Her Victory

1

He packed the car as if it were a small boat in which they would be going around the world, with few ports of call from which to get provisions. He had filled an alphabetical notebook with lists of what was to be taken, and had assembled separate collections of cases, kitbags and cardboard boxes on the living-room floor. All feasible preparations had been made. At five in the morning he carried stores and luggage to the hall. He made many trips down the stairs, and needed no help.

The last item put into the car was his sextant.

‘What do you want that for?’

‘The Lord only knows,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take it.’

He was a star-gazer, but with his feet firmly on the earth. She did not ask when they would be coming back. He said they would be away some time. She replied that as far as she was concerned it could be for ever. Already boxed, the sextant was wedged with newspapers into a separate carton.

I’ll go with you, she had said, adding that by so doing she would be accompanying herself like a jailer, because there was no other way to stay in the world and prevent a return to George. Once a change begins, alterations never stop. If you stop, you begin to retreat. You are lost. So no half measures. She liked that. She might find what she had always wanted, but which up to now she hadn’t known that she had wanted: a destination without salt or tears, wherever it might be. She was his ally in the adversity of having been born and, at her most tender, felt sensations that made all areas of love seem unexplored.

She slept and dreamed till six o’clock. No sense in both of them getting up, he said. Stay awhile. She sank under water and earth, but could only clamber on to a gaudy fairground roundabout that spun too quickly and made her feel sick. The booth of the headless woman was flashed now and again into her sight. She rushed to the bathroom just in time. Childish to be so excited over a bit of travelling. You look like the miller’s daughter, her face said from the mirror, while she wondered what food of the last few days had made her vomit. A hand scraped around the inside of her stomach as she got on to her knees at the toilet bowl. She went back to bed till he called, and in her sleep knew she was dreaming, till she forgot there would ever be a time to wake.

It looks as if we’ll need two cars, not one, to shift this lot, she had said. He kissed her. ‘It’ll fit in. Means a bit of judicious packing, that’s all. Balance the weight, to keep the car stable on turns and bends.’ He had already washed the car, and cleaned it inside. She got food, to last a few days. ‘There are restaurants,’ he said on seeing so much. ‘And cafés.’

She had premonitions of being unable to find a hotel, of dusk creeping down on a road that ran through a gorge where they would stop the car and hear silence but for icy water speeding over rocks. The road was crumbling in places, dangerous to continue in such bleak twilight. Near a wide part of the road, too close to rushing water to feel easy, they would open the back of the car to get at the primus. While he erected the tent under a tree she would open a few tins and slice bread for an evening meal. Or she would put up the tent, and he would do the cooking. Wolfish noises would sound over local music plinking from the radio. But they’d fill mugs with red wine to swill down what they ate. They were on the road and the road led wherever they wanted it to, whether hairpin or straight. Day after day they would pay less attention to the tattered maps, and on parking by the roadside would notice a tin thrown away on last stopping at that spot. They were going round in circles, and would soon get weary. The moon would disappear, never to come back. They would not have the will to continue, nor the energy to return. There would be nowhere to go, and nothing to look for any more. They had been everywhere, yet had arrived at no recognizable destination. When wolves threatened, and it seemed death to take another step, the Wandering Jew would call to God and become strong again. Or would he?

No hotels would accept them. They would park in a field and bed down in the car, no water to wash with and no food to speak of. The land, ordinary enough except when not pretty in its pastoral way, was inhospitable, and without accommodation. It would rain. The earth, smelling of soil and water, would soften into mud. The car would sink to its axles. They would get out. They had feet: they could walk. They had legs: they could abandon everything and move. With travellers’ cheques, even at walking speed, they would eat and pay their way. But they might lose the cheques, or be robbed in their sleep. Deprived of protection and sustenance, they’d be collected into a group of similarly bereft travellers and left to perish, or deliberately killed for what possessions they still had. They would die without anyone either knowing or caring. Or if they did know, the other people of the world would be glad they had been put out of the way, because they wouldn’t then be a bother with their problems any more. Yet if they were murdered they would cease to torment themselves, which would annoy the world even more, no matter how aggravated the world had been by their existence, because as long as they were present the world could torment them. You couldn’t win. They travelled, and had no country. What business had they to travel, and have no country into the bargain? If they had no country they shouldn’t travel. If they travelled they shouldn’t be without a country. If they stayed where they were they should move. If they moved they ought to have stayed where they were. The only answer was to have a country, and they would have one to hold forever, but at this moment, before the matter was rectified, they were chased through a forest in which it was muddy underfoot. The menacing breath of deadly hunters close behind was like the noise of an animal as high as the sky and about to pounce.

He kissed her forehead. ‘My love, everything’s in. It’s a quarter past six.’

She hadn’t slept well. On her various holidays it had been impossible to get much rest the night before departure, either going or coming. ‘Are we really leaving?’

‘We have tickets, passports, money and a loaded car. I seem to feel we are.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘How’s the weather?’

‘The sea will be calm.’

‘I’ve never been on a ship.’

‘You’ll enjoy it. Can you eat scrambled eggs for breakfast?’

‘I’d rather have bread and jam. I feel queasy.’

‘Excited at leaving?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘So am I.’ But he wasn’t. All travelling was going home, and she was coming with him. It was as simple as that – on one level. Where they were going seemed hardly to concern either of them. The move couldn’t be said to matter to him, being part of his mechanism that no longer needed attention.

They would get to the mainland and wander. She felt at peace with herself and in no way worried at what was to happen. She relinquished the knowledge that she loved him. The word had no meaning anymore. They were together, and she was free, hoping he felt the same.

He drove carefully so as to accustom himself to the load. By eight o’clock they were half-way to Lewes. A letter on the table explained to Judy where the rubbish was to be put, how to work the central heating, and what ought to be eaten first from the provisioned refrigerator. He was systematic. The lists were prominent and legible. ‘It’s not much trouble,’ he said, ‘and makes life easier for everyone. Judy will be glad of them, I’m sure she will.’

Could one live without advice, information and instructions – iron orders couched in the velvet glove of a request? She supposed not. She could figure no alternative to giving such help. Perhaps he knew Judy better than she ever could.

A cheque for five hundred pounds lay on the piano top, and a note that his solicitor would pay her every month now that she was caretaking the flat. A van hired by him had been sent up to London to move her goods, and three railway tickets had been posted in a registered letter.

When they had seen Judy in London and told her, she had not believed them. The argument was fierce, almost final, and she only agreed half an hour after they had stopped pleading for her to accept. It had been done because her need seemed great, as was that of the children. They would get something of what he and Pam had. With the monthly cash Judy would live without going out to work, or skiving (Tom had thought it diplomatic not to soften his words), and the children might enjoy the sea to the south and open country to the north. He would do what he could for them.

Waiting at a traffic light in Folkestone, she noticed that his hand shook when he lit a cigarette, and touched his wrist. ‘It feels right to be on the move.’

‘I think so.’

‘We should have met twenty years ago.’

He frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’

Youth was too sure of itself to think of the future, and middle age too despondent, but Tom reflected further that at fifty the possibility of endless time could be sensed, where it had formerly seemed hardly worth waiting for and living through. There was now a change, and if there was to be any time at all, and he felt there must be, it was to be reached by crossing a wilderness which his life of wandering had taught him how to sow and his spirit to make fertile.

He found it impossible to define what had guarded him in years gone by, except to assume that there had been an unconscious and unassailable strength accompanying him on those journeys which had seemed no more than an end in themselves – everyday work encased by the discipline of a mariner’s certificate. There had been a purpose in all he had done by way of duty, and in what had happened by way of destiny.

Life’s neat pattern had never allowed any escape, having shown that while no one was the master of his fate, some were the victims of their destiny in such a way that they were shown a fair distance towards what their fate had in any case ordained. He could, at the moment, think of it in no other way, merely claiming as a flourish to his reflections that since he had been a Jew without knowing it, the Wandering Jew must now take over in order to give purpose to his peregrinations, which he would pursue to that point where great circles and loxodromes converged at the centre of all graticules.

‘If we had met twenty years ago, I would have been younger for you,’ she said.

Due to ambiguous signposting on the one-way system he made two attempts before getting into the harbour area, but then drove past the terminal buildings and joined a queue of cars. ‘It makes no difference,’ he replied. ‘If we had met then we wouldn’t have met when we needed each other most. It’s better this way. In two years we’ll be able to marry.’

She had registered her separation from George with a solicitor, but wanted no more of matrimony. Having been poisoned once, she had found the drug to have terrible withdrawal symptoms. Tom did not see things the same way because he had never been married, and one of her reasons against it was because she did not want the responsibility of inflicting such a state on him.

Sun bleached the car roofs. A man came limping up the line taking tickets, and sticking a number on each windscreen. He was stout and elderly, had a leathery face and pale blue eyes. Tom took out his RAC wallet of reservations, insurance vouchers and travellers’ cheques. ‘Hello, Brian!’

The man, wearing a nautical jersey and cap, bent his head close to the window, and sounded as if he would have thrown in a few curses if a woman hadn’t been in the car when he growled: ‘How do you know my name?’

She thought it wrong and uncharitable of Tom to play a joke on the man who was, after all, only trying to do his job on a hot day. ‘The first mate never forgets a face. Or a name. At least I didn’t. Sedgemoor, isn’t it?’

‘What’s it to you?’

He mentioned a ship, then his own name. ‘In 1956. Don’t you remember?’

Now he did. She had never seen a smile emerge from such unpromising features. Tom got out, and they shook hands. ‘Are you still painting by numbers? That “Mona Lisa” was very good, in my view.’

Sedgemoor glanced at Pam. ‘I’ve got four kids to think about, Mr Phillips. It’s a different life nowadays, but I don’t regret the old one.’

‘You always did want a cushy billet! But I think I noticed a limp as you came up, didn’t I?’

Sedgemoor winked, so that only Tom could see the huge lid close over his eye, and the gargoyle twist of his mouth – and the fist that indicated the apex of both legs. ‘It ain’t wood yet, though it ought to be. Gets harder to straighten, and no sawbones has got a remedy for it. One says this, and the other yaks on about that, but they all try something while it goes on getting worse. It does its main work, mind you, and between you and me, my missis don’t complain – though I’m getting to think as maybe she ought to!’

‘Then that’s all that matters,’ Tom said, having measured his drift.

‘Yes, but women are funny creatures, and don’t we know it, eh? When mine gets on to me I say: “Why did you marry me, then?” And she says: “Well, it was because I thought seafaring natures be very good for shorn lambs!” And she laughed, and I don’t deny she’s got something there!’

Tom agreed that no one could. Meeting an old sailor was a pleasant way to see the time off while waiting for a boat to France.

‘Let me get your car out of this lot,’ Sedgemoor said after a while. ‘I don’t like to see you in a queue, Mr Phillips, especially when you’re going on holiday with your wife.’ He gave another wink, bent down to look inside the car. ‘You’ll be all right with Mr Phillips, missis. He was a good officer.’

She smiled, and thanked him as he began motioning the car behind to get back and out of the line, but Tom declined. ‘We’ll find space, don’t you worry. I’ll look for you on the way in, and maybe we’ll have some time for a drink.’ He gave ten pounds to buy something for his children, and Sedgemoor, saying that duty called, went on to the next car whistling a lively tune, in spite of the obvious pain of his limp.

Tom drove down the rattling gangway and into the ship. ‘I thought you were going to get into an argument,’ she said.

He parked between lines of buses and lorries. ‘He was a good man to have on board. However much things change, you’ll always have his sort in the Service. A dirty old devil, but as good as gold. The Old Man once said that Sedgemoor looked as happy as the day was short. He certainly seems more contented now than he was then; but he was never as rough as he looked. Only hard. He’s the sort that if he hadn’t been a sailor would have been a rougher, perhaps brutal man. It was a case where the hard life had an opposite effect to what you’d imagine.’

She felt he knew what he was talking about. He’d got on well with people like Sedgemoor. The open deck was crowded with people on day trips to Boulogne. A gull flew crying alongside, turning its head with button-eye to observe them. ‘You must feel good,’ Pam said.

There were no vacant seats, and they stood by the rail to look at the town and cliffs. ‘It’s certainly a change being a passenger, with no work to do or decisions to make. I feel a bit like a log of wood, but it’s not unpleasant!’

She carried some food, as well as her handbag, and he had the briefcase with money and papers. They walked the length of the ship, then queued for tobacco and drink from the duty-free shop. At the radio officer’s counter he wrote a telegram to book a one-night room at the Hôtel de L’Univers in Arras.

‘Do you remember the name?’

‘Does the place still exist?’

‘I checked it in the Michelin.’

They were well out from land, but mist reduced visibility to a few hundred yards. Engines vibrated underfoot as if to remind her that she had cut herself loose. How long would it be before Tom seemed familiar? It had not yet happened. Her eyes looked from the middle of a stone that would never dissolve. To break out was to know him absolutely, but being on a ship emphasized how hard a move it would be. There was too much of him that she did not know, because there was so much of herself she had never known. Leaving the flat had robbed them of what familiarity they had gained.

Did he feel the same, or was he more sure of himself, or less caring? Greater confidence diminished the importance of the problem. He assumed her attachment to him, and was content with the quality of his to her. He had often set out from coastlines in his life, and on every occasion alone, so how did he view the present departure now that he had company? The newness of everything eased her speculations. She was new to herself, yet trusted to whatever might happen. She had accepted, and couldn’t swim back. As Sedgemoor had said, ‘He was a good man,’ though perhaps she had gambled at setting out with him. She repeated the word whenever another ship passed by. Every move you made in life was a gamble, big or small. Hard to know whether she had done right or wrong. The main thing was that she had done it. Yet she felt that leaving England with Tom was of absolutely no importance. It was impossible to explain. She could not regard it as in any way significant, being tired of considering every uttered word as vital, of looking on all her moves in a way that seemed crucial.

There was less mist near the French coast. Buoys and breakwaters could be seen, and Tom was interested in observing the ship go in. Her resistance was breaking down. But resistance to what? The boat rocked faintly as it made a turn. Before the change that mattered, any resistance formed by the past must finally crumble away. When an announcement said they should return to their cars she followed him down the companionway.

2

Every car started at once, and their exhaust fumes made her feel sick, but when on the ramp and in the open air she felt better. They passed the police and customs posts, and drove by railway lines towards the town. He went with care, not heeding that cars behind wanted him to get a move on. ‘I’ll speed up when I’m used to this side of the road.’

A red sports car, flat as a bug, shot out and overtook, and narrowly missed a French van coming the other way. ‘Probably going to Barcelona,’ Tom said, when they found the car waiting at the first set of traffic lights, ‘so you’d think the odd minute wouldn’t matter.’

She could tell he was glad to get out of the built-up area. He felt his freedom. So did she, with the wide rising fields on either side. French cars came towards them like bullets along the tree-lined roads. Threading Montreuil, as he said, for the hell of it, he thought aloud that he had read of Sterne’s passing through on his somewhat sentimental journey, and hiring a servant there.

‘I haven’t read it,’ she told him.

He laughed. It was a long time ago. ‘One reads all sorts of books,’ he said, ‘in the Merchant Navy, from the misadventures of Elephant Bill to Charles Dickens and the Bible. You scan whatever you come across. My mind’s a tuppenny bin, and I remember them all.’

Beyond Montreuil it rained a few showers. Then the crooked road became straight, and the sky cleared. High white clouds let them through. At Arras he drove along the Rue St Aubert and turned into the hotel courtyard.

Fifty years before, his grandparents, mother and Aunt Clara had made their visit in a family motor with the spare tyre on the outside. A cap and cloche hats had been in fashion, as magazines and photos showed. Now he was here himself. A few months ago, he had not known. How had he lived so emptily? He hadn’t even known other things. Now he was someone else. You were composed of what information was revealed, the sort that took a grip because it was the deepest truth. Someone died: it hit you like a road accident in which, among the injuries, your soul was so smashed that you needed to be completely refurbished by the plastic surgery of memory. It was still going on, but he had already learned to live with the final effect.

The paving and surrounding windows seemed familiar, and he heard Clara shouting his mother’s name for the echo. ‘Ah yes, Monsieur,’ he expected an old woman in black at the reception desk to say, ‘I remember them well. Such a tragic family, come to visit the grave of their dead son!’

A pretty girl asked for his passport: name, address, nationality, and date of arrival to write on a bilingual form in exchange for a door key. Would they eat here? Yes, he told her. He’d never been inside France, he said as they walked up the stairs, though some harbours he knew. Their room overlooked the yard. She liked the flowered wallpaper. On trips to Spain she had stayed in new hotels with white walls, balcony and shower, and built-in noises from people in a similar box next door to embarrass you as much as your own sounds were doing the same to them.

She sat on the bed. ‘I’ll put a dress on.’

‘Then we’ll go to the Grand Place,’ he said, ‘for coffee and a sandwich.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘There’s a town plan in the guide book.’

‘Useful things.’ She opened the case. ‘Or maybe a cake to eat.’

He put his arms around her. ‘Why not? France is a good place to be hungry in.’

She stood in her slip. ‘Then again, maybe we won’t go out. It’s sexy, being in our first hotel room. So intimate and strange, don’t you think?’

‘I chose the right place,’ he said, ‘especially for you. There’s a guide book to sexy hotels, comes out every year, and this one has four stars!’

‘Really?’ She half believed him. Anything was possible these days, with so many sex shops, strip shows and dirty films everywhere. And who am I to talk? Here I am, a married woman, come away with a man I hardly know. Yes I do. I already know him more than I ever did George. It’s easier to know someone who is more complicated than someone who is not. He kissed her, and pushed the straps of her slip over her shoulders. She touched his face. Why not? Most hotels are still like this, he said. Shall we? He had to ask, and she wondered why. Shall we? she asked in her turn, smiling, kissing his face and throat. Yes, he said, unclipping her brassiere to run his hands beneath, then lowering his face to the nipples. The air was humid, and she stood in her pants. While he undressed she pulled back the bedclothes, freeing the top sheet to cover them against the draught. She didn’t want anybody to see them, and drew the curtains.

I’m tired, really, she said. I hardly slept last night. The pleasure had not been all hers, she knew. But she couldn’t sleep now, either. This was the only thing left if you did not know what you wanted out of life, or didn’t have any idea as to where you were travelling. How many more times are you going to say it? She wanted him with her all the time, his finger playing at her so that she never failed to come, then feeling him inside her as far as he was able to get. He filled her, nothing sacred any more. Her own smell excited her. He had explored in all ways, every other part, discovering responses that she herself had never known. Such orgasms left her feeling as if there was no spare flesh on her body. Immediately afterwards she knew how much they had separated her not only from him, but also from herself.

In the street her sight was sharper, all senses keen. In utter exhaustion, she was set totally within her own spirit. She laughed that she knew why it was that all the nice girls loved a sailor. He took her hand. It was as if the scale of their exhaustion was manifest only now that they were in another country. People spoke a different language, so they were more enclosed in themselves. She had not expected to make love during the afternoon, had imagined a decorous though perhaps less passionate encounter after a celebratory supper. Its intensity had divided her from him at a time when she wanted to be close, though the detachment seemed more in her than him. His care and attention was twice as necessary to get her back into the orbit of his affection, and therefore into her own. As time elapsed her tenderness and desire would return, and he was always sensitive to her when it did. What had started as an affair had become a prison that she could not bear to escape from, a prison in which she felt herself to be at least his equal because she was also her own jailer as much as he was his, prisoners and jailers both. He didn’t like the comparison, he said, but supposed it ought to be thought about, though for himself he never felt so liberated in his life – being on an extended holiday with someone he loved.

‘And it doesn’t frighten you?’

‘No. It’s unfamiliar, so fear can’t get a look-in. All I can do is thank God I’m alive, and enjoy it.’

They drank champagne at supper. ‘We’re not far from Reims,’ he told her. ‘When a German brigade had to pull out of the town in 1914 every man had two bottles in his knapsack. But we’ll drink to us, not robbery.’

She had never felt so deeply imprisoned in herself, packed hard into her limits by her own choice. It was a freedom she had often dreamed of, and wondered whether she could live with. If the spirit died, it would live again. Everything mattered. Her finger ends ached when they met against his limits. She liked it in her own prison, she told herself as he undressed her while she lay on the outer covers of the bed, taking the walls of prison within prison away. She wondered why she liked the prison of herself so much, why she preferred it here, and in fact whether she finally did or would for long. To be a prisoner meant that everything was so much clearer beyond the barred window. She could see it, but not yet get out.

Her clothes came off, and she couldn’t move, dead yet able to feel what he was doing, unable to look at him, and then spread out naked: I’m a respectable woman, and saying, ‘Fuck me!’ even while rage against having her unrelenting modesty violated went through her, and he organized her orgasm while any feeling at all was still with her and she felt that, as she came in a way that pierced her with both pain and pleasure, she was not any more or by any means a respectable woman, and hoped she never would be on feeling the implosion of his life discharging into her.

3

He moved her shoulder gently to and fro, and kissed her mouth. He was washed and dressed, spruced up in his jacket and open-necked shirt. She fought to focus, so that details of the room would become clear. Through her sweat she smelled his aftershave.

‘Time to get out of bed, my love.’

There was a knock at the door, and she pulled the sheet to her breasts. A maid came in with breakfast, and set the tray down, then gave a single accusing sniff (or so it seemed) and went out.

She wanted to shrink into the bed. ‘I’ve never felt so wrecked. Can I stay in oblivion for a week? Then I might recover.’

He smiled. ‘You look younger. Travelling agrees with you.’

She moaned, and wondered why he was so blind. She felt ninety. ‘For how long, though?’

He broke a croissant, and put a piece to her lips.

‘You’re spoiling me!’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘When you do it, I do.’ He was right. The world’s weight had fallen away. She sat on the side of the bed and looked for her nightdress. It was on the back of a chair, across the room. He ate hungrily, but paused to give her more coffee, pouring whisky from a leather-covered flask into both cups. ‘There’s nothing better for starting the day.’

Her underwear was on the floor, but she didn’t care. He picked it up and laid it on the bed, as if she ought to. But she liked it here. She was no longer respectable, and wanted to stay for weeks. ‘I wonder how Judy and the kids are managing?’

‘Well enough for us not to worry. While you’re having your bath, I’ll be downstairs paying our reckoning. Then I’ll nip along the street to visit a flower shop.’

4

The large-scale map, with burial grounds marked in green ink, had been specially produced from a War Office original by the War Graves Commission to illustrate the position of cemeteries in the Arras area. Percy had had it dissected and mounted on cloth, and folded into a leather case, with a flap which closed and buttoned over the front, and his initials embossed in gold lettering under the clasp.

Tom drove out of the valley of the Scarpe, and on to a minor road through Roclincourt towards Vimy and the Ridge. There was open land all round, and burial plots appearing by the roadside like allotments on well-fertilized soil sprouting their rows of headstones. She navigated him beyond the village and down a lane till they saw the green nameplate of the one they were searching for on a wall. He stopped on a gravel forecourt and switched off the ignition. ‘I’ll go in for a few minutes and find my uncle’s headstone. Do you want to come?’

She would, even if only to exercise her legs. He took the bouquet of lilies and carnations from the back seat. Such a notion of respect was an attempt to bring someone he had never known back to reality and place him squarely in a life they had never had together. At the same time, everything he did – she thought – seemed as if it would be the last action of its kind, a finality in each unfolding scheme, which made her feel unbearably sad, and protectively tender towards him. That he could be more vulnerable than she had ever been came as a shock, but that too helped to make their life together possible. She preferred not to ask what his plans were, wanting the childish satisfaction as each intention was revealed in action. She liked to indulge in the pleasure of receiving surprises, yet knew she had constructed these deceptions in order not to worry him with the desires in him which were so deep and personal that to bring them too abruptly into the open would cause him grief. Out of love she had manoeuvred this consideration of equals, assuming he would always do the same for her, since in so many ways he already had.

They walked between hundreds of headstones, some worn or slightly mildewed, but all in perfect alignment, the gravel neat, the grass clipped, not a weed to be seen. Most had crosses embossed, many had names, but scores were also nameless and bore the words KNOWN ONLY UNTO GOD. After sixty years they were cared for, perhaps still remembered in the families from which they had come.

He went a few yards in front with flowers held low. She was weeping with pity and a wracking pain, with terror and helplessness, sorrow and chagrin. She stopped. It was too much, this lake of graves. She hoped he would not see or hear, the wind turning her skin cold from tears that flowed on to her coat.

She rocked uncontrollably to and fro, with more despair than she had ever felt or given vent to, as if the collective spirit of so many dead were tearing out the life that so far had only raged uselessly in her. She couldn’t stop, but walked towards him.

He looked at the grave of Captain Phillips, Royal Engineers. Not under a cross, but the Jewish Star of David that his bereaved mother had arranged to be put there. A British soldier of the Star of David, he said. An officer and a gentleman in Jewry’s Book of Honour.

She held his arm while he talked. There were Jewish soldiers in the German Army too, he went on, Jews on either side doing their duty, and no doubt it happened that a bullet from one would find the heart of another. In the last war all Jews were on our side, except those who were caught and murdered by the Germans before they could be.

Her tears had stopped, though felt close to breaking out again. ‘There’s a lesson,’ he said. ‘We must never fight against ourselves. The two tribes in biblical days did, until the First Exile. Then it stopped, because there were other forces to contend with. After the so-called Emancipation, the European Jews served their countries as good soldiers, and as good everything else. But now we have a greater force against which to unite, and still for the sake of those countries that as often as not despise us.’

He placed his flowers under the Star of David. She kissed his cold face, and when he looked into her eyes he noticed her tears.

5

‘Where to now?’ They were back on the main road.

‘Boulogne. Navigate us via St Pol and Fruges,’ he said.

When the route became straight, he turned out behind a car to overtake. A horn screamed from close by, sending him in again. The driver of a yellow Ford pointed angrily to his side mirror to tell him he should be more careful.

‘He’s right,’ Tom said. ‘I must get a wing mirror to make it safer.’

‘When you want to overtake,’ she said, ‘let me know. I can look.’

Near Boulogne he followed signs for the port, and she wondered whether he had forgotten something in England that was important enough to go back for. If they made the crossing, she would feel Judy’s warm kiss, and tell her how full of uncertainty she was, how far afloat in spaces she did not understand, how lost among forces still incomprehensible. She would find comfort, even if only in talking for a few hours about things that didn’t much matter. It had taken her a long time to learn that one woman could mother another and call it friendship, and at the moment that’s all she wanted.

They were not going to England, but joined a queue by a railway line set apart from the quai. ‘We put our car on the train,’ he said, ‘and in the morning wake up in Italy!’

The heat burned into the car. They stood outside, and there was no breeze. She strolled to the end of the queue, wondering how to get a ticket and go back on the next ship whether he came or not. She could be with Judy by evening. She could be in London by tomorrow, and in Nottingham the day after that. She opened her bag. There was enough English money. But there was nowhere for her to go, nowhere she wanted to go to, only someone she needed without knowing why. It had become unthinkable not to be with him.

As if knowing what she thought, he left her alone. He would think the same. He stood, smoking a cigar, looking at long wagons on to which he would drive the car before they took their seats in the carriage. Their tickets were checked. The train was half an hour late in leaving, and he cursed the heat. A man in front cooled himself with a folded newspaper. Cars began to move. She watched him drive up the ramp. She had made her choice. On the way down, carrying their overnight suitcase, he didn’t get low enough under a girder, and bumped his head. When he swore she laughed.

6

He held her hand. ‘Let’s get on board.’

They leaned back in their seats and dozed, taken smoothly from the coast. By half-past five the train was east of Paris, stopped under a sunny sky among green fields, woods and orchards, with low hills in the distance. A halted train opposite was full of Spaniards, one of whom called out that they had come from Belgium and were going home on holiday. The heat was uncomfortable. A young Englishman understood Spanish, and translated what was said. There was a lot of unemployment in Belgium, they told him.

Pam was thirsty, and they went to the restaurant car. Tea and cakes cost five pounds, and she called it extravagance. ‘Blame the exchange rate,’ he said. The train rolled south and south-east. He took out a cloth map to show where they were. His grandfather’s signature was on the hardboard cover: ‘But the railway lines are the same.’

Window glass reflected their faces when it got dark. Inactivity made her sleepy. The noise and rattle was soporific. With darkness outside it seemed like travelling through an endless tunnel. They would never hit daylight again and see landscape. She would doze for ever, while Tom assiduously studied a multilingual phrase-book.

On her way from the toilet she opened the window of an outside door and heard the rush of wheels. If she unlatched the door and slipped she would be sucked underneath. The difference between life and death was a thrusting forward of the body, a twist of the foot. Even if there was nothing else to do she would never do it. Such impulses made life seem valuable.

‘I thought you’d got lost,’ he said.

‘I was standing by myself. One has to now and again. I might not be able to for much longer.’

He closed his book, wondering what she meant.

‘It sounds idiotic,’ she said, ‘and impossible perhaps, but I think I’m pregnant. I haven’t had a period for two months. Either that, or it’s something worse. But I don’t think so. I’ve been as sick as a dog the last few mornings.’

He hadn’t noticed. He should have done, he said. She’d mentioned it, but neither had made the connection. They hadn’t cared to. Neither had she – until now. So what else could the poor bloke do but smile? Pull the communication cord? He asked if she were sure. Who would be till it popped out? But the signs were there. It’s incredible, she said. I’m forty-one. She had lived in a dream and taken no pills. Maybe she was mistaken, but it had been impossible not to mention in this timeless train driving through nowhere. He was happy, she supposed, and certainly wouldn’t mind. She wondered whether there was any occurrence he would be disturbed at. If not, it was just as well.

He hoped it was true, he said. He could think of nothing better, leaned across to hold her and say he was sorry there was no one else in the compartment to hear the good news. He loved her, he said.

‘At least we can kiss in peace.’ If I’m pregnant, she thought, you should take me home. Ought that not to be his first consideration? If he could not get himself to take her home, at least he might say that he would like to. Was he daft, dead, or made of iron? He was unaware of the problem. They were light years apart. She had invented a reason for returning to England, but he hadn’t fallen for it. All the same, it seemed she was pregnant, and she was glad they couldn’t turn round and go back the way they had come.

At dinner they shared a table with the fair-haired young man who had translated the Spaniards’ talk. His name was Aubrey, and he was going to Italy on a three months’ tour, he said. In the autumn he would work in his father’s car insurance firm. Next year he’d marry, get a house in Boreham Wood, and travel to town every day. Yes, he was looking forward to it. Whatever happened, however trivial, was an adventure. He was philosophical: there was no such thing as an ordinary life. Dullness was in the heart of the beholder. England was a wonderful country, but he liked being on the Continent, as well. When he had a family he would buy a caravan and go touring. He ordered his dinner in excellent French, and called for a bottle of wine, saying he couldn’t sleep on a train unless he was half sloshed. Tom, agreeing it was the best thing, asked for champagne.

‘Celebration?’ He looked at Pam.

‘Not particularly,’ Tom said. ‘I have a liking for it.’

Pam was surprised at her appetite. Something to throw up in the morning. For a train meal it was good. Tom insisted that Aubrey share their bottle. They drank to themselves and to each other, to every letter in the alphabet, never to meet again. Tom was, Pam thought, used to such encounters, which is why he’ll never let me go. The idea frightened her, but it was a fear that came out of love. There was no firmer treaty. With both parties willing, what hope of parting?

Perhaps they were too unlike ever to part. Similar people repel each other, like brother and sister, and generate negative energy, whereas different people attract, and create a good – or at least positive – flow between them. She couldn’t think of a better reason why they were still together, and felt so relaxed that she didn’t want to. Maybe it was the drink, the sacred wine affecting the spine and brain.

Tom told Aubrey about his life at sea, and ordered another bottle. ‘An average of one each isn’t excessive,’ he said, but Pam drank little, and felt tipsy enough on that. They stayed till all others had gone, and the staff were impatient. They shook hands and exchanged addresses. Tom said he and Pam were touring around, with no definite itinerary. Maybe we’ll collide at the same night-spot in the next week or two. Aubrey staggered, and apologized for being drunk. ‘That second brandy,’ he admitted, ‘did for me.’ Pam thought him a nice, English sort of person.

Tom guided her along the swaying train. She confessed that she too felt pissed, but he laughed and said he would let her sleep it off tonight. The attendant had put down their beds, and they undressed in the small space. Naked, he reached out to kiss her. She still had her pants on, and wondered: What if I start in the night? A packet of tampons was under her pillow.

The train swayed at a hundred miles an hour, then stopped at a station, voices shouting up and down the line, white lights shining through slits in the blind. The carriages juddered, started to move, stopped, then rolled almost without noise so that her brain felt as if it had a steel ratchet fixed there for the whole train to go through. She slept, and did not sleep. It was impossible to say what was sleep and what wasn’t.

The attendant was to waken them at six, but she was dressed by half-past five, unable to get into even the shallowest layer of rest. Tom slept on the top bunk. Her bladder seemed about to burst. There was daylight behind the blinds, but she didn’t want to lift them and wake him. Her breath was vinous and foul.

She came back and cleaned her teeth, then went along the corridor to the door-window. Other people were awake. Aubrey whistled to himself, and didn’t notice her when he passed in his pyjamas. She flattened against the wall to let him by. The sky was clear. The train stopped, showed station buildings of beige walls and red roofs, and luminous vegetation. There was the overwhelming sound of birds. We’ll wake up in Lombardy, Tom had said. A package tour to Rimini had been nothing like this. She smiled with pleasure at travelling with a lover, instead of a husband who had always despised himself for liking her.

The wayside station was nondescript, yet exotic. If they stayed in the nearest village what would their life be like? Couldn’t imagine. An elderly man who stood on the platform some way from other people wore a grey suit, a panama hat, a flowered shirt and smart tie, and held a briefcase. He crossed the line to their train, but a station official called roughly that this was not the right one and that the train to Milan would be in soon. Or so she assumed. The man took the brusque words with dignity, and went back to where he had first stood. She wondered where he could be going at six on Sunday morning.

She let up the blinds. Tom’s voice was half-way between a growl and a moan. ‘Oh my God, where am I?’

‘You may well ask,’ she said. ‘But I’m not surprised you don’t know.’

He looked down, and reached for her stomach. ‘Is it true?’

‘I hope so, though I don’t think I’d hope so with anyone else but you.’

He let himself down from the bunk. ‘What a stupendous thing to happen!’

He didn’t know what he was in for, but she let him say it, because he had never been into that area of life. ‘Wait and see,’ she said with a smile.

She went out to make room while he dressed. He was there to look after her. She’d be safe with him, he said. But she felt bloody sick. What else could he say? She wanted to be by herself, get on to land and traipse across country she had never seen, walking and thinking, then walking but not thinking, to enjoy the flowers and trees, and watch the slowly changing view hour by hour and day by day, stopping when she liked, wandering like a mad woman between Alps and Lowlands, burned by sun and saturated by rain, but always alone, and when the first pains struck she would either live or die till she could be no more alone.

The train ran south through the shabby outskirts of Milan. He stood at the door with the overnight case between his feet. Red scrawl marks on walls were passed too quickly to be read. Hoardings and advertisements exhorted them to buy cars, sewing-machines, typewriters, essential goods and gewgaws that would save them time from the labours of life which, though they might not know what to do when they had saved such time, must nevertheless be saved. She thought of the labour-saving gadgets in her own long-gone house, and reflected that time thus conserved had in fact been all too often time lost in dreaming of what she would do with time saved if she had been really free. And now that she was, it didn’t matter any more.

They were given vouchers to get breakfast at the station restaurant. At half-past six the air was already hot as they walked with other passengers to the main hall. The restaurant was barred from within and picketed without by a line of waiters offering leaflets to explain their complaints. They were good-natured, even regretful at the inconvenience, and none of the travellers seemed particularly thwarted by their strike.

‘We’ll find a place to eat on the motorway,’ Tom said.

Some people walked to a kiosk on the pavement which was doing a trade in coffee and a sort of cake-bread. Tom elbowed his way forward. ‘Hit the capitalist system in one place,’ he observed, ‘and somebody else steps in to take advantage. It’s very resilient.’

She stood by the railway buffers while he went along the catwalk and got into the car. He came off and circled the yard, then stopped to rearrange luggage and bring a packet of maps to the glove box.

7

She was amused at his punctilious fastening of the safety belt. Did he expect to escape if the car turned into a ball of flame? He was sensible to take precautions. As a man he no doubt wanted to live for ever, but for herself – the next car coming either had her name on it or it hadn’t. If it did, her worries were over; if it didn’t, they were yet to come.

A grey flower passed, or a black flower pounced. Air heated her elbow at the open window. ‘Keep your arm in that position for half an hour,’ he warned, ‘and it’ll be cooked three layers down.’

She drew it in. Learn step by step and brick by brick. ‘Where do we go?’

‘Back.’

‘I’m never going back.’

He smiled. ‘But gradually. Home again.’

I have no home. ‘Why change our plans?’

He pointed out roads as if he had been on them before. He hadn’t. But the map was clear, and coloured, although signposts were more visible from her passenger seat. On the motorway insane drivers at their steering wheels were set to overtake, or die if they couldn’t. She had a near view of their faces. They had stumbled on to a Sunday morning hippodrome to rehearse the national sport for the bigger mayhem of midweek. She was beset by roars, revs, hooting, smoke and eye-bludgeoning from different shapes and colours of metal motor-cars that went by like rockets. Yet the faces of the drivers seemed remarkably relaxed.

‘I had a lovely scheme cooked up,’ he said, ‘to roam the Balkans for a couple of months, then go to Greece and visit one or two of the islands. But it’s got to be altered now.’

She hated being responsible for any disappointment. The land was flat, with too much haze to see the mountains which, indicated on the map, lay north and south.

‘Your earth-shaking news from last night makes that prospect seem about as exciting as a fishing trip to the Sago Sea. You can’t expect me to carry on as if it didn’t mean anything.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Go to a nice quiet town on the coast for a few days,’ he said, ‘then wend our way north. It’ll be holiday enough.’

He didn’t have to remind her that they were in Italy, but the word had a loving and homely sound when he did. She wanted to get to a town so that she would really know where they were, instead of being encased in a metal shell and taken somewhere not exactly against her will but in a direction which up to a few hours ago had not seemed possible. She fastened her safety belt, and saw the faint smile. He wanted to please her. His will had changed to hers. He thinks that at forty I’m more fragile than a young woman, which is ridiculous. Being the first time for him made him young again, and apprehensive. She laughed to herself, felt fewer years pressing her down. She wanted to please him. ‘We don’t need to run back so soon. I feel fine. There’s plenty of time before I have to take care.’

He stared at the road, intent on keeping them alive but locked in his purpose of covering distance by nightfall. She saw, side-glancing, that he was not only fearful of the road but was fleeing as if before demons, on his way to a place where he thought safety lay. Demons would be waiting for him there also. They had driven him out and would beckon him in, the same with her. She read it clearly in his features, that they were leaving a point on the earth like refugees, and felt that her own soul was built into the same escape plan. She was as much the power of their progress to wherever it was to be, as he was the mechanism of hers. They were set on a combined course towards what both had wanted since the beginning, yet neither knew what it was. She touched his wrist gently.

‘There’ll be plenty of time for roaming, afterwards,’ he said. ‘We can always put the baby in the car and take off, spend a few years on the road before he or she has to go to school.’

She was blocking his escape route, turning him back by her revelation. If they stayed somewhere long enough she would take a specimen of her water and get her pregnancy confirmed. She was sure, but wanted to be certain. She wanted it to be female, yet was glad there was no way of knowing. It was sufficient for the moment that she had caused him to change plans. Perhaps he was happy that her condition had made him want to, because he was now part of her more than he could ever have been before. If he had not said anything, she would have gone wherever he wanted, though the pride that would insist may have been no more than supine behaviour. Something more important than either of them tampered with his decisions. She resented the interference for her own sake, but not for his. For him it was the appearance of a storm in mid-ocean, an inconvenience to be circumvented. He would alter course. He knew a routine for dealing with it. That part of his temperament she could never affect – just as there was much about her that he couldn’t change.

She could have told him she was pregnant before leaving England, but such an early switchback of his aims wouldn’t have had the significance of the alteration he was making now. She had left telling him, to see whether or not he would do so. It had to mean something, and he had passed the test – her test. Maybe he was scorching with resentment, and she would never know how hard the decision had been for him. But his happiness was obvious. She didn’t know whether to be glad that he wasn’t angry. Now that she had told him, and he wasn’t, had she really wanted him to cosset her as a fragile girl? She could only accept that for the moment she had. The tune would be called by her, or not at all, though perhaps it was just as well that the situation was bigger than either of them.

South of Milan the speedometer read nearly a hundred. The southern hills were showing themselves out of the haze. ‘We’ll take off in a bit.’ But she wasn’t afraid.

‘Over those mountains we’ll get to the Mediterranean.’ He slowed down. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’

He parked in a picnic place under trees, and topped up the radiator with cool water from a tap. He refilled the supply in his container, and washed dead insects from the windscreen. The air was humid. Birds and butterflies flitted over a meadow. A few families at benches ate an early lunch. Tom took off tie and jacket, and rolled his sleeves. There was food she had bought in Arras: rye bread, pâté, hard-boiled eggs, salt and spring onions from an icebag, and some congealed cake. He took a small stove from the car, boiled water and made tea, putting lemon and sugar-lumps into two mugs.

She laughed. ‘You should have brought a table and chairs.’

It was close to midday. ‘I could take a sight on the sun with the sextant.’

‘Have fun. Where are we?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Italy.’ Her mouth was full. ‘Wonderful!’

He nodded. ‘No place like it – to hear such news. It didn’t really sink in in France.’

Steam from the tea smelled of citrus, and mingled with her sweat. She leaned against the car, void of speculation. The sky was blue. She undid two buttons of her blouse. The intense heat cut her feeling of exhaustion. She wanted to describe everything aloud in case it vanished, but to pull words from her mind would be a negation of life in this idyllic place.

A British car, luggage topped with plastic ripped by the slipstream, was full of kids and coloured buckets. He passed all but the sportiest vehicles. At such a rate it was possible to see the fuel gauge sliding to zero. The straight road crossed the plain of Lombardy, a hundred kilometres flowing while she leaned her head and dozed. She awoke, startled but not alarmed at her dream of rainy streets. They stopped for petrol, black coffee, and to use the toilet.

The wide road curved into the hills. Milky white ribs of cloud looked like the pale x-ray plates of a ghost. There were grey outcrops, and chestnut trees near farmhouses. He drove to make distance, and to get away from the pull of the place he had set out from – before having to get back to it, as if circling the calm exterior of the storm while gathering courage to steer into the middle. She also felt that life wasn’t like this, and she was sure that he also knew. He looked haggard about the eyes, with a tenseness at the mouth she had not noticed before, though when driving by cliff-like menacing lorries his features softened.

‘I dreamed of your aunt last night,’ she said.

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know. I just saw her. She was trying to tell me something. She was screaming, and upset. So was I. A bit frightened, I think. She was in the flat, in the bedroom. Funnily enough, I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but it was more than just trying to get me out of the place.’

‘I suppose one could figure it out,’ he said, ‘though I’d rather forget it.’

‘So would I. It was only a dream. I’d forgotten it until now.’ She searched for a Kleenex to wipe her face. ‘After a night on the train, and all day on the road, I’m going to need a bath.’

‘We’ll find a hotel on the coast.’ He pushed in the cigarette lighter at the dashboard. ‘I’ve pencilled places on the map where there’ll be accommodation.’

The road descended towards the signposted smoke of Genoa. ‘I can smell the sea already.’ He was joyful at the prospect.

It was easier to love a happy man. He must have been marking the map last night while I was asleep, using a pen-torch in his upper bunk to change routes from those he had intended. In the cardboard box she had seen tourist pamphlets on Greece and Israel.

He tuned in to her thoughts. ‘“Thalassa” is the only Greek word I know. Hard to forget, if you’ve read the Anabasis. One of the masters made us read Xenophon’s piece at school, but I’ve read it again since. I actually liked it, even though I was forced into it.’

She felt ignorant. ‘I don’t know it.’

‘There are so many books.’

But she would read.

He told the ‘March of the Ten Thousand’, of the struggle of Xenophon and his Greeks through the snows of Anatolia towards the benign sea that would take them home, a tale that whittled away the kilometres till the pale Mediterranean came into view for them also. Travelling was still his life. Being on the move meant nothing to him. He was taking care of everything as if it signified little to her. But it did. She was out of her element, a child again, wanting to be away from the car and in control of her own movements. It was hard to know what you wanted till you hadn’t got it, especially when you didn’t know whether or not you already had what you wanted. Equally hard to know what you wanted when you were in love, and even harder to know anything at all when you were pregnant. But what she wanted was what she had, and what she had was more than she’d ever had in her life, and because she had all she wanted at the moment she didn’t doubt that there was far more to come – as much as she ever would want, in fact. A disturbing lack of doubt told her it might never be enough, whatever it was, and made her wonder at this stage if everyone had to settle for far less than they perceived it was possible to have.

Behind the city he turned west towards blue sky along the coast. They threaded tunnels and caught vivid sights of the sea. All windows were opened. She felt more carefree now that palm trees and villas were visible, and small villages that looked good to live in.

‘There are at least three hotels in town.’ They drove off the motorway. ‘And it’s only four o’clock. Plenty of time for a stroll along the seafront.’

8

She sat in the car, and hoped there would be a room. Singlestoreyed cottages were angled between eucalyptus trees and set on different slopes. The larger building had a café and restaurant. People were sitting in shirtsleeves and cotton dresses at outside tables. He tapped on the window, holding a key. ‘Plenty of rooms.’

He drove around the complicated lane system to their allotted dwelling. There were two beds and a wardrobe, desk, chairs and a telephone, as well as a bathroom. She liked its space and cleanliness. He washed his shirt at the sink, then put his underwear into the water, while she stood under the cool shower, a pleasure all the greater for the change she was going through. Impossible to think about getting back to the place they had left.

She ran a finger through her pubic hair, and let fingers stroke her belly. She had needed to pull him from death’s cul-de-sac before seeing a way out of her own. In that sense she was connected to him for ever, and he with her, whether or not they stayed as man and wife – whatever that might mean. For who knew whether she would want to remain with him or he with her? To expect comfort from the future was no more than a pathetic cry for help. You could only live in the present, and trust that the way would be shown.

She soaped herself, and held her face to the downrushing water. With blinds drawn, they lay on their separate beds. When she awoke, two hours had gone. Her oblivion had been without dreams, or any indication of having been asleep except that she felt weak, and hardly rested.

He sat reading. ‘I couldn’t lose consciousness. The road was still rolling along under my eyelids.’

She stood by his side. ‘I haven’t looked at the Bible for a long time.’

‘I thought I’d bring something to read, for those empty moments when one needs solace. It’s a book that reinforces my moral fibre. There isn’t much left either in me or the rest of the world. It’s on the wane, but we must get it back. My spirit is solidified by this, for instance:

‘“Give counsel, execute justice;

Make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday;

Hide the outcasts; betray not the fugitive.”

‘At one time I would have needed a sledgehammer to get such precepts into my senses. Every word is like bread:

‘“And I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

And joy in my people;

And the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her,

Nor the voice of the crying.”’

What caused her anxiety at hearing him quote such poems? She felt either fear or joy at the change she had seen in him, at the alterations in herself. Nothing in between. There was no anchor, no stillness or fixity for either of them. But they belonged nowhere if not to each other. He was someone come to life whom she had known but had forgotten, yet still did not know who he was. Was that the same with everyone – for the rest of their lives, no matter how long they were together? The mystery that could never be solved was to be the cement of their unity. The insoluble joined them more firmly than the certain or commonplace. He was going away from her, yet would never get so far that they would lose each other, all the same.

He sat by her on the bed. ‘You looked beautiful when you were sleeping, but even more so now.’

She put an arm over his shoulder, thinking they would make love. It didn’t matter. She was disembodied, feeling affection more than passion. The air from outside smelled of flowers and pine needles. Their window looked up a hillside. He put on a grey light-weight suit, with shirt and tie, and she wore a cardigan over her dress because the air seemed cool.

They drank a bottle of Valpolicella before they began the dish of ravioli. ‘I wonder what happened to Aubrey?’

He broke the powdery bread. ‘Aubrey?’

She reminded him. ‘Your drinking companion of last night.’

‘Seems years ago. I expect he’s in Rome by now.’

‘Would you like to be roaming around on your own?’

Was he, sailor or not, out of his depth and unable to admit that he wanted to end the jaunt? She was elated, then depressed, within a space in which no time passed. Either that, or it went backwards. Her spirit fled. It came back – always. Did he want to turn around, but his mouth wouldn’t say so? To plan travel in the isolation of his aunt’s flat was a pleasant way to pass a few evenings. All experience said so. But how about the reality of being with her? And her reality of being with him? Feeling lost, she knew that he wondered, too, and held his hand. It was getting dark. A few couples were dancing to the music.

‘I’ve roamed enough on my own,’ he said. ‘More than thirty years. I love you, and love being with you. There’s no one else, and never will be.’

He looked at her as if also asking why he was in this place with a plain strange person who was a million miles separated from his worldly mentality. He looked at her, she thought, as if he knew more about her than he was easy with. She saw too close, and too deep, and he couldn’t know it. But was she wondering whether he wanted to go on because she herself couldn’t bear to ask the same question? The idea frightened her. She didn’t want to ask. It was unnecessary because it was unanswerable.

‘Tomorrow …’ he began.

When the music stopped there was the deafening cro-ack of bullfrogs on the hill-slope. Talk, she knew, cured all doubts – and pulverized all queries.

‘We’ll go on to San Remo,’ he said. ‘It’s not very far.’

They needed another bottle for the scaloppine con Marsala. The waiter was young and quick, with wonderful eyes. There was a beautiful man at the next table, with an even more beautiful woman. It was a pleasure to look at other people. She could love them both. ‘Do you want to?’

‘There’s nothing else to do,’ Tom said.

She knew that he was alarmed. So was she. But he hadn’t answered. He might at least reply to her question by asking if she wanted to go on.

‘We’ve hardly begun,’ was all he could say.

He was right in thinking she lacked courage. But she would acquire it by experiene, the only way she knew. It was too late for questions. Who needed them? Questions only occurred to those who found the uncertainties of life too painful to bear. Yet she did, because to let go was to die, especially during changes that seemed incomprehensible.

He stood up, and she wondered what for. Was he about to leave because he could take no more – dump her – make the excuse that he was going to the lavatory, then walk quickly to the room for his luggage and drive away? Would he join Aubrey in Rome, or find himself a proper woman who would take care of him with no holds barred – as they say? He looked tired, but smiled, a hand at her shoulder. ‘This jungle music’s better to dance to than listen to. Let’s have a try!’

She looked. He took her astonishment to indicate that she would not be able to act, so held her arm firmly till she got up and followed. They moved around the floor. He was right. The noise wouldn’t let them talk. Unlike the other couples flinging about, they stayed close, her face at his shoulder, his arms around her and hers about him. The dance wouldn’t let them look at each other. It was better this way, more comforting. Nor did he seem to mind. Both were lost in their separation. She liked being close to him yet alone. He kissed her, then stepped away and swung her back and forth, spun himself, and turned her. She laughed, jolted uncomfortably into freedom. You don’t have to care, he said, and it’s called enjoying yourself. She laughed again. The walls of the room ran around her. He was one side, then the other. His face was not part of her, but his body was, as he came near and spun off again. She missed a table by inches, and stepped back, close to him. She had never danced in her life, and now she had. He was quick, and even her clumsiness vanished.

He took a torch out of his pocket to light the path back. He liked the way to be plain, his uncertainties resolved. For her to have everything clear in life would be like having no head. She’d left all that behind. She would sit beside him in the car with no head. At the fair as a child there had been a headless woman. She remembered her terror on seeing the lit-up and gaudy poster. She had not dared ascend the wooden steps and see the woman with no head. Lost it in a terrible accident at some factory in Lancashire, a man beside them said. Every fair has a headless woman, her father scoffed. It’s the same one, the other man told him, travelling around. She makes better money, I’ll bet, than she did when she worked in the mill. Does she, though, her father wondered. She gripped his hand, and questioned why it was always a headless woman and never a headless man.

‘In tropical places,’ Tom was saying, ‘we didn’t walk anywhere without a torch shining at the ground, because of reptiles.’

Back at the room she said: ‘I care for you more than I’ve ever cared for anyone. It may not help at the moment to say it, but I want you to know, all the same.’

He stood in silence.

‘I’m sorry I’m such a misery,’ she said. But her soul was her own – sorry or not. In the uncertainty of degradation and homelessness she was herself. He did not attempt to control her by trying to share her despair. She did not need such assistance. He would not do it. He endured her feelings as far as it was possible to do so, but left her free with them, the only attitude which might help to detach her from an agony that would not release her. The nearest he would go to acknowledging her plight was to say, as he undressed: ‘We’d better get some sleep. We’ll both feel better tomorrow.’

What else could the poor bloke say? Unable to speak, she held him in a strong grip. He moved with her to the bed. She was a long way from anything she had known. He knew she was tormented, but there was nothing he could do. He was not the sort of man to do anything except allow her to endure while not being totally devastated himself. She had to break the ropes of past attachments, and weave new ones with her own unaided strength and will. She was remaking the life of another man, as she had first made the life of George by marrying him and getting him started in business and in life. She had brought up one child and would now bring up another. Was that to be all she would do with herself?

It was as if she were simply passing the years before starting something real, but by the time she was able to she would be dead. As far as she was concerned there was no other life but this, and she had to do what she wanted while there was still time. She had not come on earth to shoe-horn men out of their suits of armour and bring up their children, even though they would be called her children as well.

She had to decide – either end it, and do what she wanted, or leave things alone and live like a cabbage. The way was clear, and wide open. Every course was possible, desirable – or out of the question. She was trapped because the breadth of space was boundless. There was no firmer trap than that. She was caught beyond all possibility of movement because all movement was possible and no direction closed to her.

To leave one man and meet another – where was the sense in that? To abandon one child and have another – wherein lay the difference? To depart from one man she had never loved, to one she believed that she did, was that sufficient? The altered landscape clarified her ideas on the matter. The unknown language around them brought out only what was important. There was no time for dross, no space for former confusions. If she weren’t to die she must know what she wanted.

Men were more or less taken care of from the womb to the coffin. So were women – if that was what they wanted, but she was herself first and a woman second. She knew that now. He had been a sailor before being a man, but she had never been anything except a woman. The only strength was in being an individual. Even in the world at large – if it mattered to think so – the more individuals there were, instead of married couples, the greater the strength of that society. Double the number of individuals in a society and it would be indestructible. But if so few of them wanted to be individuals she would at any rate be one herself, as far as it was possible to be so. Only in that way could she survive.

Without any foreplay she pulled him into her, and in a few moments felt him ejaculate. Thus soothed, she fell asleep, only awake long enough to know that he had moved across to his own bed. The next thing she knew she was having vivid dreams and beginning to wake up.

9

He bought a box of antico Toscano, gnarled, dark-brown, foul-smelling cigars that nevertheless tasted ambrosial. No other word would fit, he said. He had looked more and more like a schoolboy since she had got the laboratory report that spread his smile beyond all doubt.

An Italian gentleman at the next coffee table leaned across to say it was customary to cut the antico Toscano into two and smoke half at a time. The tobacconist kept a special pair of scissors for the purpose, he added.

The palm-lined promenade was in sunlight. Tom preferred to smoke his roots in one long sixteen-centimetre stick, though he had thanked the Italian for his kind advice. They walked under the palms. ‘I mustn’t,’ she said, ‘forget to buy some insect repellent from the chemist, though I suppose if you smoked those all night and sat by my bed they wouldn’t stand much of a chance.’

‘I love you,’ he offered. ‘Of course I’ll do it.’

She believed him, whether said lightly or not. They loved each other, but didn’t know why. How could you know why? Only a fool would want to know. The reasons were obvious if you looked for them. The answers were always there before the questions. But he couldn’t convince her when he said this in all the seriousness of his easygoing manner. Oh how mixed that sailor’s manner was – far more so, it seemed, than when she had first met him.

He said often that he loved her, like a perfect gentleman who had been used to obeying and getting obedience all his life. But he never said why, and she was ashamed at telling herself that it was not enough. She couldn’t let him know what she wanted, yet couldn’t bear to wait for him to say what she needed to hear. If he couldn’t tell her why he loved her she would rather be told why he hated her than have him say nothing in response to the basic question. She hadn’t gone through the misery of leaving one marriage in order to accept something which was not good enough for her, and, since she loved him so much, was not good enough for him either.

Yet every gesture and action proved that he certainly did love her, a new experience that was overwhelming, making her the victim of an intoxicating see-saw of emotion which at times she doubted her ability to live through. The intensity of her new life (was it new, and why?) daunted her to such an extent that she couldn’t finally say that she wanted it. There must be something else apart from this – and death.

He seemed made for the sun, walking by the blue sea and smoking his cigar without any cares, happy with her, adoring her. She had never been adored before. There was nothing she lacked. If anyone had asked if she were happy she would say yes. She was. There was no other answer. They had been here a week, so long that it had become timeless. They never talked about leaving. No question of pushing on. No discussion of what new place to see. Neither joy nor anguish on the merits of staying for ever in one place. Every morning he woke at six and went for a swim. He got out of bed with more alacrity and punctuality while travelling, as if he were still at sea perhaps, and had his duty to perform, than he had when at home and needed to rise by the alarm clock.

They walked the same route, drank coffee at the same place. But the afternoons were different. ‘Tell me something,’ she said.

‘I’m an afternoon man,’ he told her. ‘Having been a morning man all my life, I can now afford to be. My faculties don’t prosper till the afternoon, even though I’m an early riser.’

She stopped at a stall and bought a postcard for Judy. ‘I miss her.’ She counted the ships on the sea. ‘Strange as it may seem. There’s a part of me that’s always wanted to be independent like Judy.’

They walked across the road. Water flickered into grits of white, visibility sharpening on the horizon. ‘You mean that you would like to live alone, as Judy does?’

‘I wanted to for years. It seemed the nearest thing to heaven. But I didn’t make the break when the longing was most intense. I got used to the torment, and so couldn’t snap free. I grew resigned.’

‘You did it, eventually.’

‘In a somnolent kind of way.’ They walked along the shore. ‘But I didn’t make a dramatic exit like Judy.’

‘Who knows what her exit was like?’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure no prize was ever offered for the most lacerating departure, though I imagine it was just as difficult and agonizing for you as for Judy.’

‘But it took me nearly twenty years.’

They watched cars driving along the road. ‘And you still want to live alone?’

‘I was doing so when we met.’

He remembered.

‘I actually thought I was enjoying it, and maybe I was. But presumably the state didn’t suit me. Do you ever remember the time when you saved my life?’

‘I relive it occasionally, hoping you’ll never think I did the wrong thing.’

She held his hand as they walked. ‘What day is it? I’ve lost count.’

‘Friday, according to my almanac.’

‘I didn’t want to live alone.’ She added after a pause: ‘What surer proof could you want?’

‘It’s not only me you’re living with,’ he said, stopping to relight his cigar by cupping the end in his hand against the wind.

She stopped, and looked at him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s not only you I’m living with, is it? It’s your past, your ideas, and all the different people in thousands of years who have gone to producing you. It’s your nationality, religion, dreams, battles, great migrations – if there were any; struggles and miseries, all the human permutations of every kind of change, which there obviously were; the strife and jubilations, which I hope there were. You wanted to escape, but I pulled you back into them. I shan’t remind you of that again. I never intended to, but it still seems to be what we’re talking about. I belong to you and your millions of bits and pieces for as long as you’ll allow me to. I’m part of them, just as you are a part of mine, and you know as much about my past as I do myself, because we went through that heap of intimidating evidence in the flat, and I told you everything bit by bit as it came to light. So neither of us can live apart from each other. Even if we went away this minute and never met again we wouldn’t really separate. By living together, we are interdependent, yet still independent, in a peculiar sort of way. I see you as more truly liberated than Judy, more courageous. You’ve been through a great deal more, and I know you are still going through it – though I’m not diminishing her suffering, either.’

She saw his face, the same she had glimpsed while driving and thought so empty. Did he teem with speculations every minute of the day? It was the same face she had woken up to after killing herself. She was amazed, yet glad to hear him talk, for how else could she know what was in his mind if, as was generally the case, she was too craven to question him directly, or too indifferent to want to know anything.’

She walked on in order to maintain her smile of equanimity, for she was exhausted by uncertainty and self-distrust. He saw more in her than there was, she thought, something he wanted to perceive but which did not exist. He was doing his best in every way. Or maybe it did not exist – whatever it was – because she did not wish it to. Who was he to say that it did, or she to say that it did not? – this mysterious quality she could not get hold of. She didn’t want to disappoint him by denigrating herself, though it was hard not to. But if all that he mentioned was a reality then it was something she herself could neither see nor feel, and therefore if it was present to him and not to her there was an imbalance in their association which, however she tried to correct it, would be the end of her independence for ever. He spoke in this way because he wanted something from her which she did not know existed, and which she might not want to give even if it turned out to be there and she eventually discovered what it was.

He also wanted to give something to her. That was certain. He already had, but she found it harder to receive than to give, and was terrified at becoming enmeshed by it. But perhaps it had already happened, and if so, there was no cause to be afraid. She had abandoned everything, but was there nothing else to be done but go on with him?

In the old town there was a market selling an abundance of vegetables and fruits, as well as olives, spicy sausage, cheeses and bread. He bought a bag full, did the buying, chaffing at the women as if he spoke their language perfectly and not just a few phrases which, she had to admit, he mimicked pretty well. They loved him, she saw. He flirted and they flirted. It was their way. And they smiled as if they loved her as well. She bought a melon while his back was turned, and the woman who handed it to her knew she was pregnant.

They drove along the coast to where it wasn’t too crowded.

‘I thought sailors couldn’t swim,’ she said, taking her clothes off.

‘It’s not that they can’t. It’s often that it does them no good when they have to try.’

She had a horror of treading on something she couldn’t see. He drew her along, and out. ‘Can you swim?’

‘After a fashion.’ She dived forward, feeling a wave of water as he followed. He swam around her, then she broke out of his circle and went ahead in a rapid side-paddle, turning to see how far off she had left him. She felt safer when she could no longer touch bottom, dipped under and corkscrewed up for air, spouting water at the sun’s heat. She laughed at his slow progress, and did a languid breast stroke towards him.

They sat on a slab of rock in their swimming suits, a towel over her shoulders so as not to scorch. ‘I’m getting dehydrated,’ she said.

He went to the car on the road and came down with the stove, provisions and a canister of water. Ships in the distance stood waiting to go into harbour. She couldn’t eat in the early morning, but her appetite came as the day wore on. Sea creamed over the rocks, a ragged string of phosphorescence coming in and going out.

‘It’s polluted,’ she said. ‘We’ll probably die after our swim.’

‘I don’t believe it. But if it is we’ll have to get used to it.’ He made tea, then sat and looked at the ships through his binoculars. She couldn’t tell when they moved, but didn’t doubt that he could. They were monuments to the patient sailors who worked on them. Graven, and unable to move head, arms or shoulders, he was a statue set above the dreamy sea. She was apart, and let him be alone, not wanting to know what he thought. He was filled with his own back-and-forth contemplation. When he lowered the binoculars his eyes continued to look in a half squint towards the horizon as if he could see beyond the dark blue line.

She wanted less and less to know what kind of vision he saw. His vision was part of him. His, and his alone. He had a right to it. What did she want it for? She had her own, however unclear it yet was and would perhaps remain. But her own. That was what she wanted. If she showed interest in his she might not understand what he would say, might not recognize her own when it became manifest, if one day it magically did. So how could she take a chance on such a vital question, which in any case wasn’t specifically hers? Perhaps at the moment he had even less to tell than she had, that he was also empty, and content in spite of all.

The sun warmed her thighs. She lay back, her head on the folded basket, lids closed against the sky’s glare, smelling trees and a mild breeze from the sea. She weighed nothing – because of the heat, the touch of grit under the calves of her legs, her closed eyes and the sense of emptiness given by sea and sky. The vacancy of space produced a peace no force could touch. Her senses floated. She could broach all limits. Within her weakness she felt a semblance of not quite forgotten strength returning from many years ago. Or perhaps she was recalling a life she had never known, a reflection sent back from the future telling of what was yet to come, but designed only to lure her into unimaginable turmoil.

Such feelings of renewal were impossible to trust. She preferred to push them away into the fanciful mists, and instead enjoy the timeless moment with a hand over her eyes to keep off the sun’s damaging glare, yet be ready for whatever might come.

He looked at the sea, and said that for the first time in his life he did not want to move. He wanted to stay where he was for ever. The great blue had meaning only because she had come with him. She was here. Why go on? Tennyson had a few choice words on the subject, he laughed. What did it matter where he lived? His ancestors could look after themselves.

He turned to her. ‘I’ve lived three whole lives: orphan, seaman, and now I’m a Wandering Jew. The last I didn’t know about till recently, which makes it more important than the others, because it really was the first. It means everything – and yet nothing, as long as I’m with you.’

God had already taken care of them, he went on, just as they would yet be taken care of. He felt weary to a depth he could never have imagined, though knew he had no option but to move, as if he had a fatal illness and was determined to die only in a particular and chosen spot of the earth, so that he could be content in knowing that he had done the right thing even unto death. He refused to believe it, however. It wasn’t like that at all. They still had a whole life to live.

They collected the things together and put on their clothes. She should have been afraid but wasn’t. When he revealed himself so absolutely her optimism came back, the unalloyed and joyous sort with no catches to it. Yet it didn’t last long, though the residue left her with the desire to do something, to move, to act. When they were driving along she said: ‘I want to go back to England.’

‘All right,’ he answered. ‘We’ll light off in the morning.’

‘Not in the morning. Now.’

He would obey. He has obeyed all his life, she thought.

‘We’d better let Judy know, then,’ he told her.

‘Send a telegram.’

‘Why not phone?’ he suggested. ‘Do it from the hotel while I pack.’

10

‘Judy?’

‘It isn’t Judy.’

‘Who is it, then?’

‘It’s Hilary.’

She hadn’t recognized the voice. It had sounded like that of a boy she didn’t know. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Is your mother there?’

‘No, but Judy is.’

Now she knew what she was going back to. ‘Get her for me,’ she said sharply, ‘or my fist will come out of the telephone and clout you one! I want to talk to her.’

There was a bang, as if the phone had dropped on to the floor, or had been thrown there. She waited.

‘We’ll only get two hours along the road before we have to stop and look for another hotel,’ Tom said, folding his trousers into a case. ‘We might as well stay here tonight – we’ll have to pay for the room, anyway.’

She could tell he thought her more stupid than determined.

‘Start early tomorrow,’ he went on. ‘We’ll be half-way up the Rhône before evening, maybe even beyond Lyon.’

She nodded. ‘I want to go now.’

‘Judy?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Pam.’

‘Pam?’

‘Pam.’

‘Pam! Where are you, then?’

‘Italy.’

‘You sound next door.’

‘So do you.’

‘I wish I was.’

‘Wouldn’t it be nice? We will be, soon.’

‘I couldn’t sleep for days after you left. What do you mean? Are you coming back?’

While with Tom she felt ten years younger. With Judy she felt that even twenty years had been taken off her life. ‘I’ve got news for you. I’m pregnant.’

There was a drop in the tone of her voice. ‘Oh.’

‘Tom’s happy, as you can imagine.’

‘I’ll bet he is.’

‘I am as well. I hoped you would be.’

Judy forced a laugh. ‘That’ll make three kids we’ve got.’

‘I don’t expect there’ll be any more, though, do you?’

‘Let’s hope not. Boy or girl?’

‘I can’t tell yet.’

‘Let me know as soon as you can.’

‘I’ll try!’

‘I’m interested. See you in a few days, then.’

There was a pause.

‘Do you want us to move out?’ Judy said.

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Well, do you?’

‘What an idea!’

‘We’ll make very picturesque refugees, sitting on the steps of the town hall. We’ll be in all the local papers. Or maybe we won’t, because I saw an empty house in Hove yesterday. We can become squatters.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Can’t you tell when I’m joking?’

Pam couldn’t always. ‘Isn’t our place big enough for you?’

Judy laughed, a more genuine resonance. ‘I hope so. We’ll all live happily together I expect.’

‘There should be space for all of us.’

‘We’ll talk about it when you get here,’ Judy said.

‘We don’t need to.’

‘All right, then. It’s settled.’ She sounded glad. There was some disturbance from the children, and Pam heard her shout: ‘Shut up, you pigs. Tom’s coming back. He’ll sort you out.’

There were cheers.

‘We’ll phone from the docks – maybe Newhaven, after Tom’s worked it out. He sends his love.’

‘Can’t wait to see you.’

‘Nor me you.’

‘You’d better hang up,’ Judy said, ‘or you’ll have no money to get back on. Love and kisses to you – both.’

She turned to Tom on putting the receiver down. ‘That’s that. All fixed.’

He clipped his case shut. ‘Will she be glad to see us?’

‘She will now. The children certainly will. She had imagined we’d be away for a couple of months, but it’ll be only a fortnight.’

‘That,’ he said, with more satisfaction than she liked to hear, ‘is fate. Everyone is at its mercy.’

‘It wasn’t fate that got me pregnant.’ She turned to her own clothes.

He ignored her remark, and said: ‘She’ll be all right. We’ll look after them. There’s enough room in the flat for everybody, as I heard you telling her.’

‘Or maybe it was fate,’ Pam smiled.

11

There was nothing in her mind except the force to get out into the open what little was in it, that much being all she had and therefore of the most vital importance to her. An east wind buffeted the car. He didn’t even see the low hills lifting to left and right. She said: ‘You are destroying me.’

His hands on the steering wheel gripped more than formerly. She had struck at the middle, and found a rock of truth that she had been feeling for since coming out of that miasma of gas when they first met. And he knew it, she thought, at which he could only keep quiet so as to be able to stay driving safely on the motorway. Their lives seemed more vital to him than anything she could say.

‘You’re trying to destroy me, that’s it.’ She was not willing to spare him. The pain was so unremitting that she could not even spare herself. Why did two people live together if they could not confess what pain they felt? Now that she had spoken she seemed more in danger than he could ever be. He knew that, as well, and if he didn’t respond, or reply, she would leap at his hands and bloody her teeth on them, tear at the dark hairs on those fingers confidently curled around the plastic-covered wheel so that he would run off the motorway or into some other vehicle. Death seemed easier than silence. She would reduce him, because the prospect of reducing herself was too final to be borne. The cost to her was infinite, but to him it would be little enough. All her life she had wanted to meet someone strong enough to sustain her central fire of attack, an attack into which was built the very substance of herself. The end had come, and she would fling herself into death; because anything less was worse than death which, though it meant life, she would not live with. She was his equal, and wanted him to know.

‘And I won’t be destroyed, not by you or anyone else, but above all not by you.’

He smiled, but was in agony. Unlike at first meeting, his face was no longer capable of concealing secrets. The ability to create mutual agony was at least a measure of their progress towards each other, as was the happiness they had known an indication of their intimacy. The driving of the car held his pain within bounds. Like the man used to obey, and to obedience, he kept a straight course, still conscious to the extent of moving from lane to lane while overtaking other vehicles. ‘You can’t destroy me,’ he said, ‘which is clearly what you want.’

He spoke as if out of despair, but she detected a note of triumph. The vivid light and stink of motor fumes made her feel near to death. Any split second, being at the outer limits of a life to which she had brought him, he might swing the car at the bank of a bridge support and end the misery he must feel but which she now told herself she did not. Death was better than no feeling. Without feeling you did nothing but that which brought death about. If she was dead she would wake him up, make his heart ring and vibrate to what was in her. He had come from the sea and usurped her place in the world, before bringing her back to it in his fashion. He was all compact and formed and finished beautifully by training and circumstance and heredity, while George had been a millpond of nothingness and she a mere appendage of that. She loved him and she didn’t, but her own terms were made as nothing by his monolithic self-assurance, against which she must prevail so as to save herself from destruction. He was the spirit to her flesh, and she would make them mix on her terms as much as on his. But all she could say was: ‘I won’t be destroyed, whatever you may want.’

She lacked words for the outside. They were there by the thousand but would not be spoken. She wanted them but couldn’t find any that would tell him what she meant. He loved her, so knew what she wanted to say, but it wasn’t enough unless and until she had been allowed to say everything.

‘I love you.’ Each word was as clear and as uncomfortable as grit in his throat. ‘Isn’t that sufficient?’

It no longer was. She had glimpsed something else. It had taken time, but another light was beginning to expand. She told him that no, it wasn’t enough, as a matter of fact.

He drove on. ‘It will have to be.’

She was sure he understood, but knew he might not be able to follow. He overtook an enormous lorry, hands relaxed at the wheel, and went on to put another juggernaut behind them. She struck, smashed, crunched her fist at his hands. ‘It won’t have to be. It won’t.’

He instantaneously gripped. His expression was unchanged, she struck again, the lorry wheels seeming higher than the car, a cliff-face sliding along with engine roaring and smothering theirs as if they were gliding in silence. He changed gear, flicked on blinkers to reach an inner lane, his lips making imprecations which might have been at the lorry as much as at her. For no reason he switched on the windscreen wipers, perhaps as if to wash her pestering spirit away. They were around the lorry obstacle, and for good measure he swung out again and left two cars behind. He thought he was safe, that he had survived a crisis as he’d triumphed in the fight when George and his brothers had attacked her.

She recalled the set-to, filled with shame and, forgetting the peril she’d been in, felt that her brothers-in-law had been hard done by. They’d stood little chance against his cock-of-the-walk sailor-bully who tricked them by bluff rather than fair fight.

The motorway curved, banks of rock and yellow soil close to the side. Heavy gunmetal clouds lay up the Rhône valley ahead. She struck again, fearing to vomit if she didn’t – blows more unexpected than the first and even more forceful, screaming at him to stop the car. He looked at the front, tightened his grip, and drove on. He thought she had finished, worked out her demons as if she were a mutinous deckhand whom he had to polish off by the old one-two. When she struck at him on a clear patch of the road his fist spun and knocked her head against the window.

‘Be quiet,’ he said loudly, ‘and pull yourself together.’

There was no other way. She was carrying his child. He would make sure no death occurred while he had control. And for the moment he had. But they were finished.

South of Lyon, a coppice of tall pipes speared into the air, blazing flames of gas burning at their tips against a dark underbelly of cloud. The tips of flame rippled like flags of victory against the world of darkness. She noticed him look at it yet watch every foot of the road. The zone the chimneys covered was immense. Her head turned to stay with them as he drove by. The rhythm of their waving flame-tips calmed her.

At the night-stop hotel, placed between the main road and a railway line, their room was only a few steps away from the dining-room, a bungalow sort of settlement which, he said, would have to do because you were forced to put up with what you got while on the road. She hoped he wouldn’t refer to her fit of rage that day, but he said: ‘I don’t particularly mind when you try to kill me, but I object to you wanting to do yourself in, not to mention the child you’re going to have.’

She stopped herself, by an effort as violent as when she had lunged at his hand on the steering wheel, from saying she was sorry about everything. Couldn’t help myself. Don’t know what got me going. Never.

He stood in his underpants to shave, face hidden from her, thinking that what he had said was the end of the matter.

‘Life’s not real any more,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘Isn’t it, by God? It’s real enough for me. You sometimes make it too bloody real for words, I’ll say that for you. Not that I want to talk about it, though not to do so would be worse for me than for you, so I suppose I have to.’

She felt exultant at his admission, petty as it was, sly as all get-out, and did not regret anything she had done or said. His eyes, when he turned, were troubled by a fire in the void behind them, which was more intense and painful than he would admit even to himself. Thus he could only smile, fresh-faced and smooth, a cut below the ear from which blood oozed. The smile was a shadow of his acquiescence to whatever demands she’d make, and he clearly expected many. Whether or not he guessed anything specific about them was unimportant, his expression said – which made her run to him and hold him.

Weeping with relief, she drew the flat of her hand over the rough hair of his chest. Every day ended in victory, when it had not seemed possible, when it had seemed that even defeat would be denied. Life might not be real, but the fight was, and so was the happiness she felt that came after it.

12

He cruised north-west along the motorway at between sixty and seventy knots. They had left the south, what little had been seen of sea and luxury-green. She was not saying farewell for long. The hills were bare and gentle, and to get north did not seem so imperative. They were behind a high, broad-wheeled safari sort of wagon laden inside and out with bedrolls, jerrycans and canvas bags. Tom kept at the regulation distance. The vehicle looked dependable for all terrain, an All-Europe construction heavy with purpose, yet capable of speed. It must shine well in advertisements and glossy brochures. She asked if he wouldn’t like that sort of thing, assuming that part of his character was similar to its virtues.

He nodded. ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. But I’ve often thought of driving through Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan to India, so it would do, certainly, though I read that there’s now a paved road all the way from Calais to Katmandu. An ordinary car like this would be good enough.’

‘If you go on that kind of journey,’ she said, ‘I’ll come with you. Sounds just the kind of trip for us.’

He laughed. ‘As long as you promised to behave!’

They watched the safari wagon move briskly, almost brusquely out, and increase speed so as to overtake a saloon car that appeared to be dawdling by comparison. Tom looked in his mirror. ‘Maybe I’ll overtake as well, for a change of view.’

‘OK to go,’ she said.

He swung to the outer lane.

She felt a twinge of worry. The heavy safari car swerved, skidding as they followed. Had the driver fainted? Had a heart attack? It weaved ponderously across the motorway, smoke pluming from the rear wheels and filling their own car with the smell of hot rubber and scorching bakelite, plastic and tin.

He braked slightly, some of his tension transferring to her. She was too fixed by her stare to speak. Bits were breaking off the wagon, now to their right-front, and a car steaming up close behind seemed about to come through his rear mirror. Her feet treddled as if she also could slow the car.

The height of the safari wagon diminished, its body nearer the tarmac, while pieces from around the back wheels were spat up and away by the force of rims hitting the ground. The wheels appeared to be disintegrating, as on a stricken aircraft that had touched the runway too fast.

The only safety lay in speed. He knew it instinctively. Pam was fascinated, no fear possible. She watched the falling to pieces of the car, the helplessness of the man at the wheel as his vehicle hit the side of the road and was carried back towards the centre, then again to the side and in a more or less straight line as their own car with a few inches of gap shot by and suddenly had the whole motorway to itself.

Tom slowed when it was safe, seeing the damaged car stopped on the hard shoulder behind. ‘It was a close call,’ he said, ‘but I think they’re all right.’ He set hazard lights going. ‘I’d better have a look, though’ – and backed a few hundred yards to get close.

The driver was laughing. Tom might have been, he supposed, in a similar plight. Not much else to do. The man’s face was pallid, his one concession to fear. He knew he’d been breathed on by death, so was letting his wind out by noise. He bellowed, amused at his own luck.

Two children and a woman were silent inside, as if blaming him for what happened. If he had been gibbering with guilt and hopelessness they wouldn’t have been so ready to blame. He treated the collapse as a bit of a lark, unwilling to get down and pray thanks for his deliverance. But he couldn’t do that because maybe he’d forgotten how.

Perhaps he had been driving the car too roughly for its own good, Tom said, when he had been told there was nothing to be done. The man didn’t want anyone to share the harvest of his downfall. Since it had happened, he would relish this crack-up. It would be his and his alone, an experience that, dangerous though it may have been, and (perhaps fortunately) rare enough in one’s life, was not to be divided with anyone, or diminished by an offer of help, which could not alter the fact that he was stranded on the French motorway miles from anywhere, after his car-marvel of automobile technology had so undeniably packed up on him.

Tom read this and more into his face, and thought he wasn’t far wrong. The man thanked him for the offer of help, and motioned him away, not wanting any other being to come between him and the breakdown gang or the one-way alley to the knackers’ yard. It was understandable, yet childish; and while Tom thought he really ought to consider his wife and children (though perhaps they weren’t his – who was to say? If they were they had every right to be far more angry), the man held up his other hand and waved a sheaf of insurance papers which, to judge from the wide grin, would bring all the necessary assistance, and pay for it, and put them into the best hotel while his wagon was repaired or replaced, or transport of the plushiest category was provided to get them home. He had no problems – but thank you very much.

Which was all very well, but there was a risk of explosion and fire from leaking petrol. It was a hot day. Tom explained, in spite of the man’s grinning vociferations turning into anger, and opened the doors gently to get the passengers out. They climbed the barrier off the hard shoulder and walked fifty yards up the slope. The driver, clutching his papers, thanked him very much, and went to find a telephone.

When he saw a breakdown car already on its way to the stricken landboat Tom drove on. ‘What I would like,’ Pam said, ‘is to get off at the next exit, and go up to the Channel in a leisurely way on ordinary roads.’

‘All right.’

‘Do you mind?’ She sensed danger, especially in speed, and on the motorway. The needle rarely showed less than eighty. Her hands shook. The wreck of the safari-wagon had been a little too close.

He grimaced, as if he did mind. I do and I don’t, his expression said. ‘The motorway ends in a few miles, in any case. One day I expect it’ll go right to the Channel. Maybe even under it in three hundred years.’

He liked the thrusting forward along the great wide road that would get him quickly back to the English water. On the other hand she was right: it would be more interesting from the point of view of scenery and navigation to go slowly along minor roads, forgetting any notion of time or a schedule for reaching home. As long as they were pointing generally north nothing else mattered, though the course would be modified from time to time. ‘We’ll go north-west for a while, and get into the valley of the Loire, then head through the beautiful belly of France and curve around Paris to the west. Schlieffen in reverse. We’ll zig-zag through Normandy, and cross from Dieppe.’ If the car came to pieces on a Route Nationale, and there was no knowing that it might not let them down, they would find a couple of days extra added to their time. Speed not only killed, it wore the car out, and that was worse, he jested, telling himself that a rear-tyre blow-out at seventy could mean coffins for them both. Off the main roads there seemed less chance. But he was going to miss the excitement of the solo cavalry charge along the broad road, the tension of high speed and the hazard of so many overtakings a minute.

When he drove at such a rate he was hard to talk to. She felt the intensity of his concentration and didn’t want to break it. On an ordinary road he would go slowly and they could talk. It would be more human. Also, she said, it’ll be much cheaper not having to pay tolls every hundred kilometres. Well, he replied, so it will. But there’ll be an extra night or two on the road, though that should be a pleasure for us both.

The green and wooded hills rolled into a central French fairyland of châteaux and self-contained villages. In one they stopped at an épicerie for food, and bought bread from next door. She left him in the car and stammered her bit of French, pointing when that failed.

They parked among chestnut trees. The place was wet and she avoided mud on stepping out. The air was dank, and she reached into the back for a sweater. Tom primed the stove and made tea on the blue flame. She pulled the long bread apart with her fingers and forced Camembert in between. ‘This is the best of being on the road. I feel like a tramp. Nothing in life matters, because I’ve got nowhere to go, and there’s nowhere for the moment I want to go. I certainly never thought this feeling was part of me.’

Could he still love such a person? Wouldn’t much matter. Couldn’t matter. She loved him in so far as it didn’t interfere with her being herself and doing whatever she wanted to do. Travelling not only broadened the mind, as it was said, but opened it where all had been closed before. If somebody loved you, and she believed him when he said he did, they loved you in spite of you being yourself. They saw something more mysterious than yourself to be in love with. She felt the same with regard to him. There was an equality in a relationship that cemented them in spite of all surface imperfections, of which she sensed there were many.

He was busy, and didn’t care what she thought. Even when her speculations were spoken aloud he did not seem to concede their importance.

She felt less sleepy after food and tea. ‘Tell me if anything’s coming. I’m going behind that bush.’

He repacked the stove, then himself went to piss.

She said: ‘When we set off, I want to do some driving.’

He gave her the keys.

She began slowly, going barely thirty miles an hour. The road was curving, undulating, and in places narrow. He sat with the map on his knees, and she felt that every mile seemed like ten to him. ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ve driven ever since George got his first car. Not all that often, because he never liked me using his precious possessions, but I can drive all right.’

At this rate, she saw him thinking, we’ll be a week on the road before landing anywhere. ‘I can look at the scenery for a change,’ he said.

‘Well, do it, then.’

But he observed the road as if he were still driving. He’ll get used to it, she thought. He worked out every gear-change and brake tread, looked in the (for him) non-existent rear mirror whenever she needed to move out and get by stationary cars in a village. At junctions and crossroads he looked to see if it was clear.

‘I’m not nervous at all,’ she said, ‘and I’m the one who should be. So don’t you be.’

He laughed. ‘You caught me out.’

‘Hard not to.’

It began to rain. ‘Which switch works the wipers?’

He reached across. ‘That one.’

‘Thought so.’ A few miles further on she said: ‘Where do we stay tonight?’

‘Wherever we land. Most places have a hotel of sorts, and I expect they’re pretty much the same.’

So they could drift. Just as well, at the rate I’m going. It was more interesting, and in a way more relaxing, to drive instead of twiddling your thumbs as a passenger in the cabbage seat. ‘You just tell me when you’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘Then we can find a place to eat and sleep.’ A car coming from the opposite direction flashed its headlights. ‘What was that for?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s either warning you to slow down because there’s a police speed trap ahead, though I don’t think that can be the reason, or you’re just a shade too far to the middle of the road.’

‘You’re so bloody diplomatic.’

‘It’s my nature.’

‘Just as well.’ On a straight piece she increased to fifty and overtook a 2CV van. He tried to count the trees as they went by, but they rippled along his vision like a washboard. The chaussée was certainly déformé, but she seemed not to have noticed. Or it didn’t matter.

At seven o’clock she drove into the square of a large village. The blonde middle-aged landlady of the Hôtel des Charmettes showed them street-floor accommodation across from the hotel. All other rooms were taken. He went back to fill in the passport form. They walked before dinner, sharing an umbrella along streets of grey houses that were mostly shuttered and seemingly minus inhabitants, despite the Michelin’s claim that the village had eight hundred. She liked the clean air and occasional touches of rain when a corner was turned. ‘It’s marvellous to be in such a place,’ she said, ‘and know we’ll be gone in the morning.’

A mildewed statue to a local philosopher of the last century glowed with the sheen of sunlight between showers. ‘I’ve turned you into a sailor,’ he said.

‘I always was one, perhaps. And maybe you always weren’t.’

‘I think I’m tired of continually wondering what I was, and trying to find out who I am. I don’t think it much signifies. I don’t know, and don’t want to know. Or I know, and don’t care. Whatever happens will happen, and that’s all that matters.’

Each word was an ache to his spirit. Confusion was never far below the surface, and he couldn’t stop indications of it breaking through. To that extent she had ruined him, or humanized him, though the turmoil would have been there no matter what childhood he had gone through, or what life he had led. Whatever he wanted he hadn’t yet found, and she suspected he knew very well but wasn’t capable of discussing it. He was lost, more lost than she had ever been. His tightrope of despair underfoot had turned into a razor-blade. He did not want to speak because he felt that changes were coming over which he would have no control, and that whether good or bad came from them they would be better by far than the perilous uncertainties that embroiled him.

But it was nothing to do with her. The fact that she was close would not make things easier for him. He knew it also. Love should be made to support only so much. She knew what she wanted, and it was up to him to know what he wanted. She wanted not to want, and at times felt close to that state. He wanted to want, and was nearer than he imagined. In a way it made some kind of harmony out of the chaos, a space at the centre of the storm in which she could stay calm. If she could thus be at rest she would be able to help him, and to that extent love could go a little way towards their support.

They got into the soft double bed at eleven and kissed goodnight, turning away into separate sleep. Every day generated absolute exhaustion. It wasn’t possible for the bones to be more tired, softened and ready to melt. But sleep fought away from such a body. Traffic went by outside, beyond the narrow pavement. The worst was the motorbikes which, though rare, cut the silence like an enormous saw. Someone upstairs finally dropped his second boot and got into bed.

The ceiling was made of paper, and when she heard him pick his boots up there was light at the window and she realized it must be dawn. Dreams, though unremembered, still weighed heavily, so she snuggled against Tom in the soft cave of the bedclothes until nine o’clock, when he moved away and got up.

They crossed the road for breakfast. She felt a sharp pain in the middle of her back, unable to take close to a full breath, or make a complete yawn which it seemed vital to do, giving her a tense expression that Tom remarked on as she poured the coffee.

‘The bed was damp,’ he said. ‘Steamy, in fact. Maybe you’ll feel better when we’re on the road.’

The old cure-all, she hoped. She was hungry, which was a good sign. When she managed to get a full breath she expressed gratitude at being alive.

13

They packed, paid, and set off, Pam at the steering wheel. The road twisted through lush country, and after a few miles she came up to a gaggle of lorries impossible to overtake. She resigned herself to the trundle, holding back from the one in front while Tom stared at the countryside. A long stretch of road was needed to overtake, but when there seemed sufficient, vehicles were always coming the other way. There was nothing to do, he said, except sweat it out. Only a lunatic would try to shoot by. According to the map there would be some dual carriageway in twenty miles. And the land would get flatter by the river.

The ache in her back was as if a large pin had stuck there which only let her take a full breath if she began slowly and hid her intention of breathing at all. Before she could succeed in her purpose she would often come full-stop against a barrier of pain and anxiety that forced a retreat back into shallow breathing. She would try again, using the same tactics, and when a full breath came the relief felt like victory indeed.

The road was empty from the opposite direction, but other cars out of the queue behind were already racing by. She wanted to stop driving, but it was impossible because the rheumatic pain and heavy dreams of the night goaded her on.

She also felt the tension in him when he was no longer interested in the scenery. He was impatient because she could not overtake the lorry and get on. He lit two cigarettes and passed one, but after a few puffs she left it in the ashtray. Speed was slow, but they progressed some miles, as he must have seen from the map. She only wanted to cover more of the road. Being a driver had its compensations, in that you forgot yourself. Who or what you were was of minor importance. You simply had to get ahead, and stay alive. Life was simple.

‘Is it clear?’

There was nothing behind.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going!’

‘Now?’ he urged.

It was a game with basic rules, and they were in it together. It was her throw. She came down to third gear, moved into the clear, and accelerated forward. The enormous arseswaying lorry seemed by her side for ever, as if maintaining speed however much she increased hers.

‘Bit more gas,’ he said coolly.

‘More gas!’

A bend was close, perhaps half a kilometre, but a hundred-mile-an-hour Citroën coming around could reduce it to nothing in a few seconds. Her indicator was already flashing for when it would be necessary to nip sharply in.

She was at the front of the lorry, then beyond it. A car from around the bend was flashing headlights as it came towards her, a jungle-monster out of the bush and dead-set for her death. The lorry behind signalled with its light, and she got safely in, swaying slightly then straightening as she took the bend.

She felt triumphant, as if she had passed a test, but decided from then on to be careful.

The lorry she had overtaken was only a foot behind her rear bumper, keeping a full battery of headlights beamed into her mirror.

‘The sod! He knows it’s a woman driving.’ She increased speed so that he fell behind.

‘At the next place,’ Tom said, ‘there’s a Relais Routier eating-house where we can have a proper meal.’

The pain was acute in her chest and back ribs, but a full breath came more often, the tension relaxing as they shared a bottle of wine over lunch. She wondered whether a lorry man who came in hadn’t been the driver of the one she had overtaken. ‘It’s good to have a co-driver to share the labours of the road,’ Tom said.

‘Hard to believe.’ But he meant it, she knew, touching his glass with hers. ‘Your turn when we set off.’

A youngish cadaverous-looking man came in clothed in black leather, probably a motorcyclist, she thought. His tall figure, pale face and staring gentian-blue eyes attracted her. He took a table by the curtains, as if he wanted to observe traffic going by, even while eating. He disturbed her, though he didn’t care or even realize. The waitress took him a litre of wine, and Pam turned away, to go on with her meal.

They walked the town for an hour, stood at the ramparts by the church and looked down a steep declivity with heavily wooded banks. She saw the black-clad motorcyclist travelling along the road they had come in by.

Tom drove as if to make up for lost time, back on the cavalry charge when the road straightened, overtaking traffic as if hoping to get in front and have an empty highway to himself.

Impossible, he knew. There would always be someone ahead as long as you were in life and not death. But the striving was there which, he supposed, would never leave him.

There was no hurry, she knew. Embroiling dreams pulled her from the ever-rolling road, the motorized dragon-roar of traffic passing from the opposite direction, and high flat clouds over the riverine landscape. She went willingly to sleep, giving herself to a change from the eternal sound and motion of travel. George, pursuing and ranting, followed into her dreams. She was glad to wake when the map fell from her knees, and was happy to see Tom’s face. ‘Was I dozing long?’

‘Half an hour.’ She glimpsed his profile as he concentrated on his work. She wanted to kiss him, but to do so might smash them to pieces, and bring their return more quickly to the kind of end they would never hope for. He felt her scrutiny. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘The aches and pains have nearly gone.’

He smiled. It was easy to make him. His face, difficult to focus, turned into George’s, and she heard an unstoppable scream tear itself from her ribs. I was only wondering whether it was you and not somebody else.

The car slowed. ‘What is it?’

‘There was something in my eye. An insect. It’s gone now.’ He was troubled. Who wouldn’t be? ‘How far’s the next place with a hotel?’

‘Fifteen kilometres,’ she told him.

‘We’ve done enough today.’

They went into the town, trees along the road, people walking the pavements. They lived here, worked here, were born and would die here, most of them. She envied them. Life seemed calm. Young girls strolled with their boy-friends. There was a public square, with a newspaper kiosk and garden seats. The streets were narrow, and shops open. It was like being back in the world when he parked and they stood upright on the gravel to stretch themselves. She belonged nowhere, only to herself. Yet she belonged everywhere she came to, and to nowhere in particular, the only certainty was that she was with Tom, covering the trail of a journey without end.

The hotel was modern, their room on the fourth floor. Out of the window she saw river and country beyond immediate roofs. ‘We must look like tramps coming out of the car.’

‘People are used to seeing such things.’

They washed and changed.

‘We’ll soon feel human again,’ he said.

He lay on the bed, and no sooner was his head on the pillow than he was asleep. It was still light outside, so she picked up the car keys and drew the curtains so that he wouldn’t wake till dinner.

She walked across the road to the parking space and unlocked the door, wanting the basket so as to buy food for tomorrow’s stint. To reach Dieppe by evening and get on the Channel ferry wouldn’t leave time for a sit-down meal. Broad daylight invited her to turn on the ignition. She backed out. A hundred miles would roll before he awoke. Traffic was leaving town, and she joined it, cars behind and in front, hers anonymous and unremarkable, one of the crowd.

Rolls of cloud lay on low hills ahead. If she met Judy by the kerb of the tree-lined road she would give her a lift, providing they were going to the same destination. It was laughable to be free. The ease of driving with no one else in the car was so much greater. She could go on for ever, until coming bang up against frontier or coastline, when it would be seen that the car wasn’t in her name. Even then, she might get through.

She would ride awhile and go back. She loved him too much to let him worry. He must be wakened for supper. She saw him sleeping, his exhaustion at last in repose. It was rare enough, these days. She wanted to be with him, and looked for a place to turn.

At a traffic island she went left instead of right. A car from the opposite direction smashed into her left side. Too late to avoid or beneficially stop. There was a rending of metal, a smash of windscreen and headlight, and a fearful jerk at the neck that spun her eyes into blackness.

14

By nine at night Hilary and Sam were so deadbeat that few squeaks or mumbles were still to come. They’d had their baths, been fed and sent to bed, and nothing could break the tranquillity of the hours that followed. Traffic noises diminished, and even the muted beat of the sea contributed to peace.

The security of living in Tom’s flat, minus the tension of wondering where the next tenpenny piece was coming from, made her feel more bodily worn out than she ever had. Having no worries, she decided, will be the death of me, unless I get used to it. The fight was worth making, considering, as she did, that her struggle had been sufficient to pay any debt towards sin and sloth that she might at some time have incurred.

She put her supper plate on the piano top, and set up the card-table by the fireplace. Her unease was caused by wondering when such good fortune – there was no other word for it – would end. She tried not to care. Her body and spirit wallowed in the succour that had dropped from heaven in the shape of this seaside flat and the money Tom allowed her.

The painting of the dead officer above the mantelpiece was taken down the day they came in, and stood in the hall where no one could see it. Sam had cracked the canvas by a nudge from his elbow, and a stab from the heel of his boot, on a race to the door with Hilary, injuries which distorted the pink-glo cheek and changed the angle of the gun barrel. But she joined the cracks with glue and coloured them with a child’s painting set, and hoped the wanderers wouldn’t notice on their return. She couldn’t remember when Sam had last shed tears, and his distress at the damage to what she considered to be the vilest bit of painting she’d ever seen almost brought tears to her own eyes.

She cooked at midday so as to have an easy time in the evening, when she fixed a cold supper of bread and cheese, and made a pot of black coffee in the fancy alchemical percolator of Tom’s old aunt. The kids had a dinner at school, and more or less looked after themselves, but she gave them breakfast and kept the flat in order, and spent any spare hours reading her way through shelves of novels by Trollope and George Eliot. Time passed, but the golden days would end, because Pam had phoned a few days ago to say they were on their way home. She expected them any moment, and then where would she be?

She sipped scalding coffee between bites of sandwich, trying to decide who she was in love with. The absence of Tom and Pam emphasized the isolated unreality of her feelings, which she hoped wouldn’t be altogether denied when they got back. She had been surprised by the realization that there had to be a man as well as a woman in her life. Perhaps such deficient people as myself, she thought, need both, but if so I don’t mind being in that category, especially if it leads me to become less deficient.

She was consoled by the fact that she could admit the truth at last. To indulge in dreams was a cure for exhaustion, a necessary exercise because at the moment there was neither man nor woman to comfort her. Perhaps there never would be again. They’d surely be too involved with each other to give any attention when they got back, especially now a baby was in the offing, but at least she would have passed time in that twilight aura of knowing there was one way which would allow her to live fully. And anything better than nothing was as good as having everything. If her hope to be with both of them turned out to be no more than her favourite fantasy, the knowledge of her possibilities would remain, and perhaps lead to a resolution of some kind.

After the children got into bed she changed to wearing one of the long skirts and high-necked blouses from the cupboard where Tom’s aunt had stored them. Slacks and sweater were slopped around in during the day, or put on to go out shopping. If it was chilly she donned Tom’s Merchant Navy overcoat, which seemed to be fashionable among the young these days. But for evenings she needed to feel different, hoping to reach part of herself long since forgotten.

She walked the room, and poured a glass of brandy. The telephone sounded, but she let it ring. Poured into coffee, the brandy warmed her. Most likely it was a wrong number, or a heavy-breather wanting his night’s sport. There had been such cases lately. She sat in the armchair with legs resting on a stool. If the noise went on for a long time she had enough will to last it into silence.

One had to know the basis of one’s relationship to love before connecting properly to life. Most people had the facility, she thought, because they reached the extent of their capacity early on, or imagined they did, which was the same thing. A proper existence must be founded on a correct appreciation of the half-hidden love that inevitably surfaced, and she knew that she had been in the presence of an enduring lustful affection which she called love ever since meeting Tom, and from the moment Pam had walked into her room one day out of the rain. It was an event of the lost meeting the lost, and feeling a sense of fulfilment as soon as they were in each other’s presence, or arms.

She remembered that they had needed cornflakes and butter for the larder, so went into the kitchen to scribble on the shopping-list before she forgot. The vital pushed out the banal. To bring food into the flat was at least as important as her thoughts, though she’d never known a time when space hadn’t been found for both.

The ringing stopped. She refilled her glass, the last drink before going to bed. Sleep would encircle her, like a ring of flame never to be broken out of. She would not take pills, though scores of boxes were in the bathroom cabinet. Most nights she lay with a book, sipped her drink and read till she fell asleep with the light on, and Sam woke her at half-past seven with a cup of tea. She would then get up and make breakfast, foul-tempered and zombie-like in her movements. Established in their new school, they went happily out at half-past eight, but not before looking downstairs for postcards from Tom and Pam. They had run back up with a few to show. He had written and told them to find the places on the map, like the good father he ought to have been.

She would not leave when they got back. They would surely fit into the scheme of the flat. Not wanting to be idle and live off anyone, she would look for a job, only wanting to stay with them, and know that life was settled for a while.

Such effrontery made her laugh. She called herself a fool, yet saw no reason not to indulge in such expectations. In the morning she would be her old self as she shouted at the kids to make sure they were clean before going to school. The raw day was a good cure-all. We are made up of dreams that can’t be real. Anything that becomes real was never a dream, but a hard-headed idea. Dreams were gorgeous, nonetheless. When the telephone sounded again she snapped off the receiver even before the second ring, her fingers ready to press out any obscenity:

‘Hello?’

‘Judy?’

The horror was that her husband had found the number, and was trying to get back with her. He had lost his job, flat, dolly-bird and car, and was on the streets with nowhere to go, and nothing more than the rags he stood in.

‘This is Tom.’

She laughed. They were at Newhaven, and would be here in half an hour. There would be no sleep that night. They would drink and talk till dawn about their adventures.

‘Tom! You sound half-dead.’ He must have whacked himself by driving day and night.

‘Listen, Judy …’

‘I’m hearing you. Where from, though?’

‘In the middle of France.’

‘That’s a fine place to be!’

‘I have to tell you about Pam.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Bad news, I’m sorry to say. Where were you all evening? I couldn’t get through.’

‘I was in the bath, I suppose.’ She must have found she’s not pregnant after all. ‘What news? Tell me, for God’s sake!’

She pressed a hand across her breasts, undoing a button of her blouse and fastening it while he tried to speak.

‘She had a smash in the car.’

‘Oh no!’

‘She went for a drive on her own. But I do feel dead. You’re right.’

She broke in. ‘How is she?’ – thinking that the bloody fool had got her killed.

‘Neither of us are, though.’ He tried to laugh. He was putting a good face on it – the bastard.

She couldn’t hear what he said. ‘Speak louder.’

‘She took the car, and had an accident.’ The pause lasted years. I’ll go grey twice over. But she wasn’t dead, or he would have said it as the first item on his official report.

‘What happened, then? How is she?’

‘She’ll be all right – in a while.’

‘What do you mean “All bloody right”?’

‘We thought she had broken her neck. She’s badly bruised. A few cuts. The baby will be all right. We won’t be back for a while. There’s a lot to say. I have to square the police.’

‘Don’t say that. They may be listening.’

She thought he laughed. ‘It’s nothing like that. Just a bit of form-filling.’

‘Thank God.’

‘I saw her tonight. She’s in the clinic here. She sends her love.’

‘What place are you at? Tell me, and I’ll come down. The kids can stay here. They’re very good at looking after themselves.’

‘Bless them!’ he said.

He sounded drunk. Must have been at that flask again. Tears came to her eyes, but she clamped them back. ‘I’ll get to where you are by tomorrow evening.’

‘It’s all right. But thank you. If there’s any need I’ll phone you. I’ll phone tomorrow, in any case.’

She couldn’t talk. Neither could he. Then she said: ‘Give Pam my love. And my love to you as well.’

‘We’ll be all right. Keep well.’

‘I love you both.’

‘I must hang up now,’ he said.

She put the phone down. Goodbye, you poor stupid kids without me to put in a harsh word. You don’t need Judy, either, do you? But what have you been up to? Wait till I get my hands on you. They don’t know how to look after themselves, because they have no idea what real love is all about.

Her drink unfinished, she went to bed without a book, and slept – though not before wondering whether to tell the kids when she woke up in the morning. But they were too grown up not to be told.

15

The smash had come from pink dust and white lights. She would tell Judy when she saw her that the explosion had shaken every molecule of her bones. The explanation ran through her mind while they stood silent on the platform waiting for the quick train to Paris. Tom paced up and down, but always came back in case she needed anything or wanted to speak.

Not even time to jam the brakes on, she would say, by then perhaps able to laugh about it. Why did I turn left on the roundabout, instead of right? The old subconscious was dead-set on my assassination, she supposed. Good to know it wasn’t as all-powerful as she had often given it credit for, since the plot or impulse had clearly failed.

The other driver was a woman, and neither had she put her brakes on. All happened too quickly. Good job she had been a woman, and hadn’t hurt herself. More helpful than angry she was, a schoolteacher on her way home, young but with a severe face, dark hair pulled back to show the shape of her skull, features I’ll never forget, but most likely won’t see again, though Tom in his appreciation left our address so that she could stay in England any time. He was always quick with the generous thought when someone did a favour, especially if it was for me. A wonder he didn’t have an affair with her while I was in hospital, but he couldn’t because he spent nearly every hour at my bedside.

I blubbered at the trouble I’d caused, but he laughed, and said it didn’t matter as long as I was all right, and I was, because everything turned out even more superficial than they had thought. ‘I got both of us, and the car,’ he said, ‘insured to the limit before we left, so the motor club can bring the car back when it’s fixed, and we’ll have a leisurely return by train and boat.’

The schoolteacher came to see me in the clinic, and brought flowers, as well as a get-well card from some of her pupils. I could have fallen for her myself with her English as good as mine, and probably more correct in its grammar. She was very charming – and generous. Tom took her to dinner one night, and I was glad, otherwise he would have drifted around the town like a lost soul, as if he’d just come off one of his old ships, or stayed in the hotel room supping on his bottomless whisky flask.

Why I turned left instead of right I’ll never know. I was happy and unthinking, a wrong state of mind because how can you be responsible if you are so stupidly relaxed? You have to pay for the air you breathe by being vigilant all the time, no matter how wearing. In the flash and crunch that followed I was in despair because he would think I had taken the car to do myself in, or get myself an injury so that I’d be in hospital for months and not have to worry about anything. Then he would wash his hands of me because I’d tried a silly stunt once too often. He’ll leave me high and dry, I thought when I was collapsed like a piece of regulation jelly outside the car, and then what will I be able to do except make my own way back and cry on your bosom for the rest of my life?

But when I told him it was no more than an accident, he believed me absolutely, a man of trust who takes things as they come, without panic or reproach.

16

The early train to Paris ran smoothly, and it was hard to believe that by midnight they would be home, except that the speed told them so and would not be gainsaid. The weeks had been difficult for him, and he must have fought his way through a few hard facts while she lay in the clinic. He sat opposite, looking at the pictures in Paris-Match.

‘Did you think of leaving me?’

She used to imagine abandoning George every morning, though only considered it now and again with Tom, a game which, she knew, must sooner or later be given up.

He rested the magazine on his knee. ‘I feel we’ve been married for decades, so why should I?’

She laughed. ‘What a load for you to bear, poor thing!’

He had carried bigger ones. ‘My shoulders are fairly broad.’

‘Well, why don’t you leave me?’

‘You want problems?’ he said. ‘Be careful. They only bring others, often worse.’

She felt light-spirited. ‘How can you be sure?’

He had read somewhere (though who needed to read it?) that a man without a woman was not a human being. There was equal truth in saying that a woman without a man was not a human being, either. He held her hand, and told her so. ‘I’ll never leave you. If ever you want us to separate, you’ll have to be the one to do it.’

He’s a sharer, she thought, all open and above board, who imagines that to pay for one’s mistakes is merely showing a sense of responsibility. ‘Why put everything on my shoulders?’

He leaned back in his seat. ‘I don’t believe in that kind of self-sacrifice.’

She kissed him. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t go through that again. I don’t want to leave you. Nor do I want you to leave me.’

‘Why talk about it?’ He rolled his magazine into a baton and tapped the window, as if testing its strength, she thought, before hitting me over the head.

‘I talk about anything,’ she said. ‘I wondered how you felt.’

‘Now you know, my love.’

The seat was empty, so she sat by his side and caressed his face. ‘I do.’

‘Does it make you feel better?’

‘Even happier.’

‘So while you’re happy, I’ll tell you, once and for all, not to do anything like that again.’

‘The third time will be final,’ she said, ‘but I hope I’ll be ninety years old by then.’

‘God might have a thing or two to say about that.’

A provision trolley stopped at the door, and he bought two large oranges. She sat back in her place, bones still aching from the bruises. ‘Do you believe in God, then?’

‘Certainly. The fact that I’m a Jew might have something to do with it.’

‘Is your God like the captain of a ship, steering the big world from the bridge?’

He took out his penknife, cut two circles in the top and bottom of the first orange, then scored the sides. ‘He’s nameless, faceless, and formless. That’s how I think of Him. But He has His people, and His people, though scattered over the world, have their country.’ He pulled off the segments of skin, and took the fruit neatly to pieces before passing them to her.

‘In many ways,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel I have a country any more.’ Her mouth was momentarily full before she squeezed the delicious fruit into juice and felt it pour in and revitalize her. ‘I don’t know why, but I seem to have lost it. You and I, and Judy and the kids together – maybe we’re our own country.’

He dissected an orange for himself. ‘I have two countries,’ he said, ‘if I want them – England and Israel. And my country is your country. That’s how I feel. Every Jew has the automatic right of return to Israel – and that means me. I’m lucky to have two such places, which both have great merits. If they joined forces they’d make an unbeatable combination. The two peoples Hitler hated most in the world, so I read in one of my potted history books, were the British and the Jews.’

He took some Kleenex to the toilet and dampened them so that they could wipe their hands. When he came back she said: ‘You seem to have been thinking while I lay in my bed of pain!’

‘The only time I’m not is when we’re making love, which I suppose is a fairly normal state of affairs. One day we’ll go to Israel, and you’ll see what your other choice of country would be like.’

She gazed out of the window at suburban houses. The future, as always, was impossible to handle. Thinking about it never brought anything but trouble. At least it hadn’t so far. But she said: ‘Maybe I’d like that.’

‘I’d expect you to think about it.’ He joined her gaze out of the window. ‘We’ll soon be in. We’ll get a taxi to the Gare St Lazare, and snatch something to eat before setting out for Dieppe.’

‘We ought to be home by ten,’ she said.

Because the sea would be rough he obtained a cabin for her before the ship sailed. She was glad, for her back was sore and she wanted to lie down, fearful of going home now that they were so near, but excited at the idea of seeing Judy, and staying in one place for a while. Tom sat by her, as if afraid she might get up if he didn’t keep guard, and go on deck to throw herself overboard. Simple man who was too good for her. She only wanted to sleep an hour or two. ‘I’ll be all right. You go up and walk around the deck.’

He stood by the open window of the radio officer’s cabin listening to the singing of the morse, but from thinking of Paul and his outlandish theories of British Israelitism he retreated into his own musings. The squall cut visibility, and the old unsteady rolling of the boat put the familiar strain back into his legs. He was a blind man at sea – l’homme qui rit – wanting to find a way off the eyeless ocean to a land he could feel was his for eternity – even if only to be buried there. Nothing had been his since being carried in his cradle to the orphanage, not school, ship, furnished room or the flat of his Aunt Clara, not motor-car nor even the deck or ground he stood on. His shoes burned and would not let him be still.

Cold water beckoned, but he spat into the lee of it, walked the length of the deck and back. Figures huddled on seats were covered by capes and raincoats to get away from the stench of frying and cigar smoke where they would assuredly have been sick. He stood at the rail to be alone, the sea in front, no ships visible. Life seemed endless. Only a happy man would see an end, and he hadn’t yet found an existence which took happiness into account. After the age of fifty something happens. Time regains its meaning. When one was young, he thought, time also had significance, with the difference that most of one’s years were still to come, whereas two-thirds were now behind.

With little time left, it must be treated with a new respect. There was less to waste, and far more to do before none remained. Yet one still can’t act – know or not what you want to do. One could create a positive end, but the ensuing blackness and silence is the final rebellion against God, and suicide the last rebellion against yourself, the vilest form of murder and no more to be thought about, a passing reflection as he turned and laughed so loudly into the wind that one of the huddled figures stirred and a pretty young woman with a face made tragic by the motion of the boat looked at him crossly for disturbing her. He resumed his pacing, smiling at the notion that even the long fart he gave sounded like a cry for help, and knowing that the only course to follow was to endure till a landfall came that he and Pam would somehow make together.

Before the boat docked he found a steward to take tea and biscuits to Pam’s cabin. She had undressed, and was resting between the sheets. The rough bumping of the sea had made her drowsy, did not let her sleep but scraped continually at the cabin to the rise and fall under her bunk, more soporific than the train, keeping nerves on edge while relaxing her limbs. In her waking dreams she seemed deep under the sea. The capsule she lay in was at the whim of unseen currents. She couldn’t imagine being in a normally lighted room, with the floor unmoving and no other noise than laughing and talking, with Judy and the kids. If the sea came in she would be glad, yet use her last strength to stay alive.

She was surprised at being left alone for nearly three hours. He couldn’t desert her on board ship. Where would he go, even if he wanted to? They were in it together, and would stay that way. Her belly was taut, increasing in size. Was the baby swimming in its own inland sea? There was no future while it was, but she didn’t doubt that it would start one day. Would all hell be again let loose? She had no option but to wait and see, and endure, until the future, with a great cry, turned into the present, which would, she supposed, cry even louder.

The cabin was hot, and after her tea had been put down she got out of bed and stood up. He knocked and came in, wearing his heavy gaberdine raincoat, and cap which he took off. ‘We’ll be in in a few minutes. Newhaven’s ahead.’

‘I don’t feel the same person going back as I did when we left.’ She pulled on her dress. The only way he could respond was to go up for air and light, and watch the ship sliding into harbour while he laughed into the wind.

17

Judy didn’t like living off a man, and told the bastard so in no uncertain terms. Certainty of meaning in such cases was a letting go of the self, and she had, she decided in that floating ecstatic moment before speech, as much right to it as anyone else. But her voice was not too loud, nor her terms so brash as the throbbing in her veins had led even her to expect. ‘I shall be leaving as soon as I can get something fixed up that won’t let the kids down too badly.’

Tom was no fool. Nobody thought so, himself least of all. Let the sky come down, but he would not raise his voice beyond the normal pitch to meet any onrush. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but listen to me. I’ll talk to you as to a woman. Or a man, if that’s what you want. Or any other being you care to imagine yourself if you’ll just tell me what it is. Whoever and whatever you like.’

If a woman (or anyone) slammed into him he slammed straight back. No messing. It was the stiff-necked part of him you could always reckon on coming into operation when you least expected it. Judy had had enough, though, Judy had, she told herself, and Judy – thought Judy – would sling her bloody hook no matter how deep in anybody’s back it was buried. But there was no stopping him, until such time as she got up and walked. For some reason or other she couldn’t, and meanwhile he went on:

‘I’ll tell you, what’s more’ – he tapped a two-fingered rhythm on the piano top to mark off and emphasize each phrase – ‘that the money you’re too scared or too proud, or too mean (let’s face it) to share with us, isn’t mine, and never was. It came from my family – if you can call it one – by no other route except that of accident. That was the only way it got to me – and therefore to us.’

Fed up with such confrontations, Pam would have told her to go if she wanted, though knew she would be out-voted on the matter. But there was more to the clash than mere argument suggested. There always was. Whoever loved each other could do so from a distance, for all she cared. She wondered whether Judy hadn’t wanted Tom to respond in exactly the way he was doing. A person like Judy didn’t know anyone until she had made them angry, though it had to be admitted that she was sincere in all her principles, and fervent in any sacrifice she would make for them.

Judy needed an emotional base, however, and once it was found she considered it too good to relinquish easily, as Pam gathered from their conversations in the darkness of the bed they had twice shared since coming back. Judy had discovered ease not in material things, which to her were dispensable, but in the security of communal friendship not before experienced. The seeds of trust had slipped into her and taken root, but the rougher part of herself that sometimes demanded change threatened her with havoc.

While it was reassuring to know that everyone was a battleground, the consequence when those battlegrounds came into contact with each other could be anything but pleasant. Yet she saw the justice of Judy’s case. Judy wanted formal and open avowals that she and her children could stay, to be cemented by anger as much as with friendship and love, enabling her to agree before both Tom and Pam as witnesses, so that from then on she would not be tempted to thoughtlessly leave. Any arrangements half-defined, or allowances given on sufferance, or terms made plain yet not specifically numbered, were no good to her. It was too English a method – too, in a way, oriental. Only the rich could live by it, but in the present case an unspoken agreement to hang on as long as you liked suited no one, certainly not Judy, and Pam saw immediately that she was right. It must be roughed out (in anger if need be), drawn up, ratified, and thoroughly understood.

Pam loved him for falling for such tactics, or for falling in with them, which was more likely, as he continued: ‘And the money’s now in my name, but don’t let that gall you. We can do something about that – since the notion clearly does.’

Judy played the game her way, while he made the moves his, and Pam marvelled how neatly the methods dovetailed when they met. She coloured at his deviousness, and at Judy’s, and at her own when an occasional small contribution came into effect. Either that, or they all had a well-developed talent for self-preservation in the midst of an incipient chaos.

Then another truth came to her, the one that said he would promise anything to Judy because he knew, she thought, that as long as she stayed so would I. This made her feel trapped, and also angry, but it was a trap she herself had engineered, every twig, leaf and piece of bait. She had deliberately made it, walked into it willingly, and feathered it almost without knowing. Now she was to give birth in it. What had she left the old one for? The question was as unnecessary as it was for her to say that she liked it here.

‘As far as possible,’ Tom said, ‘I’m trying to make out that we own the wealth – if that’s what it is – in common. I don’t really know how far back it goes, and don’t much care, because I have no guilt feelings whatsover about using it to our advantage. My grandfather accumulated property. He bought stocks and shares. Maybe he owned half a coal-mine, and inherited a few miles of some branch-line railway. It could be that he even sweated the proletariat in sundry mills and slate quarries, as your former husband might have put it. But now the residue is ours. Ours, not mine, and if you don’t want any advantage from the money, that’s your decision. But if you take your children back to anything like the life you were living in West Eleven, then you’ll be far more immoral than staying here and living off money you think is tainted because it supposedly belongs to a man.’

His face had reddened. It was not in his nature to justify himself, neither to man nor woman, especially at such length. But it was part of him to be just, and he suppressed much of his anger lest it lead to a state where he could not be so.

Judy’s shrug was a milder reaction than Pam expected from someone of her views. But there was more to her response than the glimpse of a protected existence for her and the children. The picture of her leaving was desolation indeed to Pam, who knew it had always been possible to wake up one morning and find her packing before final quittance. Now it wouldn’t be, mainly because the reality of her departure with the children had also been unthinkable to Tom, who had handled its prevention in such a way that everyone had thought they alone were responsible for winning the skirmish.

Later in the evening while Judy was taking a bath she said to him: ‘I’ll stay with her tonight. I think she needs me. Is that all right by you?’

He nodded.

18

When the baby was born Tom felt he was present at the birth of himself. Clara had described him, on his own first appearance, as having fine reddish hair matted on a fragile skull. Lips pouted and arms waved, and her small nose was like his mother’s on the photograph. They called her Rachel.

He had explored the antique shops in The Lanes for a cradle befitting the status of his daughter and firstborn, but finding nothing to suit, they had gone out together and bought a utilitarian new one from a department store.

While Pam was still in the hospital he had overheard Hilary say ‘Mum!’

‘What?’

‘Who do you love most – Pam, or Tom?’

He never heard the answer. He would have closed the door himself if she hadn’t slammed it, not wishing to know, or to pick up any evasions. No one should be called upon to answer such a question, though if children asked, then you had to find one. Children see everything. They had observed him go into Judy’s room a few nights ago, and though they had said nothing he knew that the question as to whom she loved most was their way of telling Judy that they weren’t as blind as she might in her new life have grown to believe and hope. It had been once only, and he had gone afterwards to his own bed. But one of the children had got up to get a drink of water, he supposed, and eternal curiosity had pulled at them. He had come back from the hospital, and Judy had put supper on the table.

‘How is she?’

‘A real live daughter. All sound in wind and limb.’

She didn’t seem joyful, or even much interested, and perhaps her mood made what followed even easier. ‘Another female in the house!’

‘Suits me,’ he said, ‘very much.’

‘Eat, then,’ she told him.

‘And you?’

She lit a cigarette. ‘I’ve had mine.’

But she sat close by, and when he poured wine she reached for his glass and drank. He stood up to get another glass from the cupboard, but she held his wrist firmly. ‘I’ll drink from yours, if you don’t mind.’

He refilled it. ‘I don’t.’

‘I haven’t thanked you yet,’ she said, ‘have I?’

He smiled at her strange mood. What could she mean? He had taken Hilary and Sam to look at ships in Shoreham harbour, and on recognizing an old face had been able to get them on board.

‘There’s no convincing you, is there?’ she said with a tenderness he had only seen her use with Pam.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But what do you think you have to thank me for?’

‘That’s better. You know very well what I mean.’ She crushed a piece of cheese on to some bread. ‘You’ve done such good things for me, and for the kids especially. I think you’re a nice person.’

He felt pleasure at this, till he realized it couldn’t be true. Then he thought he had better consider it as true enough, if only to be fair to her. ‘It makes me happy to hear you say so.’

‘I have to,’ she said, ‘for my own self-respect.’

‘Oh.’ He hoped she would let the matter go.

‘I mean it. You’re really all right.’

He couldn’t resist saying: ‘Even if I am a man?’

She laughed. ‘We live, and sooner or later learn.’

‘Yes, we certainly do that, if we try.’

‘From each other,’ she said, ‘but not all that much from ourselves, do we?’

‘You may be right.’ He drank half the wine, then passed the glass back to her. She stood up unsteadily in the overlit kitchen. He had made sure there were brilliant lights all over the place, every corner vividly seen. When she or Pam put only a couple of wall-lights on he became silent and sleepy. He thought she was about to fall, so he held her closer than he had intended, softened breasts against his shirt, and wine-tasting lips pressing at him.

Afterwards she said: ‘I like having a man come into me now and again.’

‘You came as well.’

‘I know. Who taught you how to do that?’

The bad dream made him sweat. He wondered how to get out of it. ‘I’m glad I was able to help.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to worry. We shan’t make a habit of it, though I wouldn’t need to think like this, and neither would you, if we were able to face the truth.’

He touched her full body, and stopped himself saying that he loved her. For the moment he did. But the truth was more complicated. It was like fire. You touched it at your peril. ‘I can’t be treacherous,’ he said. He already had, and knew it, but his mark of affection proclaimed innocence, which ordinary sense told him might be possible.

She guessed his inner debate. ‘It’s only a way of getting to know each other.’

He smiled, wanting to agree. He did so. He stroked her breast, as if his touch was sufficient to let her know he was near to her, and to explain all she might find puzzling about him.

‘Why don’t you say something?’ she asked.

‘I was wondering whether it’s possible to love two people at the same time.’

She pulled him close, and almost robbed him of breath. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said between her sobs, ‘and don’t I know it?’ She was silent, and then: ‘Of course it bloody well is!’

19

Pam came home from the hospital, and no longer belonged to him. He had expected her not to, he said, at such a time. It ought not to be difficult to accept, she answered, because she never had. Belonged to him, she meant. She never had belonged to anybody. He laughed. It was only a manner of speaking, of course. Perhaps so, she said, but she was her own woman and he, she didn’t mind supposing, was his own man. If life was to go on, and for her part it certainly was, that’s how it would be.

Love was not a matter of belonging to anyone, he mused on one of his walks by the sea, but of mutual protection whenever necessary, which must never become onerous. Dependence grew, and obligations developed. They were bound to. There was responsibility, and no freedom except what was earned by unremitting though diffident attention. He could do no more, and sensed that she didn’t want him to do less, either.

She fed Rachel by the window that looked out to sea. The primal tug at her nipple was pleasant. The fine hand and warm fingers at the flesh of the breast, and the small face already so alert, made her own smile impossible to hold back. It was a smile such as no other could be.

The light calmed and fascinated Rachel, and after her first slake she would stare at any pattern that danced or dazzled. When they occasionally did not, her head turned back to resume feeding, but her eyes flickered around as if to make sure no bogyman or shadow would appear unbidden. Hilary held her finger, and Rachel took it while she fed, her hand gripping and relaxing as the milk went in.

‘I don’t know what you find to boggle at,’ Judy remarked when Sam looked on. ‘You’ll never be feeding a kid, and that’s for sure.’

‘I know I won’t.’ He had passed his eleven-plus, and went to the local grammar school. Hilary would follow the same path in a year, because Tom had worked it out that way. He took Sam to the barber every month so that his hair was kept short and parted. Sam polished his shoes every morning, and his clothes were neat. Maybe it won’t last, Tom thought, but let the future look after itself. Judy was amused at her son’s self-absorbed industriousness, only critical of Tom’s regime when Sam seemed less connected to her than in his former outspoken days. But she thought such a change would have come anyway.

‘Don’t sound so sorry about it,’ she said to Sam, ushering them into the kitchen for their suppers. ‘Then you can go to your rooms and do a bit more homework before sleep time.’

After putting Rachel to bed Pam was exhausted. ‘She drains me.’

‘They all do,’ Judy replied. ‘It never stops, one way or another.’

‘I remember it from before.’ She went from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other – a wicked see-saw impossible to jump from. But that’s how she was, feeling no guilt about it, nor any particular wish that it would end.

‘We did the same to our mothers, I expect.’

Tom was setting the table in the dining-room for their supper. The large oil painting of his Uncle John was back above the mantelshelf, but the piano had gone so as to make more space. It was the mainstay room in which they could eat, live, or study.

She fed Rachel. If she threw her out of the window would she die? I dropped her. I was looking at the view while getting some fresh air. She moved. She slipped from my hands. Terrified at the nearness of disaster, and full of love for her daughter, she shut the window with a bang, then held her gently to stop her crying. She recalled a similar urge with Edward, wanting to end it all, even then. But at least now she knew what she was doing, or what she was not going to do.

‘Is this life everything?’ she said to Judy the following day, when the sun shone full into the large room.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it can’t be, can it?’

Judy put her arms around her. ‘You’re insatiable.’

‘I mean, it’s just not possible.’

‘What more do you want?’ There was a tone of exasperation in her voice. ‘You could live on your own and be a rag-picker, if you liked. Or you could do the Open University. Or you might try going into industry – whatever that means. There isn’t much, unless you want to join the army, or be a stunt-rider on the Wall of Death. Of course, we could get a loan and run a boarding house, or manage a pub in Cornwall, or open a boutique like everybody else. Life’s short. Options are limited. It’s too early to go around the moon on a camel and write a book about it. Anyway, you’ve got a lovely kid, and you’re in love with Tom. You’re not supposed to be on this dissatisfaction kick.’

She was in the mood to say whatever she felt. ‘I’m in love with you, as well.’

‘I know, and that’s marvellous, but don’t tell me too often, because Aunt Judy’s got her own sales-and-wants column roving around inside her. You’ll feel better when Rachel’s a year or two old. I love you as well, but it can’t mean as much as your love for Tom and Rachel, and sooner or later you might have to choose between me and them.’

‘There are too many damned choices.’

‘So there ought to be.’ Judy took a bottle of red wine from the drinks cupboard, fixed in the corkscrew, and raffishly winked at her as she pulled. ‘This will help us to relax.’

‘When I was with my husband,’ Pam said, sipping the wine, ‘and thought I could never get away from him, a story kept coming to me, repeating itself over the years. Funny how I’d forgotten it, and it suddenly springs on me again now. I must have dreamed it more than once, and the scene built itself up when I concentrated hard to pull it together. A heavy plank of wood was floating down a river in flood. At one end the husband stood, and on the other, the wife. Both wanted to get off and save themselves, either from the flood or from each other, or both. If the husband jumped first, the plank would tip and the wife would probably drown, and he didn’t hate her so much that he wanted to kill her. If the wife leapt free the husband’s end would go and he would drown, and she didn’t despise him sufficiently to want his death. They passed the occasional sandbank or overhanging tree, when it might have been possible for one or the other to have made a grab for it. But neither could jump. And they were coming to a five-hundred-foot waterfall. Only a miracle could save them. If not – over they’d go.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ Judy said. ‘But go on.’

‘Well, during the time when the plank was floating, they could have moved to the centre and got closer to each other. They could have then discussed matters with regard to jumping together, so that both would have been saved – or at least had a chance. But the torrent made them unwilling and afraid to move. They thought the effort wasn’t worthwhile, because they’d be able to jump free at any moment, and it wouldn’t have been necessary to get close anyway. It was obvious they should never have shared that floating plank, no matter what they thought they were escaping from. But they had, and that was that. It was called a romantic story, which was bound to have a tragic ending. That’s how the woman saw it, but she didn’t tell him. How he saw it, she wasn’t much interested, because he was no longer there to ask in any case. They had leapt from the plank half-way down the waterfall, neither of them thinking of the other. They had gone their separate and individual ways to death, which were more or less the same except that in every kind of distance they were very far apart. They missed the sound of the river, and the passing moments of tormenting indecision, and the noise of that fatal waterfall getting nearer and nearer. It made their life exciting, but was absolutely intolerable at the same time.’

She was silent for a while, then Judy said: ‘Does all this mean you’re going back to your husband, after all?’

‘No. That’s unthinkable. Finished. But in five years I don’t want to feel like that with Tom.’

Judy refilled their glasses. ‘You won’t, though I understand your fears. Tom’s the sort who won’t let that happen. Plenty of knock-about life is in store for you yet, I’m sure.’

‘But will he ever feel like that with me?’

‘I don’t expect so, but who knows? None of us is God.’

20

The choice came to Pam as a blinding revelation one night after Rachel was in her cot and Judy had gone out with the kids to the cinema. She looked over his shoulder at the Hebrew grammar and said: ‘You’ll never know the language properly until you go to Israel to live, and hear it spoken all around you.’

‘I don’t suppose I will. Yet I went into the local synagogue last week and heard it there.’

‘That’s liturgical. I mean as an everyday language.’

On most Friday nights a solitary candle burned on the dining-room table. The children liked it, and even Judy was tolerantly quiet. Tom wore a black cap hardly visible on the back of his head, and hurriedly murmured a prayer. He opened a bottle of wine and, to the children’s delight, poured a glass for everyone. That was the extent of his Sabbath.

‘Haven’t you ever thought about it?’ A recollection forced the question into her mind, of seeing the preacher clearly from ten years ago, in the chapel she had wandered into like a sleepwalker. She had found comfort in the strange words, and had gone back love-sick week after week to hear this unprepossessing yet mysterious man tell of the virtues of ancient and modern Israel.

Tom admitted that he had considered a visit to his second country, but so many things had happened to divert him from such an idea.

‘I don’t mean a visit,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to live there? After all, your mother was Jewish, her mother was Jewish before her, and so was her mother. It would make sense, absolutely.’

He stood up and smoked a cigarette by the mantelshelf. She looked at him: fragile, vulnerable, uncertain. From the beginning she had known all too well what he must do, and so had he, but he had chosen to deceive himself so as to let her be the one to tell him. By doing so she was being more herself than she had ever been.

She had seen him looking at maps of Israel. For a year he had read continually books on Zionism and Jewish life, and studied intensely in his spare time, but the exact place of his yearning in modern terms had seemed too remote for her to divine the answer or him to make the connection. It was amazing how distant the obvious could be. But now she knew. If she hadn’t sensed his ultimate destination right from the beginning she would not have lived with him and had their child. She would not have set out with him on such a long and perhaps endless journey. As for her independence, didn’t she know that a passion for it carried to excess was a sure recipe for getting nowhere?

She would initiate the change, move him. She felt herself drawn towards Israel, because he saw it as a land whose light was as yet too far away. The preacher’s sermons told of how the Jews were at last able to go back to the Promised Land, and she felt that circumstances had carried her inexorably this far towards it. Events always moved you to what was most profoundly wanted. She recalled the preacher’s face, and his voice, and heard again what he had said, blushing at how she had gone week after week, unbeknown to George, to sit gawping like a young girl before a pop star.

He pressed her hand. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

But he did, and she knew that he did. He always had known. She had surprised him again. She surprised herself. She loved him because it was possible, and always would be possible, to surprise him. People went to Israel for holidays much as they did to Majorca or Italy, she said. The place isn’t so remote any more, nor so strange, she supposed, unless you were like me who happens to be madly in love with someone who has a birthright connection with it.

It’s part of my life to go there, she thought, to a country like any other, yet a place that nowhere else can resemble. Being Jewish was more significant to a person than being anything else. She hoped so. She knew so. She had seen the effect on him when he first found out about his mother. He still hadn’t got over the shock. She would help him, and there was only one way. He was more than half-way there. She had seen him put money into the collection boxes on the counter of the delicatessen. She knew where they belonged.

He sat down. ‘It’s something to think about.’

‘No,’ she said scornfully. ‘If you have to think about it, it’s impossible. One doesn’t think about a thing like that. The thinking has already been done, though you haven’t noticed, I dare say.’

She distrusted herself. No, she didn’t. All motives had a thousand strings attached. Ignore them. No, don’t ignore anything. To ignore is to fly in the face of God. Did she merely want to get out of the country because she couldn’t bear to bring Rachel up in this same old place? Would going anywhere else be better? She couldn’t bear to be seen pushing her about in a pram, a woman of her age with a child on the street, and old enough to be its grandmother! If she stayed she would really drop her out of the window, all love pulled away to create a vacuum wherein she didn’t know what she was doing. And that would be the end of them all. In any other country such an action would be unthinkable. The idea surfaced vividly to convince her, but seemed merely another motive that, unable to deny, she had to contend with and finish once and for all.

Nor could she bear to love two people at the same time. It was impossible for peace of mind, and tore her in two. Sleeping with Judy was like being back with her mother, a sensual restoration of all senses, which she ought to have outgrown long ago. Nothing but a sea-change would suffice. And yet again, why should she? She would always love women if she felt like doing so. She was tired of learning lessons when it was perfectly safe for certain parts of her to drift the way she wanted. All the same, you could not give in to such distractions if you wanted to guide your life in any positive way.

They were surface reasons perhaps, excuses and nothing more, yet the words had come spontaneously because whatever reason had put them there would never be defined. If it wasn’t already obvious, yet utterly buried at the same time, there wasn’t a reason and never would be. She didn’t know which it was, and didn’t care to. They would go to Israel, or she would return to living in a room of her own. She had said enough. He must do the rest himself.

‘Is that an ultimatum?’

It was.

He knew what he wanted, he answered. Nobody knew better, but he didn’t know whether what he wanted was what she really wanted, that was the trouble. Even though she had suggested accurately enough that he wanted to break off the present life – and he did, if only to end it – he had to be sure she wanted it as well. The idea that she was merely, if unintentionally, tormenting him could be countered for the moment by saying nothing. Be still, and know that I am yours, he wanted to tell her.

He said it.

She already knew.

It was irrelevant, he felt when he had said it.

So did she.

So much was.

How could it not be?

But to the extent that you had to say it, it wasn’t.

Nothing was.

Forget it.

Know that even love was something that had to be endured, a fact which, when realized, did not make him unhappy. Rather, it made him feel less numb than before he had said it.

He said it again to himself while walking through the park by the Pavilion on his way back from the public library on a fine April morning. She wanted him to go on his own, and then they would see, but if he did he thought he might lose not only her but Rachel as well. It was too much to ask.

But the chance had to be taken. He was never anywhere except in the middle of a storm, the never-ending turmoil of life. Momentous decisions had always to be considered and quite often taken, a state of mind not unfamiliar, nor even unwanted. Life at sea was like that, and the whole of life was being at sea, until you went under into the dark. There was no reason not to smile about it, as he did when catching a glimpse of himself in a shop mirror on his way through The Lanes. She wanted him to go to Israel by himself, and then he could tell her when she and Rachel were to follow, and though he couldn’t bear to leave his two-month-old daughter for as much as an hour, he would brace himself to do it.

In other words, he would leave his daughter with a feeling that recalled his mother’s action when she had taken a last look at him in his cradle before going out of his grandfather’s house never to come back. That event, and the one that felt too uncomfortable to contemplate, were close enough to produce a crushing overlap as he turned and walked with more speed along the seafront, a memory still too near for a proper decision to be made.

But having said it, it was as good as done. Speech was the point of no return. Discipline would take over. Otherwise what were words for? Blue sea worried the shingle with a roar before going out again. There was one last journey to travel, and nobody could say he was afraid to make it.

Sunlight was doled on to the water by a wind manipulating gaps in the clouds. Glistening acres came and went as he looked from the end of the pier. Smokestacks were alive, energy and purpose in their acute angles as when he had first been mesmerized by the expanse. They ran on diesel now and were plain blocks battling their way, but all alteration was progress, one way or the other. Sloth, which was sinful in the eyes of the righteous, meant in him a self-induced form of death that was far worse.

He had given no proper and binding answer. To make it firm – so that he could not turn back for fear of damaging his pride to the extent that he would never have the spiritual strength to move more than five miles beyond where he lived for the rest of his life – they would have to talk about his departure before Judy and the children.

21

‘Israel!’ Judy exclaimed. ‘You must be stark raving bonkers!’

They talked on Saturday afternoon when it was raining too hard for any of them to go out. Pam thought Judy might be envious, and also afraid, because she seemed, after all, less adaptable to change than any of them. What she or anybody thought was unimportant. While holding Rachel to her chest so that she could look at the children playing Monopoly on the floor, Pam felt that once changes began out of a centre of consciousness, as they had with her on leaving George, there was no stopping further developments spreading in their wake. She was no longer safe or happy at being settled. She had opted for adventure, and even the final conversion, wanting the new life to go on, no matter how disturbed others would be by her wanderings. If they were in the same state would they consider her? She doubted it, and would not blame them if they did not.

Judy stood by the mantelpiece, a hand at the side of her face as if Tom’s information had struck and left a mark there. ‘There’s a war every five minutes,’ she said.

‘They have them everywhere these days,’ he answered, ‘or are likely to. You’re never far from the riot, or the terrorist psychopath with his so-called explosive device. There’s no use worrying about that sort of thing any more, or using it as an excuse not to act. If anything happens to me, all I have goes to Pam, but if we both end up dead before our time, which I consider unlikely, by the way, then whatever’s left goes to you. You’ll be taken care of, in any case. As I’ve told you before, there’s enough for everybody here.’

She knew he was Jewish, but even so, didn’t you only go to Israel if, say, some nut like Hitler came up from the sewers? ‘They don’t even have proper frontiers,’ she said.

‘They will have. Every country starts that way.’

‘You like to make things all neat and tidy,’ Judy said. ‘But that’s not what I mean. Your sort of tidiness makes me want to puke. You can’t move us around like pieces on a chess-board. I love you both, so I don’t want either of you to go.’

‘I’m not going,’ Pam began.

Judy put a hand to the other side of her face, as if that cheek was also in pain. ‘What?’

‘Well, not straight away.’

‘I can’t get a proper answer on that matter,’ Tom said. ‘Things aren’t as tidy as you think.’

They looked at each other helplessly, as if they would have rushed to be physically close had no children been by. Judy went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll leave you to sort yourselves out.’

He settled himself in an armchair, and lit a cigar.

‘I think you offended her,’ Pam said.

He puffed smoke towards the fireplace. ‘What? By talking about money? Possessions?’

She looked out of the window, her back to him, raising her voice to make sure it was heard in the kitchen. ‘Perhaps. But it’s you she doesn’t want to lose. She doesn’t care about anyone else. You can hardly leave yourself to her in your last will and testament.’

He put his cigar in the ashtray and stood. ‘Is that why you want us to go?’

‘I wish you’d sort yourself out,’ Hilary said to Sam. ‘All you’ve got to do is sell Piccadilly, and one of your railway stations, and then you’ll have some money left to go on playing.’

Sam groaned. ‘I know. But I don’t want to lose any of my complete sets.’

‘She told me about it last night,’ Pam said, after a silence. ‘What happened when I was in the hospital.’

He held her shoulders, feeling the warmth under her blouse, and looking down over inflated breasts at Rachel peacefully sleeping. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

She was surprised that it did not matter. And she told him so. ‘Somehow, it doesn’t, not with Judy.’

Nevertheless, he thought, it was best forgotten. ‘I’ll be unhappy to leave Rachel,’ he said softly, ‘and more than sad to leave you. I’ll also regret leaving Judy, and those two.’ He nodded towards the children on the floor. ‘But I have to go, whether or not I want to, or whether or not you now want me to. I’d have come to it of my own volition, otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to your wish, suggestion or command, or whatever you like to call it. But it’s easier for me to go knowing that you won’t be left here alone, and that you and Rachel will come to me after a while.’

He was rational and cool, and she was afraid as she turned to him, and wondered why he insisted on tormenting her and everybody, till she remembered having pushed him towards the move. ‘What if I said don’t go? Forget what I said when I was in a stupid and destructive mood? Somebody told me at the hospital that her husband never took any notice of what she said till the kid she’d had was a year old.’

He was bewildered. There was, she knew, no greater suffering for a man of his sort. He was fearless, and probably cared little about pain, but chaos inside was intolerable. She weighed him up as he looked at her, and such total consideration was the only act of love she could muster at the moment. That she loved him was indisputable, but she wanted him to go, if for nothing more than to prove that he recognized her love, and loved her in return. It was the only test she could make. Having grown to a state when she could confidently test a man whatever the risks, she felt that she had achieved some sort of equality at last.

The children were looking at them, and listening with interest. But it was open-house for that sort of thing.

‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘I collected my plane ticket to Athens, and my boat ticket to Haifa – both one-way. I prefer to go in by sea, to land from a ship. Even the remnant shall return. The sand of the sea shall be washed on the shore. That sort of thing.’

Before she could ask the date of his leaving, Sam called: ‘Can we come with you to Israel, Tom?’

‘Why,’ he turned with a laugh, ‘are you going to be Jewish, as well?’

Hilary pushed the heaps of false money aside and stood up. ‘I am. I’m Jewish, Tom. Daddy was Jewish, wasn’t he, mummy?’

‘No, he bloody well wasn’t.’ Judy came in with the tea.

‘And the strangers shall be joined with them,’ Tom said. ‘To it shall the Gentiles seek.’

Hilary wept with chagrin. ‘Oh why wasn’t he?’

‘He was no bloody good, that’s what he was.’

Tom grimaced with disapproval. ‘He was no more no-good than most, I suppose.’

‘You know nothing.’ Judy’s words were so fierce that all were fixed by them. ‘I loved him. No matter how much of a swine he was, and I knew he was bad, I loved him, even though I knew I ought not to, and felt ashamed and degraded that I couldn’t help myself. I went on loving him through more than I dare tell about, and it went on for years, and that’s what I can’t forgive myself for. And he didn’t love me, not a bit, though I was handy as a bit of furniture, and to scrounge money from. I was pregnant when we got married, but had a miscarriage just after the wedding because he got drunk one night and pushed me a bit too hard. That was at the beginning, but he calmed down, for a few years, till I had these two. Then one day he saw me kissing a woman who came to the house. He’d probably already had an affair with her, though I wouldn’t have known. But the penny must have dropped, because from then on he was in love with her. It was disgusting the way he crawled and grovelled. Either that, or he would go into such fits of violent hatred, far worse than before, that the danger finally got through to what bits of goodness were buried deep inside him, which even he only caught a glimpse of about once in ten years.’

‘I shan’t be like him,’ Sam said.

‘Nor me,’ Hilary put in.

She looked at them. ‘I knew I had to get rid of him then, or me and the kids would be more deranged than we’d ever be on our own, even with me going on all the time as if I’ve still got brain-damage from it. But what’s the point?’ She sat down, as if totally worn out.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom, ‘but you ought not to talk like that in front of – us.’

He meant the children, and Pam supposed he was right. Someone had to advise her against it, but Pam thought he was hardly the right person, being a man, and certainly more at sea than he’d ever been. Judy, however, looked across at them with an embarrassed smile. ‘I’m sorry too, but I won’t mention it again.’

She’s upset about us going. Pam sat by her and held her hand, while Tom pulled Hilary to him and stroked her hair. ‘Now stop crying. It’s more like the beginning of the world than the end. You can come to see us in Israel after we get settled. I promise. You can bring them,’ he said to Judy.

Sam took Rachel when she cried, and rocked her gently. It was a happy family, but all happy families sooner or later disintegrate – cruel, Pam thought, as it may seem. She was tired of it all, and watched Tom set out cups and pour tea.

‘I’m going to Israel,’ he said, ‘because it’s the only solution. My past will be put into its proper place.’ He turned to her. ‘And so will yours be. I want you to come because we were lost in the same ocean together, and came out at the same time. I can’t carry you there forcibly, but more than anything I want you and Rachel to follow as soon as possible.’

She wouldn’t give an answer, though there was a positive one somewhere in her. The time for thought was over, especially of the kind that degenerated into worry. Having been so long in the beam of chaos, she wanted the futile roundabout to stop. She had changed her life when the odds against doing so had been too heavy to contemplate. She had married blind at twenty, and had come out at forty with her heart so bruised that it seemed as if she couldn’t do anything except turn into a cabbage and rot in the earth. There was only space for one victory in her lifetime. Who needed more? Her spiritual and bodily strength hadn’t been made for victories, she often thought. It took more strength to achieve them than to sustain defeats. The victory she felt in possession of, though it might seem less than ordinary to anyone else, already felt unique to her.

She did not have to say anything in answer to his question because she felt as safe with him as she hoped he would ultimately feel secure with her. He did not appear threatened or unmanned by her silence. That much had always been obvious. What better love could there be between them? What more did she want? Nothing more. She felt older than the thousands of years he sometimes talked about, but it was part of the victory that her heart blended with his, their beginning already being far in the past. She would go to him when the time was ready, and stay no matter what, because hadn’t the preacher’s message been that Israel was her country as much as it was his?

Damn the preacher, she thought with the next inner breath. If he had ranted the opposite she would still be where she was, and of the same mind, because it was the only place in which she could find peace. Tom had, after all, brought her from the valley of the shadow of death.

Those who at one time might have said that she had had everything hadn’t known that to her it had been as nothing. And now that they could say she had nothing, she felt as if it were everything. Her heart had been unable to live without the almost sensual desire to go into another state of being, proving to her that only by complete change was it possible to learn. The embers of the heart had turned to ash, but they had retained their warmth and were ready to burst into life again. She was rebuilt by endurance, and though she still felt much of the time that she was alone, she also knew that the three of them would find an existence in the place that had been devised for them. With love they would re-create their lives in a new country, and stem the rages that would no doubt continue to torment them. But at the moment she would tell him nothing. He must go without her and Rachel, or not at all.

‘Me come as well?’ Judy said. ‘Can you imagine me picking oranges? Still, I might try it for a year: Judy Ellerker, the blight of the Holy Land! I’d love being in the sun, all the same.’

‘You’ll adore it,’ Pam said, ‘I’m sure you will. I can already see you there.’

‘Do all Jews go to Israel?’ Sam’s hand hovered around Rachel as if he was playing with a kitten.

Tom put down his cup. ‘Only those who want to. And those who have to.’

‘I wish you weren’t going, though.’

‘I’m one of those who have to.’

‘But do you want to?’ asked Judy.

‘I don’t suppose I’ll know the answer to that one until I get there. But there’s more to it than just wanting to. It’s bigger than that, beyond discussion, like so much else.’

‘Now you’re talking!’ Judy mocked.

He stood apart, conscious of the fact that in a week he would no longer be with them. They knew it. Hilary held his hands tight. ‘Will you play Monopoly with us, Tom?’

‘It’s no use,’ he laughed. ‘You always win.’

She pulled at him. The sleeve of his coat covered the back of his hand. Everyone else’s need was greater than your own. He smiled when Hilary said: ‘Not every time, I don’t.’

‘We’ll let you win,’ Sam promised.

‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘My last game of Monopoly!’

‘Leave him alone, you little vampires.’ But Judy took the baby from Sam, because she knew Tom would play a game or two with them.

22

‘While waiting for the ship at Piraeus I walked along the boulevard by the docks looking in shop windows, but nothing interested me. Since leaving you and Rachel I was an empty skin, able to move but not think, capable of facing the future, but not daring to wonder about the past. I felt part of a system, if such it can be called, that was pulling me to the centre, sleep-walking me to a conclusion that can turn out to be nothing except a real beginning. It’s a relief to be without options at last.

‘Like the normal passenger I was I loitered till it was time for the ship to sail, but felt more lost than I’d ever been during my sailor life when I hit a funny port and wondered how to pass the time before going back to my cabin.

‘I was in a state of well-being, but sorry to have left you, knowing from experience that it is always more depressing for those who stay behind, no matter what the circumstances. To that extent I felt twinges of guilt and uncertainty. In fact it might be true to say that what I didn’t feel would hardly be worth writing about! I was also obviously sorry at leaving Rachel, though perhaps on her part she’ll miss me less at the tender age of three months than she would if I had left my departure till much later. The quicker the move, the healthier for everyone.

‘The ship didn’t leave until two o’clock, and much loading had to be done, as I saw from a stroll along the quay. I probably walked around the docks to the shipping office to get my ticket checked more times than was necessary. The ship would be full. People had boxes, bundles, plastic bags, rucksacks, suitcases, trunks, and cardboard boxes tied up with string. Bedding (including a whole bedframe) was going up the stern gangplank. A line of cars was waiting to go into the hold. All luggage was being searched, in case a terrorist should plant something there.

‘I strolled back to the dock gates. There was still no hurry. I repeated to myself that I was going to Israel, said the word over and over like an incantation, and a port worker who went by must have thought I was going a bit crackers in the midday sun. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. I would get to Haifa, so then where would I go? Jerusalem is the capital city of Israel, I said, therefore it is natural to go to that place. But would I lodge there for good, or fix something up near the desert, or work in orange groves on some kibbutz or other, or stay close to the sea? Sooner or later I would have to make myself useful. Where would I pray if the need arose, as it surely will? I’d find a synagogue – no difficulty there! – to give thanks for my arrival. I had my yarmulka, so they would let me in. I hadn’t left my old life in order to settle for less. Israel was, I told myself, the only country in the world I could go to after England. It will supersede England in my mind – a great change, but it will be done. For once in my life I have to prove myself right in a fundamental choice, not out of fate, egotism or force of circumstance, but due to a religious reason that is at the very middle of me.

‘I walked back to the boulevard. A tram was going by, and I almost ran after it. Both sections turned a corner before I could make up my mind to get on. My body and spirit played a game, joining forces to perform a trick I didn’t fall for. A car bonnet passed close as I crossed the road, its hooter screeching. The heat was terrific, coming out of an emptiness I thought had been left behind. (They said there was a heat wave in Greece at the moment.) That emptiness was caused by my leaving you and Rachel. I sat on a seat by some stunted bushes, a huge ship rearing on the other side of the railings. It is impossible to leave anything behind. The past stays with you, or that’s how it feels at the moment, a part of your irreducible torment that you see reminders of again and again, memories that render down and become one more contribution to the unconscious.

‘The whistle of a departing ship reminded me that time went on and there was less possibility of retreat, no matter what going forward might mean. We will survive, the three of us, whatever happens, because in our different ways we have already learned never to be afraid.

‘The ship set off through industrial mist and sailed among the isles of Greece. I ate a meal, slept for an hour, then looked from the rail at rocks and ashy mountains poking their summits out of the clear blue mirror of the sea. It was only now, seeing the last markings of my departure from what to me was the old world, that all nerve seemed to go, and the questions began. The effect was terrifying, striking at the most vulnerable part and at the worst moment – as of course it must. I had not expected it, when I ought to have done, though even if I had braced myself, the effect would have been no different. There was little use denying or avoiding it. I was down among the jellyfish, make no mistake about that.

‘Everything I thought appeared to me as the truth, and the denials that immediately countered it were also nothing but the truth – as if the experience I had let myself in for was determined to change even the basic chemistry of my mind. The journey so far had been full of interest. I had been on the move, and there had been little time to think, but now, not only was I alone, and a passenger who had nothing to do while crossing the sea, but I was back on a ship, in the place where I had spent most of my life before finding out who I was and what my connection with the past had been.

‘I should have known. I had not given sufficient forethought to avoiding the most obvious pitfalls of my transference. Not only was I back in my former life with an intensity neither desired nor anticipated but, having no connection with it in a working capacity (nor any urge to be so), was doubly lost. Every facet of me that I was, or had been, or intended to become, fell away and left me as a monument of nothingness. I felt ice inside me, growing every second as I stood at the rail, a coldness that made my teeth clatter and my body shake, the extent of the ice inside me increasing until its volume went far beyond the size of my body and became an iceberg into whose space and constituents I had entirely disappeared.

‘I don’t think I would have come out of it – I would have thrown myself overboard and drowned, that’s one thing I am certain of – if one word had not come to my rescue. I don’t know how much time passed: perhaps not much, but in a few moments the word had dissolved my paralysis. The sound activated itself from the disciplined service I had been part of for thirty-odd years, but it also formed the definition of something that had been with me ever since I had been born. The word, which began to melt the iceberg that encased me, was fear. Fear had been with me for as long as I could remember, a fear mostly half-buried, usually totally so, from as far back as even before I was born. It had led me into every situation of my life, perilous or not, thrown me into all changes, even this one. It had earlier ushered me into becoming a merchant seaman, a very good move, thus allowing me to conquer fear, as I thought, once and for all. Perhaps it also pushed me into the present move, and that’s why I allowed it to happen.

‘As I stood by the rail therefore, contemplating my final move out of the iceberg and into the sea, the word fear spoke itself plainly through to what remained of my consciousness. I heard it, and the spark that struck warmed me back into the world. “You’re afraid,” I said to myself, “stricken with unholy and destructive fear.” And discipline took up the call, and expanded on it with words that made me sweat, but which stopped my helpless trembling. That single word brought me back to life, but the word attached itself to many others, before I banished it for ever. Early in my seafaring life an old captain said to me: “Fear God, but nothing else!” The natural and no doubt healthy scorn of the young caused me to pull the saying into myself and then forget it. But as the word came to me I realized that all my life I had been driven everywhere by fear, and even had feared life itself. During the final move that was being made away from it, which when completed meant that I would be able to fear God and nothing else, savage fear made one last attack upon me, but as I walked a free man away from the dusk and down the companionway, I knew I had defeated it.

‘I slept in the oven of a cabin, and woke the next day refreshed and calm. The boat was crowded and scruffy, and I sat by the stern with my Hebrew grammar. After calling at Cyprus I felt almost home. I was impatient to see the hills and coastline of Israel, at times wishing I had gone there by aeroplane, but consoling myself with the fact that tomorrow I would be in Jerusalem, that next year would have become this year! In the morning I dressed and went on deck. There was a breeze, the ship rolling slightly, but no sight of land. I wondered how I came to be on a ship, waiting to see Israel rise out of the dawn, such a vast change to a year ago. But I couldn’t think backwards any more. There would be no more of that. I would like it where I was going because there was nowhere else. Every move in my life had been to the same end, but this time there was a motive for my shift of vision, a connection which I had often sensed, but missed because the evidence of my feelings had not been there.

‘The decks were crowded. Somebody claimed to see land, but it was nowhere in sight. Israelis, pilgrims and tourists jostled for a place at the rails. After breakfast we saw the coast clearly. The ship waited for a pilot boat to show us our moorings. A police launch stood by with machine-guns mounted – or maybe it was part of the Israeli Navy. The only Hebrew I spoke was that of having to do with First Seeing the Land.

‘The mist cleared. I looked through binoculars at the coast and the old Crusader town of Akko till my eyes ran from the strain. I saw the docks of Haifa, and the long back of Mount Carmel with modern buildings crowding the northern spur. A notice said no photos were allowed. It was a busy harbour, with plenty of traffic. People were waiting by the sheds to greet lucky passengers. There were cars and lorries beyond the dock gates, and pedestrians in summer clothes. Gangways were lowered, but it took an hour to get through tedious landing formalities.

‘By sharing a taxi I was in Jerusalem at midday. I sat in a café with my suitcases, watching people go by and sampling that smell of musk and spicy food on Ben Yehuda Street. Using the café telephone I located a hotel with a vacant room. It turned out to be somewhat modest, and I was told I was lucky to get it with so many tourists crowding in, but it was a place to sleep and leave luggage while I wandered around.

‘There was less heat than on the coast. The sky was blue when I stood below a windmill and saw the crenellations of the city walls. I wanted to reach out and touch them, but they were too far away. So I looked. I looked at the walls and at Mount Zion for half an hour, impossible to exult or brood after so long, only to stand still and look with steady recognition at a scene I had heard of and read about even from my Bible days at the orphanage. The agony of being without a past was over, however bleak the future might be.

‘Many tourists were coming and going, bringing a babble of languages from all over the world. I walked at my usual quick speed between some houses and down the hill, as if I had been there before, across the valley and up to the Jaffa Gate. At the open space inside I bought a glass of freshly pressed orange juice, glancing at the people as I stood and drank.

‘Pushing my way down David Street, I had to step around places where the road was up. It was as if I had arranged to meet someone and was already late. I stopped a soldier and asked the way to the Western Wall. It used to be called the Wailing Wall, but I learned in the taxi, when one of the passengers corrected me in a very brash way, that it doesn’t have that name any more.

‘So much space in the middle of a cramped city came as a surprise, but once you’re in there’s no doubt where the Wall is. A soldier examined my haversack, for bombs, I suppose. Then I put on my yarmulka and went into the enclosure. There’s a place for men, and a place for women, which I suppose neither you nor Judy would like! I stared mindlessly for a few minutes, before letting my hand touch the stone. When the Hashemites from over the River Jordan occupied this area no Jews were allowed in, I was later told. The Wall cut off the sky, but was a lightning rod in contact with it. A few people on either side were praying, wearing shawls and weaving back and forth. Without intending, my forehead was touching the Wall. How long I was there I don’t know. I was with you. Then I was with myself only. I was mulling on all I had discovered about my mother, reliving every event up to her death. Perhaps if she hadn’t died we would both have been here.

‘I lost a sense of time when my hands touched the Wall, unable to let go because it seemed alive. If ever there was a man in a dream that man was me, but the dream knew what it was doing, even if I didn’t. I pressed the Star of David from my mother to the rough surface to prove that one of us had come back to where we belonged. The action comforted me, however outlandish it might seem to you – and in some ways seemed to me when I realized what I was doing.

‘After dark I walked to the Jaffa Gate and out of the City. Back in my room, with a dull bulb glowing, I felt calmer. It is my home for the moment. I’m reminded of when you were in your room in London, as I try to stamp my own personality on to it, even though I may be here only a few days more. My half dozen books are on a shelf, my map on the wall, and the sextant on the dressing-table. All I need for the moment is this small room, and I feel richer than Solomon at knowing it is in Jerusalem.

‘I still don’t know why I left you and Rachel, but there was no other way. I feel pared to the bone by the mindless search which has now come to a stop. The fact that there is no going on will take getting used to. Unless the unified heart is wholly committed to life, no one can truthfully speak of the oneness of existence. There had to be a stop. It is irreligious to strive for the absolute, which is beyond human comprehension. A deeper meaning can only be found by searching within a closed circle, through actions rather than words, but actions that are good rather than evil. One must cultivate justice, love and mercy, in so far as one’s life and one’s country are spared to let you do so.

‘The place I have chosen is the one that by birth was chosen for me. I am under no illusions. That too would be a sin, because we know, or should, that illusions pave the way to greater evils than those which might already be close by. Israel is in the middle of the world, and I can’t help feeling that it is a rock on which the stability of the world depends. At the same time it is a country like any other, while also like no other country. You have to be here to feel it. First impressions count for much, even though they might amuse those who have been here so long they have forgotten what their first impressions were – if such a thing is possible.

‘I speak to people in the cafés, and my poor knowledge of Hebrew – though it is improving – brings comments as well as a few laughs, but I use it without any self-consciousness. Someone generally speaks English, so it’s not difficult to start a conversation. I mostly listen, however, to what goes on among the others, being too diffident about putting in my no doubt naïve opinions. What they are, I have formulated over the past year, and confirmed during the time I have been here. If I had no such opinions how could I have been here in the first place?

‘While life is normal, one senses a faint electricity of danger in the air. At least I do, though perhaps that’s because I’m still a stranger. Maybe it’s only a more-than-usual feeling of existence, an urgency, liveliness and tension coming from three million people back in their own land after having been denied it for so long, and determined to survive in spite of all adversities. But such a feeling as mine only makes life seem more real, because I’ve long been used to the feeling, as one always was on a ship, and especially during the war. Maybe it’s best for me to have come, after all, to a country where danger of some kind is never felt to be absent. Not that there isn’t a need for such vigilance everywhere. Explosions occur in London as well as in Israel, and no doubt will continue to do so – though I haven’t heard of any here as yet. It is a factor of modern life, and also the kind of evil that has always been with us, which indiscriminately strikes every time at the innocent. Various countries have no option but to live with it, and to contain it till, like a visitation of the plague to which a healthy country cannot finally succumb, it goes away. Whatever there is to live with will, after a while, seem ordinary enough. To be surrounded by enemies is a form of reality, and in this country life goes on as normally as anywhere else. It is a new nation still, not thirty years old, going through flux without end, from inside and out. But it will endure, no matter what, and to be here fills me with a joyous will to live.’

23

She read the letters from Tom after supper. There were no secrets from Judy. They placed their armchairs by the fireplace, each with their separate side-light and pot of coffee, enjoying that silence when children are in bed. Tom had been gone a month, and until each letter came it seemed to Pam as if she had never known him. But the letters brought him vividly back, even more so when she read them to Judy. The only part that remained was Rachel. When Tom was present Rachel looked like him, but when Tom was away it was Tom who resembled Rachel, so that whatever she felt, she was fundamentally linked with him. Life with Judy and the children seemed settled, yet the flat was only a half-way house until the time came to be on the move again.

The end of his letter (‘I’ll start looking for a place for us to live tomorrow. It could be anywhere between Dan and Ophira, and from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan. I’ll hire a car and reconnoitre’) had been followed by one in which he said that he had found a flat for the time being in Jerusalem, and wanted her and Rachel to join him as soon as she felt they were able to make the move. He could come and get her if she liked, and they would make the trip by plane. He’d see that Judy and the kids were all right, unless, he added, they would like to come as well! Even that could be done.

‘The pair of you certainly seem to have got all that was possible out of each other,’ Judy remarked, ‘considering how it looks like ending up.’

‘Nothing is ended yet, that’s the joy of it. I hate to think of endings.’

‘Yes,’ Judy said, ‘I suppose beginnings are more in your line. But you will go, won’t you?’

She leaned, and filled her cup. ‘What would you do, if you were in my place?’

‘I’m not, and never would be, thank you very much. But if I had the chance, you mean?’ Her voice quavered, and broke. ‘Well, I don’t know. I love you too much to want you to go. You shouldn’t ask questions like that.’

It was unfair, Pam saw. There was too much pressure between them. She complimented her on her honesty. ‘Do you want a brandy in your coffee?’

Judy noted how affectionately they cared for one another, and how soon it was to end. ‘Sorry, whisky.’

She went to get it.

‘But I mean’ – Pam poured it into both cups – ‘I’m asking what you would do in my place – exactly that.’

‘You’ve made the bloody coffee cold,’ Judy said. ‘We have as near a perfect life as I can imagine at the moment. Trust a man to ruin it.’

‘He made it possible.’

‘Damn him!’

They were silent, Pam hardly able to look at Judy who gazed intently at her.

‘I’d go,’ Judy said. ‘That’s what I’d do. But don’t let me influence you, for God’s sake!’

‘I won’t,’ Pam said. ‘But I suppose I shall go.’

‘“Suppose!”’ She saw some hope. Then the light went out of her eyes, because any uncertainty from Pam only brought a certainty closer. Seven negatives made a positive. She poured more whisky. Close to crying, you must laugh. ‘Shall you dip Rachel in the Jordan?’

‘I doubt it. Whether I’ll stay in Israel or not, I can’t say. Depends on a lot. I’m too free a person to commit myself, though I suppose that, too, is an illusion. In one way I’m frightened, but on the other hand, to go to Tom in Israel is something I can’t not do. Not to try it would be cowardice. Since we met I’ve really given him a hard time. I can’t imagine how anybody but Tom would have put up with it. There’ll be no more of that, though, from now on.’

Judy sat at her feet, and put her arms around her legs. ‘If you go, it’ll be for ever. I know.’

‘That’s being melodramatic. Nothing’s for ever.’

‘Maybe not. But I know you, absolutely. You’ll go, and you’ll stay, even though you may well come back now and again to say hello to old Judy.’ She looked tired, as if she would feel a weight off her when there were no more decisions to be talked about. ‘It’s front-line stuff out there. You know that, don’t you?’

‘It’s where I want to be, though. There’s no other place.’

‘No, I see that. Not for you there isn’t.’

‘I’ll begin arrangements to move in the morning. I see no use in holding back once my mind’s made up.’ She smiled. ‘There are certain things you have to do, and you’d never make any beginnings if you couldn’t act until you were able to see the end.’

She spoke without much consideration. Life seemed empty, but the weariness was finished, and she could only gird herself for the future. ‘After all, it’s my victory as well as his. And the fact is, there’s no such thing as a victory, unless you have someone else to share it with.’