The Death of William Posters

1

All afternoon Frank Dawley walked across the Lincolnshire uplands. Grey cloud corrugated the sky and deadened the sound of his feet on the metalled road. His mind had changed with the landscape since leaving Nottingham, surprising him at times by its breadth. A dog-wind snapped at the back of his head. The country was bleak, hilly and monotonous, and he had no reason for walking along that particular stretch of narrow road.

Journeying was cheap. The sale of his car had enriched him by four hundred pounds which he had split and spun out at ten a week for himself and ten for Nancy — rather than be shoe-horned into another job. He left his suitcase at his sister’s and set off with a small rucksack, walking, or hitching rides along whatever road suited him. Sometimes he would wait for a lift and, seeing a car coming from the opposite direction, would walk across and thumb that, set off north before south, east instead of west, all decisions meaningless now that he had made the great one of his life. One leg took him from Reading to Manchester, with a TV producer in a jungle-green Jaguar, which Frank also drove and so got him there in half the time by steering through the night, after a beano dinner at some typical English pub with Spanish waiters — coffee, brandy and a skittle-shaped cigar to follow, which this TV bloke said would go on expenses, so drink up and let’s blow town, he added, trying to imitate Frank’s life. Blinded with drink; Frank wasn’t, so let him sleep in the back while he, glad to be at the wheel after a fortnight on foot, took them steadily north through wind and drizzle, the radio playing softly the Fly-by-night Favourites for nomad boozers. He felt light and free, so quick moving and empty of all responsibility and the black care of a working life that he expected a flashing light to flag him down, a copper’s voice on the beam-end of it barking for his passport and licence and laughing in his face that it was too good to last. But even his passport was in order, the first official document he had ever voluntarily applied for, on whim six months ago, for no reason but just in case, as important a secret to keep from his wife as if he’d got another woman to warm the other cold half of his life. It was a blue book, new and empty of foreign stamps, the first book in his life he had bought which wasn’t a paperback, and he didn’t begrudge the price of twenty-five bob, but merely wondered what impulse had forced him to buy its so far useless bulk.

When tired of lifts he wandered along lanes and minor roads, revelled in the smell of fields subsiding under dew and mist, the drift and tread of dead leaves, the steaming semicircle of cows staring him out as he sat a few minutes on some gate to eat bread and meat.

A limpid watery sun shone through, livened the grass, and waterdrops fell from branches as if melted like wax by the faint warmth. He walked on, only memories taking over the space of dominant sensual impressions. This made him look as if walking somewhere, though there was no objective in his mind. There was too much to slake off as yet. He was just above middle height, with grey eyes, and darkish hair that gave a sallow and tough appearance to his face. A fairly high forehead when he thought to brush his hair back denoted intelligence, though not the assurance of using it properly every time it was called for. A short white fishbone scar had stayed above the left eye after a pop bottle burst there as a kid. It was the face in which a smile would be giving too much away, betraying the deadpan working-man exterior consciously maintained. Stern, it was fenced up to stop things coming in and going out, often with little success due to an exuberance over which he had little control.

Walking along black midnight roads, off the main trunks where cars were scarcer, ready to tramp all night and like it, the wound of his separation from Nancy reopened. He had often considered packing up his life with her but never imagined it would be on a Saturday afternoon. Such a day made it more sure and permanent. If you walk out on Wednesday you are back by Friday. If you pack up on Friday you walk into work on Monday like a zombie and clock in, going home in the evening for your tea as if nothing has happened. If you leave on Tuesday it’s only a joke, a bit of bluff, but in the cool dead hour of Saturday afternoon it’s almost like cheating it’s so serious.

Walking up the path, he had turned in towards the back door, and thanked God no one was at home. There were so many baby and doll prams thrown by the step that it looked like a bloody cripples’ guild. The five-year rage that had led to this had deserted him; yet it had left him so cool at last that his purpose was inflexible — so inflexible that he distrusted it. Even his heart wasn’t beating faster than normal.

Apart from the good clothes on his back he was surprised at how few he had. They hardly filled the case, and two were bulging when he first came. All the less to carry away, he saw. I’ll get rid of the car and travel light, nothing I can’t pick up in my own two hands. He looked along his row of books: Camp on Blood Island, Schweik, Sons and Lovers, War of the Worlds, Dr Zhivago — to pick out the best, books he had read and enjoyed but finally didn’t trust. Lady Chatterley’s Lover should have been there, but he’d thrown it on the fire in anger and disappointment.

Under the bookshelf was a pile of all-sort records. He was going to look through them but didn’t because he’d leave the gram for the kids. The paperbacks looked derelict, forlorn in his bedroom where he wouldn’t sleep any more, possibly the only things in it that would draw his thoughts there now and again. It was easy to shed leaves out of a thriller from way back. Held over the fireplace, its guts fluttered down, loose enough to make a fair body of flame when he put his lighter to it. Unwilling to see the flame fold up its yellow wings and die in this cold cage of a grate, he split another volume, tearing pages quickly to keep the fire on the upreach, his hands warming at the work and heat, hardly aware of what they were doing. Satisfied when all were burning, he closed his suitcase, and turned to carry it downstairs.

‘Where the hell do you think you’ve been all night?’ Nancy wanted to know, standing in the doorway. His eyes stung from the paper smoke, lips hot and dry. It was hard to answer, but he’d lose no time over it once they moved from the head of the stairs. Her tone changed to one of solicitude for herself, the kids, for him, on seeing his case: ‘Where are you going, then?’

‘Let’s go down,’ he said, moving by and soon half way to the living-room. She called after him: ‘What have you been burning?’ A picture swamped her, of him tearing up their wedding photos, snapshot albums of outings with the kids, marriage certificate maybe, papers and souvenirs that had held them together by more than flesh. ‘What did you do that for?’ she cried, following him. ‘You didn’t need to do that.’

He stood in the hallway. ‘I didn’t burn anything of yours, or ours. I can’t put up with things any longer. I’ve got to go.’

She stood also, still in her coat, her pale face unable to show the thousand expressions crowding behind its façade like corroding moons. They looked at each other. Instinct told him to run, but he was somehow unable to move as long as she was without speech. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Honest. I don’t understand. I knew this would happen though, when you didn’t come home last night. Why did you make me wait all day before I was sure?’

‘I got back as soon as I could.’ Their voices were as closely matched by the twin tones of brevity and desperation as their bodies had often been in the timing and rhythms of love-making. He thought of himself making love to her — on a long summer afternoon when the kids had been packed off to her sister’s, and even when there had been no kids — but such memories were dead, nothing left. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, not out of curiosity, but to keep him longer in the house. It was as if they were talking on the edge of a thousand foot cliff in a gale. She was afraid of the emptiness he’d leave, and he was afraid of the emptiness he would fall into. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said.

‘I asked where you were going,’ she snapped.

‘What difference does it make? I don’t know.’

‘Well, I’ve got to know. I’ll want money from you every week. You don’t think I’m going into a factory to keep your kids, do you?’

‘I’ll see you’re not short.’

‘You’re always ready with the money, I will say that. Money cures everything, don’t it?’

‘What do you want me to do? Chop off my legs and leave ’em behind? If it’s finished it’s finished. Or maybe it’s only me that’s finished. I’m twenty-seven and I feel like sixty.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t think you do, either.’

‘Maybe not. I’m off just the same.’

‘I hope you enjoy it.’

They stood like two armless people under the short claymore sentences chopping across each other, dry, painful and cutting deep. ‘I suppose you’ve been fed up with me, as well, lately,’ he said.

‘I was fed up with you five years ago. But I’m not like you. I thought: “We’re married, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s that. This ain’t what I thought it would be like at all, not what the stories and magazines or my own mind led me to believe, anyway, but here it is, this is life.” That’s what I thought, and it didn’t take me long to get to it.’

‘I can just hear your mother saying that. “You made your bed, now lie on it.” It must have made her happy to say it. But I’m not going to be the one to lie for good on the bed you’ve made. Nor on the one I’ve made, either. It’s finished, I tell you.’

‘Don’t keep saying it, then. And don’t call my mother. She’s not here to answer back. It’s a good job for you as well, or you wouldn’t be getting off so light. She helped us a lot when she was alive.’

‘I’m not getting off anything at all. I wouldn’t even bother to argue with her if she was here. I can never argue with people I hate. I just want to get away from them.’

She laughed, and he felt bitter because it stunned the fact that he really wanted to explain things. They stood, unable to walk back from each other, attracted and held like two magnets in a field of iron filings. Their thoughts struggled towards unity of expression, but found it as difficult as if buried deep under a mass of twisted metal, pinned hard, stultified and killed as soon as the desire for release became known. They had lived together too long to produce explanations that either would in any case believe.

He picked up his case and opened the door, walked out of the house for good, a departure so quick that he later reflected that it must have left her with an appalling undying bitterness. He went along the path, a lighter tread than when he came in from work every evening. The gate slucked, instead of the backdoor rattling. His footsteps got quieter, instead of him walking gruffly across the kitchen to hang his grease-stained cap, mac and knapsack on the hook, before swilling his face at the sink and sitting down to tea and kidnoise.

He stood, leaned on a gate, head down and roaring like a muzzled bull before the shambles. It was a black road, with no moon to help, no stars to goad him on. If his legs hadn’t suddenly and for no reason gone on strike against walking, the wound would not have burst. Immobility was still his death. It wasn’t that he had regrets, wanted to go back and wallow again in the bitter salt and honeycomb; but he was roaring at blind solitude surrounding him, at a hermit-like future pulling him in and boding little for his own good. He wondered how long he could go on living through various days and black nights before being drawn into the pit of another job, bed, and life even more null and commonplace than the one that he didn’t yet know in any respectable language why he had left.

Autumn was no time for travel, certainly, hitch-hike, push-bike and footslog, but he was cursed by the St Vitus zig-zags — and who looked at a calendar before running from a long and painful suffocation? He’d intended making his way slowly around the country, but free transport winged him beyond this speed. His skill at driving often shortened each lift in time, and his gift of talk also made a long drive shrivel, the road a spinning discarded umbilical cord lost in bad weather between green fields and sunken crossroads. England was tiny, he’d always known that, but the proof of it in getting from one side to the other in a day gave him the delirium trembles and the kennel-mania shackle-fits. In a fortnight he’d been up to the Lake District, dipped into Cornwall, bounced against Wales, and sped over the flat ditch-crossed Fens between Spalding and Wisbech; hypnotized on the beach near Grimsby by long shimmering febrile blue-black waves speeding at even pace up the immense zone of sand — each one following the other as if to get out of reach of the deep sea where they might drown. Dogger Bank and the Rhumba-Humber, a North Sea cloud spat in his eye and drove him over on the ferry to Hull, as if ‘Bill Posters will be prosecuted’ were written on every blade of grass and white sea wave and he was William himself on the run even beyond cities.

All through the twelve years of his factory days and the years of his marriage he had brooded and built up the Bill Posters legend, endowing the slovenly Bill with the typical mentality of the workman-underdog, the put-upon dreg whose spiritual attributes he had been soaked and bombarded with all through his school, home and working life. Frank had fought them off, being like him in no single way at all. Yet the Bill Posters ethos hung around him like a piteous and dying dog and, being so hard to throw off (he sometimes wondered whether this would ever be possible until he kicked the bucket himself) made life more deep and harrowing for him. It was difficult to get rid of him precisely because his sympathies were in the right place, and because the conditions that made Bill Posters still persisted. In some big way Bill Posters had also been responsible for his exploding out of life so far, leaving wife, home, job, kids and Nottingham’s fair city where he had been born, bred and spiritually nullified. Yet it wasn’t so easy, and on buses and foot he was often cast back into those barren streets to dwell upon the predicament of that man who had a firm place still in his heart.

Poor Bill Posters. Everywhere he was threatened with prosecution. The alarm had been raised for him. The whole country, it seemed, was after him, had been for years in fact, certainly for as long as Frank could remember. He must know no rest, for they were still out to get him, painting his name big and square at every corner, and threatening prosecution. What had he done? Frank had always asked, and nobody would ever say, so it was bound to have been something serious and shameful. He had never seen Bill Posters, but pictured Bill as if he’d known him well, almost like a cousin; saw him as he’d seen him even as a kid of six just learning to decipher those words of menace, as a fairly tall thin man of twenty-seven, thin faced and wearing a threadbare unbuttonable jacket as he hurried, looking from left to right, along the street and round a corner — dodging his everlasting evertrailing prosecutors. Bill was always in a hurry, travelling furtively, travelling light, an unwrapped piece of bread in his jacket pocket which he sometimes munched at as he went along. Sometimes not as much as that to keep him going, maybe only the smell of an oil rag and even that was rancid.

But the great and marvellous thing was that they never got him! Bill had been on the run from birth and was more than a match for his persecutors. They could write his name on every street corner, but they’d never catch Bill — hurrying always one street ahead of them, or perhaps even behind, for he was clever and must have his moments of triumph as, from behind a newsagent’s shutter (the sublime light of underprivilege spreading a smile over his good-natured and cunning face) he watches them painting his name big upon some massive waste-ground wall: BILLPOSTERSWILLBEPROSECUTED — just wanting to burst out laughing yet too smart to give himself away.

He feels a lot as he watches his name being spread out in public. Bill Posters has been infamous in these streets for generations, bandit Posters, as well known or maybe scorned and scoffed at as Robin Hood, justly celebrated in that hundred verse ‘Ballad of Bill Posters’ recited for generations in Nottingham streets and pubs. There’s been a long line of William Posters, a family of mellow lineage always hoved-up in some slum cellar of Nottingham streets. His existence explains many puzzles. Who was General Ludd? None other than the shadowy William Posters, stockinger, leading on his gallant companies of Nottingham lads to smash all that machinery. In any case didn’t Lord Byron make a stirring speech in the House of Lords about a certain William Posters sentenced to death in his absence for urging a crowd to resist the yeomanry? Who set fire to Nottingham Castle during the Chartist riots? Later, who spat in Lord Roberts’ face when he led the victory parade in Nottingham after the Boer War? Who looted those shops in the General Strike? No one has ever proved it, but the ballad sings of it, and historians may make notes for future conjectures. To those who don’t think much about the present upholder of the Posters race he is half-forgotten, invisible, or completely ignored, but those wags and sparks whose hearts he lodges in sustain that image, keep his furtive ever-enduring figure alive as it flits at dusk or dawn down slum streets from one harbouring district to another. The fact that he is never caught indicates the vast population of his friends, and the one sure sign that he is never taken off by the cops is that his name is always being painted afresh on some wall or other. His enemies, though, are equally numerous, and it is even harder to say exactly who they are than his friends. Everyone knows Bill Posters is one of us, and everybody knows that his enemies belong to the people whose emissaries come with pots of paint and describe the fact, legally on some chosen wall, that Bill Posters is going to be prosecuted. Why are they so persistently out to get Bill Posters once and for all, to nail both name and man to the flagpole of that arse-rag, the Union Jack? To write so publicly and often the fact of Bill’s impending prosecution must mean that they had mountains of evidence against him. All of it was false, of course.

Maybe if he hadn’t been persecuted, Frank thought, he’d have turned out a different man, been a bloke like me who’d got a job at a factory and worked every week for fifteen quid or so. He might have been a good worker for the union and, who knows, in time become a big official — Sir William Posters ‘today went to confer with Beeching, Ford, Robens and Nuffield with regard to the General Strike called for tomorrow by his caucus of unions. According to the D. Worker Sir William maintained that he wanted a minimum wage of twenty pounds a week for all workers, as well as a communist government of six hundred and forty deputies to be chosen by him and sent to the House of Commons. Great cheers from all the workers’.

‘Don’t call me Sir William, lads. I shit on the Sir. Call me Bill — Bill Posters as I was born and bred.’ Comrade Posters, party boss, in his cloth cap and big topcoat as he inspects blast furnaces and power stations. ‘Good old Bill. We’ve got what we want now.’ Until an aeroplane flying over one day, sky-writes high up in the blue: ‘No you haven’t. BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.’

Mostly the people who gave Frank lifts were happy to do so. One man was not, and said, when they were well into the wolds beyond Louth: ‘Don’t you sometimes feel ashamed, to be begging lifts like this?’

There’d been no smile when the man stopped to pick him up, nothing but a slit-mouth asking where he wanted to go. He wore a belted mac, and cap, was pale at the face and kept his steel-blue eyes angled towards the road. ‘To get where I’m going,’ Frank replied, ‘it would be cheaper by bus. I only hitchhike to give miserable bastards like you a break from yourself. Stop this car and put me down.’

The man smiled. ‘Well, now look here, I didn’t mean to be offensive, you know. I asked a question because I don’t see much point in sitting quiet for the next ten miles.’

‘If you don’t pull up I’ll grab that wheel and swing you into the ditch as well.’

The car stopped quickly. He reached for his pack and got out, not a word said, happy to have weight again on his moving legs. He gave lifts to hundreds of people, even those who didn’t look as if they wanted one. On the last day before leaving, anything to get out of town, warm sunshine dazzling through the spotless windscreen, he sped along a straight, narrow lane that ran two flat miles across open wasteground, had a yen to take his car off and crash the fence, subside into the ditch and grind up onto wider spaces. But what was beyond them except what he could see now? — the Trent, the power-station and, over the river, hills forming a hazy blackening cloudbank?

Driving towards a rooftop sea of newly built houses increased his worm-eaten discontent. Fields and woods bordered the sluggish river, a live, cloud-reflecting limb held under by a smart new bridge. Beyond the estate he turned to the main road, and, seeing a soldier and kitbag planted hopefully for a lift, drew up to find out where to. ‘Loughborough, sir,’ came the obliging answer.

‘Sling your sack in,’ Frank said, opening a packet of twenty, fresh and newly shining like Alfonso’s teeth: ‘Fag?’ He was about twenty — short haircut and come-to-bed eyes for a female ape — sallow-faced and ill at ease as he drew the door to. ‘Slam it, mate, or you’ll roll out, then you won’t be worth much as a soldier.’

‘I’m in a good regiment,’ the soldier said, stammering slightly. Frank lit up before driving off. ‘On leave?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t call me sir. It makes my ulcers jump. Call me Frank. I might have a car, but I’m still one of the mob.’ Deep angry creases formed on the soldier’s forehead, as if he wondered: ‘Who does he think he is, telling me not to call him sir?’

‘How long you got?’ — a few bob a day, and kept on call with nothing to do but read Flash Gordon comics.

‘Seven days, sir. I’m a bit fed up. I’m married, and don’t see much of my wife. This is the first bit of leave I’ve had in months.’ Frank pitied him, stepped on the accelerator to get him back sooner to his hearthrug pie. ‘You know what you ought to do?’

‘What, mate — Frank?’

‘Pack it in. I’ll drive you down to London if you like. Fix you up at my house with a suit of civvies, and you’d never get caught. I’ll take your wife down at the same time. It’s no good being in khaki and having to jump out of your dreams every time some bloke with two pips on his bony shoulders opens his plumby mouth. I know. Was in myself once.’

‘I couldn’t.’ The soldier hesitated, still with a slight stammer, as if obliged to consider it seriously for the privilege of his lift. ‘I’m due out soon. There’s no point. Anyway, did you desert, then?’

‘No,’ he answered, unperturbed, ‘there was no one to help me. I was too stupid in those days’ — and went on talking as they sped along, making a short journey of it, plying the soldier and himself with cigarettes and hoping to brainwash him into saying: ‘All right, mate, stop the car, I’ll desert now’ — though it’s hard to brainwash someone with no brains. Not that Frank was serious; he was playing a game, knew it when a startling question was etched on the emptiness of his own mind, saying that since he was telling this young man to run away from his khaki troubles, why didn’t he pluck up guts enough to light off himself, sell his car, buy a rucksack and bike, and just fade out into the blue-and-green? He smiled: it was impossible to do anything while thinking about it.

The built-up area fell like red flakes around them. The youth seemed happier. ‘Where’s your camp?’ Frank asked. ‘Is it easy to get into the armoury from outside?’

‘I suppose so,’ he stammered. ‘It’s right near a wood on the edge of Harby camp. The doors are locked in case anybody tries to get in without a pass.’

Frank laughed. ‘Wirecutters and a hairgrip. When you’re on guard next send me a telegram and we’ll clean it out together. Draw me a map of the camp, will you?’ — passed him pencil and paper.

The youth’s face became rounded, his eyes and mouth open. ‘Do you mean it?’ He was glum, set in a grim mould of discontent and fear, which made two of them.

‘Don’t worry,’ Frank said, ‘I’m not serious.’ Passing a disused railway station, he climbed the smooth tarmac up a hump bridge, and the speed of his fast-cruising car dropped them into an airpocket on the other side.

Ashamed to be begging lifts! I’m learning more in two weeks than twelve years in factories and living with Nancy. I couldn’t get this from a paperback. The blue wolds drew him in, treeless heights rolling and dominant. He struck off the main road after making his exit from the car, cut along a minor route marked red and thinly on his map as the veins in somebody’s bloodshot eye. No woods or villages, just onward rolling fields, the smell of dead rose bay and the lonely farm every mile or two. At the moment he felt more at home on this paved lane where no traffic passed than he had on the A road further back. Black and white cattle, huge and sleek, were dedicated to a slow contemplative chewing of grass, contrasted to his own troubled mind as he spared a glance for them and walked on.

Sunday and distant bells muffled the cold air. A mile ahead and dropping two hundred feet was a village still locked in afternoon sleep and stillness. Peace was rampant out of town and factory, obtruding, obvious and disturbing, and it wouldn’t let you be. The other day he was at Wainfleet — about five in the afternoon — and thought he’d nip along a lane and get to the sea, have a paddle before dark. He reached the sand but water was nowhere to be seen, then walked miles, it seemed, out over the hard sand, jumping ruts and channels in places. It was flat, dead flat, and no matter how far he walked and how much he looked across this sand he couldn’t see a ripple of the sea. It began to darken so that he couldn’t see the land either — and it was so flat — and somehow in the distance he could hear water shuffling around like an old man in carpet slippers, looking for the light switch in a dark room. But he couldn’t see anything so came back to the proper coast. Near it was an old pillbox, a machine-gun post he supposed from the war, so he went inside and slept the night. Waking up next morning the sea was almost lapping at the door. He stripped off and swam for half an hour, then got dressed and went back to the main road, where he ate some breakfast at a pub, food well-needed because he hadn’t slept well in that pillbox. It was cold, and he had rough dreams.

The first house set by itself on the far outskirts belonged to the district nurse, so the plaque said. A red Mini was posted outside, and the sight of it made him wonder for a moment, in his biased state against all four-wheeled friends, whether he should call there at all, or whether it wouldn’t be better to walk on to the next house. But he knocked at the door.

‘Yes?’

He felt he should say: ‘My wife’s labour’s started. Can you come and see her through? I’ve been expecting it for a week — she’s that much overdue’; but he said:

‘Would you give me a drink of water, please?’

2

There was nothing she liked better than, on a long, free, wild winter’s evening, to shut all doors and curtains in the living-room, heap up the fire with coal, and sit down with a book. It was the best distraction from her nurse’s life, a deep and final escape for a few hours from the insistent and necessary calling of the outside world. She was old enough to appreciate this solitude, after a child and twelve years of married life, yet young enough to let her book fall and reflect on what had brought her to it, and to realize faintly that this work and solitude was not to be the end of her life.

Vile weather was held at bay, its thumping sea-like roar muffled by walls and comfort. Outside it was wet and violent, the world a boxing-ring for ebony shapeless cloud. Inside there was warmth and clarity, light, good furniture and food. As a woman she respected it, knew its rarity and value. The hours had no end. The end of them was out of sight. They had no frontiers — until the phone pulled her back into the world again, sent her out to birth, death or pain, which was easy to handle since it was no longer her own. So there was always this possible disturbance to cut into thoughts or reading, and the elements growling beyond the walls were always audible enough to eat at the basis of her reasons for being there.

On this Sunday even fine weather, open curtains and in-streaming light from the blue sky didn’t save her from the encroaching habit of reflection. Since she had left her husband and gone back to nursing he had made good progress in the advertising firm he worked for. She still received an occasional letter from him, saying he wanted her back — an unfortunate phrase which implied that she had once belonged to him. When she left him he hadn’t run off to the woman he was having an affair with — which might have embellished their break-up with some slight yet elevating aura of tragedy; he had gone to his psychoanalyst and spent another year pouring out the soul he had never been able to pour out to her. He imagined, in his suffering, that she must be suffering too, but her pain had died before leaving him, so that when she went away there was never any possibility of her ‘going back’. It wasn’t possible to go back in life; it might often appear nice and cosy and comfortable, but it would mean a perilous defeat, an annihilation of her true growth, a rejection of the world that she had, after immense expenditure of spirit, come face to face with at last. Even in her lonely Lincolnshire cottage, with the spite-wind of the wolds sealing her in with apprehension and self-questioning, she knew this — that she was out on her own, independent, useful, set at last in the vanguard of her life.

Keith, now in middle age, had told how his mother gave him three choices for a career: either the Church, the army, or advertising — and he chose the latter because it was considered something new. Pat thought him dead, hollow, and self-centred, but couldn’t deny that he was good at his job. In that, he was forthright and decisive — so she gathered from parties given and gone to — but with her he was never able to make up his mind about anything, threw all decisions onto her. He wouldn’t say: ‘I’m taking you to the Mozart concert tonight,’ but: ‘Would you like to go to the concert?’ so that she had to wonder whether or not he’d like to go before answering (and deciding) whether or not she’d like to. It was the same in all things, even to the buying of cuff-links or a new tie. The only thing he could decide on without her was a new car. She put it down to a terror of life, and a form of togetherness that she was glad to be away from.

Keith had said in his last letter that he would come up to visit her one day, talk to her (plead, she noted), but she knew he would never have the courage to do so unless she sent a definite word of goodwill. This she could never do, because one’s life grew hard and settled after decisions had been acted on at a certain age. The anguished turbulent twenties had played themselves out to the bitter end, though she had at one time seen herself putting up with it for good, queening it forever over their small house near Notting Hill Gate that grew tinier with her discontent.

In her early twenties love had been the most important factor, and no good had come of it because it hadn’t been the most important thing to her husband. It was only now that she realized how little love he had been able to give her, both physically and from his spirit. He had wanted to give her all the love in the world (much as if it were a collection of Boy Scout honours and Sunday school prizes), great amounts of it (to recall one of his phrases), to smother her with far more love than she really needed. This was all very fine and well, she recalled, except that he hadn’t as much to give as he thought he had. The power of his emotions was so great that it held back the considerate speeches that should have been made; and whereas he saw it as a sign of the overpowering love within him — which it may have been — it only served to prevent him transferring this love to someone else. It was a deadlock that nothing could cure. The only chance was if she called off the fight and left him. Hadn’t he indicated once in a quarrel that he had so much love to give, and that it was her fault that he couldn’t give it to her, that maybe one day he would find someone with whom a sharing of his great and beneficial love would be perfectly natural and easy? Her unwillingness or inability to accept his love was killing him. After leaving, she suspected that this great untransferable passion he had raved about was really no more than self-love. Perhaps she was unjust in thinking this and, being able to use more intelligent and realistic terms nowadays, knew that maybe her side of it also needed explaining.

The end had been a nightmare, a violent festering wound finally causing death to the body politic of their married life. In the final weeks he had threatened to kill her, then to kill himself — in that order. The house had been a battlefield. He went off to Manchester for a three-day conference, and she knew that he wanted her to take this as an opportunity for going away, of leaving him in peace and sanity. She could, of course, have been mistaken, but she also had wanted to use these seventy-two hours to arrange her retreat from that bleak Labradorian coast of a wrecked and rotten marriage.

Now, in her isolation, she couldn’t understand how it had taken twelve years to find out that it wasn’t going to work. But the twenties of one’s life were like that: painful and slow, to which one tried continually to adjust against the most impossible odds. It was no use brooding on it, for that would merely show that they still had power over you, and such a thing was humiliating to a woman like Pat in her early thirties.

She hadn’t thought about it much before. What was the point? It was no use easing the plaster off a sore place until the wound had healed, and she admitted that hers hadn’t yet, though it was well on the way since she could reflect on it without getting back to the pain and dread. But to expose it to the fresh air of anybody else’s gaze would be both useless and uninteresting. She was very conscious of being now in her thirties, of having crossed certain chaotic miserable territories and landed on a sounder shore. It was no less hard and perilous, but things were seen more clearly than before. She felt more confident now, saw that some mishaps could even be avoided, armed as she was with this new foresight and intelligence. As the twenties had been ruined by love — or her preconceptions about it — so her thirties would be made by work. She grew to believe that work was the most important thing in one’s life. It was the rails, the mainstay, the only valid reason for being alive. Without embarrassment she remembered her parents stating exactly this, and she had scornfully denied it, calling them cynical, materialistic, Victorian, but now she knew they were in some way right. The difference was that her idea of work was not theirs. After twelve years of marriage to an advertising copywriter, she saw it clearly. His work to her parents was honest because it was greatly rewarding. Her work — to her — was better because it was rewarding in another way. She didn’t want to explain it further than that; but even that was far enough for her to accept the maxim that work was the only thing worth living for. As for love, well, that would either come or it would not.

There was no doubt though that lately she had been getting into a solitary state from which she could only emerge as an old maid with a cat on her shoulder. She couldn’t have set herself up in a more remote place. There wasn’t much friendship for her in this village. People were cheerful when their noses weren’t pressed to the soil by hard seasons, and talked to you often enough, but you were expected to do all the listening. The ordinary people respected her as the nurse, told of their simple and significant troubles, but from a distance that she could never cross. The so-called ‘gentry’ didn’t consider her worth knowing beyond the ‘Good morning, how are you?’ stage. As a nurse they all imagined she was someone who didn’t need ordinary human contact, and thought that her job gave her more than she could want. All she had to look forward to were the holiday visits of her eleven-year-old son, but even these were shared with her husband, and didn’t exactly fill her with the intimate and interesting conversation she had gone without all the rest of the year. Still, it was true that she did not rationalize this as solitude, and she did not complain about it now, either. She could not dislike the two years she had so far spent alone, partly because she might have to do so for a very long time, and also from a real and gentle feeling for solitude remembered from the time when she was without it. Since leaving her husband she had a way of liking whatever state her new life led her into. This was an advantage for her wellbeing, but she also saw that it was not so good to glory in such a state of mind, since certain deadnesses of perception and a limitation of experience also went with it. Such a thing was to be expected, but that too would change. After all, not only could you not have everything, but as far as she was concerned it was often true that the less you had the more might be in store for you later. This was a parsimonious, puritanical, yet unpredictable state of mind, at the mercy of any strong outlandish circumstance that came unexpectedly from beyond the outer limits of such prickly defences.

3

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘come in a moment.’

It was a plainbricked four-roomed cottage and, when he entered, a steep flight of stairs faced him. One door to the right led into a parlour, that to the left, a dining-room. ‘Leave your pack by the stairs.’ He dropped it and followed her into the dining-room. On the table was a tea tray, and she took another blue-ringed beaker from the shelf: ‘Sit down and have some tea. That is, unless you’re determined on water.’ She was tall, had ginger hair and flowerblue eyes, thin lips that smiled back at him. Her frock had a cardigan over it, and she wore stockings and houseshoes. He put her at over thirty, but then, he thought, I’ve never seen a young midwife. ‘You look as if you’ve walked a long way,’ she said.

He faced her across the table, slid down the sweet scald of the big cup. ‘From Spilsby.’ It had been the longest footslog so far, his eyes fried and feet sore, his body feeling dustcaked and sweatbound. He offered her a cigarette.

‘Thank you,’ she said. The silence won over the birds, backed up by heavy cloud shadows approaching road and hedgerows, and the humping softloamed fields beyond the window. A car went by, leaving a heavier silence. ‘It’s rare for someone to stop at my door and ask for a drink of water — unless it’s children in the summer.’

‘It’s rare for me to get tea when I ask for it. I’m on my way to Lincoln.’

‘Why Lincoln?’ She spoke well, smoked as if she smoked a lot, and seemed always about to laugh at him, which he sensed and was amused at.

‘To get to Sheffield. I’m just tramping around the country.’

‘You don’t look like a tramp. When I opened the door just now I thought you were an ordinary young man from the village to see about some carpenter’s work I want doing.’ He had that sort of build — yet now he didn’t seem like that to her at all. Maybe that’s what put that bastard’s back up who thought I was begging his lift, he thought. He didn’t know what I looked like, out on the road with rucksack, but dressed in smart enough jacket and trousers, travelling in heavy and well-polished shoes, a short haircut, and a tie on. If I’d snivelled and was clobbered up like a tramp, that would have been O.K., but it worried him that he couldn’t place me — private, corporal, sergeant. He thought back again to giving the soldier a lift. After dropping him at a house in Loughborough he had headed north again, the day opening wider as his car drove into it, black trees and green hills of the Trent hemming around the curving road. Summer was poleaxed: the sapjuice smell of wild flowers and dead wheat soaked in sun was giving place to spent grass and barren trees. September was playing it cool, and the first subtle change of season rolled a desperate message up from the turning tyres, whispering it was time to light out to the unlit far-and-wides felt to exist with such potency only by a man more than fed-up to the teeth.

A policeman was flagging him to a halt by a barrier of black cars and cycle-cops, plainclothes men and brasshats talking together as if the word had gone out to get Bertrand Russell. He slowed down and a black cyclop swung towards him: jackboots crunching, helmet unstrung above a red, vacant face, in truth the timid Midlands visage of a man who should have been serving behind the Co-op counter, joshing with the women in some collier’s town. He stood by the car window and Frank twisted the ignition off, tempted to let the wheel roll over his boot and end his days in prison. ‘A man’s got out of Upton Asylum, and he’s dangerous. You haven’t given anybody a lift today, have you? He’s a young feller of nineteen. Got out early this morning. Wearing a soldier’s uniform, and stutters a bit.’

Frank lifted his face, hand on chin as if truly thinking, yet instinctively answering: ‘I didn’t see anybody.’

He was waved on. It must have been that soldier I picked up. Maybe tonight he’ll be raping little girls or coshing an old couple for their pension books. Perhaps I said I hadn’t seen him because it would have kept me back from a drink for an hour while they checked my answers. I suppose it’s no good, though, not to be bothered, but in most things that’s how they like you to be, to watch the telly or have a few drinks and not be bothered, because if I was bothered I wouldn’t put up with the death camp I’m living in. So they’ve got to be satisfied when I can’t be bothered to help them to capture some poor soldier who has jumped the looneybin. I couldn’t be bothered to tell the police where that soldier was because I couldn’t be bothered to be bothered. But they’ll get him because thousands of others can be bothered to be bothered, but maybe this dangerous soldier will get his hands on the throat of some fleshhead who can be bothered to be bothered and drop him dead in some dark corner, because those who can be bothered to be bothered are bothered about the wrong things and never bother to get bothered about things that really matter.

Still, it worried him that he hadn’t told them where he’d driven that soldier to in Loughborough, and now so long afterwards it seemed much more a crime that, in his lunacy of the last day, he had committed without thought, worrying him more and deeper even than his departure from wife and kids.

He looked around the room, at the writing desk, bookcase loaded, mirror above the fireplace. ‘It’s good furniture you’ve got.’

‘It belonged to my mother. I brought it up from Surrey, and some of it came from auction rooms around here. What else do you want to know?’

He played along with her light-hearted mockery, unused to the idea of eating in such silence. ‘I didn’t think you came from the norm. How did you end up in Lincolnshire?’

‘I hope I don’t end up anywhere. By marriage I lived in London, and by appointment I got this job here. It’s a hard one, but I like it. Have another cup?’

‘I will. You’ve set me off, with such good tea’ — and again she gave a smile as if to say: ‘I might have taken you in out of the goodness of my heart, but you don’t have to say anything nice for it. I’m in charge here.’ She laughed at these thoughts: wrinkles beginning around the eyes, but her skin was white and smooth. The dress was buttoned to her neck, and the cardigan didn’t hide completely the small swell of her breasts. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ he said. ‘Knock a few more miles back.’

‘I don’t imagine you’ll get to Lincoln tonight.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll sleep somewhere snug. I’m glad of the healthy life for a while. It’s not too cold yet, and a barn will do me.’

‘Why are you on the run?’ she asked. ‘I’m curious.’

That makes two of us, he thought. ‘I’d had enough of married life. It was getting to be like that play on in London, “The Rat Trap” — now in its fifth year. It kept going along, dead as a doornail, and then, all in the space of a day I’d decided everything, packed in and left, as if those five years were only a sizzling fuse leading to a load of dynamite that suddenly exploded.’ All in a day, and the shell-shock was rippling. Out in his fast car he’d had nowhere to go, except home to say it was all finished. He was on the main road after the soldier’s lift, doing ninety and dashing around like a tomcat after its own bollocks, tart wild and pub crazy after a stretch of high-fidelity that he’d stood so long because he was temporarily dead, thinking: ‘I go round in circles, as if in some past time I’ve had a terrible crash, and the more I drive in circles the more I’m bleeding to death. I don’t feel this bleeding to death because it’s slow and painless (almost as if it’s happening to another man and I’m not even looking on, but am reading about it in a letter from a friend hundreds of miles away) but I know it’s happening because my eyes get tired and I’m fed up to my spinal marrow, while the old rich marrow I remember is withering and turning black inside me. But perhaps it isn’t completely bad, because if I thought it was I’d flick this steering wheel enough to hit that fence or pillar box and flake myself to a scrap of cold meat under the soil and greenwood tree. Maybe you can get better from it, because I can’t have lost enough blood if I could get in with that woman last night and hump into bed with her. And perhaps I’ve still got blood in me if I feel it running out of me.’

A paraffin upright stood in the corner, warming the room, perpetuating the smell of tea just made and drunk. Someone walked along the road, whistling. A van drummed by. ‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.

‘I don’t notice it usually, but when I do, I like it.’

‘I’ve never been in a house so quiet. I worked in a factory where you can’t even hear yourself shout. I had a wife and two kids, and a house where you couldn’t even hear yourself think above the news being read, or someone yapping about Homo or Wazz.’

‘That’s modern life,’ she said. ‘Would you rather work in a field?’

‘That ain’t why I’m on the run. I don’t mind noise at work — though I notice you haven’t got a television set.’ Out of the factory his face had changed, away from Nottingham and the pubs. It wasn’t that his expression had lost self-assurance or his body its confident walk, but his actions were slower, his smile more uncertain. It made him look older, as if thought preceded even the movement of his hands bringing the cigarette up to his mouth, as if his smile or frown was backed by an unfathomable depth of reasoning. ‘Maybe I’m on the run to find out why I’m on the run,’ he grinned, feeling foolish at making such a twisted statement.

‘Perhaps that’s why everybody goes on the run,’ she said. ‘I think you’re probably right.’ He was surprised and flattered that she took it seriously. She was fascinated at flashes of complexity in a mind she had imagined as too simple to take seriously. So far, he could only see the mechanics of how he’d gone on the run, rather than the cause. She had used the phrase, and he wondered if the time would come when it no longer applied, when he would be going to, and not away from, something. He’d got back to Nottingham, after so much driving around, and felt like using his feet. He parked his car up a side street off Alfreton Road, and the sky was less blue, white clouds hanging around the chimney stacks of Radford Baths. He yearned to let his legs walk, maybe carry him where a car could never go.

Narrow, winding and mildewed, he’d lived in these streets once upon a long time ago, and hovering odours made different air to that in the windswept well-spread estates. He’d hardly noticed such change in the oblivious one-track of getting married. It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen in, but years had gone by before clarifying his vision of it.

After the landmarks of birth, school, work you get more handy with the girls. Then at eighteen you’re called up, and so look forward to getting out. While you had something ahead of you it was fine. When you got out you Went after the women, earned your money and drank your fill. This went on for a couple of years, then there was nothing left, just a fifty mile wall dead in front, starting from your shining shoes and going, as far as you could see, right up to the sky. At the feel of it you stepped up the wild life, went mad for a month or two, spinning around like a bluebottle with a dose of Flit, and people thought you weren’t half a hell of a lad. Then you stopped, because even though the thick grey wall had gone and the sky was spring-blue again, you felt that the wall was still there, but inside you, which was worse because it really did mean that life was finished. You brooded for a month, and people thought you’d turned thoughtful and worried because you’d got some young woman into trouble, but you hadn’t. It was only your black ever-surviving heart getting you used to seeing a way out that you’d have whistled at in scorn only a few months before. Then your eyes opened, or you thought they did, and in this wall you saw a hole at the bottom, surrounded by rubble and dust as if you’d used the handgrenade of your life so far to blast that hole just big enough to crawl through. So you got married, and it all looked rosy on the other side. The fact that a penny bun didn’t cost tuppence any more, but four-and-eleven with threepence off was almost a pleasure to put up with. You loved in bed and comfort night after night and thought what have I been missing all these years?

The marriage was a light-hearted get-together at the Registry Office, standing to repeat after that sanctimonious corpse-head in glasses to honour and obey until the atom bomb parts us. And there was I larking around and pretending I had to be dragged in screaming by my mates because one of the other blokes had got her up the spout and not me, whereas nobody had at all and she was as pure as virgin snow I don’t think. Nancy smiled as if nothing was happening. Her mother tut-tutted and didn’t know where to put her face because she thought I meant it — and maybe half of me did, but things quietened down and ten minutes later I was under a snowstorm of paper wanting to get my hands on a St Bernard mongrel with a keg of well-bred brandy around its neck. To everybody’s disappointment I was icicle-sober that night.

Nancy must have come from a long line of bad cooks, because after a week at Cleethorpes she put a plate of tinned steak, tinned celery and baked beans before him, fortified by several slices of Miracle Bread, so named, he supposed, because it was a miracle it didn’t kill you. Ever the gentleman, he tackled it as best he could, able to joke about living off love until the month was out.

They lived with Nancy’s mother, and her cooking was worse. Even the meat tasted like cabbage, and there was nothing he could do but push it aside like a spoiled kid. Mrs Stathern thought her cooking the best for miles around and this made him hate her as well, because he couldn’t stand up and say he was going down the road for an egg and chips. If she’d known it wasn’t so good he might even have eaten some of it — in a joking light-hearted way while waiting for the stomach cramps. All he could do was thank God for a canteen dinner and get Nancy to fry some beans and bacon in the evening, a concoction that got monotonous day after day, but at least it was difficult to spoil, and such repetition eventually turned her into the best cowboy breakfast cooker in the whole of Aspley.

Those early months dreamed themselves by. Food wasn’t as important as his thoughts for some reason now made it, for there was house and home to buy and pay for week by week, and the first kid to wait for month by month and his machine to work at day by day. He couldn’t understand why it had gone on so long. Was it because of the violent blindoe times he’d made for himself before feeling that wall in front of him? In effect, he’d never left the wall, after having crawled through the shell hole with such relief. Instead of in front, the sheer face had stayed a few feet at his back, and now, lately, it had drawn a circle around him, stifling his life, so that he had to get out or choke to death.

‘The thing about this country,’ he said to her, ‘is that there’s nowhere to go. You just keep going round in circles. Have you read Dr Zhivago? No? It gives you a marvellous idea of what it’s like living in a big country. Spaces thousands of miles wide and long. I’d like to be in a big country. He goes from Moscow to Siberia. When the train is held up by snow everybody gets out and digs. And when he wants to go back to Moscow, he walks. I don’t know how many thousand miles it was, but he didn’t say: “Oh, I can’t go because the trains aren’t running.” He just walks! He found out why he went on the run after he’d been on the run long enough. You know why it was? I’m just finding out myself as I talk about it: he went on the run because life was too much for him.’

‘Do you know then why you’re on the run?’ she smiled.

He thought, his face hard. ‘Ah! I do though, if you want to know. It’s because life’s too little for me.’

‘It’s the same thing. He couldn’t face life because it was too much. You can’t face it because it’s too little. Neither of you can face life.’

‘You put it neat,’ he said, rueful over his shattered epigram.

‘I’m not a nurse for nothing. I’ve been in nursing for fifteen years, on and off. It makes you hard and wise, if you know how to take it.’

‘It’ll be dark soon, so I must be on my way.’

‘I have some sherry, nothing harder, would you like a drop for the road?’

‘Yes. Are all those books yours?’

‘Mostly novels. Some I’ve never even glanced at. They’re part of the furniture.’ The cardigan sleeve was drawn up almost to the elbow, showing freckles on her fair skin. He looked directly at her eyes, and she smiled before turning. ‘What I’ve always wanted to do,’ he said, ‘is do nothing for a year except read books, and learn something.’

‘I don’t think you’d learn much, necessarily, but you might enjoy it.’

‘You’re bound to learn something if you don’t know anything.’ He finished the sherry, sweet water, cold and griping after the tea. ‘There’s a drop left,’ she said, ‘so you might as well finish it. I can’t see you getting drunk on it.’ It was darkening outside, and she stood to switch on the light. ‘If you’re not in a desperate hurry to get where you’re going I have a spare room upstairs. It’s only a camp bed, but you’ll find it comfortable. Better than a hedgebottom, though it’s up to you.’

He hesitated, as if unable to believe the offer. She laughed, open and frank about it. ‘I’m not trying to pick you up. You look as if I might be.’

‘I didn’t think that. I’ll stay then. When you’re on the run you’re always ready to stop running — like a rabbit.’

‘You seem well up on the philosophy of escape.’

‘I’ve never walked so long. Nor thought so much. Walking has turned out to be even more monotonous than standing at my machine at work. But the thoughts are better.’ She asked why he had left his wife, but his fullblooded, earnest, airtight reasons had melted. He felt foolish trying to explain something that had taken a lifetime to overwhelm him.

She drew the curtains across: ‘I don’t want your reasons if you can’t give them. I’ve done so many things I still can’t give reasons for. I had a fiancé once, when I was nineteen. He lived in Portsmouth and I lived in Guildford. I found out one day that I was pregnant, and on the same day I had a telegram from his mother to say he had been drowned.’

He was caught by the infectious remembering of her voice: ‘That was terrible. Where’s the baby then?’

‘I took steps to remove it, but I got married very soon afterwards, and had a baby within a year. I could act on my decisions quickly in those days, and they always proved to be right. He’s a boy of eleven now, very bright. He comes home for holidays, and to everyone here my husband is dead — though I left him in London two years ago. You’ll sleep in Kevin’s bed while you’re here. My name’s Pat Shipley, since we’ve been talking so long.’

He made the exchange. ‘Will you come out with me, and have a drink, or supper? We could go to Louth, or some place.’

‘Let’s have no tit-for-tat, as they say around here. But I thought you were broke, walking to Sheffield?’

‘I wouldn’t do this if I was — walking, and hitching lifts when I feel like it. If I’d got no money I’d stay put until I had.’ She declined, and he would rather stay where he was as well, the oil stove warm and the room closed off in the vast country silence. He wondered what sort of woman she was, whether she would or wouldn’t, wanted or didn’t want, whether she was a posh tease taking a rest from it, or a sex-starved isolated nurse who worked so hard she’d had neither time nor opportunity in the last year and wouldn’t squeal if he made a grab for her before she grabbed him. Not that she was all that much to look at. Nancy would make ten of her, but then, she was dead on him and this Pat wasn’t. He looked at her through the clarity of silence: a rather round plainish face, if it weren’t for her eyes and long ponytail of red hair. He’d never been with a gingernut before, but the hearsay on them was they were red hot. Not that I’ll touch a hair of her red head, though I’d like to.

‘I’ll fry some sausages soon. I have tomatoes and bread, eggs and bacon.’

‘It’s too good of you.’

‘I feel like being good — now and again. It’s my job. Haven’t you seen the advertisements for nurses?’

‘Well, they are a bit daft,’ he said, ‘that’s true.’

‘They’re more accurate than you think, though.’

‘Do you like your job?’

‘I’m too busy doing it to know.’

‘Don’t you find it lonely?’ He saw her as called out all hours of the day and night, coming back between long, lifesaving watches to an empty house — paraffin stove out, cupboard empty, even the cat gone from the back door, gloom and rain spattering the windows, looking around and wondering what to do now that she had a few hours off. Maybe she’d put the light on, hatch a fire in that parlour he’d glimpsed, find some tinned food and boil it, make tea, sit down to a book after letting in the cat that had found its way back to the door and mewed for her. He was right, she thought. That’s my life: lonely, hardworking, yet happy if there is such a thing. ‘I’m not lonely,’ she said. ‘I like being by myself. I see lots of people on my rounds.’

‘Sick people,’ he said. ‘Is that enough?’

She spoke in a soft comforting way, yet he felt the edge of nervousness on it. It seemed strange to him that she was a midwife, yet it was possible to imagine her firm and soothing at critical moments of illness or childbirth. ‘Not only sick people. What I prize more than anything else in the world is independence. My father was a police inspector, and still is, I won’t say where — and as a girl I was bullied and disciplined in the most awful stupid way. At school it was worse, and the first time I thought to get out of it I became a probationer nurse, out of the frying pan into the furnace. But it all led to this job, so I don’t regret it now. I suppose when you know why you left your wife you’ll go back to her?’

‘I’ll never do that. I haven’t only burned my boats and smashed my bridges, but I’ve burned my heart as well. There’s no going back for me.’

‘You say it as calmly as if you meant it. It’s frightening.’

‘Yet maybe I’m like a bloody moth near a flame, spinning around so close to Nottingham that I’ll have to wrench myself further away to stop going back there to see how things are. I feel the kids pulling at me more than anything.’

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’ll see what there is to eat.’ It was a spacious kitchen built onto the back of the house, and he leaned against the fridge while she cleared up. He hadn’t expected to see such desolation. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t time to get things straight before a call came to say that Mrs Robinson’s leg was bothering her again — but it was cluttered with the stains and refuse of weeks. The sink was heaped with pots — tea rims turned green on the inside of cups, porridge mouldy, knives black when she took them out of the water. It’s a damp place, he thought. The smallest of the four stove burners glowed red. Hot water splashed over her words: ‘I always leave that one burning, day and night. It doesn’t cost so much, and it keeps the kitchen warm. I can get coffee quickly without waiting for the stove to warm up.’

Foreseeing a long job he stored away yesterday’s groceries in the larder. ‘The place is a mess,’ she said. ‘But don’t bother to help. This is woman’s work.’

‘It’s work,’ he said The shelves had no room — about six boxes of various breakfast cereal took up space, some empty enough to discard. Jars of different jam, wrapped cut bread with a few stale slices left, sauces, mustards, various pastes. He’d never seen such a lavish and squalid larder, and threw half out. She didn’t object: ‘You get careless, living alone. I’ve been meaning to clear it for days, but it’s hard enough keeping my work up. Everybody seems to get ill in autumn and spring — when the seasons change.’ She plugged in an electric kettle, turned on a burner of the large stove.

‘You fixed up a fine kitchen,’ he said.

‘Now that it’s clean. I’m still paying for it. It’s not only the workers who get trapped by H.P.’

‘No.’ he said, ‘but there are so many of them that it’s them that keeps it going.’ He made a fire in the parlour, looked around the small heavily carpeted room. Bookshelves padded every possible piece of wall, and he skimmed their titles — medical, history, books about Lincolnshire, poetry, and books on other books. How did I land in this smart educated place, he thought wryly, supping with the village midwife? He looked through a pile of records, kneeling on the floor to get at them. They were mostly chamber music, old seventy-eights, heaped around a small portable windup. ‘I like classical stuff,’ he said, when she came in with the tray. ‘Beethoven, and — who was it wrote the Planets?’

‘Holst.’

‘Somebody got me Mars and Jupiter for my birthday once. I played them so loud that a bloke next door threatened to duff me if I didn’t keep it quieter. I told him to try it, but he backed down and said he’d get the police. I lost interest in it though because Jupiter was what we used to sing at school and I didn’t like it at all. Mars made me laugh, and I used to act the zombie to it for my kids. But it’s a rotten piece because it reminded me of the Germans smashing everything at war. So one day I snapped the record and threw it out.’

She put sausages and tomatoes on his plate: ‘A pity they’re only the sawdust type, but that’s the worst of working in these outback villages.’

‘I don’t think I know anyone,’ he remarked, ‘who likes the work they do. There’s always something wrong with it.’ He was a quick, orderly eater, as if the food on his plate were a fortified area to be reduced by knife, fork, and mopping-up bread. His manner of speaking annoyed her, of connecting her spoken thoughts too outlandishly to some hook in his own mind. He was a passer-by she’d given shelter to, a footloose working-man from whom, at moments, she wanted the same tone of deference that she’d grown to expect from the grateful Lincolnshire villagers roundabout. ‘People who work at jobs they don’t like are too stupid, unintelligent, and cowardly to break the rut they’re in and get work that they would like.’

‘If everybody changed the job they didn’t like I’d be at the pit face and you’d be roadsweeping.’ She’d set the meal as if the idea of eating had no appeal for her, but now she ate as if hungry at the sight of someone else loading it back before her. ‘Everyone does the job they’re fit for. The natural order of things works pretty well. Eat some bread and cheese.’

‘Thanks. We’ll talk about that when there’s a natural order of things. Most of my mates wanted an easier job, less hours, more pay, naturally. But it wasn’t really work they hated, don’t think that. They didn’t all want to be doctors or clerks, either. Maybe they just didn’t like working in oil and noise, and then going home at night to a plate of sawdust sausages and cardboard beans, and two hours at the flickerbox with advertisements telling them that those sausages and beans burning their guts are the best food in the country. I don’t suppose they knew what they wanted in most cases — except maybe not to be treated like cretins.’

She went out, returned with a pot of coffee and a jug of hot milk: ‘Anything but work, that’s what you mean. Strike, go slow, or work to rule, seems the order of the day. Why is it, I wonder?’

He cut bread and cheese. ‘Now you’re being unjust. It was to vary the treadmill. But as well as that there was a collective wish to change the way things are run, so that they’ll have the power of running things. If that happened it wouldn’t be a treadmill any more. They wouldn’t strike. They’d be too busy. And too interested in running it.’

‘That’s being idealistic.’

‘I know it is, but not too much.’

‘I think you’re speaking for yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re more knowing and intelligent than the rest. Not only that, but you speak of it in the past tense, I noticed.’

‘I haven’t thought much about the factory since leaving it, that’s true, because I suppose there’s so much else to think about, soak in. But maybe what I soak in is still connected to the factory that I don’t think about. It still separates me from the world in any case, the fact that I’ve been in one. Whether it’s on my mind or not. How many of the others have you met besides me, come to think of it?’

Her face relaxed, and she laughed.

‘I thought so.’

‘What would you say if I went on strike, a nurse?’

‘I’d condemn you. You’ve no right to go on strike. You sell your knowledge and art, a workman sells his labour. That’s the big difference. Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. If I had a vocation I wouldn’t have the right to strike, either. But you must concede it to the others. I didn’t know I was so hungry — and talkative. Travelling makes me eat more, though I feel thinner than when I was at work. I don’t eat as much as some people. I once knew a man who ate so much he had a blackout. Then he died. I think it was his liver. Some people never know when to stop.’

‘That’s a story you made up,’ she said, pouring his coffee.

‘I know. They’re all true enough. I think them up when I’m walking.’ They sat by the fire. She suspected he was trying to charm her, but was disturbed more by her suspicion than by the fact that it might be justified. He obviously didn’t think about what he said, she decided. ‘This is a comfortable house,’ he remarked, ‘I’m enjoying tonight.’

‘So am I,’ she admitted, ‘in a strange way.’

‘That countryside was getting me down. It’s too green. The road’s hard and the sky’s too grey. I favour a warm room and the supper I’ve just had.’ To spoil it, his feet ached for the walking they’d do tomorrow. He couldn’t thumb any more lifts, as if the man’s accusation of begging free transport had broken one part of his spirit, only to have strengthened another that had just become visible to him. ‘It’s hard to imagine you not getting lonely though, on these nights.’

She was glad of his curiosity. It comforted her, since it was too rare these days. Yet it was also too brusque and offhand, not only that he might not be sincere in it, but that he might be forgetting that they had only just met, and that such curiosity was premature. Still, she had asked him in — for a cup of tea — and in spite of its short time ago she felt no shyness in talking, mainly because she was only talking out of herself, on the understanding that he would be gone in the morning. In any case, he seemed amiable, almost interesting, though somewhat more remote than a person often is when you stop them in the street to ask a direction.

Relaxed and comfortable by the fire, another part of him was out on the wide spaces of the road, blinded by sky and distance. ‘I haven’t always lived alone,’ she said. ‘I was married twelve years, until I split up a while ago, to a typical middle-class Englishman, an advertising copywriter — someone who sat in an office all day in Holborn thinking up slogans that would sell soap powders or a correspondence course in bricklaying.’

Her phrases gave way to a ticking clock, a noise which made the silence deeper than itself. ‘You chose him,’ Frank said.

‘I made a mistake.’

‘So did he. So did I. It’s a marvel to me how many people make mistakes.’

‘You have a sense of humour. But I was tired of the useless life I was leading. It got so that I didn’t need him and he didn’t need me. He was a sort of father to Kevin, but even that didn’t weigh when I decided to leave. Being a housewife in London with a charwoman and an au pair wasn’t enough. I was a trained nurse, and was needed in a village like this, by ordinary people who want some sort of looking after. I think everybody should do useful work. I hate idleness or pretence.’

‘So do I.’

‘Tell me about your work. I’ve never met anyone who worked in a factory, not to talk to.’

‘In what way? I’m what they used to call a mechanic, but I was beginning to see further than the end of my nose. I was also what the gaffers called “a bit of a troublemaker”, but for years they were baffled by me because I was also a good worker. I could set anybody’s tools and take their machine apart as well as the chargehand, and I had many hints that if I stopped being such a keen member of the union, life would be easier for me as far as getting on went. But I saw too much injustice to accept that. I knew which side of the fence I stood on, and still do. I made many others see it as well. They had a favourite trick at our firm of starting on the coloured blokes when they wanted to reduce work rates, but I got the whole shop out once over this, a stoppage they didn’t forget because they had to give in over it. People think factory life is a bed of roses, but it needn’t be as bad as the gaffers make it. I loved the work — though I didn’t realize how much till now. But I can’t go back to it, not for a good while.’

‘You’ll go back to it,’ she said, ‘like I had to come back to this work after so long away.’ She liked people of integrity, but wasn’t sure that she liked his brand of it, so foreign to all the things she had been brought up to believe.

‘What do you do on these long nights?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t see any dance halls on my way into the village.’

‘I keep a journal when I can. I read, listen to music, make dresses sometimes, knit. I’ll show you where you’re to sleep.’

The stairs were steep, straight up, and narrow, and he followed a few steps behind. The long cardigan gave her figure a squarish, rather old-fashioned look, though the shape of her legs and the unmistakable sway above them redeemed her femininity. When she stopped on the tiny landing, there was some hesitation in her face. He was tempted to put out his arms, kiss her if she responded. But they had been talking too long which, for the moment, killed him with hesitation.

She pointed to the bedroom opening to the, right: ‘Go in, and I’ll get you some blankets. There’s only one sheet, so you’ll have to double it.’

A camp bed lay under the window, and in one corner a tank of four goldfish on a table. It had been the kid’s room; shelf of books, a football, boxing gloves, crayons and paint tin, whistles and Dinky toys jumbled into a tea chest. The walls were whitewashed — the first time he’d seen it used for other than ceilings — and it made the small cottage bedroom look bigger than it was. ‘A nurse in the next village is standing in for me,’ she said, dropping his blankets, ‘so I’m off for the next three days. Which means that I’m not getting up till nine in the morning, so you can just let yourself out early. Slam the door behind you to make sure it locks.’

‘I can’t thank you enough. I was done-for when I knocked at your door.’

‘You looked it,’ she smiled. ‘I must say. I expect you’re tired now, as well.’ They shook hands. ‘If I don’t see you, good luck.’ Then she went out, closing the door.

That was quick, he thought. She couldn’t get out fast enough. As if I might jump her here by the fish tank, and me on my last legs at that, though I’ve knee-trembled on no legs at all before now. It was hard to tell whether she wanted me to or not. It was hard to tell whether I wanted to as well. And on that, he was sleeping.

4

It was half past six and still dark, and a driving, wind-crazed rain rattled the windows. Gutters and drainpipes shuttled it musically across the garden path and Frank listened to its stream of consciousness from the warmth of his camp bed, hoping it might stop before he set out towards Lincoln. His first thought on waking was always, nowadays: ‘Where am I?’ The less comfortable his night’s lodging, the quicker came the answer. The space between oblivion and full consciousness was always disturbing, a basalt twilit vacuity, such a depth of neutrality that it was alien and torment to him. In factory days there was no space between deep sleep and dressing, and this new zone had crept into his experience since leaving them.

He stood on the landing. Outside, rain scattered its pellets across shining slates and the heavy blackening evergreen of autumn. No sound came from the nurse’s room and, shoes in hand, he stepped softly down stairs that creaked, vibrating so strongly into every room that he expected her door to flick open.

The kitchen was cold, in spite of the single burner left glowing, so he switched on others and set a kettle to boil, washed dishes from the previous night to the futile dizzying beat of Light Programme light music coming from an eye-level radio. An S O S message before the news requested Mr Albert Handley, last heard of at Skegness in 1943, to please ring Leicester Infirmary where his mother Mrs Clara Handley was dangerously ill. The dragnet was out for some poor bastard who lit off nearly twenty years ago, and even if he wanted to ignore this message he couldn’t because his mates at work this morning would say: ‘Hey, Bert Handley, is that you the wireless meant? Hard luck about your poor mam. When are you going? There’s a train at eleven-five.’ And maybe poor Albert will spit on his luck, or change his job, or hotfoot it back to his mam’s, just to see her out as a good son should. Which only goes to show how you can never be left alone.

A loud fry-up drowned the news. He sat to breakfast at the kitchen table, hoping the sky would run out of rain and let him walk dry-shod over the wolds. An hour had slid by since opening his eyes, and at this speed he wouldn’t be leaving till four o’clock. Newspapers flapped through the letterbox. He lit a cigarette, put up his feet to read. The Mirror and The Times. Out of curiosity he looked at The Times first: adverts on the front page, and most of the back ones full of stock exchange and company reports. A property firm made a profit of seventeen million, and a woman had lost her dog.

Eight o’clock. The kettle on again. Her larder was well stocked with the essentials of life. It didn’t seem right to leave without saying good-bye and thank you after she’d picked him up off the doorstep half dead from exposure and crippled feet, nursed him back to life even though he was a stranger. What a legend! Talking so much last night, it seemed as if he’d known her for years, even though he hadn’t been to bed with her. She was handsome as well as generous, an unbeatable combination which only came to him forcefully on the point of leaving.

He opened the back door and slopped out tea leaves. Daylight and rain showed a garden ending at a meadow, a clump of trees on the rise of it like a secret meeting of amateurish burglars whispering to decide which house to do tonight. The garden was dug over in patches, other parts gone to bush and speckled weedgrass, a few dead potato heads overlapping what remained of a path. A good plot — with a few months’ loving care, strong arm and boot. He remembered his night in the hut on Harry’s allotment before leaving Nottingham. The soil and damp smell was the same. But then, at that time, there had still been the scent of stubbled wheat and fallen poppy heads, potato tops, snapped runner beans and updug soil, vanishing scents of a receding summer that barely penetrated his rubbed-out brain as he zig-zagged towards the hut.

He had wakened to Harry’s spade rhythmically shifting soil outside. There was no one else he could visit after his goodbye to Nancy, so he’d left his car at Bobber’s Mill, drunk half the whisky neat between switching off the ignition and opening the door, then cut across the maze of gardens towards Harry’s. He let himself in with the spare key under the waterbarrel, sat on a stool and finished off the whisky, then slid to the floor.

He had twelve eyes in his face all trying to look into one another and, when succeeding, only meeting twelve more staring back into each fragmentation, and then into his heart calling him a bloody fool like the opening mouths of ten million goldfish. He pulled a hand to his face, sensing he could put his head in the crook of his arm and crush it like a walnut. Nothing remained but the fleshless knot of his headache, a fizzled-out brain. He stood up to find a cigarette, but fell down again, head thumping painlessly against the floor, a rubber ball dropped by somebody else.

Harry said: ‘I see you’ve had a drink or two?’ A fist came from Frank’s guts: that’s the way to talk! Harry the railway shunter out of contact with the acid and battery world; or was it just sarcasm? He was too far in to tell. Harry lit a paraffin lamp, stepping around as if Frank were a normal feature of the hut floor, some garden novelty such as a little boy pissing in a fish tank taken in out of the rain. Frank lay waiting until the anchoring ropes of earth and moon unknotted themselves from his head. He watched Harry pump a primus, and promise tea, while all he could do was tap his ankle and croak: ‘Water!’ when he bent down to hear what he wanted.

‘It’ll make you sick,’ Harry said. ‘Tea’ll be O.K. — if you drink it slow.’

‘Water!’ Frank said, as if covered in sand. Someone rammed a javelin into his mouth. It stretched from throat to belly and burned like prime acid. He wanted to cough or be sick, jettison it from him, but was unable to make the effort, and in any case if he did all his life’s guts would go with it. He was sure of that, waited for his own heat to melt the metal of the javelin, so that he could dare to move again and one day stand up. When he tried, the earth spun in and blacked him out.

‘This is no joke,’ Harry said. ‘You might not be at death’s door, but you’re at the bloody side-entrance if you ask me. Was anybody mixing your booze?’

‘Give me some water.’

‘You’ll get some as soon as this kettle boils, so hold on.’ He closed the hut door and sat on a stool looking down at his guest. ‘You can take an Aspro as well, and have something to eat. There ain’t much I ain’t got in this hut. Home from home. Ida’s been on her holidays this last week, and I slept here a couple of times, so you’re lucky we’re well provided for. I’ve got some sardines and a chunk of bacon on that shelf, and some yesterday’s bread.’

Frank’s eyes were closed; the words ‘bacon’ and ‘sardines’ made him retch, but it stopped at that, though ever-ready Harry pushed a piece of sacking at his head: ‘Use that if you’ve got to.’

The clean aromatic smell of hot tea came to him, worse than the idea of oil-dripping sardines, though still the javelin stayed lodged in his body when another set of spasms jerked up from his stomach. ‘That’s what drink does,’ Harry handed him a cup of tea, ‘fills you full of bile. You ought to keep off it. Want summat to eat?’

‘Ay, give me a deathcake — and a cup o’ quick poison while you’re at it.’ He groaned, rolled away from the white heat of the flaring lamp. ‘You been in a fight?’ Harry wanted to know.

‘Only with myself. I’m still in it.’

‘Now you’re being funny.’

‘Do you ever think about the future, Harry?’

‘Eh? Get this.’

‘Water. I’m drowning in lung fluid and stomach piss but I’m thirsty as if I’ve worked a week in soot-dust. My breath’s a blowlamp.’ He tried to light a cigarette, choked, and lay back down, felt, in spite of feeling weak, sick and near death’s outward fires, as if his interior had been renewed after destruction, and the experience of scorched guts and humiliated stomach had somehow rejuvenated his heart and soul. Never before had so much happened in one day, and the thought made him laugh.

A sip of tea set him talking, relieved that his mouth liked the heat of the liquid. Maybe I’m coming back to life. A pan on the fire was frying bacon for a row of breadslices, and after a day’s gardening the smell of it was pleasant to Harry: ‘Of course I do think about the future. Even at my age. I suppose you’re too young to bother with it,’ he grinned.

‘You’re wrong. I’m full of it, the future, it’s on my mind all the time. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that there’s going to be any future. You remember that last crisis? Planes were going over day and night and I used to watch their vapour trails from the factory roof — all loaded to the gills with hydrogen bombs ready to go off any minute towards Russia. I felt my nerve going as I saw what might come — a complete deathfire burning everybody. But I’m strong, too bloody strong, and I just went back to my machine. “What’s the use?” I thought to myself. But I wondered why everybody was dead at a time when they should be alive. And I thought: maybe it’s because everybody’s talking about it on the telly and reading all about it in the papers, and while this goes on they think it’s a game and can’t happen. You don’t have a bleeding future while you’ve got the telly on, and that’s a fact. I feel I’ll go looney though if I don’t get on the move. I’d like to walk ten miles every day for ten years. I feel as if I’m being strangled. This country’s too little for me — you can walk to any coast in a week — a bit of eagle-crap dropped out of the sky. I look at all the people round me who have boxed their future up in the telly, and it makes me sicker than that whisky I slung down. The wide open spaces would frighten any dead bastard who didn’t like other people. That’s what the telly does anyway, teaches you to despise your fellow man. There’s nothing left to believe in in this country, nothing left, not a thing.’

‘Careful,’ Harry said. ‘That’s because you’ve got nothing to believe in yourself.’

‘You may be right. I’ll have to find it then. There’s nothing in this country that can help me do it and that’s a fact. There’s a spirit of rottenness and tightness in it.’

‘You can’t condemn a whole country.’

‘I don’t. I never wanted a country to believe in, either. I’m out of a factory. A machine will do me. I was just talking about the feeling. I feel like an ant on a gramophone record that can’t get off.’ He was sitting up, legs spread along the floor, having eaten his way through a bacon sandwich and drunk the mug of tea. Harry had said little, let him rave on, let the fire in his eyes burn undiminished, glowing as if he’d put back a bottle of paraffin instead of whisky. A hard wind kept up a continual bumping against the hut, as if a huge dog running blind across the gardens stumbled at the hut it could never learn to see: ‘You can talk, but the world will go its own way.’

‘As long as I go mine. That’s all I feel fit for now.’ He felt good for even less, but couldn’t admit it to Harry: head full of stones, legs dead, body paralysed and yet to be woken up from, as if the whisky had killed him, stopped his heart so that he had actually wandered around in the black limitless emptiness of unearthly death in the hour before Harry found him; travelled among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks, hands and shoulders that, thanks to the bacon and blind talk, and after so long, were getting blood through them again.

Harry spread more slices in the pan. ‘It’s all right you blabbing about England being rotten, but it’s better than some places I could name, for all its faults.’

‘That don’t say it can’t be better though. It won’t last much longer.’

He laughed, and turned the bacon over. ‘It’ll last me out.’

‘Enjoy it then, while you can.’

‘I’m not enjoying it. I’m too bloody busy living to let things get my goat the way you do.’

‘There’s some as can do both,’ Frank reminded him.

‘And there’s some as can’t help but do both,’ Harry said, ‘and delight in it’ — turning the rashers over for a final crispness. The hut air was close and heavy with breathsteam, fagsmoke and the top-heavy odour of burning fat, a total blend suggesting warmth and protection from the outside world. It was comfortable, even though Frank’s enduring prostration on the hard boards wore his bones away and ached into his muscles. It was inside, away from the vile attack of problems, and here the only problem Was in talk, and to catch into talk the numerous problematic thoughts that came into his head — before they spun away and lost themselves maybe in the sort of protected atmosphere he’d stumbled into, where no real problem could get at any other problem. His head dizzied at such spinning arrows. He wanted to get up and go outside, lean against the hut, push and strain until the whole ricketty fabric, Harry included, fell into a heap. But he wasn’t even strong enough for that after so much drink. I’m waking up in a way I’ve never wakened up before; or maybe the whisky’s scorched the jungle from my brain and left only a few steel bolts and rods that I can find my way through at last. Unless it’ll only feel like that until the last drop of whisky’s all pissed out and I get into my old leaf-bag skin again.

He reached for another sandwich, while Harry set the kettle on the primus in a self-indulgent excuse to keep the blue flame comforting the vitals of the hut. ‘Death means nothing to me,’ Frank said to him, ‘because my future has been taken away. Yet I can’t live without a future, Harry. There’s got to be something, but when the whole world can go up in five minutes, what is there? There’s not even a chance of crawling back into the swamps and living off fish and snakes. There’s nothing at all, because the future doesn’t mean anything. But to me it’s got to. I’ve got to rip something out of it. So am I supposed to make a future out of this world that’s already taken it away? People are, better off without a future, tamer, docile. No, I’ve got to figure one out for myself, which means I’m on my own, even when I don’t want to be.’

He ate, and relaxed. It felt like a truce in life — a white handkerchief slowly ripping in the outside wind. Harry often came here and had this truce with himself, yet he was the one who at work said life was a long continuous battle from cunt to coffin. The wind jumped, caught the hut beam end on, shook but didn’t budge it. I don’t want to go out into that wind. It’s dark outside, and cold. I want to stay where the bacon’s frying and the lamp’s lit. That wind can never bash the hut flat, but it might crash me down if I go out into it. But what’s the use of talking? My mind’s made up to go out into it whether I go out into it or not.

He shut the back door quietly so as not to wake Pat, felt like an island, drifting away from the continent of his life, almost as if he’d been pushed off by it like some lifeboat no longer needed. The twenty-seven years of it, three times nine, seemed to be receding from the isolated point at which he found himself. He felt more cut-off from life than even when walking the lonely hedgebound roads an hour before dusk. It was a weird feeling, limboed in some Lincolnshire cottage, feet on the table and drinking tea, radio piping softly.

He had to leave, yet without knowing why, as if there were slow-moving springs in his legs over which he had relinquished control, months ago, before he had even thought about blowing up the bridges of his life. He stood to re-set his pack, wrote on a note-pad: ‘Dear Pat, thanks for everything, Frank.’ She’d had quite a life compared to his: fiancé drowned, married life to an advertising nob, nursing on and off, and God knows what else. Mine’s been tame, stuck in one place, factory, house, pub, same pals, brands of ale, glorying in a pushbike and then a car, dull when you think of some people. With all her books and records she’s a better educated person, and they’re the people who move and live exciting lives. Things happen to you, the more you know, the more you think.

Rain had stopped brewing itself into the derelict garden. The brimming waterbutt became still, reflecting the sky growing lighter above the hillock, and clouds as if ready to get a move on at last. He walked along the path, smelling the fresh damp air, soddened grass and the distant whiff of rotting tree bark; sedge underfoot was clean and heavy after the night of saturation. Wind jumped the trees, flicked the outer edge of emptying twigs left and right. In Nottingham the streets would be on the move, main roads flooding well, yet there was a sense of movement around this silent garden which he was beginning to understand.

He stepped back into the kitchen, meaning to get his pack and go. Pat stood by the table, having glanced at his scrawled note. She wore a long dark-blue dressing-gown, her face pale from sleep, hair falling loose. His entrance made her jump: ‘I thought you were already off’ — not meaning to sound so brusque.

She was more relaxed, lines on her face, a smile less bright, less stern and sure of herself than she seemed last night. Straight out of sleep, a recent battleground of dreams, she wasn’t yet accustomed to daytime and the presence of this man she had given shelter to. He made her feel as if she was in a strange place, a home not her own that she had woken up in out of a dream. Her senses were overdrawn, exposed, isolated from what surrounded her. She wanted him to vanish, then to stay. There was something pleasurable in the power facing her, so that she distrusted it but could not retreat. Some people, he thought, get up after a night’s sleep; other people recover from it, and you can see it on their faces — as it was on hers. He stood close: ‘Not yet. I made myself comfortable for breakfast.’

His hands were on her elbows, moved up her back. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

The answer was a massive rockface, a cauterization of all social feeling, a force that no will or protest could stop. He pulled her to him, face against the side of her neck. ‘This’ — kissing her warm smooth skin, feeling her body slowly pressing. Her head drew back, eyes closed. ‘No, leave me, for God’s sake.’

Her lips were hard, opening so that her teeth were against his, and neither could speak. She forced herself away, saying anything that would preserve her from him until the right moment; whenever that would be. ‘Not now. Stay though, if you like. I have to dress and go to the stores in the village.’

He sat in the parlour reading a book to the background of the Clarinet Concerto and a coal fire scorching his ankles, finding it pleasant the way she took the fact of their morning kisses so coolly, being accustomed to this as a time of snap and quarrel, a canyon separating you from the woman you’d just been funny with. But she acted as if they’d done nothing, or as if they’d been courting a year already. Nevertheless Pat found it strange the way he seemed at home so soon, took to a book and Mozart as if he’d been familiar with both all his life. Maybe this was what he’d craved since leaving his wife: a new home, though he’d never admit it. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do with myself while you’re shopping,’ he joked. ‘I can’t wait till you get back.’

‘Read a book,’ she said, busy with a shopping list. ‘Put a record on.’

And he hardly noticed her return: ‘What are you reading?’

He looked at the cover: ‘The Naked Lunch. I thought it was a dirty book, with the word naked in the title.’

‘I can’t tell when you’re being serious,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ Indignant tone confusing her even more, though she didn’t show it. He was many moves ahead in being familiar with her, and she envied his uncomplicated social ease when she didn’t resent it. ‘Where did you get this sort of book?’

‘In Paris, last year.’

‘You’ve been to Paris?’

‘You sound impressed. Only on holiday.’

‘I’d like to travel one day. I can tell it’s a good book though from the writing. I hope they banned it. It’ll make the bloke who wrote it a lot of money. I reckon they should ban every book that comes out so that more people would read.’

She laughed, taking off her coat. ‘Would you like coffee?’

‘Aye, one for the road,’ standing up to kiss her.

‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You’ll get me drummed out of the village. I’m supposed to be a pillar of the community: irreproachable, but invisible as long as I’m alone.’

‘Let’s go upstairs then,’ he said, ‘so that we won’t be seen. It’s lucky there is an upstairs. If there’s two things in the world I can’t stand it’s twin beds and bungalows. If somebody left me a bungalow in their will I’d put a double bed on the roof and saw a hole in the ceiling, so that we could go upstairs when we wanted it.’ His hands roamed at her waist and hips, and any moment he expected a swingback from her — as he might have got from Nancy even after years of marriage. But she turned by the top step, forced his arms around her; ‘I love it when you do that.’

‘I’m not shy,’ he said, unable to recognize her unassailable self-possession of last night.

Neither was she; undressing, she asked if he had anything: ‘You know, precautions and all that.’ He’d never seen a woman get stripped so quickly, yet without hurrying, in a casual and graceful way. It was all off before he could get a good look in and enjoy it — no fumbling with hooks and buttons that crazed him well before glimpsing the real thing. Having regarded it as inevitable, and lacking the patience not to make it so, it was partly shyness that made her undress so quickly. Now that she mentioned it, he hadn’t got any: ‘I started out with a gross, but somebody picked my pocket in a pub the other night. Everywhere was shut yesterday.’

‘I’ll cope then,’ she said. What’s the use being a nurse, he thought, if she can’t? The room was white-washed, brilliant, bare pictureless walls showing the flesh dazzle of her body plain before him. The curtains were closed and electric light on, so that it might have been two in the morning, and this seemed like the limit of sloth to him, real sin compared to the fact that he was about to make love to someone a complete stranger now that she was naked. She seemed taller, with long legs and well-shaped thighs, a tapering waist not noticed when clothed. There were faint stretch marks on her stomach from having the baby all those years ago, but her muscles were flat and the navel distinct, while her breasts were small and round, purple-ringed at the nipples. His hands went over them, shaking at the soft velvet touch as if he’d never made love before. Her arms pressed around his neck. I’ll shoot my bolt before I get there if I go on like this, so out of practice, and nervous as if I was fourteen.

He lay by her side, and they were content to kiss tenderly. The silence of the house and the day outside made him think they were in the sky, or the smack centre of a millpond ocean. How was it possible for such quiet to be in the world? Her eyes closed, and he knew she was waiting, that the time had come. But he didn’t want to move. He couldn’t shift. For some reason, for the first time in his life, the will wasn’t in him at the crucial moment. Her kisses grew harder, blinder, and the more they increased the less was he able to follow. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘come on, love.’

But he couldn’t. Or, in the deepest layers of himself, he would not. Unable to satisfy such scalding lust, they lay for some time: ‘Are you nervous of me?’ she said at last. He sat up. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ve never been nervous of anybody like that in my life.’

‘Maybe you don’t love me,’ she smiled.

‘Love?’ he said. That had never bothered him before.

‘Some people can’t do it unless they’re in love, been seeing each other for a while first.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Any reason gave him heart, though it was so unique and stunning he could hardly feel ashamed. Yet beneath all this, a subdued rage was ebbing away: ‘I think I’ll be off’ — standing to get dressed.

‘Why are you in such a hurry?’

‘I stopped yesterday for a drink of water. I can’t swallow the tap as well.’

She frowned, drew on her dressing-gown. ‘That would sound like folk wisdom to some. To me it sounds like the cold shoulder, as they say.’

‘Well, we’ll see. I was meaning to give that garden of yours a dig over when it stops raining. When was it last done?’

‘I can’t remember. I’ve been too busy to bother.’

‘It’s heavy for you, that sort of work. A man should do it.’ He went downstairs in his socks, put on his shoes by the still burning fire. ‘What was that woodwork you wanted done?’ he called out to the kitchen.

She laughed: ‘I thought I’d have a couple of shelves above the stove. There’s nowhere to put things.’

He went to look. ‘I’ll get some brackets and plugs. Are there any tools?’

‘Under the stairs. I had the wood cut last week, thinking I might try it myself, but I don’t suppose I really wanted to.’ She peeled potatoes, dropped them into the pot — cooking without an apron, which was something new to him, better in that she didn’t hide the goodness of herself in the paraphernalia of domesticity. He stood close behind, kissed her neck, and held his hands over her breasts.

There was less formality about it than the deliberation of walking upstairs and going into the bedroom, and stripping as if to a drill, an exhibition as if performed before all the generations of the world to prove that you were with them in their unconscious battle for survival against the ravages of nature. She turned and lay her face in his shoulder. His hands were below her waist, body pressing stiffly but without urgency. He walked her into the sitting-room. There were no fires of impotence this time; his madness was controlled, hard at the loins, and the hundreds of miles journeying during which he had almost forgotten the need for love had only made him forget it in order to overwhelm him now with an unexpected force and sweetness he’d never known before.

They lay on the floor, clothes hardly disturbed, crying out together as if they had been burnt.

5

The village, when he explored the roundabouts of it, was set in a horseshoe of the wolds. After a few weeks he seemed never to have been anything but a countryman, as if much of William Posters had, for what it was worth, been excised from his backbone. Walking alone through the bracken earth of the autumn woods on a long, purposeless, satisfying stroll (while Pat was out in her red Mini on some errand of mercy) he could watch for pheasants, squirrels, or the erratic flip among upper branches of birds tough enough not to go south at the first chill breath of October damp.

He was surprised at how much life there still was. Two squirrels in the middle of a lane fixed each other, until his appearance sped them apart. One, with a handsome grey tail and upright back, had a small red disc for an eye, after fighting the rival which had already made off. The other eye must have been uninjured, for the squirrel flitted among a confusion of trees and bushes without tearing its hide.

Apart from mistily remembered bus-rides as a child, the only times he had seen the country was from his car-screen, stopping now and again to eat sandwiches with the window open, or dashing across fifty yards of greensward to gulp down pints in some sheltering pub. Now he not only lived in it, but spoke about gardens and poaching with men in the Keaner’s Head when he sometimes called there. Words like covert, lodge, hill, grange, flew from him — and only a month ago he had been at his machine, driving a car, in bed with Nancy, bawling at the kids. Yet in those days the dominant feeling was that of not living his proper and allotted life, of being enmeshed in a totally wrong sort of existence no matter how plain and real it was said to be. The present life at least was too new to give any such feeling.

Even so, his mind was at all points of the cardiac compass, unsettled and drifting. Out of the wood, he walked along an open lane, beet fields on either side. A Land Rover was coming and he stepped aside for it. A lean-faced man of about fifty called: ‘Where are you going?’

Frank looked at the grey, non-penetrating eyes, and said nothing. The man spoke: ‘This is a private road. If you go any further you’re liable to be shot at by one of my keepers. I’d turn back if I were you.’ His head withdrew, quicker than any argument that could follow, and the car rumbled towards a distant farmhouse.

He mentioned it to Pat. ‘It must have been Waller,’ she said. ‘He’s not really so bad. He farms all the land down by Panton Moor, and owns the woods near Clayby. He breeds pheasants by the hundred, and his friends come up from London to shoot. He’s rich, one of a shipping family in Hull, and doesn’t get on with people around here though — the people at the Hall I mean. He’s one of the better ones, believe it or not. His children are great friends of Kevin’s. Waller lent him a pony last summer.’

‘He still sounded a right bastard to me,’ Frank said, thinking that maybe William Posters wasn’t dead after all, not by a long way. ‘He’s no right to have land that nobody else can walk on.’ Old Bill Posters of course would never have been caught, would have smelt the set-up and gone through gorse and pheasant farms in his usual sly way, so that even the watchdogs wouldn’t have stirred, and he’d have come out with a cockbird in every pocket and a hangdog daisy in his buttonhole.

They sat at the evening meal: grilled steak and salad, bread and cheese. Lights were on, blinds drawn, and the fire humped red. ‘You see,’ she continued, ‘he gets a bit jumpy because people sometimes come in their cars from Scunthorpe and Grimsby, scare his pheasants and anything else that moves.’

‘I was on a peaceful stroll. Next time I won’t be.’ She saw him eating too well to be as angry as he made out. The walk must have seen to that. ‘If he’d known you were staying here he might not have been so brusque. He thought you were a stranger.’

‘Ah!’ he smiled. ‘You mean he smelt fifteen years of overalls on my back! The Lincolnshire wind hasn’t got rid of it yet. You’ve only got to stray a bit off a lane in England and you’ll find a notice stuck in front of you saying trespassers will be prosecuted.’

‘You’ll just have to ignore them, if you feel like it.’

‘But it’s still no good that you’ve got to.’

‘If you feel free, you are free.’

‘That’s the mentality of a slave. You’ve got to know that you are free.’ They were strangers still, and the hardest for her to bear were the long silences. Frank didn’t mind them, for they were his, and he could sit for an hour or through a meal without being embarrassed that neither spoke. He was unconscious of the silence until its meaning came to him, in a reminder of past noises that he was trying to forget. In the old days Nancy had always brought up the fact that something was wrong with their lives when the kids were crying, and he couldn’t stand crying kids, especially a baby — though he’d willingly agreed to himself that something indeed was rotten in their lives. He’d grown to put up with a lot since the first was born, of course, but the soulless noise of a crying baby lit up the dark spaces of emptiness within him, hammered in the roof to prove that no matter what vast emptiness was there at the moment, it would go on expanding into limitlessness if he didn’t flee from it. With such a noise and all its meaning it was a case of every man for himself, to run out and find something of substance with which to fill this vacuum lit by the cry of a baby. He didn’t follow his instinct and light off, but his reaction to it had at least pointed out that something was wrong.

Well, he had got over that, and didn’t know what reminded him of it so strongly, stuck in front of the fire with the village midwife who was now his mistress. A man’s manhood was tested by crying children and he had weathered it, or maybe only thought he had since it came back to him now with the force of an experience more agonizing than at the actual time. Why should he be noting his own rebirth by the memory of their birth, and grieving more for their loss than that of his wife?

Pat knew that he was only silent to her, and that in him were plenty of words that spoke loudly for himself, but because he never shared them she worried that one fine morning he would just get up and go, or that she would find the house empty on coming back from a call one rain-soaked afternoon. But perhaps one day these huge silences would melt into oceans of talk, to prove their growing regard for each other.

The fire blazed, in the wrong place, he thought, hardening himself to think so. It should be in me, instead of the damp ash I feel. She came back from the kitchen, and her face, utterly on its own and cut off from him, had nevertheless a beauty and dignity that he thought she might net even be aware of. He laid his hand on her wrist, squeezed it so that the veins met and hurt, held on as if the long hard grip were more necessary than the hour of unspoken words, a spiritual refuelling whose lifeline no words could latch into place.

She felt something good in his touch, a desperate healing of interrupted blood-flow, a contact between them that no words were at the back of — and that maybe joined both their wounds. He seemed to forget that she was there at all, as if, after the original impulse to touch her, he had lost all feeling for her consciousness close to his which had to be respected. This she did not like, drew her hand away, went off to the living-room and sat there with her thoughts — until he came in and greeted her with some pun or flippancy as if they’d not seen each other all day.

She asked about his parents, what sort of family he came from. ‘Your ancestors, for example.’

‘I ain’t got any,’ he smiled. Growing easier with her, homelier phrases occasionally tumbled through into his speech. ‘I don’t believe in ancestors. One grandfather was a foundry worker; the other a collier — as far as I remember the old man saying. Maybe we don’t go back any further than that. There’s no Adam and Eve in our sort of family.’ It was almost possible to believe him — his face momentarily bleak during the repose after his statement.

She wondered how much he thought of his wife and children, sensed that when he gripped her in a blind unspoken manner it was to hold back despair rather than prove undying love. She sympathized, yet disliked these moods that claimed him from her. When she had left her husband it needed countless solitary months before she could look at another man and think of love. But Frank had been away only a month so must still be neck-deep in the vat of it — and she refused to think that such upheavals were different for men, that they were more predatory, amorous, foot-loose and dominating (or whatever they liked to call it) than women. Maybe his love for this wife (or whatever he liked to call that, too) had been dug so deeply in after six years that the felled tree-roots still ached at contact with air and sky.

Frank complicated her existence, yet she was sure enough of herself not to refuse the first taste of love since leaving Keith. There had been no courtship with him on the morning he was supposed to leave, but neither of them needed the long sweet agonizing preliminaries that were essential for the naïve and inexperienced — or the idle and sensual. In these few weeks they had grown used to loving each other, love beginning from the middle of the fire and moving outwards to all its subtleties, delicacies and considerations from there. There was a liking between them; as between grown people who could never go back lightly on it.

He could know nothing of all this, she thought. Space and violence had been his lot, which wasn’t much to say for the world, but there had been more depth and contact in it. Now they were equals, which is to say that there was no depth yet for either of them, who shared the same house. But she reflected, intelligent and realistic, that they shared it at the moment anyway, for who could be sure when he would leave? To her the concept of love was based on a strong, honest, mutual exchange of feelings, and in this sense it was still impossible to think of the word love with regard to him. Maybe time was still to alter all that, though in spite of his gruffness, halfcocked jokes, occasional clumsiness, he was a comforting person to have in the house, to talk to, to have love from when they went to bed at night (sometimes when she came in from rounds that had dragged on all night).

Her basic views were the same as before Frank had turned up. She liked the idea that he had stayed, like his loud unselfconscious concern for her, his tenderness in bed. Before, the solitary house seemed to die, to turn into a meaningless untidy shell whenever she shut the door behind her for a day’s visits; and returning to it, it hadn’t been so easy to get the breath of life going again. In fact it had become harder and harder, though she was resilient and self-possessed enough not to have admitted it to herself until now, when it didn’t matter. Things were different with a man in the house. Despite his long solitary walks a fire was always heaped up on the living-room grate, the radio just switched off, books put back on the shelves. If she thought to set a record on the wind-up gramophone, she didn’t need to work the handle or change the needle before it would go.

Her thoughts couldn’t much dwell on how he had come into the house. She must have been in some strange trance-like state, a dream almost, as Frank knocked at the door, and when she woke up, they were living together. It seemed like heresy to ripple the process of it by brute recollection — though at other times she felt ashamed that it had happened at all.

She knew little about Frank, though such a lack didn’t stop her liking him. Abiding by her natural talent for scrupulous honesty, she could like him for what he did rather than for what he was. Afraid of drawing too favourable conclusions, she could not let what he did act as a pointer to what he might become. Once bitten, shy forever. In that way, if there was a let down it would be gradual and not from very far up. If their love prospered and she really fell for him then that would be even more of a surprise and ten times as pleasant.

Frank went to the pub now and again, had his pint before closing time, and came back — more for the walk, he said, than the drink. One cold and starlit night he set out earlier. Pat had left the house at six on call, and he wasn’t at home when she returned at nine. She made a meal and ate by herself. The ten o’clock news was disturbed by the phone. ‘Hello?’ she answered. ‘Nurse Shipley.’

Button A was pressed. ‘Love? This is Frank.’

She smiled into the phone, surprised at her happiness: ‘Where are you?’

‘In the village.’ In spite of his closeness she thought the phone or line must be faulty. ‘But I’m blind drunk, so I thought I’d let you know. Then you won’t be shocked. I’m on my way back, but go to bed. Don’t see me. I’ll be O.K. I feel marvellous, but I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Even before the phone went dead she was laughing, her head back, happier than when she had first heard his voice a few minutes ago. She sat in the armchair, feeling as if she had just been told some hilarious story while still young enough not to have experience and age spoil it for her. The black years fell away, as if she were sixteen again and sensing the possibility of easier and freer days than those of puberty, waiting for a shattering experience that would release her from it.

She had no thought of going to bed and cutting off her day as he had wanted. This strange recall of youth and happiness was more mature than the actual one which had had the storms of her twenties before it. There were no storms before her now (she was so much a woman and sure of herself) and she was more capable of enjoying it because she knew what it meant without wanting to know the cause of it.

She looked around the living-room: decorated and set out with all the taste that remained from her marriage. She had scoured auction sales in the market towns, collecting furniture, books, lamps, odds-and-ends to achieve the harmony and comfort of a spiritual base. The house was her own — except for small mortgage payments each month. Twelve hundred pounds seemed paltry when set by the stature she now felt. The first payment and necessary modernization had taken her last penny. It was a venture, to accumulate all this, for who knew when she would have to give it up and go elsewhere? No one ever knew that, but if her life had taught her anything it had been to live where she was, to the maximum that could be achieved, and not to think about what she would be doing in a year so much as how she wanted to live at the moment. On reaching a new job, a new place, one must set down roots as if one were going to stay there forever. She had done this, and the fact of it was part of the present happiness that overwhelmed her.

She decided to put out all lights so that when he came in he’d think she was in bed. There wasn’t long to wait — which she was glad of, darkness not being a good cloak for the way she was feeling. His key turned, and she stifled her laughs as he bumped over the threshold.

It was hard to get much sense out of his words, but she felt his relief at thinking himself alone: ‘Blindoe,’ he kept saying. ‘Hate anybody to see me blindoe. Gutterdrunk. Where is she? Snoozing in a warm bed. What a night. A pint of mild and a double rum. A double rum and a pint of mild. The roundabout, as I explained; wouldn’t serve me. Well, I said, I’ll serve myself. Then he did. Didn’t want trouble. Neither did I. I wanted a drink.’

He was falling through the living-room. Hands, unable to get bearings, scooped a book off the table, went by her face. ‘Noise, noise — I’ll wake the goldfish. I’m in the bloody wrong room. Get upstairs, Frank.’ She thought it no joke at all, wondered how she could break it.

His hand touched her, and she laughed again, still at the same pitch of happiness. ‘I knew you were there because I’d seen you,’ he said. ‘Put the light on now, love. Only dead people sit in the dark, and I hate the darkness.’

‘You were so funny,’ she cried.

He blinked at the flooding light. ‘I’m sure I was. I suppose that’s your idea of a joke. Well, it’s better than snatching the chair from under me, I suppose.’ He pulled her out of the chair, dead sure and strong now back in the presence of her. The darkness had been grey and gridded, impenetrable. She spoke between his kisses: ‘You sit down, and I’ll make us some coffee.’

‘Don’t bother. I’m done for until morning.’ She had left him, was already plugging in the kettle, opening bread tin and cheese dish. He lay in the chair she had sat in, head back, feeling like a survivor on the rim of an explosion — thumped and thrown, drowsy and happy because it seemed that the earth, haying spared him, was his friend. He wondered: What am I doing here? This can’t be my home. I was never meant to land up here. But maybe I was. You end up where you were never meant to end up. He wondered what Nottingham looked like from the air, but fell like a stoned and frozen bird back near the middle of it. Recollections were never hazy: even half drunk they were sharp and concise in the meaning splayed out to him. I was meant to leave, and that’s true. On the Saturday morning of his departure, back from his car ride in the country when he’d given the soldier-lunatic a lift, he parked it and set off on foot down Boden Street, midday chips already steaming in their homely bins, a coalman coming back with his empty lorry, black-faced assistant resting his arse on the scales. The last few years had bored him to death and distraction. He’d even tried following his father’s advice and joining a working man’s club, but that was worse than sitting at home with the telly smashing one tab, and kids bruising the other with their screams and squabbles as he tried to get the guts out of some book or other. No politics, lads, and no religion. Just drink your pints and sling your darts, heads down for Bingo and look alive to win a fiver at the end. When you’re off sick we’ll look after you, lad, give you a bit of club money, like, and a seaside booze-up once a year. But no religion, no politics. Don’t think. Heads down. You’re all free as long as you do as you’re told. Legs eleven, bed and breakfast, key of the door. Heads down and look in, sink in that pound of treacle. Oh its own: number one; the messages fell sharp and fast.

One street funnelled him into space, a view across rubble that a few months ago had been a populous ghetto of back-to-backs and narrow streets. He lit a fag, to shock absorb the sight of all these acres cleared of people, smashed down and dragged to bits. It wasn’t unpleasant, this Stalingrad of peace, and he’d heard that a start was one day to be made on this triangle of three main roads now with heart and guts scooped out.

He walked into space, few paces taking him across a clearly marked street plan on which as a kid each moss-dewed corner and double-entry had seemed miles from each other, different nations and tribal zones locking their arteries in handshakes of tumultuous life. You could still see the sockets from which lamp-posts had been tugged out like old dandelions and stacked ready for transport to the melters. He thought of going home immediately to Nancy, swinging on his heels this minute. But he rejected the impulse, unwilling to go back there like a bat into hell. Streets in all directions had been clawed and grabbed and hammered down, scooped up, bucketted, piled, sorted and carted off. Where had the people gone? Moved onto new estates, all decisions made for them, whereas he also wanted to uproot himself but must make his own moves, create something positive from the irritating mists of discontent — a freedom which he thanked and cursed at.

He crossed towards real streets, hoping to find a pub. But these streets too were down for demolition, nearly all empty. One or two still had people living in them, isolated houses encased in ruin and desolation. It must have been strange to live there, waiting for the dark ceremonious smash before the dawning of some new house nearer to fresh air and fields. Two up and two down, they were finished after eighty years of life. Many had doors and windows off, smashed in destructive joy by kids, and Frank walked into one, the living-room piled with planks and bedticks, shattered glass and slates, bricks and the heaped throw-outs of family living. He looked over the panels of a half ripped-off door, towards sombre backyards of taps and lavatories. From the fireplace a large rat blinked — though didn’t move. ‘Robert the Rat,’ he said aloud, ‘your number’s up. They’re coming for you.’ The half brick flew from his hand, but the rat clawed a way up the chimney, unharmed.

On the next street corner was a pub called The Rising Sun, which he thought at first to be untenanted, but a few Saturday morning people had already gathered there when he pushed his way through to the bar. It was a clean, cheerful sort of pub, customers mostly elderly. He unclipped a pound: ‘Pint of mild, mate’ — his call over loud since he wasn’t used to being served straight away. He also wasn’t a regular at this dying beacon among the ruins, and all the stares of the old men were on him. He leaned against the bar and stared back, thinking: ‘Christ, am I going to be like that in twenty years? Not if I know it. But maybe I don’t know it. Not much I don’t.’ They turned from his thoughtless eyes, back to low talk and dominoes, the comfortable vacancy of a half empty glass. He put his drink down after one medium sip.

In over ten years he had formulated certain rules about drinking beer. For example, he wouldn’t drink bad beer, and to cut down the chances of this he would never be the first at the bar for a drink when the pub opened its doors, wily enough to let some other get that hop-spit-and-a-sawdust down his unsuspecting gizzard. He often left a pint, walked out after one swallow if it tasted the slightest bit off-centre. Too many pals, himself included at one far-off time ago, had come to work on Monday suffering more from a couple of pints than some men did from a sling-down of forty. You couldn’t be too careful. And this fancy bottled beer they were always trying to shove at you had more heartburn in it than any of the draught stuff. As far as beer in tins was concerned, excuse me while I commit suicide — no, don’t wait, just turn your back. But the worst of all, bottled or not, was warm beer, and that’s what this pint of mild was that had just been dished up.

He invited the publican over. ‘This ale’s rotten. It’s warm,’ he told him. Everyone stopped what they were doing, and stared again, that concentrated stare kept by the old or finished for a member of the encroaching young, or a plain enemy with the expression of friend on his face. He slid it towards him: ‘It’s rotten. Taste it. Warm as Monday’s suds.’

‘You must be mistaken,’ the publican said. ‘My beer’s never rotten.’

‘Taste this, then.’

‘I have, friend, I taste every barrel before it’s put on.’

‘A young ’un like that don’t know what ale is,’ an old man-called, while the others chuckled comfortably.

‘Still,’ Frank said to the publican, surprised at the tense atmosphere over a matter nearly always rectified in willing silence, and quickly. ‘Still, whether you tasted it or not, that ale’s rotten, and so would my guts be if I drunk it. Warm ale once gave me the colic for a week.’

The publican’s face grew redder. ‘That’s about the tenth time you’ve called my ale rotten. It ain’t rotten.’

‘It’s warm though, and that’s the same to me. So how about changing it?’

‘I’ll do no such thing.’ He smacked one-and-six down on the counter. ‘Clear out.’

‘You soon know where you stand in this place. I expect it’ll be flat on its face next week.’ He took the pint jar, slow, mechanical, absent-minded almost, a black feast for all staring eyes, including the publican’s, and emptied its ale onto the floor: ‘I don’t drink warm suds,’ he said. ‘You should have changed it.’

Frank realized that he, in any case, ought not to have splashed out the beer with such deliberation, ought simply to have left it and walked out — or maybe knocked it accidentally with his elbow while turning from the counter. ‘Get the police,’ a voice called above the muttering cauldron of advice.

‘Set into him,’ someone else cried. ‘He don’t belong here.’

He walked unmolested as far as the door. On his way there he observed a good fire going in a side parlour, horse brasses above every shelf, regulation dartboard on the wall, coloured prints of horse races in black-bead frames, as well as the usual sick, dog, children, blind and ex-soldier collection boxes along the bar. The publican caught him by the arm. ‘Come back, you bleeder.’ Grey eyes, pupil and retina, glazed into one unseeing pint-sized point, were beamed onto him: The publican thought Frank was drunk, even though he seemed to carry it rather well. ‘You’re coming back. I want your name.’

Frank’s hand was on the door. People closed around to make themselves part of a climax. He looked at the publican’s concerned, determined face that hadn’t bargained for trouble this Saturday morning: he wore a blazer with an Air Force wing badge on his lapel, and a Marks and Spencer’s old school tie of black and red pattern. ‘Come and clean it up.’

‘Ar, that’s right,’ ran the chorus, ‘that’s just.’

Frank wanted to hit the man for suggesting he was the sort that would wipe up some mess, especially one that he had made. A bastard like that had never done a real day’s work in his life, he thought, as his fist stamped into him, causing a startled cry as the publican fell into the not so old man who had called out: ‘Ar, that’s right. That’s just.’

He was back in the street of empty houses, running along it and holding his fist, shoes crunching over smashed slates, kicking against half bricks and rotting woodlumps. The publican’s gang weren’t far behind, and he expected nothing less than lynching if they caught up. At great speed he ran into the same house, along the hallway and back into the living-room. By the fireplace he trod on the startled rat before it had time to shift, but it had scattered up the soot-banks and into the chimney before the publican’s boots squashed all life from it.

Frank, in the backyard, heaved himself to the roofs of a dozen insecure half-gutted lavatories, his egress fixed now into the next street. A brick parapet divided the sloping roof of one set of lavatories from the slates of the next, and Frank stood precariously astride this high ridge — a ridge so rotten that he could bend down now and again to lift up a brick from it, or even a piece of one, to threaten his attackers — since they too had access to bricks and were now industriously prising them loose for a short-range stoning.

He was perched eight or nine feet above, and at his first shot they scattered. Frank had had enough, was ready to make his retreat towards Hartley Road and back to his parked car. But the world swayed, as if he were about to faint, to roll down limp at the feet of the exulting posse.

A brick caught him weakly on the shoulder. He hurled two, clearing the space of backyards. The earth swayed again, his shoes moving slightly on the slates, several bricks cascading from the parapet between his legs. Are any of them bastards pushing at the walls? No, they couldn’t, otherwise he would have seen them. He stood under the clear sky, fighting for his balance, a horse on all fours, then straight and uneasy, ready at any second or footweave to use his hands again. He hurled his last brick through a window that still had glass, and at the force of his swinging arms the whole line of lavatories swayed like a slate-blue wave of the mid-ocean sea. His attackers drew back terrified into the house, as if running for their lives from some huge towering scar-faced monster high in the sky behind that Frank could not see.

He heard them falling over each other (trod on that poor bloody rat again) scrambling back through the house to the comparative safety of the street as if the whole district might crumble, only too glad to go laughing in to their snug pub at the poetic justice of that young bogger up to his neck in ruins and bruises.

When the collapse began under his feet, Frank slid pell-mell down the slates and onto hard asphalt of another backyard. The lavatories collapsed as if dynamited, like a bit of war from a silent film of long ago, ending in a mass cave-in of bricks and splintering wood, a rising grey stench of bug-ridden slatedust settling over the lot as he made his way out of it, back towards the car, and hoping the same fate would be soon in store for the pub from which he had been so discourteously thrown.

She came back with a laden tray, set it on a low table somehow missed on his crazy zig-zag across the room. He was drunk no longer, yet she needed to shake him as if he were, back into the immediate environs of love and care at the heart of Lincolnshire: ‘If you want to drink and not suffer you should eat a slice of bread first, with butter half an inch thick. Or drink a glass of water between each glass of whisky — or whatever it is you drink.’

He waved his hand. ‘What’s the use getting drunk if you prepare for it in such a scientific way?’ Pills and Alka Seltzer were on the tray. ‘Knowing so much would stop me enjoying it.’

‘If knowing stopped you enjoying life, then you wouldn’t be much of a person. Come on, love, eat. Drink.’

His eyes were fully open. ‘Would you marry me?’

She looked, all laughter gone. ‘As far as I’m concerned, we are married. Why do you ask?’

‘I suppose we are. You don’t need to answer. I’m in love for the first time in my life.’ He found it impossible to say why he loved her, had been so busy in his life that she was the first woman he had thought to ask this question about, frightened into it because early on in his stay he would sometimes wake up in the morning and be unable for a few moments to think of her name. Such a thing proved how completely she had altered his life, and you could only be in love with a woman who had done that to you. She had become a midwife indeed, getting him out into some new lit-up world still beyond the touch of his hand and brain to reach.

6

Furrow-lines refused to break as he walked over them. Frost made the earth hard as steel, coated the ridges that bent the arches of his feet. A copse on the opposite hill was bare, sky visible through upright posts. A dead bird seemed a piece of hoar-shaded soil until he was right up to it. There was no wind: winter had brought a biting lacquer of frost that numbed his face and half-closed his eyes. At two in the afternoon the land was silent, all doors locked against it.

He had walked since morning in a great circle, down the valley-path and across the old railway, cutting over the speckled leprous surface of a frozen stream and heading between coverts to Market Stainton. With a cold pint in him he trekked over Dog Hill, took the sloping track through fields that met the houses of High Benniworth. His eyes had sharpened and, as winter gripped, more life was evident. The faintest impress of rabbit feet vanished into a spinney. Magpies argued on a dung heap just inside a farm gate; dogs and cocks called in tune with vertical smoke going out of the chimney — life in spite of all doors closed. By Warren Hilltop, where the sun reflected shadows on the green-white landscape, a spring poured from a hedge bottom. Gulls screamed upwards — often seen no matter how bitter the weather, and always reminding him that the sea was close, only fifteen miles east of his crunching feet, a flaking, slow, raw-heaving sea of frost and desolation. Winter was in the earth like King Arthur’s sword, waiting for a hand of resolution to heave it out and set off over land and sea. He smiled at such a flamboyant impossible image, knowing he was fixed in Lincolnshire for a long time with the sort of love he had on his hands.

In drunkenness he had spoken the truth, saying he was in love for the first time. He reminded Pat next morning that he had said this, and neither had she forgotten the night that his words had branded. Understanding of them had matured, and his drunkenness subsided by the time they got to bed. He was surprised that she hadn’t resented his coming back in such a state. He’d mistrusted her amusement at it, having expected, when phoning in advance, a retort to stay out until he was sober. Not a bit of it. She took it well. Maybe she was not as rigid as he’d often thought. She even seemed more relaxed, as if flattered at the possibility that for the first time he had revealed part of his real self to her. They drew closer together in spirit. She hadn’t even bothered to ask why he’d got drunk. Not that he knew, either, though maybe it had been so that this understanding could be reached between them. Things sometimes worked that way, though he could never imagine her admitting it, and in any case he would never get drunk again.

They talked about Kevin, who was to come up in a week from boarding school, and stay for Christmas. ‘How are you going to explain me?’ he asked.

‘I’m not. I’ll simply tell him.’

‘Isn’t he a bit young?’

‘You don’t think I could lie, do you? He’s eleven. He’s old enough to know.’ They drove to Lincoln, Frank at the wheel, taking it slowly on frosty bends. Kevin had caught the express from St Pancras, then the diesel from Nottingham. It drew quietly into the long platform on time, half empty so that Frank thought it a train still to go out before the one waited for came in. He expected all trains to arrive crowded, people packed by the windows ready to disembark. Right from the beginning of childhood, railways had been life lines to him, the double attraction later on of machines travelling. A train rushing under a bridge and through a station was a serious and romantic sight, mystical and full of power over a person’s life. He had rarely taken a train, rather bus or car, because to do so would be committing himself in a way he felt hardly ready for.

They walked along the platform. Pat wore a heavy camel coat and fur boots; Frank a thick sweater under his mackintosh, and ordinary shoes. Kevin already had his case down, stood by it till he saw them. Expecting his mother alone, it took some time to recognize her. She embraced him: ‘Hello, darling’ — and asked about his trip down.

He was a tall, dark haired boy of eleven, had the same shape and colour eyes as his mother, though lacking their clarity. His features were similar, slightly darker, and his presence seemed more poised and careful regarding the different worlds he moved in, as if much of Pat’s one-time and far-off assurance had passed early to him — though the seeds of something like her present conflict and uncertainty loomed in his eyes. ‘I was looking out of the window all the way,’ he said, ‘watching things. Then in Nottingham I had a pie and some coffee.’ He glanced up.

‘I want you to meet Frank,’ she said. ‘He’s living with mummy now.’

‘Hello,’ Kevin said, not, as Frank observed, batting an eyelid. They walked out to the car. Frank fastened his case on the luggage rack. Pat embraced her son again. ‘Don’t you think he’s handsome?’ Frank agreed, but wondered why the boy wasn’t shy of so much fuss. He sorted out the various combinations regarding their journey back. Should Pat drive and the boy sit in front with her? Or should he take the wheel, and the two of them sit together in the back? What about her driving, and Frank sitting beside her, with the boy behind? Which would be best for the wellbeing of their time together? They couldn’t all sit in the front, and that was a fact — which was the worst of these mini cars. He laughed, to find himself blessed with so much consideration, only to wonder what the hell it mattered. Well, things do matter, he decided, pulling forward the front seat so that Pat and Kevin could get behind. But halfway to the village Kevin had to sit in front because he felt car sick.

For the first days he was taciturn, studious, and went only once to visit Waller’s farm. Frank talked to him, spellbound him with facts and possibilities of the various machines he’d worked, discussed motor cars, and natural history which he had taken an interest in through Pat’s books and on his walks.

The sensual monotony of their existence was broken. Kevin sat at the table for meals, and when he wasn’t telling his mother about school he either ate silently, or looked at a book while slowly dealing with food on his plate. Pat didn’t mind him reading at meals, and on this point Frank wondered whether she was spoiling him, or allowing so much freedom simply because it was good for her. Frank had the sense to treat him as another man which, in intellect if not experience, he often seemed to be. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Pat said, after Kevin had gone to bed. ‘Before, I think he used to be lonely, with me out on my calls so much of the time.’

‘He seems a good lad,’ he remarked. ‘I can’t make much of him, but then, you never can at that age.’

‘I often don’t like the idea of him being bandied about from one part of the country to another, yet it’s best, as things are, that he’s away at school.’ Seeing how she treated him at home, he realized that she must have worried about him a great deal when he wasn’t there, though she had kept it well concealed during the long autumn weeks.

On his ramblings he had noticed a small plantation of firs in an isolated hump of land beyond Panton Hall — trees that were part of the estate. He set out with a trowel, circled and undermined the roots until the slender trunk sloped into his arms and he could pull it clear. Steering a return course through the backbone of the night, head bent and breathing evenly under the coarse weight of the tree, he felt happy at having made off with a piece of greenery that had sprouted from the earth, land which he considered belonged to him, but was denied by circumstances or sham legislation. He felt nothing like a thief except in the caution of his getaway, and hoped the tree would be missed in the morning — likely, since he’d all but trodden a fence down to get at it. As for being tracked, he’d walked the half mile of a nearby road, and turned across fields from there. Low cloud held back stars and moon, and no one else was out on the broad earth. The frost had broken, loam softening underfoot, a smell of soil and bracken cutting his nostrils as he breached a hedge. It seemed as if the year had doubled on its heels to bring autumn back.

He sat down to smoke in the Lincolnshire blackness, his tree a piece of plunder towards which freedom had led him. The roots of it smelled of sap and stored-up frost, comforting soil and crushed fir-needles, the fruitful odours of a life snapped out of its accustomed earth and rut. He thought of Nancy and the children, not with shame or anguish, simply saw them for a moment in front of his eyes. Memories made him uneasy, helped him over the long stretches of field bearing his tree, but he wanted to be further away from them, felt as if tied by the ankle and barely hovering beyond the darkness of their confines — whereas a thousand miles might make him feel as if the whole complex recollection had been worth abandoning.

They were surprised to see him pulling the tree through the back door. ‘Here’s a good-looking conifer for the Christmas pot.’

‘What a robust specimen,’ Kevin exclaimed. Pat came in from cleaning the kitchen, and asked with a cold glance: ‘Where did you get it?’

He weighed up her disapproval, and said for Kevin’s sake: ‘Panton village. I met a man in a pub last week and told him to put one by for me. I paid ten bob for it. Cost a pound in Lincoln.’

He trimmed it, and Kevin helped him gather soil and fix it in a large earthen pot — which they stood in a corner of the dining-room because Pat hinted strongly that it would spoil the furnished perfection of the lounge.

When Kevin was in bed she demanded: ‘Well, where did you get it?’

‘I dug it up. You don’t think I’d buy a thing like this when there are so many around?’

‘No, I don’t. But don’t bring anything else that’s stolen into this house. And don’t tell Kevin where you got it. Not that he doesn’t suspect already.’

The tree framed him, two trees, his own foliage gone deep within. She would certainly never see it, only the mirror of his grey eyes beating back her inquisition. It was the sort of strength she hated in a man, features as if they had been set for generations, fixed like stone that had somehow learned to move. ‘Kevin’s got a head on his shoulders,’ he said, amused that she should control her anger and not come right out with it.

‘It’s a good job he has, otherwise he might mention the tree to someone who’ll hear that one is missing from Panton Hall — to Waller, for example. You still have your city ways: they only have to miss a pound of apples around here and it’s the talk for weeks. Next time, have a head on your shoulders and don’t rely on Kevin having one. I want him to be honest, as well as intelligent.’

How could you argue with a woman who was worrying about her kid? Especially when he’d tried to do them a favour. There was no love for him that night.

But on other nights during the holiday their love was more silently rapturous. Her son was in the room across the landing, and this was all he could put it down to. She folded Frank with her warm arms and slender legs, slept naked with him, in spite of the winter, which she had not done before. Her face changed for love in the moments before the light went out, softened in the frame of her outspread reddening hair. He kissed her lips, and flower-blue eyes that wouldn’t close until he touched the light switch. The strong love, the unique tenderness felt when looking at her, compounded itself when he thought back to her anger, seeing how his love had drawn her out of it, and even without him knowing had transformed them both. They had to be quieter with someone else in the house, and maybe this gave their love that slow-motion, secretive bitter-sweet ritual under quilt and blankets that sent through them such all-flooding passion. Unable to cry out with pleasure they bore it within themselves, touched by its sensual echoes long after the first violent spasms, until they were still and separated, pulled down by some irresistible force into an enclosed boat of sleep and left to drift in a black and dreamless sea.

Such intensities subdued them during the days that followed. Waking up, Frank felt he had been wrenched by a claw-hammer out of a week’s sleep. But he was downstairs before Pat, often while it was still dark. A lorry had dropped off a load of trunks, and he’d set up the horse by the back door, got to work in the bleak air with jacket loose, drawing back the teeth that he’d filed one by one to sharpness so that his rhythm caused streaks of sawdust to mark the asphalt, and created a log-pile by the kitchen wall. At eight he filled the house with a smell of bacon, took breakfast up. They talked, and he watched her put on her clothes as if, he thought, they belonged to someone else, looking at each item as if she’d never seen it before, examining it for cleanliness rather than colour or style. ‘You were up early.’

‘I felt like it. I always do after the sort of love we did last night. It turns me into a new man.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ she laughed. Sometimes when the phone snapped her out of bed she dressed in a few minutes, ruthlessly. He hated the noise of it, had used one rarely enough in his life to know he would never sound otherwise than a hung-over aborigine when forced to listen and make words at it. Her self-possession when called to it at certain moments never stopped surprising, and, in a way, pleasing him.

She pulled on her long woollen underwear, and fastened her brassiere — something which he considered her breasts could well live without. Occasionally she left it off, and he would kiss her from behind, his hands roaming the nakedness under her sweater. ‘I thought I’d get the bus today into Louth,’ he said. ‘Buy some things we need.’

‘Take Kevin if you would.’

‘I was going to. You know, love, I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be better for him to live here all the year round.’

‘I’ve thought about it, too. But I’m not sure he’s not better off at school. He’s settled there now, and likes it. Apart from that, his father wants him at school, and I’m afraid he has the final say. You see, I was the guilty woman who abandoned my husband and child.’

‘Well,’ he said, with a hollow laugh, ‘you can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.’ He thought she was making this up as an excuse, on the assumption that if they all settled happily together he’d go off one day and leave them high and dry, murder their bloody happiness. She must have had a few knocks in her life if she imagines that. He couldn’t tell her all this, but he put his arms around her. ‘I’m with you for good, love, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I know you are.’

‘Don’t smile. It means you’re not sure.’

‘If I didn’t smile I’d be lying.’ Her lips hardened, ends pointing downward, a sign of boiling sands beneath. ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I want to believe that you feel sure about me,’ he answered, standing by the window, his back to her.

‘That’s up to you then, as well.’

‘I know.’ He turned, and she was already dressed: a heavy brown sweater, skirt, thick stockings and shoes. ‘You think I don’t know it? But it seems easier for me to feel sure.’

‘We’ll have to wait and see whether it does.’

He felt as if an axe had chipped through to the ashes in his stomach. Her eyes rounded, but she wasn’t smiling: ‘That shouldn’t have sounded as hard as it did.’

‘I’m able to wait and see whether it does, whether you’re sure of me.’

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

He turned on her: ‘That’s the trouble. We love each other. It’s too easy to say. Maybe we only think we do, which would be better as far as I’m concerned, because there’d be some hope for us of a real love then. There’s too much missing still. In the last few months I’ve had my guts ripped out and put back again. After last night I can’t stand to look at anything. I can’t think at all.’

Tears were falling: ‘What are you trying to do to me? To get from me?’

It was an effort to stay calm, and embrace her: ‘It’s what I want to give you,’ he whispered. ‘We’re trying to make something here.’

She grew quiet and they went downstairs.

The days were short, occasional sun. Frost would have been better, for mostly it rained out of low cloud that swirled as mist along rolling tops of the hills. Bare hedges and trees were laden with it, and the garden was waterlogged, spreading a heavy permeating smell of rain and soil and soaked wood. It was an odour Frank liked: every sight and tang of the countryside emphasized his complete limb-rip from the past, stamped his isolation from it even more than living with Pat. He stood at the end of the garden; watching far-off house-roofs wilting under rain.

One morning they stayed late in bed, a rare happening, and Kevin tapped at the door with a tray of breakfast he’d made. ‘Just a moment,’ Pat answered, reaching for a nightdress. Frank got into pyjamas, and all three ate a relaxed easy breakfast in the room.

After lunch, shadows drew in, leavened by silence. Frank kept lights burning all day, closed the blinds before night had time to thicken. Pat hated the winter. It made her work a double burden, depressed her with its dragging timelessness. Kevin was sent to bed at ten, so they sat in the lounge reading, a logfire scorching the small room, hissing and spitting as sap rolled into the flame.

One morning early they went for a walk. It was a winter’s day, the blue dazzling snowless heart of winter in high Lincolnshire. Kevin had stayed at the cottage and tuned in to French lessons on a set of records his father had found one year at the Portobello market. It was winter only because it was cold, air chipping like invisible scraps of steel at the dead flesh of the face. They stepped quickly along the southward lane, through fields of frosty grass, as if they were going somewhere. ‘I hate to stay still,’ Frank said. ‘There’s no work on days like this so I feel good to be walking.’

She grasped his hand, as if they had much to say to each other, but which her vanity had decided was unnecessary: ‘It’s a change to get away from the house and be alone like this.’ They climbed the sloping hillside of loam, a hard hour’s walk, edging slowly towards the top line that separated them from the touching sky.

The crest was gradual, shaved off, but suddenly there was nothing between them and the deep mist of the sky. The only sound that the world gave was that of their breathing. Up here, there was nothing else. They stood still: animals were underground, birds dead or far away, no roads, people, houses, nothing to make noise. Such uplands were a world on their own, not high, but isolated by the North Sea, the Fens and marshes, the Humber, and the subtle snakiness of the grey Trent that needed wide lowlands to breed and flood in to the west. Hamlets were half lost in frosty air. The rim of blue haze on the horizon was the pink of spring flowers, campion petals, premonitions of cuckoo spit and primroses, soft grass and tadpoles. The land was a whitened waste, copses and woods like dropped hoods set down to cover something special until spring, isolated farms and cottages hard to see but for minute darkenings of chimney-smoke. The hard breath of their climb subsided, until it could only be heard to each separated self; then they became aware of it, and it decreased again until they were as silent as the bitter unobtrusive air-touching hands and faces.

Unwanted words were spelt like a lit-up newsflash across the inside of his eyes: ‘Now what do we do?’ The noise of his own life had been taken away, and the sound of all others, too. A pool in one of the fields had turned to ice, as if molten lead had been poured into a hollow and left to set, unbreakable, fixed forever even through summer. He was immobilized by lack of sound.

To break it he said, releasing her hand: ‘Let’s go down,’ and their feet moved with comforting heaviness over the frost as she took his hand and obeyed.

7

In four months he hadn’t seen a film. At the pub, he drank in a private room to get out of the death-ray of television. Once a week he made tracks there, had a pint, watched by those who speculated on his long sojourn at Nurse Shipley’s house.

He offered to take her to Louth or Lincoln for an evening, but she said: ‘When I want you to, I’ll let you know. If you want to go, just do so. You know that I’m all right here.’ He too liked the peace and isolation — while often wondering how someone like Pat could stand so much of it since she’d already done a couple of years.

He had cleaned out all he considered to be the good books of her library, and looked forward to the huge shiny-sided van drawing up outside the house to lend them more. ‘I’m happy here,’ he said, ‘lapping up these books like a cat lapping up milk’ — so that she wondered whether he were here for any other purpose than that. Still, in a discreet, offhand way, she advised him what to read, careful not to praise any book but merely putting it in his way by such phrases as: ‘This one isn’t bad’ or ‘You might like this one.’ He had an irresistible yen to fill his shattered mind, to separate himself from the world, and yet have something to talk about with Pat. He secretly wanted to catch up with her in all she had read, felt that such continual reading was altering the basic mechanism of his senses in a way that reading had never done for Pat. For her, books were an accepted part of life, even to the reading of them, whereas they had been something rare and foreign to him, seen in other people’s houses as part of the furniture — a showing-off part, at that. He had detested books at school as symbols of torment, employed only to prove in public what he had always known about himself in private — that he was dead ignorant. He assumed readily that Pat’s books must be good because he didn’t feel uneducated or foolish while reading them. Having tackled so few in the last ten years made them so much easier to absorb now.

They weren’t the sort that taught electricity, plumbing, engineering or gardening, but they widened the world beyond the range of his eyes and softened the hitherto hard limits of his perceptions. Reading Homer or Sophocles, he couldn’t scorn the idea of gods or God if he wanted to enjoy and get any good out of them. This wasn’t easy. The many Greek names in a single book of the Odyssey bothered him, but Pat had a dictionary, so that he reduced his natural strong hankering to know what happened next, and actually enjoyed looking up every name until, towards the end, he had a rough idea who and what they meant, soon recognized them as clearly as he once had the names of players of his favourite rugby teams. He looked up words in the English dictionary, then lost his shyness at seeming half literate, and asked Pat what they meant to save himself the trouble of moving from the fire to the bookshelf. He’d previously bought or borrowed books to read about war or sex, but now he got pleasure from a story taking in neither. Or he found that if a book was well-written about love or war then it gave more satisfaction than a paperback half a notch above comic books. He’d liked Tom Jones, struggled through the peace parts of War and Peace, read Tess and Fude. One day he said: ‘I suppose a lot of those people gassed by the Germans had read good books like these.’

‘Of course. Many of them must have,’ she answered.

‘Those German bastards,’ he retorted, and went on reading in the savage light of illumination.

Kevin was seen off from the crowded platform at Lincoln. Frank had been indifferent to his visit at first, only wondering what effect it would have on him and Pat, realizing finally that in a curious way it had enriched them. Frank had grown used to him, and by the time he left they’d become so attached to each other that Kevin had promised to write. ‘I’m glad you got on so well,’ Pat said on their way back from the station. ‘I was worried, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ Frank said. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were, though, instead of letting it drop only now?’

‘What’s the point? It would have been useless to let you know I was worried before he came.’

‘We could have talked about it,’ he said. ‘Talk is the staff of life. You don’t think I’d have taken it the wrong way, do you? I’ve come to the conclusion people don’t talk enough. There’s not enough talk. The powerlines are cut when a person hasn’t anything to tell or say. I don’t believe in the strong silent type — he might be strong, but he’s dead. I’ve met enough of them to know this, looking back on it. I prided myself on being one, once. But talk is blood. It’s a bandage as well. You’re a nurse: you should know. You wrap it around your wounds and don’t bleed to death.’

They drew in for petrol. ‘Honestly, I didn’t see the point of mentioning it.’

He said, when they were on the road again: ‘If you didn’t, why do you mention it now that he’s gone back and the issue’s over?’

‘You say you think people should talk more. So do I. Which doesn’t mean only you, either. I suppose your ideal is really somebody who didn’t talk at all except to say “yes master” and “no master” to all that you had to say.’

‘If I didn’t want you to talk, the only way would be not to talk myself.’ It was pointless to bicker, as useless as the frostbitten sunshy road in front. ‘Anyway, I hate arguments while I’m driving. You know: careless talk costs lives. But I’m sorry Kevin’s gone. We’d got used to having him.’ He saw she was upset, about to weep. ‘Don’t worry, love. He’ll be back soon.’

While still in bed at Pat’s warm side he sensed that more snow had drifted down, felt the cold presence of it beyond drawn curtains and shut windows, pressing thick over wolds and fields. Like a magnet it drew him out, silently to gather his clothes and tread naked to the kitchen where he dressed and saw by the clock that it was barely half past six.

Eighteen inches of snow had fallen during the night, drifted against gates and fences up to double that depth. He looked across the garden, at sprout tops like deformed mushrooms humped above milkwhite snow. It was a silent, low-clouded dawn, steely and lifeless, without colour. A shiver started at the roots of him, shook its way out. Winter seemed to go on for ever. The quiet countryside was more savage when at the mercy of snow than were hard paved streets in the city that put an invincible layer of paving between you and the rich worms. He’d slung his hook at the wrong time, landed himself first in the rainy season, now in the ice-age.

A path would need clearing to the road — though on first wielding the spade he didn’t know why, since no one would get up that route awhile to set down milk or newspapers. Still, a path looked good: if a ghost on skis passed by he would see from the sunken snowpath looped around half the house that someone lived there who was alive in it. The radio called this the worst winter for many a year, and no one could say it was lying.

Dawn had not yet churned its full shoulder above the bleak land. It was half dark, half day, day surfacing after being half-drowned by final blackness. But it had fought its way out, a rebirth of the day in hard uncompromising silence. Not a twig cracked, not a lip of wind, not one muffled paw in the settled snow. Even his spade was soundless, slicing layers of snow up and on to long mounds on either side. A silver light shone from the open kitchen door, and when the kettle signalled its boiling guts his path was already by the house-wall and nearing the lane. The whistle was subdued by zero air, by frostbite hovering over the newly created path, sounded like a whistle found in a Christmas cracker rather than its usual full-blooded shriek that dominated the tiny cottage until Pat could stand it no longer and snapped it off. The path, he thought, before turning to do so, will need cutting even further than the village if she gets called out today — which is bound to happen. Yet, strange to him, she’d hardly been summoned in the last week, beyond routine visits to the usual aging sick. ‘Snow is healthy,’ she explained, ‘but just wait for the thaw!’ Which was a fact: he loved the not-too-bitter silences of snow, the thick covering of whiteness and the hard digging needed to clear it. The ruthlessness when fighting it filled his heart to think of all that nature might still throw against him. He relished the shut-in evenings that seemed rich with life, more than he’d ever known; and if this wasn’t much, then it brought him back to life, which was everything.

No papers this morning. He heard the news headlines and flicked up the switch. It was a day to start with a breakfast, spread rashers on the grill and run the opener round a tin of tomatoes, crack eggs into a pan. It was an enjoyable life: a pleasant loneliness filled in trying to bridge the here-and-now with Pat to his old life with Nancy, in which the gorge of chaos was wide and deep. But the effort annoyed him, because it was too early to throw out the bridge, spring the camber and tighten the hawsers. Better to look back on it over much land and time, when the gaping earth wound of now would be a mere slit to step back over. Living with Pat he felt a contentment more enjoyable because he sensed its precariousness in that they hadn’t been visited by any sort of fatal quarrel. He and Nancy went at it like cat and dog, but here, maybe they were too absorbed to argue yet. And perhaps it wasn’t true that quarrelling was proof of love, for it was marvellous that they didn’t, apart from occasional sour looks of a too-early morning.

He cleared away breakfast and hatched a fire. There was a smell of tea, the subtle combined residues of tea made or about to be, a pleasant herbal odour joining generations of people and memories that persisted when the windows of summer were thrown open, went even beyond the drastic cleansing of renovation when Pat first came. Drawing back the curtains, thick flakes were drifting zig-zag in a hypnotic slow-motion down the outside windowpanes. It seemed strange, a snowfall in early morning. He’d always fixed the prevailing time for it as being towards dusk or during darkness. There was no telling where the base of the clouds began: the sky was particles of white, lapping slowly through the livid scar-blue of a day not yet wakened. In spite of the fire, he rubbed his hands: it was an ashen desolate marvellous window, but had to be turned from. Nothing would get through, not mail, milk, newspapers nor breadwagon — only perhaps the phone would ring for help from the village or beyond. He would have to dress up in compass and gumboots and brave the blizzard for provisions. Not that they needed much, for he’d taken care that they were well-stocked for such an undistinguished calamity, but he’d maybe slog it to the village just for the battle against piling snow.

He took orange juice and tea up the steep stairs. She lay with pillows heaped behind, and a book in front, wore a heavy cream woollen bedjacket rolled slightly at the sleeves, showing her white wrists. ‘I heard you making the fire. I think before that I was wakened by the sound of snow coming down. It’s funny how it wakes you.’

‘I thought you’d be still deep in it,’ he said.

‘No. A day like this is like the end of the world, so you’ve got to be awake.’

‘It’s the beginning, more like.’ He sat on the bed-end. ‘Unless you get called out, we’ll be locked in all day.’

‘Not a hope,’ she laughed, pushing strands of hair back over her shoulder. ‘I’m usually looking at people in bed. It’s good to be resting for a change.’

‘I should be in with you,’ he joked. ‘But I like to look at you. It’s a bit of a change, anyhow. Maybe I’m getting old, or older. I feel more alive than when I was in Nottingham. It’s funny, that. It’s not so many months ago, either, but it seems years. A family kills you; it kills everybody, I think, the way it drags your spirit down unnecessarily.’

‘That’s the only way to live.’

‘It needn’t be. There must be a better way. If there isn’t I’d cut my throat. In China they reckon there is, but not here. Go on reading if you like. I’ll go down and throw something in the pan.’

‘No, sit here for a bit. You’re always so restless. The air’s muffled with so much snow around, as if I’ve gone a bit deaf. It’s good to talk when it’s so quiet: words mean something. You know, you don’t have such an accent in your speech as you did when you first came. It must be my influence!’

‘I’ll be giving out the news on the B B C if I’m not careful. “Here is the news, and this is William Posters reading it. An atom bomb got lobbed on London this morning, so will everybody with a sore throat please report to Nurse Shipley on their way north through Lincolnshire?” I can see that, right enough.’

‘You don’t take anyone or anything seriously.’

‘It was your joke,’ he said. ‘I do though, inside myself. But outwardly I’m cool, dead cool.’

‘If you’re so cool, you want to be careful the fire isn’t out.’

‘No danger of that. If I’m cool it’s because I’m burning up. I haven’t got guts but a firegrate full of prime pit dust that you get no flame from but can toast bread at.’

She looked at him sitting there, smoking a cigarette, out of his depth, and not knowing where he belonged — a strong aura clinging to him that made her think she would one day wake up and find him gone. She couldn’t imagine the house without him. Or she could, in which case she couldn’t imagine staying in it, feeling that both she and it would collapse if something impelled him to leave as unexpectedly as he’d come. There was always a danger of it, but he would deny it in a blind rage if she mentioned it. So she never would, and maybe in this way it wouldn’t mystically lodge in his brain, and he would stay for as long as always turned out to be. He was downstairs, and came back with tea and fried eggs.

‘It’s stopped snowing. It’s freezing over where I cleared away. I wish I knew how to skate or ski, then I’d get to the village in no time for whatever we want.’

She smiled: ‘There’s nothing we need. The pantry’s full.’

‘And the fire’s burning a treat. Even if you come down in your shimmy you won’t feel the cold. I’ve never known a house so warm in winter.’

‘As long as the taps don’t freeze.’

‘I’ll melt snow.’

‘I can ski,’ she said. ‘I went to Switzerland the year before last.’

‘Where are they?’ looking around as if they might be in the bedroom.

‘I don’t have any, rented some when I got there.’

‘You’ve been around,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind travelling a bit, out of this country. I never used to think about it. Maybe it’s reading books that set me going, and talking to somebody who’s travelled.’

‘I wouldn’t say I’ve travelled,’ she said, a little too quickly.

‘Now you’re showing off,’ he laughed. ‘Maybe we’ll go one fine year, who knows? Hump our bags to Spain or Italy. I’d like to do that. I knew a bloke in our factory, about my age but single who set off to travel round the world. He saved up, and planned it for years, said he’d work when money ran out. I looked on him as a real adventurer, someone to envy. We had a party for him before he went, and it was even in the paper about him. I was sad to see him go, yet bucked at the idea of what he was doing. Six weeks later, he was back. He’d been through France, got as far as Barcelona I think. I was disappointed, almost didn’t want to know him. If I go away I’d want to do better than that. Don’t you ever get fed-up in this village?’

She shook the pillow, put it back under her shoulder: ‘Who doesn’t get tired of the place they live in?’

‘I mean bone-tired, right from the guts?’

She smiled. ‘You want me to say I do, don’t you?’

‘I want you to say what you think.’

‘You’re a smug bastard. As if anybody ever says what they think. It’s always what somebody else thinks — in a different form. You just want me to say “Yes, I’m thoroughly tired of it, so let’s go away, this minute, tomorrow” — just because you want to disappear. Why don’t you come right out with it?’

‘Well, it doesn’t mean that much. I only feel like that because I’m in a snowbound cottage with the only woman I’ve ever really loved. I can’t be happier, so I think of the wide open spaces open to us.’

‘Open to “me”, you mean. If you had any love in you you’d keep such thoughts to yourself. The first sign of love is when you think about the person you love, and apply the thought to her before turning it to yourself. As it is, you just torment me.’

‘If that’s the way it makes you feel, forget I spoke. I don’t believe in that sort of self-sacrifice.’

‘I can’t forget. You can’t undo things just like that. If you want to go, go.’

‘Excuse me while I get my skis and foodbag.’

‘Why do you turn everything into a joke? You have no respect for people. Nothing is serious to you.’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m shooting my mouth off. I love you. I like being here. But I’m alive. I talk because my arms and legs move.’

‘You think so? You talk, to show me your wounds.’

‘I’ve got less wounds than most people. I can wound more than most people, as well. Anyway, I didn’t say anything about going. What did I say? I forget. I can never remember what I said five minutes before. Five years, maybe.’

‘You said we should go away together.’

‘Is that all? Well that’s not much. Why are we fighting over that?’

‘I suppose it’s because I want to go too. But I can’t.’

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go, either.’

‘You said you were fed-up with the village.’

‘Let it drop.’

‘That’s what you said.’

‘Forget it, love.’

‘You say something, and then you say forget it, because the damage’s already done. If you’re really tired of living here, you must go. But don’t destroy everything bit by bit before you do. I won’t allow it. I have to stay, so leave something intact.’

His hand touched her shoulder, feeling its shape under the jacket and nightdress, a reminder of better hours than this. ‘You’re making a wrong sort of picture. It’s not true to our life here.’

‘It is. You want it to be.’

‘Make up your mind. I’ve already made more out of my life in the last three months, than in ten years before that. You know why? Because I met you. Since then everything’s changed, my whole mind. I feel as if my eyes are a different colour.’

This did the opposite of calm her: she couldn’t bear the responsibility for it: ‘It’s impossible to know what you want. You talk about going, then you try to tell me you’re in heaven.’

‘I only want what I’m getting,’ he said morosely, ‘what I’m able to get. If there’s anything bigger, it’ll come along without me wanting it.’

‘I suppose you want me to throw my life out of true before it comes to you? A little human sacrifice never goes amiss, especially when it’s someone who’s just taken ages to win a great personal battle. It makes it so much more satisfying.’

‘I hate sarcasm. It’s the worst disease I know.’ The stare in his grey eyes had emptied them. He seemed far away from her, beyond the house, in a seclusion private to himself, a step back and above any patch or person of the world.

‘Explain something to me,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Anything. Whatever you like. Just explain something.’

He thought her mood had marvellously changed. ‘What, though?’

‘Whatever you like. Think something up, and explain it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m not being subtle or sarcastic. Just explain something about yourself.’

‘You’re trying to get it out of me with a knife, so I can’t.’

‘I didn’t think you could. Can’t you explain anything?’

‘No, not yet. I don’t see why I should, even if I could. Explanations don’t automatically solve things. They don’t always make life better, either.’

‘Ah, now we’re getting at the truth,’ she said. ‘You don’t talk at all. All you can do is deny, deny, deny.’

‘All you can do is destroy.’

‘But you know, you’re such a bloody letdown.’ The hackles of destruction were out, all the goodness he had brought between them gone bitter in her in an inspired unguarded unjustifiable moment. ‘You act as if you died at the age of five,’ she said, ‘and have been living ever since on what’s left. You’re soft. You can’t take it. You can start it, but you can’t take it. All you can do is mystify and bluster.’

He sprang to the bed and crashed his hand against her pale strained face: ‘What are you going on and on for?’ he exclaimed. ‘Let it drop, can’t you? All I asked was if ever you got fed-up with this one-eyed village.’

She fell sideways from the pillows, the bedside telephone spilling onto the floor. ‘You stupid fool’ — wrenched out by sobs of rage, words spinning at him like wheels of fire: ‘If you want to do that you can get back to your housing estate or slum. I suppose they love it there.’ This final end to a quarrel had never been imposed on her before. She felt a shame that stunned her, a rage spilling against him and herself. How Keith would laugh if he knew of this — but wasn’t that why she had left a man with such a mind? But her face burned more from the blows, and tears forced themselves through, until the effort of fighting them turned shame to anger.

He stood at the window: black frost glazed the snow-covered ground; he hated it. Before, it had been comforting, an ally to his love, a balm to life. It now held the world’s evil under whitened hoods and claws and clamped all things down that he wanted to spin out slowly from himself by way of explanation to Pat. By which time the snow and frost would have melted away.

She set the telephone back on its stand. It rang at the same instant, incising the four walls with urgent noise, and she spoke into it as if no quarrel had happened, perfectly ready for her work. He walked down the stairs.

8

Work served the same purpose as snow and frost — to cover up scabs and interior minefields, muffle the galleries of his mind leading to caved-in girders and smashed hydraulic props. The air was keen, snow heavy on the spade, granite and marble at deeper layers that he didn’t work at, but attacked. Frozen seams from previous hard weathers called on the dynamite of his total swinging strength to prise them free from the flagstoned path by the side of the house. He went deep into his mind, but syphoned-off energy prevented him getting anywhere near the end or bottom of it.

She’d put on her overcoat, gloves, hat, picked up her bag and gone out, climbing across snow towards the village, passing the school where, already and in such weather, children were gathering. Phrases came to him, but the sounds contradicted each other and kept his lips firm together, and she’d gone off without a word, face set hard, like his own heart and face, like the ice-snow he was trying to crack on either side of the drainpipe. He didn’t know what had sparked all of it off. It seemed as if her sort of love was meant to eat each other up, exactly the sort he was trying to escape. People should adjust themselves to the external world, not to each other, a diffuse connection with the whole world rather than the icy inbite of destruction. There is a natural tenderness in everybody which should make it possible for man and wife — or woman and man — to take care of each other, and ignore the fastenings of over-strung emotion which strangle at both of them.

Till midday he cleared snow from around the house, scraped walls and steps, shook it from fences. Standing on the floor of the shallow loft, he opened a skylight and freed a good part of the sloping roof, right down to its blue slates, by wielding a long brush and shovel. He hauled up an aluminium ladder and fixed it from the skylight. Within the radius of his burning mind and arms he worked to push snow-ridges down towards the eaves, over and off, a spluttering impact as it hit the ground.

A whole flank cleared, he straddled the roof to begin the other. The low sky, absolutely without feeling or sense, a forlorn William Posters at his wits’ end and taking a breather, stood by his elbow and above his head, dumb, omnipresent, and never-pouncing.

Arms and chest sweated under his jacket, but he pushed strenuously at the snow. The thaw might not come for weeks, and his irritation at this was expressed by a slow, patient thoroughness in his task of uncovering the house. He swung the ladder over and fixed it to the ridge, made his way down almost to the eaves, scooping snow even out of the drainpipe tops.

A few beams of midday sun came through. On earth again, he shovelled snow from the lane, until the house and its outskirts was an island of brick, slate, paths and fences in an ocean of snow-covered wolds, an isolated clear speck of winter-liberated country. He inspected his work, walked around the cottage on solid ground, stamping his boots as if still necessary to knock snow off them. Cold air penetrated now that he was still, stood smoking a cigarette, wondering when Pat would be back. Possibly there was no point in waiting, but it wasn’t in him any more to run away. The fighting had only just begun and he hoped that both of them would be worthy of what they could end up becoming to each other. Two more calls had come in before she left, so a whole day would pass in helping some bawling pink blob of a kid into this arctic-orientated world.

He put on his coat and ploughed a way through to the village pub. Five lanes met at Carnford, sloped in at various points along the sinewy mile-long street. Much of the road had been cleared, though no bread would come from Louth that day.

He shook his way into the saloon bar, and the landlord was talking about it to the only other customer. ‘They’ll have to manage on biscuits and cakes then,’ he laughed. ‘I saw a fine stock of them in the shop just now.’

Frank reached for his pint and the cold tusk of it going down was something he’d craved during the snow-heaving. He sat by the electric fire, more for company than warmth, a solitary two-bar heater glowing from the depths of an ancient fireplace. The other drinker caught his eye: ‘I expect it’ll last a while.’

Frank didn’t mind talking: ‘I’ve cleared my lot. Been on it all morning.’

‘I’d never shift mine,’ the man said. ‘My kids are too idle. Strong, but bone idle. They wouldn’t lift a spade, not them. I’ve got seven of ’em, all grown up. If I said: “What about taking a spade to it?” as I did this morning, they’d say, as they did this morning: “If we want to do that sort of thing we can go to work. I suppose you’ll be sending us to work soon? Nothing would surprise me.” So we have to keep ourselves as best we can. It’s not easy, it ain’t. It’s not, either. My name’s Handley, Albert Handley. I live at the Burrow. Turn left by the next pub and it’s up the hill a bit. You’re living at Nurse Shipley’s, aren’t you?’

Frank couldn’t be sure till he saw her again. He took the measure of Albert Handley during a few gulps and commonplaces. He was a tall, spruce-looking man with short dark greying hair, the sort you could comb without a mirror. He seemed about forty, had brown eyes, a reddish face, and a small dark moustache. There was something intelligent, considerate and ruthless about his face, as if he’d left the army as an N C O not long enough ago to have regained the easygoing appearance of a working man of the world who hadn’t done much work because he thought himself a bit above it. He didn’t seem like a farm-labourer, nor a farmer, nor even one of those men from the council houses who took the bus for Scunthorpe steelworks every morning. It was hard to say what he did, though from what he said, he did nothing — hard to get to know such a man until you got to know him.

‘How did you land up in this place, then?’

‘Came to see Nurse Shipley, and stayed,’ Frank told him. ‘Have a pint on me.’

‘I’ll do that. Like the old village?’

Frank stood at the bar with him, pushed two empty jars towards the beer pumps. The landlord filled them. ‘I’m fond of a bit of isolation. Lived in a city all my life.’

He chuckled. ‘You’ll get it here. Health to you.’

‘Cheerio.’

‘I’m a Leicester man. Was on the coast in the war, artillery. Met a girl from this village. Married her. Worse move I ever made. Still, mustn’t grumble, as the parson says. Ever since then I’ve never had the bus fare to get back to Leicester. With a wife and seven kids every shilling gets snatched away. Perhaps I like it though, I don’t know. What’s your trade?’

‘Machine operator, when I do it. I gave it up a few months ago and came here to think things over. I read a lot, which stops me from thinking, so maybe I don’t want to think after all — yet.’ Half the pint slid into his throat.

Handley was also a fair drinker: ‘You read a lot, do you? You don’t look that sort.’

‘Thanks,’ Frank said. ‘I wish I could meet somebody subtle for a change’ — though aware of him being someone with whom small talk couldn’t get you hung, drawn and quartered. Handley laughed: ‘I used to read a good bit in the old days: Marx, Conan Doyle, Michael Arlen, Lenin. Not that I get much time for it now, old chuff, what with writing my letters, and painting.’

‘Painter and decorator, are you? Have another?’

Handley’s brown eyes looked steadily: ‘Are you rich?’

‘No,’ Frank told him.

‘I didn’t think so. Honour among thieves. Have one on me. It’s my turn. I don’t paint houses, I paint pictures.’

‘Pictures?’ Frank snapped into his new pint.

‘I have to live. You’ve never heard of Albert Handley’s Lincolnshire primitives? Neither has anybody else, above twenty miles away. But stay around a bit, and I’ll show you something before the day’s out. Get that drink finished, and we can walk up to the Burrow for a bit of exercise.’

‘I’d like to,’ Frank said. ‘I haven’t met anybody before who does paintings. Not that I need exercise after the clearing out I did this morning.’ He bought two quarts of brown, and they were ready to go.

The sky was darkening, as if evening couldn’t wait before closing in. An icy wind licked over the wolds, fit to prise open the village street, all doors clamped against it, smoke caught by it, scooped up slowly from every chimney. ‘I’ve spent many an hour analysing winds according to what part of the body they seem most hell-bent on,’ Handley said as they walked along. ‘Up here they’ve all got characters, the winds — which is more than I can say for the people. Sometimes there’s a leg wind that paralyses the kneecaps, pulls you over by the ankles like a starvo-loony mixing you up with the NAB bloke. Now and again a wind will get at your breath — a chest wind, the most dangerous of all. Or there’ll be a head wind, which makes the temples ache and the eyes smart. They just concentrate on one place, even in a gale. I’ve known a wind just go for the shoulders or the small of the back — leaves you groaning for three days with rheumatism or lumbago as if you’ve been conned into a job on the new motorway. A wind can give you a stomach ache as well, or it can get at the heart or liver. One consolation is that it never goes for two things at one time, but one is enough to floor you in most cases.’

The top of the snow had turned crisp, and boots cracked into it as they made their way through the shallower drifts. The sunken lane leading up to the Burrow had a three-foot depth to plough through, the only marks on it made by Handley on his way down. Even wild life shunned it on such a day.

‘The worst of living in the country,’ he said, ‘is that it’s not fit to live in.’

Frank was breathless. ‘I still like it.’

‘You’re not used to it, that’s why. Now and again I have a dull ache all over the left side of my chest, as if my heart is going to seize-up, and stop all life in me. I lie down and try to sleep, but it’s worse. I can’t paint when it’s on. If I dig in the garden I sweat. It lasts days, and when I wake up without it one morning I feel as if a fifty ton stone’s been lifted from my head. The pain’s terrible. It eats me up while it lasts but the local quack doesn’t know what it is. Nobody does. I always say it’s the wind — a special sort that just goes for that side of me. Why try to explain everything?’

The lane turned sharply, snow not too deep, so that a foot of it seemed like normal walking. ‘If you want your bus fare,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll lend it you. It can’t be much to Leicester.’

‘What the hell would I do in Leicester? Shoot roof rabbits?’

Back from the next bend stood a large three-storeyed plain-fronted brick cottage. ‘There’s the happy homestead,’ Albert said. ‘Fifteen shillings a week is what I shell out for it, and that’s all it’s worth, believe me. There are four buckets under the attic roof for when it rains, so thank God it’s snowing. We’re dreading the thaw. In winter it’s an igloo; in summer a cullender upside down.’

Within fences was a large garden: coal sheds and chicken coops next to the house: bike shelter, rabbit-hutches and wooden porch. It seemed a bargain to him. Two sacks served as doormats, iced waterbutts on either side. Some kids had scrawled in chalk: ‘Sticky bombs for sale.’ They kicked snow off before getting out of the deadly wind that Albert had been too busy talking about to notice what part of him it was getting at.

The hallway was bare except for a framed portrait of the Queen on one wall, and one of Albert’s larger pictures on the other. There were no mats or carpets on the wooden stairway, and it wasn’t much warmer in than out. A sea-like clatter of spoons and pots sounded from somewhere.

‘The family’s having something to eat. Let me show you this painting.’ Frank stood too close, stepped a few paces back, until he bumped into the Queen’s head on the wall facing. ‘Turn it round if it bothers you,’ Albert said. ‘I just keep her there because it looks good if somebody comes to see my paintings. They never used to buy any before I put that up. Then they thought I was a fine chap who should be helped. One of my best brainwaves.’

Frank got a good view, and nothing else bothered him. It was an epic combination of browns, greens, mauves and purple-blues, a massive background landscape as if meaning to depict the whole breadth of Lincolnshire. Against this was the vague grain of a brown cross, almost merging into it, and on the cross was the shadow of a man, his head not, as usual, hung in the hello death position, but somehow upheld and looking inland, over a violent shift of darkly coloured and merging symbols in the foreground. His outspread arms were drawn back over the wood and tied there. Hanging beneath the crosstrees was a row of small dead animals that looked in no way out of place. ‘They’re rabbits,’ Albert explained. ‘I call this picture “Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher”.’

Frank was transfixed. The totality of it reached a long way into his heart, touched a dark and not disagreeable world familiar to his senses and memory. It wasn’t so much the dramatic content, startling and effective though it was, as the colours and juxtapositions of shapes that weren’t relevant to the main theme, showing with terrible perfection a clash of personality punished by crucifixion. They were the colours he felt hidden between his everworking heart and disjointed soul, a coagulate of visual mechanism located somewhere behind the eyes. He had studied Gray’s Anatomy in Pat’s library over many weeks, but his idea of the body and its components retained the primitive impressionism of childhood. The plates, as clear and marvellous as coloured diagrams of the four-stroke engine, stood no chance against the eternal fixtures of his earthed imagination.

‘Someone from Grantham offered me forty pounds for it last week, but I asked fifty — what with the time it took, and materials I had to find. I think he’ll be back. Not that I’m worried. I could use the money, but I wouldn’t like to see it go either. I like it myself, and that means it might be good.’

‘It’s really got something,’ Frank said. ‘I can understand it, you know, but I can’t say much about it.’

‘Ah, well, that’s saying a lot in itself. I take small ones to Skegness in the summer, sell ’em for a few pounds on the front, but it’s hard. Every month or two I raffle one in the village, send my kids out with books of tickets at a shilling a throw. I clear twenty quid on a system like that. Then the odd few people come and buy one now and again. They must be scattered all over the county by now. I used to think it a funny thing, me being a painter, but I got over that long ago. I don’t know what sort you’d call me, a sort of primitive surrealistic realist I suppose — which means keck-all, but sounds like something. I just go on painting though, because I can’t do much else. I started during the war, saw some reproductions of modern stuff in a big book, bought an ordinary box of water-paints and some cartridge paper. An officer saw me one day and encouraged me, got me books, oils, canvas. Went out to Burma and got killed. He said I had talent, but also I’d got idleness, and that made it better.’

They went up to Albert’s studio, opened the beer. ‘I didn’t know there was somebody like you in the village.’

‘I keep low,’ Albert said. ‘I’m busy and harassed most of the time, and can’t be bothered with people.’ The room was bitterly cold, the floor carpeted with newspapers which Frank felt like kneeling down to read, as if one might contain the message of his life. He’d never been in an artist’s studio, looked at the vast square table scattered with utensils and bric-à-brac, all kinds of pictures leaning against it and the four walls. Some canvases were primed, others finished, but most were still raw wounds of thought split and laid open among odours of turps and damp dust. ‘I haven’t been in for a couple of days, that’s why it’s so cold. I might get back to it tomorrow, but I’m like a bloody motor car — can’t start in such weather. Maybe the wife’s got a bit of dinner, so bring the bottles.’

They walked along the corridor and down by the shaking banister. Two children, pinch-faced and happy, lay on the bare floor playing Monopoly. ‘It’s time you went to school,’ Albert said. ‘Don’t think you can stay away just because of a bit of snow. The vicar told me you played truant from Bible class last Sunday. If you don’t keep it up we won’t get another parcel at Christmas. See that you go.’

Via a bare parlour they entered a kitchen. A fire burned at the range, and down the middle of the room was a table flanked by wooden forms. Under the window was a huge pram, in which a baby played with blocks and rattles. A twelve-year-old girl with short straight hair and a face like her father’s was reading a book at the table, and an eighteen-year-old sister was washing up at the sink. Frank fixed his eyes on her. She was fair-haired with a sulky, thin face that didn’t altogether match her fine bust and mature hips well held by shirt and skirt. Her feet in carpet slippers, legs without stockings, she glanced at him with large blue eyes, a slight sneer on her lips.

Albert’s wife sat at the table, a white-skinned, large-boned middle-aged blonde. ‘Hello, Ina,’ he said, ‘this is Frank. He’s the man staying at Nurse Shipley’s.’ The girl by the sink, and the mother, looked again. ‘I brought him up for something to eat.’

A wireless-eye glowed green from the top of a low-lying pot-cupboard, one of its connections faulty. It kept coming on, staying for half a minute, then cracking out softly again in the middle of some B B C parlour game that would have sounded like the apotheosis of boredom had anyone been listening to it. ‘There’s something left,’ she said, ‘if you’ll wait while it warms. It’s rabbit stew as usual.’

‘There wasn’t any post,’ Albert informed her. ‘I would have got through. He’s a bit soft, the postman we’ve got now. In the last big freeze-up the postman made a sledge. Never missed a day — till he died of pneumonia. Still, they say it’ll be in either late tonight, or in the morning. Mandy can go down at six.’

The girl by the sink said: ‘She can’t. She does enough for this house as it is.’

‘We can’t exist without letters,’ her mother said, ‘you know that. We haven’t paid the grocer yet for that wine. Nor have we settled the newsagent.’

‘I didn’t drink the wine,’ Mandy said. ‘You two did. I didn’t read the papers either. You light the fire with them before I get up.’

‘You should get up before midday then,’ her mother said mildly.

‘Tell me what for, and I will.’

‘They’ll have to wait for their money,’ Albert said. ‘They won’t get blood out of a stone. Anyway, I’ll write a few more letters after I’ve eaten. Mandy can hand them in when she goes down.’

‘I’m not going down,’ Mandy said, coming to the table and looking at Frank as if seeing him for the first time. ‘I told you already.’

‘I’ll knock you about one of these days,’ Albert said.

‘Drop dead. Take an overdose.’

‘You rotten little sybarite,’ he called. ‘Get out of my way.’

‘You’re not saying much,’ she said to Frank, ignoring her father.

‘I’m thinking though,’ he answered.

‘I suppose he’s one of your pub mates,’ she sneered. ‘That wireless is driving me potty’ — and went out of the room. Ina laid dishes: ‘Mrs Warlingham came today for that painting you promised, of her house and orchard she said. I told her you were still working on it.’

‘She’ll be lucky if she sees that,’ Albert said.

‘She paid you for it.’

‘Half. I’ll do it when it thaws. Otherwise I might just as well give her a piece of white board.’ He reached for the bread. ‘That’s not a bad idea. As long as I frame it. It’s been done before.’

Frank opened the beer. ‘Got any glasses?’ Ina brought three — one for herself. ‘Are you any good at writing letters?’ Albert asked.

‘Only love letters,’ Frank said. ‘Why?’

‘Well, I’m a great writer of begging letters, a born begging-letter writer. To edge-up my income (such as it is) I turn out a few every week. You’d be surprised at the results. With an old typewriter, a copy of Who’s Who, a few stamps and a bit of imagination, quite a bit trickles in. Where’s that rough draft I knocked off this morning, Ina?’ She passed him a sheet of paper from the shelf: ‘It needs polishing yet.’

‘Listen to this, though, it’ll make your blood run cold. “Dear Sir, As you know from my last communication I have seven children on the point of starvation, and so far you have done nothing to help me alleviate their condition. At least, I myself had the goodness to write to you and describe their plight. I have had many vicissitudes in my life. Once a successful coal merchant, I went bankrupt when rationing stopped, had to leave the semi-demi mock-tudor pebble-dash detached I was buying on a mortgage and come to this rural slum. My car is rotting at the end of the lane, and I haven’t had a smoke for a week. Apart from that, as aforesaid, my seven children are undergoing hardship in spite of the socialist benefits from this left-wing conservative government.” A remark like that usually puts on an extra five pounds. You’ve no idea what pig-rats they are.’

‘One day he’ll come to see you,’ Ina said.

‘No he won’t. They never do. They hate poverty even more than they like money.’

‘But we aren’t desperately poor.’

‘Not much. The longer I live the more I know I’m poor. If he told me to get a job I’d throw a fit.’ He turned to Frank: ‘I’m a full-time painter and a part-time epileptic. But I’m so good at begging letters that I posted one to myself once by mistake. It broke my heart, spoilt my day, and I was putting a ten bob note in an envelope before I realized my mistake. My eldest son’s going into the Church. I can’t think of a better trade for a lad of mine. He’s at university already, thanks to a scholarship he was bright enough to get. He’s glad to be away from home because he doesn’t like my begging letters. I can’t think why: he never gets one. He calls them “charitable appeals”, the craven bloody hypocrite. Goes white as death when I talk about “begging letters” in front of his friends. They don’t get them, either, though I’ve toyed with the idea more than once, and he knows it as well. What can you do when you’re a painter? You can’t go out to work. Work is a killer, occupational disease number one for a bloke like me. If I do a stroke it puts me on national assistance for a year.’ He smoothed at his moustache, giving the same impression of sulkiness that had been on Mandy’s face, indicating dangerous temper in such a grown man.

Frank stood: ‘I’ve got to empty some beer. Where is it?’

‘You’d better use the one upstairs,’ Albert said. ‘You’d sink without trace in the one outside. The door next to my studio. Show him up, Ina.’

‘Don’t bother, I can’t get lost.’

He went through the hall — children still playing — and up the stairs. How could anyone live in a house so bleak? Snow beaded the windows, worried the chimneys with discordant yappings as the lifting wind hit them. It was a larger house than it looked, emphasizing the power of its protection as he reached the first floor.

He opened a door by Albert’s studio, presumably the wrong one. When his eyes focused he saw a bald-headed thin-lipped man, illuminated by a table lamp in a room of drawn blinds, sitting at a transmitter-receiver with earphones on and fingers ac a morse-key. The man, wearing a good suit, was sweating, shivering as if in the first stages of malaria. He turned a panic-stricken look on Frank’s intrusion, then swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘Get out!’ — an unforgettable picture.

Frank slammed the door, went in the next before giving himself time to parry the surprise of his first incursion. It was a whitewashed room, open to milky daylight of the outside snow. Nearly the whole space was taken by a low table, over which was spread a vast taped-together ordnance survey map. Two youths were leaning across from opposite sides, moving different coloured symbols across the co-ordinates. One, wearing a black leather jacket and a ban-the-bomb badge, looked up and said: ‘I’m Adam. This is my brother, Richard. Do you want a game? We’re practising civil war on England’s green and pleasant land.’

‘No thanks, I’m looking for the lavatory.’

‘It’s always more interesting when a third nation intervenes. Have a shot at it.’

‘Another time. Not now. Thanks.’

‘Across the hall,’ Richard said.

He shut the door quietly, stood by the dim landing. What a way to kill time. It’s like Ludo, or Snakes-and-ladders. And who was that bloke at the wireless? A notice posted on the back of the lavatory door advised him to now wash his hands, but one of the kids had pencilled underneath: ‘All right, so where’s the sink?’ Another remark said: ‘But pull the chain first.’ I suppose that bloke must have been a lodger, though I don’t know why he turned a gun on me, when I’m on his side. Not that he was to know. It was so authentic it didn’t look real.

He pulled the chain and went outside, collided with the girl he’d seen at the sink downstairs — Mandy — felt her breasts and arms against him. ‘Sorry,’ he said, to step aside.

She took his hand: ‘Don’t be. Come in here.’

‘Where?’

‘In here, quick.’ Her hand turned the door knob, and he followed. It was a clean whitewashed room with a single unmade bed, a chair and chest of drawers, magazine pictures of musclemen and Tommy Steele on one of the walls. An ashtray of cigarette ends lay on the chair, and the room smelled as if she had smoked in it most of the day.

‘Quick,’ she said, ‘please’ — her arms around him, lips fastened thickly over his. He responded, and after a few minutes lay with her on the bed, his blood stiff and beating against her thighs, one hand gripping her long blonde hair. Would anyone come in? Was he safe in this madhouse? But he was ready, and didn’t want to rush at it like a man who thinks he can’t do it, or someone who doesn’t think anything at all. On the other hand he didn’t want his good luck to push off before he could get set. Her clothes were up and open, arms around him as he spread over her. Kissing her eyes, he felt her tears on them, which may have been proof of an uncontainable passion, or of some bleak snowbound despair, for her hands fell from his back, and she lay still, breathing softly. He was in no condition to ponder on her state of mind, exploded into her as if someone had pushed him violently from behind, and at this unmistakable impact her arms gripped him again.

After a few kisses she said: ‘Now get up.’ The encounter had been so rare and dreamlike that he obeyed like a zombie. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘I should be the one to say that.’ He stood, while she stayed on the bed, tear marks still at her eyes. ‘Now give me some money,’ she said. He took out his wallet: three pound notes, and some change in his pocket. He put all of it on the chair. His knees shook, as if all strength had gone at one blow. ‘It’s too much,’ she said. ‘I only want a token.’

‘Enjoy it,’ he told her. ‘I did.’

‘Don’t tell daddy,’ she smiled. ‘Please go down now.’

‘It’s hard to tear myself away.’

‘Please go.’

He walked to the stairhead, looked at his watch, and saw he hadn’t been with her more than ten minutes. What sort of a family is this? In the hall he stopped again by Albert’s picture of ‘Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher’. He’d lost the romantic imaginative clarity of an hour ago, and the landscape colours were sombre and meaningless, the figure of the hanging man desperate with the ages he’d been up there. Rabbits turned to foxes, biting at wood, hanging on with filed teeth, as if after such great efforts they were going to climb and run at the man’s head, finish him off. Frank lit a cigarette, trying to fix himself somewhere on the picture, draw its totality right into him, meet it halfway at least. The face held, looked as if wanting a drink from the vague line of sea behind, aching to eat what landscape nine-tenths surrounded it, taste both before rabbits or foxes got there first. It wanted the world pushing into its mouth, to digest it and shit it oat. Yet no one was there to do it, or understand that it needed to be done, and he was hardly in a position to bend down and do it himself, scoop up earth and sea to cure his own agony.

Frank saw the picture as painted on the surface of a common house-brick, one pictorial from thousands plain that made an enormous wall he had to breach or climb. Maybe that man flexed on the cross isn’t Christ, but none other than my old friend William Posters, not dead yet, but surely dying, hanging as a warning for all to see. Bill Posters will be prosecuted, persecuted, gut-smashed, blinded, crucified: all those pictures of the cross and the bloke skewered on it stuck up at street corners with the common caption blazoned beneath. What was behind it? A wracked, hot-spring, wide-throwing black sea perhaps, God’s all-spewing bile slung into it like a dye-pill and churning it crazy. You’d think so from this picture. It can’t be a calm sea. No seas are calm except on postcards. It might look flat, but just peel back the top skin and look below, and that will be another matter. Or maybe there’s land behind, land you can walk across in a straight line to your life’s end and not get to the finish of, only rivers to swim, never a sea to reach. Or maybe one day I’ll be looking along a rocky, storm-coast: spray bursting by the bottom cliffs, mushrooming up as if mermaids were planting sticks of dynamite all over the place and blowing white water sky-high into the air, the full dull burst of breaking water battering my ears time and time again, never subsiding into flatness even though I button my coat against it, light a fag and walk off inland with my head down thinking.

Someone tapped his elbow: ‘We wondered where you’d got to.’ Albert wore a cap, as if against the cold in the hall.

‘I was caught in your picture. I can’t get away from it.’

‘Take it, then, I don’t need to have it up there. I’ll make you a present of it.’

‘It’s all right. I don’t need to take it. Thanks, though. I can’t take a man’s work like that. It should belong to everybody, if at all.’

‘Ina’s got the tea on. Come down and have a jamjar before you go.’ He looked at the picture himself, then turned from it. ‘It’s strange, but I’ve always wanted to be sickly and neurotic, yet can’t because I’m so strong and tough. I’ve been out on the bitterest nights for rabbits and pheasants, chased by the toughest keepers in the land, but got back none the worse for it. It’s bloody weird. Maybe I’ve got a super-duper built-in death-wish — which is why I gave my wife seven kids. I don’t know, but I suppose there’s some reason why I’m a painter. I’d like to explain it, being wedged out here in the wilds for a lifetime, and getting the whole lot of us by as best I can while I do my painting.’

His brown eyes glittered, feverish with the night behind them that, in his talent, struggle, and world-ignorance, he was trying to illuminate. ‘Come on down, and we’ll get that tea.’

9

Keith was so disturbed after a sleepless night that he missed a left-fork in the interlacing roadwork of north London, got himself shunted towards Cambridge instead of the Letchworth — Peterborough axis. This latter would have aimed his Sports-Triumph straight at the heart of Lincolnshire and the dead-end village in which Pat had incarcerated herself in a futile act of self-abnegation. Misery and injured pride improved his vocabulary while doing little for his sense of direction: that’s how Pat would have put it, sarcastic at the beginning and the end. Match that to a high moral tone and you have an untenable relationship as far as man and wife are concerned.

He’d set out early, in spite of blackening rain. Carruthers had been difficult about three days off from the office, saying that the new Watkins table-sauce account was in urgent need of smart treatment for the next T V series which, he added, is worth a lot to the firm. But Keith was just as likely to come up with an incontrovertible dead-set image racing along the open road, as he was locked in the super modern office block above High Holborn. So Carruthers had no option but to drop his hidden persuader technique on someone already a master of it — a prize copywriter who earned every penny of his three thousand a year.

Hearing all the arguments, his psychoanalyst also disapproved. ‘If you succeed, I’ll be pleased and surprised. But the chances are that you’ll fail, which will put you back two years’ — as if advising a tubercular Sisyphus not to push his great stone once more up the mountain when the gods had ordained it.

But Keith had decided to isolate himself from all advice since Kevin called on his way through London and said Pat had a man in to share her bright little cottage. A high moral tone had always been her line, and now she wasn’t only having an affair but had let Kevin go up and live in the same rotten nest. He at least had always kept that part of his life separate from what he termed his ‘permanent domestic cage’.

He filled the car with a homely stench of French cigarettes — which made him feel somehow safe. The wipers cleared his vision, swilled rain and dust against the outside screen. A youth and rucksack at the next hilltop held up a thumb and smiled, as if the thumb were injured and he were putting a good face on it. But Keith pointed to the right, as if turning off too soon to bother stopping. He felt guilty again, but couldn’t stand fifty miles of chattering, having to think of that bloody image, as well as plan his gambits for when he bumped into Pat. Not that there’d be much room for manoeuvre. It’s plain as all hell, getting Kevin up there while she’s living with another man. I’m not against it, oh no, she can do what she likes for all I care, but not in front of my son, understand? Not in front of my son, for God’s sake. Kevin hadn’t even disliked the chap, which shows how successful she was at, well, corrupting him — there’s no other word for it.

He’d intended stopping the car to consult the R A C book and find a way towards Peterborough, but whenever a layby was signalled his hands wouldn’t react to the offer of it, and he held a steady sixty along the present road. I’ll stop now, he kept saying, and draw in — but it was impossible. As long as I’m going north: he consoled himself for the strange state of his will, as if to stop would end his life, make him call off his expedition, fall asleep over the wheel, burst into tears, turn round, begin to doubt himself all over again. He pressed on the accelerator, nearly hit a grass verge at the next bend, then slowed to fifty on the straight because he had frightened himself.

Crossing London he’d licked through Highgate, and Muswell Hill — the place he was born and lived at most of his life. It hadn’t altered, he saw, detouring along the avenue and stopping by his childhood house. The extrovert Keith loathed it, while the introvert tended a secret passion for the hidden depths and darknesses of it. He recalled those ideal days before the war, the long never-ending boyhood peace of them. Later he rebelled against all that house and suburb stood for, had even joined the Labour Party at one time. Who hadn’t rebelled? Rebellion was the anaesthetic of youth, and that was the only way to get through it for some people; though if someone would kindly point out the anaesthetic for middle-age he’d be bloody glad.

Cambridge showed on the roadsigns: there was no point in turning off now, so he stopped for a legstretch and petrol. He wanted four gallons, watched the big hand of the meter slowly register, fascinated by its unclogged movement, an unattainable harmony that men got from machines but not themselves. A pity, but then, maybe they just sent machines ahead as an advance guard, and one day they’d catch up with the way machines worked now. Take this car: care for it, feed it with oil and fuel, drive it lovingly, and it would give good use and service for years. Why couldn’t a man be like that? Because he can’t. He’s more mysterious, superstitious, clumsy, despondent, clever. There’s too much we don’t understand about the light and darknesses of his insides. Isolate a specimen, do everything right both flesh and mental, and what happens? He dies one day from something you can’t trace. Not a hope. Even I’m like that, one time poet and now a mechanic of the wormy depths in the service of advertising, an instigator of conspicuous consumption which, as we all know, breeds spiritual cancer. But that’s my job, so what the hell? I’m not one of those who paid cash for his house.

One time he travelled around in a Jag, but they were getting too common, so he preferred the distinction of anonymity in a souped-up sports. In any case he’d soon be a shade too old for a Jag. Maybe after forty he’d change to a Mini, just to be on the safe side. He walked impatiently along the pumps, his appearance that of a well-dressed young middle-aging man, fairly tall, with fair wavy hair and the troubled aspect of someone whom smallpox had thought to attack but changed its mind at the last minute, merely branding him as a person who had gone through the mill in some indefinable manner. He had a high forehead, lined to match, and hazel eyes that looked out from a man-created hell, imploring as they looked, not at those they turned on, but begging the furnace within to make them less imploring. Such eyes resented what the mirror of his soul had turned them into, without questioning the soul itself. His small mouth, the sort that didn’t seem inclined to open often, would only say something if his soul in agony screamed at him to protest.

Working at the hidden springs of other people’s slothfulness, he had no time (or perhaps, after all, no desire) to turn these perceptions on himself. This he left to a psychiatrist who hadn’t till now made a good job of it. In spite of everything the expression of suffering was taken as sensitivity — which blended so well with his well-shaped chin and intelligent forehead that he not only inspired confidence in those he worked for, but was considered by women to be good looking.

The sun shone, driving through Trumpington, up past Fitzbilly’s and Pembroke. The sun had shone on it too during his three years reading English after the troopship crawl from Burma in forty-eight. Cambridge hadn’t altered. The students weren’t quite the sort he would have mixed with then, and might make good salesmen at Harrods, he thought, observing a scarved knot of them on the street. After leaving the Labour Club he had prayed many days in King’s chapel, entranced by the stained-glass windows, meditating on their pictures of Christ and the Virgin. Even in the bursting cold of midwinter he would behold them for hours, scribbling fervent impressions in his leatherbound notebook, nose red but scarf well drawn. After Burma he considered this extreme change good for his soul, and remembered Cambridge as part of a rich and varied life. While others were roistering and masturbating, he had revelled in the mellow, satisfying depths of tradition and scholarship.

Foregoing coffee, he got out with his memories as fast as he could, on the road to Ely. Twice in this short burst of the rainy day he’d stumbled on places that brought back disturbing echoes, made off from each with relief and guilt at having strayed into them against his will. Life, he had known for a long time, was something of a battle between his objective and subjective worlds, and neither treatment nor willpower could keep it level. If he looked out of the window one fine day and saw cleansing sunlight on opposite roof-slates, a voice within told him that all would be black rain before he got into his car for work. But if by then the sky was still clear and warm, he wouldn’t revel in it and bless his luck, but would see it as a sign of impaired reason, as another point scored by the interior subjective bully of himself. It won continually, by the bell and on points, but for once he felt the victor, saw his daylight swoop on Pat and her boy friend as a rational blow in a scheme to coax her back to the comfortable fold of his bijou gem and get some love and order once more into their lives.

But could he do it? He had doubts on this, as on everything, as each corpuscle of his blood must have had as it entered his heart full of doubt, and left it with the same feeling. Yet blood moved just the same, flowed through and kept him alive. Doubts, in the end, looking back on things, didn’t matter. It was what you did that mattered, and what he did in this case seemed already halfway done. Confronting her, he would have to sell the product before she would buy — to put it in crude and workaday terms. His ability to probe the pseudo-masochistic impulses of the human soul, and lay them out as alluring symbols of acquisitiveness or greed, ought to help in an expedition such as this. He smiled at the thought. Christ, what haven’t I sold in my time? Persuaded people to buy? The bonfires of conspicuous consumption had lit up the housing estates, flames dead already, dustbins emptied, ash cleared away. The world is a furnace, a boiler house, wheels within dark satanic wheels moaning above the backs of the H P-paying multitude. It would be nice if the reality were so stark and clear. Yet he liked to dwell upon simplicities, no matter how exaggerated. Simplicity was oil on the wheels of his chronometer heart, reaching even the poetic cogs of them, the last hope of the divided man who could never really put humpty-dumpty together again.

He had always regarded himself as something of a poet, more so after he had stopped writing, on leaving Cambridge. Not only did his self-respect need this reassuring memory, but skill at his job proved some truth in it. At his desk, blinds drawn, ‘DONOTDISTURB’ hung on the door (not locked in case someone should need to on urgent matters), he sat with only a desk lamp shining on pen and paper, a dictionary and thesaurus to each hand while he struggled in the jungles of myth and nightmare, an unacknowledged legislator who, with others, ruled the world. He wrestled for days over a single phrase, surfacing with it in the end like a drowning man who had been pulled under more than three times, a cracker motto in his teeth that in a few weeks would be dazzling around millions of peak-hour television screens. He found his work profoundly satisfying, in spite of snide articles against his trade that popped up now and again in the toffee-nosed weeklies. Work kept him above the brimstone lake of final despair, and made him forget the pain of living without Pat. In the last year he had not suffered unbearably, it was true, but Kevin’s revelation that she was living with another man had filled him with a doomlike blackness. This was understandable, in spite of the bull and treaty of legal separation. Yet he thought the blackness should not have been so thick, nor the doom so heavy. It was the way that Kevin, in all innocence, had told it to him, for in spite of his eleven years he hadn’t really understood the full strength of what was going on. But if this was the case how could the force of Keith’s righteous anger be caused by his son’s corruption? He was given to honest and penetrating analysis, so long as it was in the interests of self-preservation, yet he was afraid to admit (half sensed and so shied back from) that he was jealous of Kevin being an approving witness of his mother’s new happiness. Kevin actually seemed to like the bloody man, which meant that Keith in time was going to lose his son as well (no matter what the law said) — or his son’s respect, which was even worse.

He swallowed all of it, the whole bloody lot, blinded by a diffused jealousy, afraid to drive too fast over the straight flat road. The one solution was for her to come back, so that Kevin could be at home, and the wheels of a blissful domestic interaction fall into place once more.

He began to feel dead beat on the tiresome crawl along the back end of Norfolk. Veering across the flat roads and frozen landscapes of English Holland, cutting the afternoon mist of the Wash only a few miles beyond the desolation of his right-hand side, the country was coated with frost, turned pink and blue by the sun, penetrated in all directions by the thin spires of village churches. In spite of his determination to hate the trip, he found this part inspiring, surrounding him with a beauty never expected, a soft glaze of green frost blending with mist and sky at every point that the car nose turned to. Cold, impersonal, natural beauty always mellowed him with optimism, burnished him with hope.

Fatigue grew easy on his back, and he imagined returning to London this long way with Pat, especially to show her such mysterious and favoured landscape, watch her face as she enjoyed it with him. Maybe they could get a cottage here, use it for long week-ends, and holidays with Kevin when he came from school. They could go to the desolate marsh beaches and swim in the high tide of the gulf, a map of which on a café wall showed intriguing names: Thief Sand, Roaring Middle, Blue Back, Mare Tail, Herring Hill, Inner Gat, The Scalp, Black Buoy Sand, Westmark Knock, Wrangle Flat — names to fascinate schoolboys, some perhaps that he could use in advertisements for a new brand of salt. Along the straight but minor road beyond Boston the Fen drains were grey with ice, and house roofs looked as if they had been patched with snow after a hailstorm or cyclone. The land was darker: ice and snow had been the last of his expectations.

Eyes ached at the constant road. A pain needled his back, gnawed at his ankles after the gear and acceleration work getting out of London and the long haul up. There’s no one more determined, he grinned, than the man who thinks he might fail. He would stay up here for days, if necessary, no matter how much it would upset Carruthers.

10

All the rest of that day it was her intention to pack him off, but he was out when she returned, and in the lighted solitude there was time to calm herself, to realize that such action against a man she loved would be a defeat for her as much as for him.

But he went to the stair-cupboard and drew out his rucksack: ‘All right. You don’t need to tell me. I’m off.’

‘Going away only proves you haven’t the guts to face what you’ve done.’

He threw the rucksack down, a pair of shoes still in one hand. ‘I have,’ he cried. ‘But have you? That’s why I’m off. If I was in your place I’d never want to see my face again.’

‘What’s the point in saying that? Leaving won’t do much good either, though do it if you really want to.’

The lines on his face stood out. In the last few months his features had lost flesh, due to walking, exertion in the garden, the gathering in of fuel, and various repairs to the house. When she mentioned it he said that’s what came from being in love, and living a new sort of life. At this moment his face was cast between the two big decisions. One of them she did not want him to make, but wouldn’t say so even though her life seemed to depend on it. She saw the sky full of menace, crossed by long-tailed rockets that exploded on meeting, that threatened to descend and burn her life back into a solitude she could no longer face.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said. ‘You don’t even need to think of it. If I talk about what I’ve done I’ll smash my head against that wall. But if I don’t talk about it, I have to go away. You know what I mean? Yet you can’t know, can you, unless I talk, talk, talk? I’ve never been much of a talker at such times. A thing like this is sure to stop me talking, and this is the time when you’ve got to. But I love you though, and that’s true. If only I could talk, instead of eating myself up.’

I could talk to Nancy, he thought, and I can talk to other people ten to the dozen; I was fluent in the factory right enough, which caused all the trouble, but it was easier than this. He wanted to drag himself out by the roots, expose them for her, suffer. But it was impossible. She didn’t think their quarrel deserved it from him in any case. They should simply give in and end it all, pull out before the burns went deep, walk to opposite ends of the house, get caught up by a different and superficial topic. She herself was already surfacing, but the blows had left greater marks on Frank, though it now seemed wrong that they should have done so.

He walked over: ‘Stand up, Pat.’ She looked into a face from which no elaboration could be expected until the tension had worn off and so unblocked his heart, by which time they would be happy perhaps, and explanations would seem irrelevant.

Her face was level, faintly smiling. They stared at each other, and when they could no longer bear to, his arms were pressing her to him, as if she had been the one to think of running away.

She couldn’t imagine where Frank had gone. Where was there to go in such a place? She’d finished her rounds, laid her bag on the dining-room table, took off her coat and hat after a hard day. They had all been hard, lately. Maybe it was winter grinding its way like a juggernaut and presenting her with too many sick. Snow still scattered over the lanes had thinned and turned to a stonier grip of ice.

Fields were darkening, houses and cottages with yellow eyes shining in the sharp dip of land. She plugged in the kettle, opened a newspaper. The light oppressed her, seemed to curtail her sight rather than clarify the small print. Feeling tired — it must be that — she put on her glasses. But still she could not read, uneasy that Frank wasn’t in, surprised at it also, and smiling at how completely she lived with him.

The kettle shook her from drowsiness by a shrill cockcrow which she fled to stop. With Frank in the house there were two people to involve in her wishes, so no one could call her practical any more. She bent over a stack of logs by the hearth, to lay some on the coal. Practical people lived alone, had the run of their narrow earth. If they had any life in them they burned to death all by themselves. So it was either him or herself, and no one could tell who it would be. This was equilibrium perhaps, and maybe that was love. Balance, aid, interdependence, passion at the end burning these first three away like a sparkler, ever descending, ever decreasing, until the hand jumped and only the shock remained.

He had power over her, and she wasn’t used to it. He didn’t exude or revel in it, probably didn’t even know it was there, but its truth was proved by the fact that he had struck her and was still living in the house. That blow had taken her power, upset the balance, destroyed her independence. She saw it in simple terms: either it was true or, if she was exaggerating, her character was flawed. Even to think such denigration pointed to how much her self-reliance had cracked, compared to the days when, in London, she controlled her house, child, and husband. Memory let her down again, showing how Frank, on the day of his arrival, had helped to clear out a larder stamped with chaos, the mark of a woman anything but ruthlessly efficient and self-contained. So the rot, she thought, had started before his appearance. But when, when, when? The inner fires of agony blazed just as painfully with a person you loved as they did with someone you hated. They also burned when you lived alone, facts which proved you were alive and could feel how much there was to be thankful for.

Getting up to close the kitchen door and stop a slow draught eating into her legs, she heard a car coming down the lane, a deceleration as if for a final drift into the village. It pulled up outside, wheels crunching the glass of frozen snow. She wondered who could be wanting her. It didn’t have the weight of Dr Abel’s stationwagon, or a police car. Her last thought, before the iron knocker flapped like a gun, was thank God something had come to snap away her useless self-questioning mood.

A figure stood outside: ‘Hello, Pat. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ The voice penetrated her memory, a tranquil afternoon blown away by a cold wind nosing around. Neither of them knew how to make the next move. He immediately puts me into the same old role of deciding for us both. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘come in.’

Light dazzled him. Such unwelcoming words had, secretly, been one of his expectations. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of you to come and see me, though I don’t see why you thought it necessary.’ Such irony made him doubt his own reasons. By nature optimistic, he was easily discouraged. The greater his effort to wring success from impulse and optimism the more likely was he to back down at the first snub. When the great fire blazed, the drop of water frightened — though not for long, because optimism would eventually frog-march him back to his obligations.

He smiled, glad that whoever she was living with was not at home. ‘I’ve been meaning to visit you for a long time. Out of curiosity, let’s say. You seem to have a nice little place. How does work go?’

She was short of answers, except for blunt truth:. ‘All right. I bring babies into the world. Old people go out of it more comfortably than you’d imagine. I’m more use in a place like this. I feel a real person now.’

‘Meaning that I’m not?’

‘I only mean what I say. I’ve spent two years unravelling myself from that black knot we got into, so it’s no use trying to put meaning into things I didn’t even say. If you’ve satisfied your curiosity you can go.’ She was aware of speaking too quickly, of saying too much. But Frank could walk in any minute and she wanted her visitor out of it.

‘I didn’t come to stay. Merely to have a talk. In any case this isn’t a special trip to see you. I’ve taken three or four days off, and I’m just driving around the country. Quite without thinking, I found myself in Boston. Thought I’d call on you.’

‘You could have telephoned. Kevin has the number. Enquiries would have given it to you. As you can see though, I’m well. I have a house. I’m working.’

‘I think I could say the same.’ He recalled that the main consolation in being married to her had been the knowledge that domestic peace would mean a living death — and who wanted that?

‘You could,’ she said, ‘but I’m not interested in it. You’re the one who came to see me. I still can’t think why. Did you expect a better welcome than this?’ His opening gambits were being thrown back on him. No, he hadn’t hoped it would be easy, but she seemed more icy and bitter than he ever remembered. He’d give a lot to meet a woman who wasn’t as neurotic as they bloody-well come. ‘I suppose Kevin told you that I don’t live alone any more?’ she added.

‘He did. He gave me the idea you were living very informally, breakfast in bed and all that.’

She laughed. ‘What a way to put it! Though I suppose there’s no other way if you think it worth mentioning at all.’ He was bewildered, but hid it, had intended reaching this point only after, say, a couple of hours’ pleasant enough reminiscence. With a good memory and clear brain available for such occasions he’d planned it on the way up — but without anticipating the possible moves that would operate against him. The image of Pat in those few and far-off hours of peace between the great storms had been unclear, unrealistic, an ideal face of his own creation based on the best of her nature. He planned, but when the test came he only reacted. In the car, planted somewhere above his rear mirror, her face had smiled, but it was unlike the flesh-and-blood Pat before him now, tired from work, face lined, altered, but alert and full of energy at the opposing force of him.

The world, she found, was a different colour every day, and now the spectrum, usually sombre in winter, had swung to purple. The clock ticked, someone walked heavily by outside, and for one moment she thought the steps would stop at the door and Frank would enter. Keith waited for her to say something, while all she wanted was to see him walk out, hear him drive off and vanish; but she knew how hard it was to discourage him unless she stood up and told him directly to go, and if she did this it would only confirm in him that there was even more reason to stay. His tenacity scared her, and she wished Frank would come back.

‘Kevin sounded interested,’ he said at last, ‘affected, I might say.’

‘I should hope so. He’s intelligent, and fully aware of what goes on.’

‘But he’s only eleven. It’s up to us to give him the protection he needs. I give it to him, at any rate.’

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you, after all these years, that you and I have different standards?’

‘But we have the same son. We ought to have some common policy for his upbringing.’

‘Perhaps,’ she retorted, ‘but whose? Yours or mine?’

‘Both. Maybe we can talk about it.’ He felt the initiative on his side. ‘I didn’t come here specially for that, though. I simply took off, on impulse, and ended up here. I wanted to see you. There must be a meaning to something like that.’

‘Oh no there mustn’t. You’re just craving after the past.’ This stupid, irrelevant, chance-meeting (which was what he made it out to be) had too much importance because of a unifying fatigue, and even this much in common she did not like. It coloured and thickened the atmosphere, made her doubt herself when she should have been decisive and brusque enough to send him away at once.

He lit a cigarette — the same blue packet. Wasn’t it still chic in his job to buy a case? ‘We had a rough time,’ he said, ‘when we were together. Too rough for either of us. It was perfectly natural that we split up. But it’s more than two years since those battles.’

There was a pause, in which he felt foolish that no one was talking, and until she felt the pity of so much wasted time: ‘I’d forgotten about it. Even when I remember, it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Maybe it’s as well,’ he said, encouraged. ‘Instead of taking up where we left off, perhaps we can start even from beyond nothing. It’s not Kevin’s future that matters, but you and I. Things would simplify if we lived together again. It would solve all our problems.’

‘You were always so concerned to solve problems. That’s what made half of them. When you pull out you see that there aren’t any. At least, you do after a while.’

‘I don’t understand that,’ he said.

‘That’s honest, anyway.’

‘I love you, have ever since we separated, even when we were together. I still don’t know why you left. We could have survived that storm.’

‘And gone into others,’ she said.

‘And weathered those also. That’s what life is. One big storm after another. You go on and on, but you can’t let your-self sink under them.’

‘At one time you were the one to sink. Have you forgotten? You see it all in a rosy light now, but I’ve got a sharper memory. These so-called domestic storms eat the middle out of you. They were a way of destroying you, taking up your life when you’d got no job to do. You went off to the office each day no matter what happened, but I was left at home in that dead, miserable house. You thought I should be happy in it, imagined I was unhappy because I wanted to be, because I was born like that, because I had nothing else to do. But nobody is born like that. People are made by themselves and other people. You wanted me to work for some charity or other in my spare time, something which would leave me free for you but still not get at the core of what was eating me. And now you have the nerve to ask me to go back to the same thing. You can keep your image of a storm and a ship for a new brand of tobacco, but I’m on my own feet now, and you’ll never know how much it cost me to get here. And as for going back, I’m not that sort of person.’

He heard her out: ‘Suppose we forget all that? I still don’t see why there can’t be some advantage in us living together again. You can do the same useful job: there’s plenty of need for you in North Kensington. I know we’ll be more tolerable to each other after all this time apart. It will have been good for both of us.’

Every word scraped against the carefully-built edifice of her self-esteem. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘every disaster is a blessing if you’re spineless and lack imagination. But you underestimate me. I could never live with you again.’

He lost patience in a passionate way that he thought might appeal to her by its intensity. ‘Pat, why are you so bloody cold towards me? We have a son, remember?’

Everything he said seemed out of context, unconnected, yet from it she tried to disentangle the threats he was making in his subtle faint-hearted way. ‘I don’t even loathe you,’ she said. ‘It’s not that. I just dislike you at times when you cross my memory. Seeing you doesn’t make things any better.’

He was encouraged by the mounting force of her attacks, though they hadn’t yet attained that pristine viciousness of the final days before their break-up. Still, he hoped that at last he might be getting somewhere. ‘Even to say that means that I affect you.’

‘I don’t see any use in your wanting to recreate the holy family with me at the middle of it. The family is all right for the man perhaps, but it’s no use for the woman. I refuse to be tied up in that way. Don’t think my life’s easy up here, either. It’s harder than it ever was, but funnily enough, I like it. I actually like it, because I’m more myself than I ever was, and I don’t care how many times I say it.’

‘Even with your boy friend living here?’

‘That has nothing to do with you.’

‘Hasn’t it? But why can’t you still have this life, but with me in London? Come back, and I swear we can make a go of it. I’m not the same person as before, and you aren’t the same, either. We’ve grown out of all that frightful quarrelling that puts you off so much. It puts me off as well, but we’ll be able to manage with each other now.’

‘Would you be prepared to give up your job and everything else in London, and come to live with me here?’

‘I can’t, you know that.’

‘So neither can I,’ she said.

‘Why not? There’s no real argument against it.’

‘Not to you. To me there are dozens. Also I’m in love. Do you think I could live with someone without being in love? That shows how little you know me. Do you think it was because I was lonely and needed a companion?’

It stopped him too sharply, and he recognized it as being the end. His fatigue had changed to a pallor she had never seen before in him, a whiteness at the side of the mouth, a flexing of hard veins at his temples. She couldn’t believe that her blow had been so desperate, nor that he could simulate such pain. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘and this is the person you were in bed with when Kevin went into your room one morning, having innocently made breakfast for you both?’

‘Why make so much fuss of that? Kevin knew us well enough by then.’

‘It won’t happen again.’ He smiled, in spite of his loud words. She was near to tears, iron control needed to dam them back: ‘You must have been playing with that piece of blackmail all the way up. Not that I didn’t suspect. I only hoped you’d never have the vileness to use it.’

‘Do you think I’m a complete fool?’ he cried, standing up. ‘I mean what I say. That’s real life, that you pride yourself on leading. The real life! These are the real facts of life. Simple and hard. What you think is real life is the fool’s paradise that you’ve made for yourself up here. It never solves anything, to cut yourself off.’

‘Real life isn’t that,’ she said, ‘it isn’t what the world says it is, but what you feel to be inside yourself.’ He was harder, more direct than years ago. He didn’t display miles of innuendo any more before coming to the point — in order to make the storm more violent and bitter when it burst. His skill and patience had gone, and the result was ugly to her. She didn’t know how to deal with it.

‘You left me,’ he stated, ‘and you abandoned Kevin, so he’s in my care. He’s only been seeing you in the holidays because I allowed him to.’

‘You mean I take him off your hands while you go off to Majorca or wherever it is with some typist or other.’ She raised her voice: ‘And stop talking like a judge. You’ve no right to judge me, in spite of your blackmail.’

‘I don’t want to. But Kevin won’t come here again. You can keep your facts of life away from him.’

They hadn’t heard Frank come in. He stood at the open door: ‘What facts of life? What’s all this?’

11

Even before opening the door Frank knew who it was. His reasons were vague, but he didn’t question his instinct. Two cars outside made it seem like a bloody roadhouse. He heard voices within but not what they were saying, Pat’s tone quiet and insistent though edged with hysteria, the man’s gruffer, loud, but with an odd shrill phrase chopping it — as if they’d been arguing for a long time and not yet convinced each other.

His instinct told him it was time to go, walk off, never look back, be a hundred miles away before midnight. The husband had returned, the game was up, and the rules said blow town. All’s fair in love and war. But love that equals war ain’t love. Running away was all right for a lark: it left everybody happy because things had fallen out as they should. But times had altered, and he happened to be in love, so there was nothing to do but turn that key and push that door.

They were facing each other across the table, tea things still on it. His unexpected entrance froze them. They looked like a brother and sister who had been talking about him. Keith’s hands rested on the table, by his cigarettes, lighter, and cold cup. Hers were on her lap, out of sight. She knew some introduction must be made, but gave Frank time to take stock of what blind emotions were knocking about the room. Her normal reserve of control had been drained, left her pale, her life now at the mercy of the bare features of her face.

She hoped Keith would not leave and drive away. That was all she wanted a few minutes ago, but if he went now he would never let her see Kevin again. It was so possible that she felt faint from the effort of holding down her blind misery.

Keith forced himself to glance at Frank. Having lost himself in plans and hopes, pre-occupied to the utter depth of his life, pleading to the exclusion of all else, he hadn’t foreseen this sudden appearance. Having failed, he wanted to go, but a new factor stood by the door as if it would never move or say anything, as if all of them were waiting for a bombardment to end before returning to normal life. Time passed. To Frank it seemed short because he was the first to speak: ‘Why did you come up to see Pat, then?’

‘A chance visit,’ Keith said, easily.

Frank, deciding not to sit down, felt that Keith was no stranger, since Pat had told so much about him. He was often angry that he could still take so much of her, while he had kept Nancy out of it. ‘It must have been important to bring you all this way. There’s a sharp frost tonight. It’ll need careful driving.’

Keith looked at this strong-faced broad-shouldered man still in top coat and scarf, the sort of working-class chap who, once out of housing estate and factory, lost his callouses and the final trace of discontent. He’d seen such types some time after the war at Cambridge, inmates of various colleges able to believe their intelligence but not their change of life — even in their second or third year. He looked younger than both of them at this moment, which gave Keith an undeserved feeling of superiority — somewhat mauled though by the fact that Frank had been the first to ask questions. Keith didn’t like that at all, and he liked even less the fact that he had answered that question.

Frank waited for him to stand up: it was always for the husband to make the first move, or try to, though the rules were shaky these days because not only had he come into the house when he should plainly have fled, but he had already spoken to the husband in a way that seemed unlikely to start a fight. He was a traveller in a strange country, and he liked travelling. ‘I’ll make some more tea,’ Pat said, ‘if there’s any talking to be done. There’s no drink in the house.’ Frank followed her into the kitchen to wash his hands: ‘What’s he come up for, then?’ — the tap flowing loudly against the bowl.

She looked at him: ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’

He stood with wet hands, regretting a question that only disturbed her. ‘Has he been upsetting you?’

‘Well, I was surprised to see him. I’ve had a difficult day, in any case.’ That didn’t explain her general air of bewilderment and shock. Hard days often left her in a good mood. He remembered she was menstruating, which certainly didn’t help. People always choose the right time to visit those they don’t like but pretend to love, he thought. ‘If he did upset you I’d flatten him.’

She put down the teapot, face rigid, eyes burning with the force of her words: ‘If there’s any of that, there’ll never be anything between us again. I’ll be finished with you. I won’t have any of that in this house. This is for me to settle.’

‘All right.’ But he knew something had been said, and that she was holding it to herself, too bloody tight and haughty to put the half-weight of it onto his back. ‘I’ll be subtle. Iron won’t melt in my mouth.’

Both men looked equally at home. Keith picked up the evening paper, scanning the front page. Pat came in with the tea. ‘Are you looking for a job?’ Frank asked, sitting down.

‘I have one,’ Keith said. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m living on my savings.’

‘Whose savings?’

‘Mine. Do you want to look at my hands?’

‘Not particularly. It wouldn’t prove anything.’

‘It would if you held yours up as well.’

Keith put the paper away. ‘If this is the way you compete for your lady love it won’t get you far.’

‘It won’t get me as far as London, and that’s a fact. It ain’t necessary for me to compete, in any case.’

‘You think not?’ Keith retorted. ‘You’d be a lucky young man if it weren’t. And the woman would be unlucky, wouldn’t she, Pat?’

‘She wouldn’t think much about it,’ Frank said, ‘unless she lived in the Dark Ages.’

‘We’re in them now,’ Pat said, pouring the tea, ‘so perhaps she would.’ She put bread and butter out, and biscuits. Frank ate, but Keith couldn’t. Pat only wanted tea, feeling parched and feverish at the throat. A petrol stove burned in one corner, but Keith was chilled, unable to trace the moves that had landed him in this wintry unlucky cottage.

‘Do you mind if we talk alone?’ Keith asked.

‘I do,’ Frank said. ‘I’m staying. But say what you like. Don’t mind me. I live here.’ He waited, curious and interested in this new kind of situation that at the moment made him forget his natural disadvantage of worldliness.

‘After all,’ Pat said, ‘we did have a long time before he came.’ Keith did not like him. In the old days, if any man looked at Pat otherwise than by accident, he imagined that man in bed with her, and immediately loathed him. Now he was in the same room with a man who was not only her lover, but had flaunted the fact in his son’s eyes as well. He had no real claim on her, but saw Frank as an under-educated throw-out of a workman who had treacherously planted himself like a rank weed in the fair field of his hopes and affections. He and his type fell by the million under the sway of his sub-Freudian scythes, spent their sweaty wages before displays of deep and tricky symbols. No doubt Pat had told him of their past troubles, revealed secrets. There was an air as if they’d been living together for longer than they had. Present lack of speech didn’t faze them. They were undisturbed by each other’s weariness at the end of the day. Maybe she’d been truthful in saying she was in love. The idea appalled him. He knew they wanted him to go, be alone and console each other, but he would stay to the bitter end of what his own perversity had dragged him into. Yet at the same time he wanted so badly to leave, fly down those icebound lanes to Boston and the south, back to the warmth, light, and civilization of London. He could not get up and make an exit that would satisfy the pride that had suddenly become apparent in front of another man. ‘I came to ask Pat if she would live with me again.’

‘I don’t see what else you could have come for,’ Frank said.

Keith remembered the advice of his analyst, that speech was always less harmful than silence, often a definite advantage. ‘I object to Kevin being up here when another man was in the house.’

Frank laughed: ‘It’s better for him to see a man here than not. Gives him a sense of security. It’s even healthy for him. I’d like my wife to take up with another man, in case the kids grew up kinky. You never know.’

‘I have different views,’ Keith said. ‘I happen to be still in love with my wife. I object to my son witnessing the life she leads with someone who isn’t his father.’ Frank thought that was the way people only talked in books and on the BBC. He was amazed to confront it in real life.

‘There’s nothing wrong with what he sees here,’ Pat said. ‘You’re just turning it into something unwholesome.’

‘I don’t see the point of this,’ Frank told him almost gently. ‘Pat stays with me. There’s no need to bring Kevin into it.’

‘You think not?’ Keith said. ‘You obviously haven’t the power even to begin to understand my point of view, though it’s simple enough.’

‘We’re different people, you and I,’ Frank smiled, ‘brought up in different ways. Is that what you mean?’

‘You’re saying it. I’m not.’

‘You bet I am, when you can’t come out with it straight. If I was in your shoes I’d pull out without any fuss.’

The tone was falling below standards that Keith had been moulded to respect and live up to. This man knew no rules, had an undisciplined uneducated mind, and was actually trying to tell him what to do, to give advice, insults which he had no way of countering. ‘I’m sure Kevin would be better going to France or Austria for his holidays. If I were in his place I’d have had Lincolnshire by now. I’d want a change.’

‘You mean that if we were divorced,’ Pat said, a smile which made her lips seem thinner, ‘and I was married again — all respectably — there’d be no objection to Kevin coming up here?’

Keith also smiled: ‘Don’t you know that we’re living in an age of conformity?’

‘Why try to soften it?’ she said. ‘Frank won’t mind.’ They all still sat, and she saw this as a help towards no real quarrel breaking out.

‘I’ll take anything from a cunning bastard,’ Frank said, ‘except action. Let’s make it plain: you want Pat to choose between me and Kevin; and you think that if you can blackmail her into choosing Kevin, then I’ll just quietly sling my hook and leave you on the field? How long does it take to put you off? Do we have to make a declaration of solidarity, or something?’ He understood Pat’s diffidence about provoking a row, but he saw there was nothing to be gained by listening. Keith might have the whip-hand but he couldn’t have it all in tea-party manners.

‘I don’t see why we can’t settle it in a civilized manner,’ Keith said.

‘I suppose by civilized you mean your way? There’s nothing to settle. It’s no use using your subtleties here. It won’t work. You’re not persuading anybody to buy Daz or vote Tory, so don’t come it.’

Keith laughed. ‘It’s no use trying that line with me. I’m completely apolitical. I dropped all the political stuff years ago. I’m simply asking you to choose,’ he turned to Pat.

‘How can I?’

Frank sensed her tears, as close as when, weeks ago, they had quarrelled and he had struck her. The recall of it doubled his rage and bitterness. He felt as if standing on a shellbacked insect getting bigger under his feet, felt himself blacking out towards another strange light dominated by the smooth face, fish-eyes and polished shoes of the person whose opposing spirit wanted to crush and strangle his own: ‘Listen, you bastard, you’ve got no right to come up here and spoil what doesn’t belong to you, to wreck and ruin to your own sweet tune. Your cock crow’s hoarse and false, mate, full of maggots, you miseducated boatfaced bastard eating food and wearing clothes you never earned or advertised on the telly. You speak calm but you boil like an empty kettle, the moon in your mouth and the sun up your arse. You’re starry-eyed and cloudy at the brain except when it comes to doing the sort of job that will keep you like it forever. The world’s top heavy with you and your sort who wank people’s brains off every night with telly advertisements that make them happy at carrying slugs like you on their backs, but I’d like to see you do a real day’s work, if you could, if anybody’d be crazy enough to set you on.’

Keith pulled back his chair and stood up, a hand at his forehead as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer and was wondering where the blood poured from. ‘I had a commission in the army,’ he said, his voice dry and shocked, ‘and put people like you into detention.’

An almost soundless blow sent him against the wall, bent double as if to look at some intricate design on the carpet that he remembered seeing years ago in Heal’s. Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face, an engulfing polar cap. The chair cracked. Keith reacted, taller than Frank, heavily built, fist bursting, a whale-head driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness.

Pat cried out at the black sky: feeling the rotten, festering sores of the everyday world a thousand times enlarged bursting over her again, the love and peace, isolation and work made into a disease that she only wanted to shun. In a few hours it had happened, the impossible, unexpected, unwanted, all out of nothing, for no reason, taking away two years of dignity and usefulness. ‘Frank,’ she cried, ‘don’t.’

He was unconcerned whether it was the end or not, in some ways hoped it was, considered himself in the way of it since leaving home, wife, and factory, splitting his life’s tree with the axe of temperament and bloody-mindedness. The table roared, skidded before it could slice his spine, met the wall. He flung himself at the rushing figure, shoulder against chest and threw it stolidly back, drove his fist at an uprising forearm as if to break bone.

A voice telling him that this was no way to argue, a surrender to barbarity, was stifled as a stab in the back from a world he had recently met. He hated this world because it let him down at such a time, didn’t tell him how to avoid a punch-up nor how to survive it. With flooding eyes and face awash, a waterfall came crashing from the roof. His fist swung into a blind, wet, unkillable face that slid away, then wielded its own granite response.

There was no stopping or facing each other except by attack. Frank wasn’t conscious of thought, or even of seeing Keith’s upright body helpless against the wall before the violence of his opponent left him a shell unable to dwell on how he had come to begin this spiritual carnage. The room was a lighted cave, purple corners, greying walls, blue floor underfoot seen from scarlet eyes that alone had strength left to know what had been done.

Keith fell, groped and spread. The house was silent but for a clock ticking from the kitchen. Frank felt isolated, pinned into the darkening hemisphere of his pain, used, shamed, unnoticed, an animal at large in the frightening wilderness of himself. No one else was conscious in the house — he was the shell who conquers, winner of desperate wars in which despair is the only winner because it takes everything and loses you to yourself.

He sat on the floor, leaning at the wall in the smashed room, knees drawn up and smoking a cigarette, wondering why he hadn’t left when he saw the car and realized who was in the house. He had shunned the unwritten rules, the birthright, the tradition, and now the wage packet was proffered to be filled with his blood and life for repayment. Retreats are always wise, for if you retreat often and skilfully enough you may find that one of them has become an advance if you are quick to exploit it at the turning moment.

He was conscious of the room’s true shape, geometry around chaos. How had it started? He didn’t know, except that it was stupid and unnecessary and that he alone had done it. A sickness of hunger swelled in his stomach, but he couldn’t break the barriers of misery to get up. Pat had gone, he knew, left some time during the fight. He didn’t even wonder where.

Through the kitchen and out of the back door iced air gripped his throbbing head like a great hand, pressed more pain into it, a compress of cold sky. The big moon had been thrown up from the black net of bare tree-branches that stayed outspread waiting to catch it again should it fall back. Luminous, yellow and fire-bright, the blue-night sky held it, pale in the middle then darkening outwards. There were millions of stars. A car started at the front of the house, engine opening with a roar, charging down the lane, gear changes happening quicker than he could count. The garden was empty. Let her go. What else could she do? What else could he do, either, come to that?

He held fainting onto the rim of the sink, the grey narrowing cylinder of unconsciousness passing over, slowly receding. The roads were iced and dangerous. Why had she done this when all he’d wanted was to protect her, keep her from the insults of that mad bastard in there? There was some reason in it, but the only thing she could do was take-off into the black night of narrow lanes, the steep sleeve-hills of this winter land that burned the heart out of you with its ice and frost.

A cock crowed — shaking frost from its comb no doubt. He didn’t know what hour of the night it was. Shutters had fallen over the sun and moon, and he couldn’t break out of this timeless cottage. What had these last months been except a womb? Having taken off from trouble island he’d dived deep into what seemed like peace. Why did I do such a stupid thing? Not that I’ve been aware of it till now. Yet if it had been happiness, where was Pat? Gone, in spite of her so-called love, run away at the first sound of pain and responsibility, ultimately frightened at the back of her fine face and behind her strong front against life. He remembered her cry: ‘Frank, don’t!’ when the fight had started. Why hadn’t she shouted: ‘Keith, don’t!’?

With a bowl of water he walked into the flaying light of the living-room. Keith slept on the floor, grey and cold, his face grazed, eyes blue, bunched mouth dark with blood. Yet his sleep was gentle, like a recuperation from some great struggle that had lasted all his life, and which would only land him back into it when he woke up. He seemed more of a man, lying in such a sleep, stronger, more in control of his ultimate safety. Frank had intended reviving him with the water, letting a chute of it fall over him, but thought he deserved better than that, ought to be left alone in his prostrate dignity.

There was no point in staying. He was the bomb in the house with the slow-smoking fuse. Bill Posters was in paradise compared to this. To be prosecuted and persecuted, dogged and hunted is to be wanted at any rate. He hoped Pat would come back soon, but knew she wouldn’t. The fires were played out, purple ashes cold, black waves chopping at the mast. His packing-in from family and job now seemed light-headed, a lark, a jaunt, a cowardly truant meant to be skedaddled back from if the novelty grew stale. But now that a second break was on him, the first one seemed real enough, pushing the old life one stage further back into the past.

He pulled the table to its usual position, set chairs in old places, closed doors, straightened pictures and mats. Order, order, order, there was no such thing as order in the land of the heart. The neat house and the bombed-out heart hid the truth from each other, a devastating fact. Restoration was quick and complete, the only incongruity being Keith. Why not leave it all as it was at the beginning? He set his mouth in a grin when all he wanted was to smash his head at the wall and finish off the live expanding stone in his chest.

He worked his fists under Keith’s armpits, fastened his grip and dragged him towards the stairs. Every muscle in his body strained, as if, at each step, they would burst and leave him dead and helpless. He had never been more consciously afraid, for there seemed an element of death present in the effort to get him up towards the bedroom. In spite of Keith’s weight it was an effort he knew could be easily mastered at other times, for his strength had grown since leaving the factory.

Time drew a circle round him, moved with him step by step but refused to be measured. The spending of his total strength couldn’t slacken for a counterfeit second. Unless he spent his agony in this way he wouldn’t be able to leave. Any strength remaining would weaken him, make him sit down and think things over until it was too late — until she came back, or Keith regained his consciousness of life. There must be nothing left. He would take nothing from that house. At the blackest and most desperate part of his midnight she had gone, seen him as light headed and fickle, fighting for no reason, reverting to the animal of what she thought was his past — in spite of the knowledge and intelligence she knew he firmly had. It showed how little she had ever understood and therefore loved him. It was impossible not to leave, even in the middle of the deepest love he’d known, for that’s how she wanted it, for her own good, for the good of Kevin, maybe most of all for the good of her husband — though she probably wasn’t to know it yet.

The emptiness was breaking him. The dragging of this stone uphill was snapping the cord of his senses, tearing into his living strength like grapeshot. Maybe if she would come back. Maybe. Things didn’t happen that way. It was impossible. And if that door swung open now, the end would be the same. It had to be. He would leave. He would save her for herself and the others. She had gone out for that, expected it of him, a test that she maybe hardly knew about, to see what sort of a man he finally was. The idea was awful but he knew it to be true, the one action that could atone for having started the fight, and the only one that could prove to her how much in love he was.

No more steps behind his heels, he moved along flat boards, tapping them and searching, hardly able to believe it. Where should he take him? Onto Pat’s bed? He’d already given it up to that extent, to think of it only as hers. But that would be too final and complete. Kevin’s door was open, so he pulled him in, a painful and steely emptiness dragging a loaded man towards the camp bed under the uncurtained window. One war was over and he could afford to pause, match the utter silence outside against the new battleground of his breathing. He listened to the desolation of silence, deepening in himself. The stone exploded. He couldn’t remember this as a man before, ice breaking on midnight seas, the floes of dead passion crumbling inside him. He lay Keith, still senseless, on his son’s camp bed.

Frank was breaking apart, a snap and creak of mooring-sinews, heart, stomach, brain, liver, body and mind separating, ripped out of him and filling the darkness. For a moment he felt battered, helpless, shorn of life; on the other hand he was like someone just born who needed the first and final knock to get him breathing. Answering this thought, he tapped himself on the head, and groaned at the bruise-fire that jumped around his temples.

Keith moved, but didn’t open his eyes or wake up. Fetching a pile of blankets from the cupboard, Frank spread them over him. He’d made up his mind to go, and remembered it suddenly. The pain was greater than his bruises. It would be wrong to hope that further thought might alter his decision. He was bigger than that. He walked without thinking to the door, went downstairs for his things. In a few minutes he was out of the house.