pink-faced and breathless. ‘We shot bullets,’ Hilary cried. ‘Real bullets from a rifle, Pam. Look at my card: you can see the holes!’

Tom took off his overcoat. ‘There’s a shooting gallery on the pier. The only thing that would keep them quiet.’

‘I’m frozen,’ Hilary said. ‘That rain had needles in it.’

Pam pulled her close, a smell of wet clothes and soapy scalp. ‘Go in the kitchen then, where it’s warm.’

But she wouldn’t. ‘I’m starving-hungry, as well.’

‘Me too,’ said Sam, to be in competition.

‘They’re packed tight with ice-cream,’ Tom told her, ‘so they can wait for dinner.’ He looked: ‘Where’s Judy?’

‘She fell asleep. I left her among all the clothes. She certainly looks a picture!’

‘She’s always falling asleep,’ Hilary said. ‘She’s got sleepy sickness.’

Sam held out his arm. ‘Can I look through your binoculars again, Tom?’

Raindrops flecked the window panes. ‘You won’t see much at the moment.’ He hung them round his neck. ‘Sit on that chair, and tell me if you see a ship coming towards us. Then we’ll take evasive action!’

‘I’ll wake Judy.’ She left him opening the wine. Impossible to disturb her. She closed the door and knelt by the bed. There was hardly a breath, only a faint tremor at the breast, and at the closed eyes. She moved to kiss her lips, but held back. She could only go so far, must be met at least half-way before she would dare such sweetness. A kiss would wake her, and Judy would know why. Kisses that didn’t waken were impossible. There might be a reason, if she were seeing her for the last time. And she didn’t want that. Friends in her new life affected her profoundly. Her brain had turned about. She smiled at the difference in consciousness. If Judy were awake a kiss would be easy. Or would it? She had never kissed a woman on the lips before today, at least not when it meant so much. She stroked her forehead, unable to believe such gentleness could be felt through the curtain of Judy’s sleep, the pad of her finger ends going backwards and forwards along the faint lines.

It was hard to regain control of her feelings so that the experience could be put behind her. She wanted to look back on it, instead of being ever-worried by its implications, which was the only possibility of keeping it as marvellous as she had found it, and the one way she wanted to think about Judy when they faced each other again – without guilt, as the only moments of freedom in her life, if freedom was the time when what you did had not only no connection whatever to the thought within but advanced your consciousness in a direction you never suspected was possible, in such a way as to allow you the choice as to whether or not you wanted to go there at all.

The idea expanded, and warmed her. She felt a more malleable affection than before, as if she had been inside the moon and was still glowing from its heat, though she assumed that Judy would think nothing of their encounter, and that they would probably not meet in such a way again.

Her eyes opened. Neither spoke. Judy looked, as if wanting to know where she was before trusting herself to say anything. ‘I haven’t enjoyed it so much for a long time,’ she said.

Pam nodded.

‘I didn’t expect it.’ She held her hand. ‘And so quick!’

‘Secret?’

There was mischief in her glint. ‘Yes, sure.’ She sat up. ‘I slept ten hours in one. You’ve changed back to your own clothes.’

‘I know. But keep yours on. You look grand in them.’

Judy stood. ‘I need a wash. Now I know why you asked me to come down!’

‘That wasn’t the reason.’

She laughed. ‘Have the children been good?’

‘Tom says so.’ She watched her fasten her skirt and blouse, then tidy her hair at the mirror. ‘I can’t believe how different you look.’ When Judy kissed her on the lips she stiffened.

‘Relax,’ she whispered in her ear. ‘I won’t hurt you. Or eat you!’

‘It isn’t that. But we’d better go.’

She was held firmly by the waist. ‘If you come to London I’ll ask you to stay with me.’

She would never be there again, she supposed. At least not alone. ‘All right.’

Sam and Hilary played on the floor with the colour supplements and a packet of felt pens, elaborately vandalizing the advertisements, while Tom read an article in the Sunday paper by a Member of Parliament who began by calling himself a friend of Israel and then went on to consider it right and proper that Israel should surrender its provinces of Judaea and Samaria (and therefore its secure borders) as well as Jerusalem the capital city, as a mark of goodwill to the Arabs, for the sake of international peace, not to mention oil supplies to a Europe which, Tom reflected with disgust, had never been reconciled to the existence of a Jewish State.

A feature on how to decorate houses seemed genuine because it made fewer demands on credulity and credibility, but he was diverted by someone coming into the room whom for a moment he did not know.

The sky turned dark outside, and with only wall-lights on, the shadows lengthened Judy’s pale face. Her features were stilled at his gaze. The long skirt and high collar turned her statuesque, made her severe and formidable, an apparition until she spoke. She had stepped from one of his memories, as if an acquaintance of his mother’s or aunt’s had reappeared with a disturbing suddenness that would silence any speech.

She sensed the unwanted effect, deciding she had been foolish to dress up and that Tom regarded her transformation as either an act of thievery, deception, or cheek. Hilary got up from the floor and ran to fasten her arms around her mother. ‘What’s the matter with you, mummy? What happened?’

‘Stop crying, and don’t be so bloody silly.’

She smiled at Tom, and was again recognizable. Hilary’s octopus grip was hard to break. ‘I hope you don’t mind me having looted your family’s rag-trade heirlooms?’

‘I said you could.’

‘You look as if I’m back from the dead, though.’

Such clothes enhanced her beauty. ‘I did wonder, for a moment.’

The oil-painted face above the mantelshelf seemed to be observing her deliberate pose. ‘Almost feel it myself,’ she said.

‘You look splendid.’

She rested a hand on the piano, a distorted reflection filling the polished top, broken when she turned savagely on Sam for his continued stare. ‘Never seen a woman before?’

‘Take them off,’ Hilary whimpered.

Judy walked over and stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘At least you’re normal. But don’t worry. I’ll be back in my old drag-clouts soon. Then you can feel safe again.’ She turned to Pam. ‘That’s the trouble with kids – you never know what to do for the best!’

‘Perhaps if you take to wearing such clothes,’ Tom suggested, ‘you might civilize them.’ Yourself as well – but he wanted peace while they were here, and said nothing.

‘I told her how marvellous she looked.’

Pam wished she had kept silent when Judy scoffed in reply, piqued perhaps because everyone seemed determined to undermine her: ‘You should be the last person to want to straighten me out.’

Her attack, veiled as it was in her own sort of humour, was noted by Tom, and also by Sam who had turned pale at this apparition in unfamiliar dress. The seriousness of the insinuation was marked by a twitch of alarm on Pam’s lips. Judy relied on her reputation for outlandish remarks in order to evade the responsibility for what she said, whether it had been true or not, but this time she knew she had gone too far, and tried to make amends, a move which to any acute person, which Pam thought meant everyone in the room, could only confirm the truth of what she had implied.

‘After all,’ Judy added with a laugh, ‘you said I ought to try something on.’

‘I’m glad you took her advice.’ Any words from Tom were better than none, relevant or not, and he spoke only to break the lull following Judy’s assertion which, open to more interpretations than could be fitted in now, was most likely a jocular comment that meant nothing to anyone except herself. Certainly, Pam’s frown vanished as soon as he turned to pour drinks for the three of them.