The Death of William Posters

12

Though born and bred in Hampstead, Myra was built for the country, George said. He’d once written a poem implying that while she might be no fit subject for Baudelaire or Boucher she was all that he wanted her to be: strong, passionate, and a lover of woods and gardens. As the last wheel of the barrow was dragged up the final step, her ironic grunt would have ruffled his peace of mind if he’d been home to hear it. He’d merely stated what he wanted her to be, and being in love she’d moulded herself to that off-beat image. Well-built and tall, she had small breasts and full hips, and arms that had grown strong and tanned in adjusting herself to George’s ideal, while George himself, over their years in the house, spent more and more time in his study and less and less in the garden. She wore glasses, kept her hair short because whenever it grew long she looked too much part of the trees and landscape, a duller person than she thought she was, mistress of lawns and lettuce-plots behind the six-roomed Georgian house.

In many ways Myra wished she had become a lover of the country, for maybe then the country would have grown to love her. But neither was it intolerable, which showed how George had been mistaken in at least one of his adjectives, for if she’d any passion left she’d be out of this green horseshoe of lawns and shrubs.

The false adjective told more of George than a score of right ones. Though his character was less flawed than most, he didn’t show much of himself, which meant that more than six years had passed before she finally knew him, thereby proving the advantage of the strong silent type: marriage lasted longer, for one couldn’t possibly lose interest until all secrets had been opened.

On first meeting he was quiet, shy, and big-built, a young man with short black hair and brown eyes, pipe smoking, comfortable, twenty-nine years old, working with a survey group somewhere in Kent. On Friday night the Soho pub was crowded. Myra stood well back from the bar, able to see only the glittering wall of bottles rising in the distance. She’d spent a day in the art galleries, and now wanted to see crowds and real faces. Drawings and paintings had shown little humanity, though they had, as usual, opened various aspects of her inner self — only to close them again the minute she stepped outside. She was fascinated by other people’s visions, the colourful abstractions of singular rare beings called artists — until her perceptions were swamped by a sensation of drunkenness that didn’t take away the ability to walk straight.

Having few friends at the L S E, she loved the comforting sight of people whose purpose in life was different from her own. Street lights and coffee smells, shouts and stars — she left them on impulse and went into the pub. This well-built man was talking in loud fluent French to another drinker. She looked, unaware that in observing him it might be said she was trying to pick him up. Faces fascinated her, so that she wondered whether she shouldn’t have gone to St Martin’s instead of the L S E. On the street she’d look at a face — belonging to a man or woman, it didn’t matter as long as they were beautiful or interesting — and only realize she was staring when someone smiled and asked her to come and have a drink. She thought that, having what she considered a rather plain face, her stares would be taken as unimportant, until she realized that looking at someone might make her face softer and more appealing than before she stared.

George looked drunk, his eyes lit, but his French sounded so perfect that she thought he might be French, though anglicized to the perfection of good clothes looking shabby, a button missing from his mackintosh, shoes needing polish, and a pipe that wouldn’t light for more than two puffs. His face became rock calm when listening to the other man’s replies, and she saw what it would be like when out of a pub and sober, found it interesting because it was profound and kind, a low forehead all the more attractive in an obviously intelligent man. Talking about books, the words Proust, Huysmans, Apollinaire bounced softly above smoke and noise.

The barrow of dead leaves, held from cold wind by the weight of a fork, was hauled to a mound already smouldering. George hinted that she clear the lawns and paths so that they looked once more part of the smartest house in the village. She’d intended doing it next week, after writing her lectures for the W E A, but George, thinking her unresponsive, sulked at last night’s supper, a polite sulk which meant gruff replies to any question concerning the house. Not a word was said about the lawns, as the hours between supper and bedtime plodded on, both reading on either side of the dead television screen, and the reason for his silence came to her. She looked up at eleven o’clock and said: ‘I think I’ll get rid of the leaves tomorrow. Burn them.’

‘All right,’ he said, as if it didn’t matter whether they were cleared or not — yet the petulance drained from his voice. She imagined this to be the perfect marriage: intuitive, calm, diplomatic. If only I didn’t know all his thoughts and wishes, and he didn’t sense mine. There’s little left at this stage, though it was the same after two years, so I’ve no reason to brood on it at six. He didn’t even glance from his book, and her irritation was squashed by the fact that she’d hardly looked up from hers, either.

He’d noticed her staring at him, back in that far-off Soho pub, a young tall brunette with rounded cheeks, and glasses that hid the full glamour of her eyes unless or until you went to bed with her and she took them off. Maybe they stayed on even then. Her face was pale from too much walking, his red and flushed from striding fields with notebook and theodolite. She looked — and after six years she hadn’t stopped looking for some sort of answer in him. Perhaps one came only when you didn’t need to look. To look was to doubt, and answers were given only to those who trusted. But no, she’d gone through that phase years ago, and found it as false as any other. Permutations and subtleties were mere mechanics that explained nothing — though immersion in them was often a satisfying anodyne to stop you cutting your throat, or to enable you to do so.

Lifting another half-pint, he’d called: ‘Mazel tov!’

The phrase startled, by its appropriateness when addressed to her, but coming from him the greeting lost its authentic blade-ending, that last syllable sharpened on whetstone that chopped you down the spiritual middle to make sure the good luck entered. ‘Why not have a drink?’

‘I have one.’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything’ — he stepped closer — ‘in case I reminded you of a brother you hadn’t seen for five years.’

‘You don’t. But where do you get the “mazel tov”?’

‘I buy it at Christmas, plenty of white berries. You kiss under it.’ He kissed her: ‘Mazel tov!’

‘That’s mistletoe,’ she smiled. ‘Mazel tov’s Yiddish. I’m Jewish, so I thought you were.’

‘Don’t be literal. One of my pole-carriers uses it. He’s a Cockney.’

‘What are you?’ she said.

‘A surveyor. A bore. A technician mapping out the new age in Kentish swamps. I like being a surveyor, but don’t ask me why. People fall into two tables: they either ask me that, or they say they’ve never met a surveyor before.’

‘I’m in the second table,’ she said, then ordered another brown ale. Half an hour later she was drunk, and George said: ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

He had a room in Pembridge Square, and their taxi swayed between traffic along Oxford Street. The feast of talk that had possessed them in the pub lapsed before the wide curves of a traffic roundabout. Sobered, George leaned across, one hand behind her head, and his mouth pressing skilfully onto her lips. She saw other cars swinging towards them across the blue-black tarmac, giant sparks sliding into the central fire of their passion. They began from a distance, gathered speed while growing bigger as if guided by phosphorescent glowlamps overhead and coming for the big smash, upshoot of fire and metal. His kiss grew hard, and she closed her eyes to fill in the bones of it.

She felt sick, so they got out on Moscow Road, soothed by a cool wind blowing in the darkness, hovering lamps, cats at dustbins outside grocery shops, milk bottles piled in crates. He put an arm around her. ‘You need a meal. I have food at my place. Tins, anyway. Some biscotte. Tea. You’ll feel better.’ At nineteen this was adventure, far from that Hampstead monstrosity in which her family lived, double fronted, double garaged, double cream cream in the double sized fridge, a double lounge and double everything house that meant half a life she’d rather stay out of half the night than sit and argue with her mother who thought she should have left school at seventeen and learned hairdressing. Her parents were fine: as long as they left her alone, she loved them very much.

They walked into the outstretched arms of Pembridge Square, swaying a little towards its massive houses. The night filled her with a sense of freedom, gave her a visionary light-bodied walk, in the middle of the road, alone, her satchel of books and make-up swinging loose — until the noise of an on-rushing car threw her breathless onto the pavement. George laughed, and took her arm. ‘Will you still marry me?’

The stairs were steep, wide, dimly lit. Drudging around Soho all evening had drained her energy, and she ascended slowly. Halfway up she touched his arm and answered: ‘Yes.’

I hadn’t said yes to anyone before, and I don’t know why I said yes then. Once in his room we didn’t wait to eat. He told me later how surprised he was at the speed at which I undressed. I knelt on the bed and looked at him, loving my nakedness and not really concerned about his as I took off my blouse and brassiere. It was quick, and didn’t add up to the sort of passion he wanted, but he was too excited to notice. He was drawn out too quickly by my split mixture of coldness and blinding rage, of wanting to be loved all the way by a man I had fallen in love with but who was for all that a stranger.

In a way he was still a stranger. She found that the only time he was free with speech was when using a foreign language, talking in French or Italian to some waiter or fisherman during a holiday. Myra’s shyness never approached the dimensions of spiritual deformity it sometimes attained in George. She was protected by a more intelligent face from which comment was not always expected, though in which it was always assumed to exist.

The thunderbolt of soberness hit them so hard that they couldn’t stay in the room either to eat or sleep. They walked — traversing the lit-up arc of north-west London, hardly talking, between decaying houses towards Edgware Road and Swiss Cottage, as if to escape the ghosts of that unexpected love-making. Myra had been exhilarated, though not satisfied, by the straight-rutted contact with another person, as if they had put each other to a certain use through lack of patience or knowledge. She felt fine, full of energy, feverish; yet aware of the cosmic distance that had separated their feelings, good only in that it had sharpened the carnal matching of their bodies. She had expected a softening of the spirit, a drawing closer as this hard aloofness vanished with the years, but it had stayed in that same pristine state of pure contact — moonlove and nothing else.

Like natures were no good, she thought, tipping the barrow and scooping the last leaves out with her hands, raking them into a heap. If silence and shyness ever broke they would have become different people in each other’s sight and fled apart. A lack of reserve would be fatal. Reserve is what we depended on each other for — to bolster it up in ourselves, to protect George from himself and me from myself. We each are afraid of ourselves, not each other, and won’t ever get close until our separate fears are done with. One like nature holds the other in check, the sparks of mutual domination being all that remain.

They drank coffee and ate sandwiches near Hampstead tube station, walked towards the Heath. George knew it well, a short-cut from the Ponds to West Heath Road, a slow madcap around the heights of London. They found a place in the undergrowth, hidden from all lights. Myra felt no coldness, nor blinding rage either. The orgasm went into every limb, diminishing its impact at the vital centre of herself.

Beech, plane, oak and maple, the last dead twigs and branches were gathered from around the house and brought to the top bank for burning. She smiled at thinking so far back, paused between sweeps of her rake and realized how much they had nevertheless changed since that first evening. If he hadn’t changed so much — from untidy, generous and shy, to neat, maniacal and tight — she wouldn’t be hounding the garden offal of winter for the first big conflagration of the year. At that first ‘mazel tov’ she would have consoled herself by the folk adage that still waters run deep if she hadn’t seen this as an advantage in a man. But from running deep the banks had almost joined, due to limestone and chalk deposits. His lack of speech when sober had led him to choose a wife after half an hour’s drunken talk. Through lack of experience she had accepted a husband in the same space of time. In the old days a girl was matched and married off by a broker, sold and traded like a slave, and in thinking she had done the opposite she had only done worse, because from what she knew of George she might as well have been taken to the canopy never having seen him at all. She drew herself back: that’s not quite true; we did live together a while before marrying. And when they did — a quiet splicing at St Pancras town hall when the red flag still flew — George had chosen a house in the first spasm of looking, though she had to admit that as a surveyor he had made a better job of this than in his choice of a wife.

For George, the house was a dream come true, worked and toiled for since driving along the village street in his battered sports car six years ago. Realism was on his side. He’d seen it first in November, with no blue light and sun of summer to blind him into love for it. A square, neat, two-storeyed Georgian structure, it stood in cold and drizzle, gardens empty, garage falling to pieces. The quiet sort, he was an optimist in material things, saw the garden cleared and the lawn laid, garage, woodsheds, tool huts and wash house all hammered, relatched and painted; bricks repointed, windows cleaned, the front door gleaming black with a polished brass knocker, the back gate opening to a path that, running through the yard, would lead char or tradesmen to the kitchen door.

George had set himself and others to work on it. A thousand borrowed from his mother made the down payment, the last money in her account, but with George’s cash a flat had been converted above the garage and she had lived there until she died two years ago, glad to leave the semi-detached in S.E. 98, become a member of the Women’s Institute, the Old Folks Club, and be among friends and family for the rest of her life.

Myra went to make coffee. Mrs Harrod was vacuuming upstairs, but would be down when she heard the cups rattling. After coffee a laundry list must be made, then Myra would go to the village store. Notes for her next lecture needed re-thinking, and there were letters to write, as well as minutes of the last W I meeting to type. Doing nothing was even more of a full time job than a full time job, though it was easier than when George’s mother lay in bed above the garage. It had been difficult to fulfil his dream of a perfect house, and still apply principles of family love and solidarity by emptying his mother’s slops.

Another help in their long haul up was Myra’s own money, five hundred a year from her father who wanted to stun the government out of death duty they’d scoop from his thriving shoe factory when and if he died. The indestructible old man sat in the big chair when he came to see them and grinned at the nestlike order his son-in-law had created with such hard-earned money — that he’d hoped he’d have the panache to spend like a man.

Myra’s mother hadn’t taken to George at first because his religion wasn’t the same as theirs — though neither family had much — not to mention a difference in race which her mother was too polite to mention except every day for six months when she wanted Myra to change her mind and marry one of their own sort. But Myra didn’t succumb, knew exactly what she couldn’t help doing beneath that rounded face, smile and glasses. Under it, as under a calm moon of autumn, the sea moved. She went home often at the beginning, and each time, after arguments on love and loyalty and family, came away wounded but in one piece, bringing typewriter, gramophone or books. By the time she went to the registry office, standing in the large room with George and repeating all the pointless formulae, she felt a wild exuberant sea pressing to burst out and overwhelm her with laughter and gladness. Her face was on fire, her knees seemed about to commit the first and final act of treachery. She felt alone, a pillar of stone in the middle of a violent lake. George did not exist. No one was there but herself, and the faint influx of these tedious words that she must have been repeating: ‘I do,’ but the affirmation bashing against her shouted: ‘I survived. I survived. I’m in one piece and free.’

It was freedom only because it was different. Finding a house and fixing it up hid the fact that underneath they were two wounded people who had met one morning after an inconclusive and agonizing battle. They had come together by the planned move of a psychotic God. ‘Mazel tov.’

Coffee boiled, was poured out and blancoed by milk. Mrs Harrod, a grey-haired old woman with a lined face and cat-sly eyes, sat opposite. Her husband, working in a motorway repair gang, had been spun off his feet by a passing car five years ago, so neatly clipped that hardly a mark was visible when his mates lifted him out of hoar frost by the road and humped him to the tool hut. From this accident Mrs Harrod bought a doll-cottage, and voted Conservative instead of ignoring election days. Good fortune coming out of so much black could only be an act of God, so she went to church on Sunday and was even spoken to by other property owners of the village. But she had to live, so worked every morning for Myra. She was neither clever, neat, intelligent nor industrious, but drudged around and did the jobs that Myra could never face — though they sometimes appealed to Myra more than the gardening that had fallen to her lot. She’d thought of letting Mrs Harrod go, and paying a man to garden with what she cost, but George wouldn’t like it, because Mrs Harrod was the sort of anachronistic rural institution that appealed to him in spite of his progressive brand of politics. And Myra was also fond of her. Mrs Harrod was the only person of the village whom she felt close to. Considering all the stillbirths, deaths, accidents and animal woundings that had gone on around her, Mrs Harrod seemed to have lived her life in the red. There was no one in the parish she didn’t know about. The most obscure family in the council houses up the hill, or the remotest keeper’s cottage set at the far corner of some copse and miles from the nearest lane were as simple illuminated books set out for the autodidact. She created a village of two faces for Myra, one of the Women’s Institute singing ‘Jerusalem’ in this pleasant arcadian valley; and another of ferocious sexual Luddites liable to turn without thought and set axe or penis at the nearest body. The two blended and Myra saw it as part of her own life, though whether the village accepted her as quickly as she had accepted someone from it to do her housework was impossible to say.

Outside her activity with the Old Folks and the W I she felt the depths and working of Mrs Harrod’s life close to her own which had not so far flashed and shuddered to all kinds of unjust visitations from chance. The recounted tales had the same edgy bitterness and gallows humour of certain Yiddish storytellers, those poor of the Polish and Russian towns in the last century became finally real to her. The empty flat above the garage, though draughty in winter, was luxury compared to Mrs Harrod’s cottage at Preston Bottoms. It had bathroom, gas and electric light, while the Bottoms had washbowl, fireplace, oil lamps and earth closet, and a long walk to the lane for every drop and swallow of water. Mrs Harrod never compared the blatant inconvenience of one to the normal equipment of the other, but Myra let her do a weekly wash in the huge white Axiomatic standing under the kitchen window. The spin drier made it light to carry back, saved her living among stalactites of steaming cloths during days when the fields were black with rain.

The sun dipped its beam through the kitchen window. ‘Have a biscuit, Mrs Harrod.’

‘Thank you. I do like these tinned biscuits. They’re old-fashioned. Better made. Not like them one and tuppence, penny off packets. I used to cook my own when John was alive. He’d come in from his work and eat as many as a dozen before charging off to play darts at the Legion.’ Myra remembered the last general election. She and George pinned a Labour poster on their gate, and one day, walking towards Preston, she saw a picture of the Tory candidate grinning in the window of Mrs Harrod’s hovel. Here was she, mistress of a detached Georgian residence squat in its own grounds, with garage, outhouses and flat, off main village street and in quick reach of town (as it might say in the Observer if ever they decided to sell it for five thousand more than they’d spent on it) and there was Mrs Harrod stuck in a lopsided cottage, ready for the council to condemn it out of hand, so that by another malevolent crack of fate’s bullcosh she’d end up in the workhouse, though still carried ga-ga to the polls in some spinster’s car who’d guide her shuddering hand into a cross by the right Tory name. Myra smiled, though thanked God for the voting Labour masses that still seemed to inhabit the north: cloth-capped, hardworking, generous and bruto, or that was the impression she got from reading a book (or was it books?) called Hurry on Jim by Kingsley Wain that started by someone with eighteen pints and fifteen whiskies in him falling downstairs on his way to the top.

George had considered using the garage flat as a study, a snug retreat where he could have books and drawing board, wireless and map table, a bed even — as if, Myra thought, to get away completely, wanting to leave me but not quite able to. His idea of marriage was to come home, eat, and read a book, thinking that enough communion passed between man and wife if they merely sat close and silent. He had great faith in his presence for generating love and affection. The miracle was that it sometimes worked, often enough for their marriage to be felt by Myra as pleasant, if not happy.

There were times when George drank himself into a three-day stupor. It came on him like a cold or illness, began when they went out to dinner or a party. He would drive home drunk — to prove he wasn’t drunk — cool and slow, careful and safe. When Myra was in bed he would go on drinking, open a bottle of rotten steam (as he called it) and listen to Bach or Vivaldi until he fell asleep or senseless. The next day would be the same, and the day after, his private kind of necessary oblivion. She remembered him telling her how the electric spring of his life had tightened itself beyond bearing on many nights of his lonely youth. Sometimes at midnight, in a deliberate trance-like way, he would get into his car and drive around the empty, lit-up roads of London. He would go from Notting Hill to Kilburn and Cricklewood and Hampstead, swing back at full pelt through St John’s Wood and Maida Vale to Kensington and Hammersmith, then via Shepherd’s Bush to Pembridge Square, stopping for petrol and coffee on his mad figure-of-eight career. He played a game called ‘Jump-the-lights’ — seeing them on red a few hundred yards away, treading the accelerator as if it were a piece of sacred earth he wanted to get the feel of before going on a long journey. The reds glowed like blood-eyes in a great mirror, drawing him closer by the second, his eyes shining, half conscious, fixed by the hypnotic stare and defying them to make him stop — when he was already out of the zones of his own power to do so. He sped between, unscathed, always untouched, a sweaty smile of triumph and relief, a heart battering him back to consciousness.

Now he was a quiet, hard-working enjoyer of the settled life because his dream of the dream-house had come true. Lectures often took him as far away as Plymouth or Edinburgh. Calm authoritative George, she saw him as the young, heavying fuddy-duddy of thirty-five expounding on the geological structure of the Kentish Weald, and theorizing on its relationship to the economic life of today. He was considered brilliant, his knowledge overlapping into anthropological and all manner of social sciences. She loved him for this knowledge, could forgive all the nights spent reading and writing alone at the kitchen table, and hearing mad rain gunning the windows loud enough to drown any footsteps. She kept the house going, fires lit, bulbs in their sockets, stove, radio, gramophone, dishwasher, all machines in smooth running order, so that the house worked as soon as his hand touched the doorknob.

She saw him — drunk and happy after his lectures, arguing till daylight, a long fluent talker when he had something to say, a conversationalist all-admired. Books and papers overwhelmed his front-room study, and the thought of him taking over the garage flat might not be a bad one, except that he would then pass all his evenings there and rob her even of that much time with him.

Early on they had talked of turning the flat over to what children came along, for George’s dream also included a pair of tow-headed Crispins crunching the gravel and grass, and high-jumping blue-eyed over the jungle-jim erected on the front lawn for all passing enviously to see. It had also been her picture, but she couldn’t stand the thought of it now, for both pregnancies had ended in miscarriage, the unexpected start of labour, and the bloody totality of George’s dream pushing out too early and dead, bursting her asunder in a most awful pain and waste of the world’s spirit. There was no physical explanation for it. She should keep on trying, the doctor said, but to ‘try’ for such a thing was a spoliation of human dignity that believed in procreation before everything else. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again — the spider image of Robert the Bruce — that Ouraboros of conventional response fitted only a fool without wit or patience, unable to wait, goaded by failure into accepting a maxim coined by the successful ashamed at the sight of other people’s disasters.

So the house became a factory that produced good living: a day of work gave peace in the evening, and a fine table to pick and choose from. The larder was flexible in its offerings because Myra bottled, smoked, salted, pickled, baked and prepacked; collected cook books and recipes from the Observer and Sunday Times, wrote cheques for magazines pandering to house and home, namely Which? Where? How? When? and What? — a super householder driven into the ground by it. Her ideal had once been to work in some newly relinquished colony, teaching economics or social relations, helping to form a new nation from the top-heavy powergrid of exploitation, or rescue it from the threat of black dictatorship. Love, getting married — it had occurred to her, but was to stay subservient to the main ideal. Even the dreamlike beginning of her affair with George didn’t seem to threaten it, for one could live with a man, get married, have children even, and still axe out a career from the thousand circumstances that tried to deflect one from it. But George’s dream drew her in, engulfed hers because its bricks and slate reared up around her, a house to be worked on for months before the multiple lists of emendations were finally screwed up and burned one morning with the rest of his yesterday’s rubbish.

Myra went to London, to shop, buy books, call at the house of her brother and sister-in-law, go around the galleries. These pleasurable expeditions took her off early in the morning and brought her back late at night, seemed to last long enough for her to face another month in her bucolic outhouse. She had bought the framed drawings and pictures from her own pocket, wise purchases, easy in price, but transforming the white and empty walls. She received notices of new exhibitions, even an occasional invitation to a vernissage, but so far she hadn’t gone to any of these openings, preferred seeing three or four shows at one outing. George had left this side of the decoration to her on the assumption that she had better taste, and she accepted, if only to have one aesthetic corner of their dream world to herself.

The house was supposed to run itself, yet where was the spare time? She still couldn’t snap its iron grip and begin a life of writing and reading that George had promised when they first met. He had tried to get a man from the village to do part-time on the garden, someone at any rate who could hump the heavy work and cut Myra’s time on it to half a day, but farms and gardens of the surrounding estates took all the labour, and George’s ideal house was by no means set in an ideal countryside where people could help him maintain it.

Spring was breaking up the enveloping peace, and Myra couldn’t say which would be a better life: something useless, sterile and exciting; or a writing, reading, constructive time-passing inside her own spiritual boundaries. In the long run, which was the best to have lived? The question was idle, a maggot that would kill you until you died, deny you either, push you into a limbo of both and nothing. You lived what you lived and couldn’t change it by one act. Only an outside force over which you had no control — unexpected, huge, enthralling — could do that, and you wouldn’t know it was happening because you’d be too busy fighting it.

Coffee finished, Mrs Harrod would clean out the living-room. The sun’s warmth drew back from the linoleum table-top. It would rain later, so she’d better get that winter and spring rubbish burnt, smoke out the garden and maybe clear her draughts. The deadness of life might blossom if she had empty time. The soul developed and deepened in idleness, which was freedom. George would be the first to agree, because that was what he too had always wanted. Two incompatibles in quest of the same thing. She looked forward to firing the leaves, as if such action would release the held-in fire of her past existence into the wind.

13

People in the compartment sat dead to each other the whole four hours to London, refusing Frank’s offer of fag-packet or batch of newspapers, and he thought what unsociable bastards. He supposed that in any other country somebody at least would have talked, said good morning, nice day, raining — but no, not here. And do you know, at the end it turned out they were all close friends going to a cricket match?

He found a room in Camden Town at three pounds a week, its walls distempered puke-green and kek-yellow, furnished with a gas-ring, bed, and a wardrobe so big he was surprised they hadn’t let it out to a family at thirty bob a week. If they had he wouldn’t have cracked his shins on it every time he tried to get into the room.

The stairs were washed every week by a disinfectant that smelled of sweat, soon overwhelmed by train-dust and smoke-soot from surrounding railways. There was no bathroom in the eight-roomed house, and the only lavatory for a score of people was a smashed pan stuck in a shed at the end of a postage-stamp garden. Coming to London certainly brought you down in the world. It was true of many people, for they couldn’t have been born with such rancid unearthly pallors.

But the winter was almost over, a clean wind snapping along early-morning streets after fresh rain, letting him breathe a few minutes before the traffic roar opened its awful voice. People seemed to have been killed, pole-axed, driven to earth and sent pale at the blow. They looked as if they saw nothing but pavement and road, or advertisements ringing them: a silver jet-liner going through the heart spraying jelly-babies and electric shavers.

It was the first long time he’d spent in London, and he liked it so much he was a fortnight before starting work. He often walked eight hours through the streets and did not feel weak; but after three in the British Museum he almost fainted. The historical totality of the exhibits staggered him, and the precise old-maidish way in which so much insignificant stuff had been gathered together intimidated him as massive proof of his own unimportance. He almost wanted to set fire to it, blow it to bits, yet went on other days, fixed by Egyptian mummies and Samoan canoes, flint heads and spear tips — the preliminary skill and precision work that had, after thousands of years, landed him at his machine.

He bought a saucepan to boil eggs and make tea in — otherwise it was Lyons, fish and chips, or one-and-ten snacks at Mike’s on the corner. He got work at a car park in Soho, a safe enough place for a man who wanted neither past nor future. He guided cars in, drew them out, issued tickets and collected money, easy and mindless work, necessary at the moment because he also was mindless, caved-in and floating among dead buildings at the bottom of a smoky sea. With a spear in your metaphorical side the only thing you could do was move, move, move — even if only in circles, even if only on crutches. You could look at the traffic flowing around Cambridge Circus, bury yourself in Cyclorama or some museum — as a man in the last extremities of toothache crawls under the bedclothes with a bottle of whisky — but sooner or later you have to get up and move again.

Anything to escape from this padded cell that he could only flop into blindfold, hugging the pick-up and sound-box of all he brought with him from Lincolnshire, still ripping at his psychic vitals. He gripped the splintered and tacky wood of the bed to stop himself taking a tube to the farthest outpost of the Northern Line and making a way to Lincolnshire, that county where his guts lay bleeding, and his love, still working perhaps, still alone maybe, waiting for him to come back and who knows, wanting to hear from him, a word, an address, an acknowledgement of agony, a promise to return tomorrow, soon, before long, something better than never. She sat alone, waiting. She loved him, wanted him to come back and love her, make love to her, show love, warmth, tenderness, care, make up for the promises he’d smashed like museum china, spread his spirit over the house. The bed frame deflected his beating fist, strong enough to outlast him. His mind swam through the fish-seas of doubt and reversal. He could never go back after doing so much the right thing in leaving when he did. There was no guarantee that she had given up her job and moved already to London with her husband, but at least she’d be able to see Kevin whenever she wanted. If she couldn’t it wouldn’t be his fault. For this big reason he couldn’t go back; he had smashed promises by leaving, but would smash bigger ones by returning.

The rank walls, the damp spring darkness made a trap-cage baited with the rotten meat of all his life’s impossibilities. They had got him, cornered him there in this room, while his Bill Posters’ heart chewed on them, chewing itself, himself that he couldn’t run from unless to Lincolnshire. Memories of her were burning ash-blue in the brain, wouldn’t leave him alone. The voice of what he’d gone to bed with the night before had been calling him through the hours of sleep and darkness — and it wakened him by six o’clock only to face it again, day after day.

He’d always wanted to live a while in London, enjoy himself and see things, but now that he was here the ashes were in his mouth, choking him. Out of the window, a great gaping hole torn to the north, was the open starbag of the heavens, and there was nothing to stop him fish-swimming through it except an outmoded feeling of pride and obstinacy.

Nine-thirty in the evening was too early to sleep, and too late for a trek to Soho, but he put on his coat and descended the narrow unlit stairs. A pram blocked one landing, he got round it and opened the front door. The orange-lit roar of Camden Road, and the cold heavy atmosphere of soot and iron filings surrounded him. It was invigorating, the one fact of London that shielded him from a final black fit. Even the museums smelled of it: if you were to bump, into that mummy in the British Museum and accidentally crumple it up, the dust and plaster and death would reek of London pall, streets and petrol. On Sunday morning he would go out early, pick up an Observer and Pictorial at the tube station and ride down to Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, and the same throaty smell of tool sheds and locomotives dragged at his nostrils.

The pub was well enough packed for a midweek. He stood at the saloon bar feeling how out of place it would be to shout for a black-and-tan, unless he wanted a rough-house. Uncertain of its benefits, he felt more diffident about getting into one in London than if he was in Nottingham. The odds were too chancy, forces too foreign and remote. Yet he remembered one of his Nottingham mates who, unless he got blind drunk, spewed his guts up, and was knocked to the ground in unequal fight, didn’t feel he’d had a good time — the sort of thing that now seemed a waste of life to Frank Dawley.

The pint tasted good, and he took a reasonable time over it. A young man who sat at a nearby table with his girl friend was trying to light a cigarette. Every time he struck a match the girl blew it out, intent on revenge for something the young man seemed to have forgotten. He treated it as a joke for the first six matches, but eventually, once when he almost got his fag alight through a skilful cupping of hands and still her breath drove it out, he put down his box of matches, laid his cigarette on it, and landed her a sharp smack at the face. She burst into tears, and he comforted her, until she stopped crying and agreed to a Babycham.

All this stung his brain. Lincolnshire had been further away from Nottingham than London. He walked into the comforting lit-up dark, but after a hundred yards he hated it, and entered another pub as if the street had driven a nail into his back and pushed him through the door.

‘What are you jumping into me for with such force?’

A pub was like a church, full of altars and incense, beer and biscuits, where you could either be with someone or alone. Frank eased the man out of his way: ‘If you want a drink, say so.’

‘I want nothing that belongs to you, but if you jump me like that again, I’ll swing this pick handle I’ve got under me coat, and there’ll be no mistake about that.’

Frank stood at the bar: ‘Drop dead. I tripped on the way in.’

The man hung at his elbow: ‘Not at all, friend, not at all.’

Through the face he saw the snow-loam of Lincolnshire, the features that poached and wrote begging letters, the snow-tanned sun-lined phizzog of Albert Handley with the dark-brown eyes and short lips topped by a clipped moustache. The dawning came slowly, because Albert in his translucent joking had used a mock brogue. He also wore a new cap, a heavy good quality overcoat, buttondown shirt, tie, smart shoes and gloves. A long thin cigar hung from his mouth. He stank of prosperity, and a few whiskies: ‘You’re not dreaming, Frank. It’s your old pal. I knew you a mile off, that square walk of yours, as if you’d hump through any door that wouldn’t open. I’m only up this way tonight because I’m slumming. I got fed up with staying at the Metropole. Too posh for me, though I’ve only been there a week.’

‘Two doubles,’ Frank called. ‘If this happened often I’d die from shock.’

‘So would I. Let’s down a few while we’re at it: on me.’

‘I’ll pay my rounds,’ Frank said. ‘But what went on?’

Albert motioned him to a table. ‘Let’s sit down, then I’ll tell you. It’s something I’d always expected, but never knew would come. I often joked about it to Ina, to burn us up when there was no coal for the fire. It’s so new to me I’ve hardly sorted it out myself yet.’

Frank wanted to ask him about Pat, to catch any fact or rumour of what took place after he’d left. ‘You see,’ Albert said, ‘I was discovered as a painter, as the bastards say. Last week I lugged fifty prime canvases and a roll of drawings to London for a show I’m going to have. That was after the owner of an art gallery here in London, the Arlington, had spent two days at the village getting photos of them, and another bloke had been taking down my life story for publicity. I got more money than I’ve had for all the paintings I’ve so far sold put together. I still can’t believe it, Frank. I can’t, my boy. It’s bloody fantastic. If I took any real notice of it I’d be in chaos. Have another on me. You remember all them drinks I sponged off you in the village that snowy day?’

Frank downed another double. ‘That still don’t tell me how it all started.’

Albert grinned, swallowed. ‘It was all your fault. You’ll be surprised to hear it.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘You see, after you left, Pat Shipley’s husband came up, to get her back.’

‘Not after I left,’ Frank said, ‘while I was there.’

‘Was it? Well, I never knew much of what went on in the village. But one morning I sent a lad of mine around the houses with a painting, and a book of raffle tickets at a bob a time. Everybody was dunning me, and I hadn’t got a penny. I was desperate, always am when I come down to raffling a picture. So he calls at Nurse Shipley’s, and who should come to the door but her husband. He’s a fine man is Keith, a very good chap, quite a big advertising man here in London. Well, he asked who had done the picture, and to cut a short story shorter he comes up to the house and asks to see my other work. Then he goes back to the village and phones a telegram to a pal of his who owns the Arlington Gallery. This chap comes up after a couple of days, and the ball starts rolling.’

‘This is the best thing I’ve ever heard about,’ Frank said. ‘When I saw that picture of “The Lincolnshire Poacher” I was crazy about it. Remember?’

Albert laughed. ‘I offered it to you. You’d have been worth a good bit now if you’d gone off with it.’

‘That doesn’t worry me. That would have been robbery.’

‘It’s getting pride of place in the exhibition,’ Albert said. ‘That one knocked ’em all flat, so I’m glad you didn’t take it.’

Frank came back with two doubles and two pints. ‘Did Pat’s husband stay long?’

‘About ten days, I should say. He was well liked in the village. Bought four of my paintings even before the Arlington man came up. Not that he’s my sort though. I can forgive a person anything, except when they buy one of my paintings.’

‘You just paint to make enemies then,’ Frank taunted. ‘I’m glad I didn’t take the one you offered.’

Albert laughed: ‘So am I! I had a couple of reporters today at the hotel, and they kept asking me why I painted, so I got fed up and said: “If anybody asks me why I paint again I’ll punch his clock.” Then I got my fists ready, expecting them to come for me, but they just wrote down what I said, thinking it was a gimmick, I suppose. But I happen to be serious. I’ve been painting for nearly twenty years, working all the time, going at it alone in between making a living and writing begging letters, not many people knowing that I even painted, and those that did wondering when I was going to get a job.’ He sagged over his drink, head looking into it as if into the bulb of a flashlight. He swung to Frank, one eye closed, showing his teeth in a grin. ‘Stop me, Frank. I still think I’m talking to reporters, or that fat get Teddy Greensleaves who owns the gallery.’

‘All right, it’s time,’ the waiters and publican shouted. ‘You’ve had your lot. Outside now.’ Frank hated the way pubs closed in London. Customers were treated like dogs who’d been allowed to sup at the common trough. In Nottingham serving often continued twenty minutes after time, the pumps pulled surreptitiously, one eye on the towels and the other on the door for the coppers.

‘Teddy Greensleaves is a strange chap,’ Albert said. ‘He tries to dazzle me with all his learning, and thinks I can’t see him doing it. Talks about Oxford and rattles off the big art names, goes on theorizing about art till the cows come home — but they never do because it doesn’t mean a thing. Lucky Dip I call him, because whatever you say he’s always dipping into the sackbag of his mind to pull out a quotation from some book or other. I don’t think he’s got a mind of his own. He’s consumptive in that way, a fat consumptive,’ he affirmed, ‘not a thin one. As long as Teddy sells my paintings, I should worry. Let me get back to the clean fields covered with cow shit.’

Frank shook him: ‘Listen, Albert, I’ve got to know something.’

‘Anything,’ Albert said. ‘Anything. Greensleaves said: “The hotel’s on me. Where do you want to stay?” So I said: “The Metropole” — which was the only one I’d heard of and cost ten pounds a night. He nearly dropped through the floor, but he kept his word. It’s comfortable, central, but that’s about all as can be said for it. I get paint all over the carpets. Had to smuggle it in. Wrapped canvas around me like corsets. Use the wardrobe for an easel. Not too boring like that.’

A waiter snatched their glasses. Frank pulled his back, still half filled with beer. ‘You’d better get out,’ the waiter said, ‘or there’ll be trouble.’

Frank finished his drink. ‘I’d like to see it.’

‘You will, mate,’ the waiter said.

Albert woke up. ‘Clear off,’ he said. ‘Get them glasses washed.’ He winked, and slid a pound note across the table. The waiter took it and walked away.

‘You’ve learned quick,’ Frank said.

‘It’s easy when you’ve got money.’

‘You won’t have it long though, like that.’

‘Plenty more where that came from. My wife and kids are swimming in it. I like to see people like that waiter crawl. They’ve got no backbone here in London. The other night in the hotel it was ten o’clock and I hadn’t got a bean till the bank opened next morning. I was in my room reading the paper. I picked up the phone and said to the bloke at the desk: “Put two half-crowns on a silver tray, and have it brought up to me here.” I wanted to go out for a pint in one of them pubs up the Strand. So this waiter comes up and stands by my bed with the two half-crowns on his tray. I pick one up and put it in my pocket. “The other one’s for you,” I say. “It goes on Mr Greensleaves’s bill.” And he says: “Thank you, sir,” and humps off. I don’t stand any fucking nonsense from this lot down here.’

‘Tell me,’ Frank said, ‘where’s Pat Shipley living?’

Albert opened his eyes. ‘You don’t know a thing, do you? Something funny happened at that house. She sold it, by the way, and got a good price for it. I would have bought it but it was too small for my mob. I’m buying the house we live in, remember? I’ll have an extension built on, and a studio down the garden to keep me away from the sound of battle. All on private mortgage. The place is falling to pieces, but I’m softhearted.’

‘What did happen?’

‘She crashed in her car one night. Plenty of ice on the roads. It worn’t bad. She was lucky. Broke her arm, got a few bruises and cuts. The car was a write-off though, but she got the insurance. Can’t put a foot wrong that woman can’t. She’s back in London now with old Keith. I saw them the first night I was down, and they look happy enough. They’ve got a little house, in the Royal Borough of Kensington — Dogshit Borough, I call it. I’ve never seen so much dog shit on the pavements as down there. You’ve only got to step out of a taxi and splut! you’re in it. Still, it’s royal dog shit, so you just look happy and scrape it off on somebody’s doorstep. But it’s funny, when you go in that house it looks exactly the same as the one she had in Lincolnshire. She brought all her stuff down, but even so, it’s bloody weird.’

They stood up. Albert swayed. The pub was dark except for light behind the bar. The waiter stood at the door: ‘Good night, sir.’

Frank took his arm. ‘I’ll get you a taxi. We’d better cut through to Camden Road.’ The council blocks had had most of their eyes knocked out for the night — a few yellow squares remaining, squat and baleful, as if kept in by the intermittent flush of traffic on the downhill road. It seemed darker, though the same lamps were lit, upturned orange troughs high in the air. Albert rallied: ‘Greensleaves is going to throw a big party when my show comes on. Swill for everybody. I’ll get him to drop you a card.’

‘That’s all right,’ Frank said, his mind flying across the wastes of other things. I can’t see her again, burned my boats and sunk ’em, blocked the river and collapsed the banks, blown up the bridges as well. Only swamp left. ‘Good, then,’ he said.

They walked as far as the canal, and no taxi passed. Albert leaned against the wall and looked over. ‘It’s not deep enough,’ Frank said, thinking that he might go in first if it was. A train hobbled over the bridge. ‘I’ve thought of that a few times since all this fuss began. But I’m pleased and happy that something’s happening. I can’t wait to get back home though and start work again. This fuss — I feel as if a great shovel comes out of the sky and scoops my willpower away. Then I want to drop under a train. I wouldn’t live in London, not even for a pension.’

‘I’ve seen the last of Pat,’ Frank said.

‘I reckon you have,’ Albert agreed. ‘So you ran out on her, did you?’

Through fire and dead soil, the pain unearthed itself out of his guts, tried to pull his eyes backward into the depths of his head, then to ram the back of his head into his eyes. Holding his face with both hands he spun into the middle of the road, roaring between the fire-lamps of traffic: ‘Taxi! Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!’ I didn’t run away from her. I jumped from the snow and ice of her life, and of mine. I was the odd man in, then the odd man out, the third man in a crowd, the trickster who is supposed to have no heart, who pulls the string and gets buried in the avalanche he makes. The only person she loved was her kid, and the one way she could go on loving him was by living with Keith, and I was dead right when I left her after she left me. The sky turned to water, froze, and slid under his feet.

‘You can’t stand up,’ Albert said, ‘and I’m the one that’s drunk.’

‘I can’t take you in that state,’ the taxi driver said.

Albert still held him. ‘He doesn’t want a taxi, I do.’

‘Where?’

‘Phone me,’ Albert said, gripping him at the arm like iron. ‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Metropole Hotel.’

‘Who are you kidding?’ the driver said.

‘I’ve never felt less like kidding in my life. I don’t work there either. If you don’t want to take me though, I can walk. I’d rather walk than put you out, mate.’

‘All right, all right, get in.’

Frank stood apart. ‘I’ll see you.’

‘On the big night,’ Albert smiled. ‘Don’t forget. Come and support me. I’ll need it. Greensleaves said everybody’ll be there, though I don’t see how he’s going to get forty-eight million people into that gallery.’

The taxi drove off gracefully, making speed along the shining road towards the tube station.

14

The Arlington was re-opening with Albert Handley’s show. His work hung finely framed around the room, honoured in one of the smartest Bond Street galleries. It was difficult to see his paintings, for the huge, long, low-ceilinged hall was crammed with people who seemed to be holding them up by a collective gaze, meshing them to the wall with admiring words. A charming, high-haired woman stood by the door, Handley’s face looking seriously up at her evening dress from a pile of handouts on the table containing his life story, list of exhibited works, and a few reproductions, including one of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ in full colour. This celebrated picture at the far end was impossible to get at, except perhaps over the mass of elegant, poshly coiffeured heads. Cigarette smoke made her eyes sore, or maybe it was the lighting which wouldn’t normally allow one to linger too long at any picture — brilliant and merciless, like the wit overheard when pushing towards some scrap of paint and canvas.

After all, it was a party, so she’d be lucky to see anything — or perhaps unlucky, since it wouldn’t be fair to make judgements on a night given over to publicity rather than simple pleasure. Not that she’d be able to afford the Arlington prices, and was curious as to why or how an invitation had been sent to her. No doubt she was on the mailing list, having bought a couple of drawings in the days when prices weren’t so fancy.

She took a glass of champagne, wondering how the waiter could manoeuvre so freely when she had been jammed five minutes in one place. She recognized living images from the Sunday papers and the rich sleek weeklies. A shadow-faced novelist from the north was saying to a famous American painter: ‘When’ I have a cold I can only smoke cigars’ — in a loud, bell-clear accent totally unlike any used in his books. The collective noise deadened all thought of speech. Her voice was normally soft, and toning it up would call for some forceful inner assertion that she didn’t feel inclined to use, shy of drawing notice to herself in case it should be unfavourable and so erode her long nurtured feeling of aesthetic superiority to these newspaper and television people, critics and middlemen, fashion-mouths and party-liners. Yet they impressed her as figures because they had the courage of their non-convictions, hired beliefs that they had grown to regard as their own, and which, to give them their due, they now put over with a certain amount of panache and literacy. Living in the country so long had given her a sense of detachment — which was something to be said for it — had taught her to appreciate the power and value of London’s amenities, while occasional visits inclined her to despise them. On balance she took from it what she wanted, and was only contemptuous of what it tried to make her want.

Such a crush disturbed her. Also looking as if he didn’t belong there a man made way, squeezed himself aside so that she could get through. Another bubble of conversation broke: ‘My analyst said: “There’s too much death in you.” “I know,” I told him, “but death is better than suicide.”’ Glasses didn’t stop smoke paining her eyes. Her body pressed by, and he held her arm, unable to give free way: ‘Have you met Albert yet?’

‘I’ve not long been here. I think it’s impossible to meet anyone.’

‘You’ve met me,’ he smiled. ‘I’m feeling a bit like a … spare man at a wedding. Greensleaves asked too many people. Come and see Albert though. He’s an old pal of mine.’ His middle-strong height cleaved between the backs of talking drinkers. He gripped her hand, turned to see if she were still the same person: ‘There’s plenty of booze, I will say that.’

She was intrigued at the thought of meeting the man responsible for ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ especially after the articles that had already garnished the fat Sundays. ‘My name’s Frank Dawley,’ he said.

‘I’m Myra’ — and felt him press her hand in acknowledgement. He pushed one upright back too hard, a tall bald man in a lounge suit who stared furiously but said nothing. Frank wore a grey pinstriped two-piece, charcoal tie under a white collar, black high-sided shoes. He’d taken a day off from the car park, unworried as to whether he got the push or not, being flush for money from having saved much of his pay in the last few weeks. He was feeling the need to lift himself out of London, light off for the country, or drift over to France. A letter from his sister in Nottingham told that Nancy was living with someone else, a bachelor of the old days who had courted her even before Frank turned up, who had never married, whose mother had not long died, and who at last saw his chance. Another solid door of his past had locked — in which there couldn’t be anything but a lasting good. ‘What do you do?’ Myra asked, as he paused to get a bearing on Albert.’

‘How do you mean?’

She felt foolish at having let out a direct and simple question. ‘Are you a painter? Or a writer?’

‘I work at a car park. An odd job until I find out what I want to do. How about you?’

‘I live with my husband.’

‘Is he here?’ No, and he drew her through the crowd again, pleased because she had thought he might be a painter or writer. Well, he could be, but wasn’t, not even a writer of letters because his separation from Pat was as final as if lightning had flashed between the ingrowing tree roots of them, split the sphere of the earth in two and set them spinning in different galaxies, finished forever, at distances that not even words could span.

Albert was answering questions against the wall, hating it, as if cornered by people whose belongings he’d filched, and who wanted to know, earnestly and sympathetically, why he’d done so foolish a thing — before they sent him to prison. Frank barged between: ‘Meet Myra, an old friend of mine.’

Albert was glad to, red from champagne, eyes smarting and half closed as if he hadn’t seen daylight for weeks. Myra was surprised at the open sensibility of his face, had expected something crude and northern after the write-ups. He was forty-two years old according to the catalogue, yet looked little more than a man of thirty who had already suffered the fires of life’s iniquity and emerged with a broader, deeper comprehension of the fact that there was worse to come. She hoped his paintings mirrored such a face, fragmented it to the same depth and caught the enigma of his lips and eyes.

‘I’m tired of meeting strangers,’ he said, dismissing his court. ‘I don’t get on too well with them, especially this sort. If I’m to believe ’em, I’ve already sold the whole show out.’

‘Too bad for me,’ Myra said, ‘though I don’t think I could afford the pieces here, anyway.’

‘Don’t let that worry you,’ he smiled. ‘I was only joking. I probably haven’t sold a thing. But I’ve got a few good pictures stowed away at my place in Lincolnshire, that you will be able to afford, so get my address from Frank. You can always come up and pick one or two. I’ll be only too glad to diddle old Greensleaves out of his whack.’ Greensleaves may have heard this, Albert fearlessly nodding in his direction: ‘I’ve told a lot of people that, and given them my address. I don’t care who knows it, even if I am drunk. I’d tear this place apart if I thought it wasn’t insured.’

‘It wouldn’t take much doing,’ Frank cautioned, ‘but there’s no point in it.’

Myra was amused at his empty, touching arrogance. Yet it could explode. A troupe of Didikois called at the village last summer and one of the men whose eyes burned to the same pitch-emptiness as Albert’s had been the ringleader to break up the pub after being refused a drink. ‘I hate my pictures on these walls,’ he said, unable to swing his arm towards any of them. ‘The bastards have no right to put ’em up like that.’

‘It’ll help you to live,’ Frank said sternly, ‘and paint.’

‘You think it will?’ Albert cried savagely. ‘I painted when I had nothing, don’t forget. When I see a picture of mine on the wall, and look at it properly, I feel full of bullet holes, my guts showing, all of me stark naked, hanging there for everybody to poke their fingers at.’ He took three drinks from a passing tray, handed one to Myra and Frank without a break in his talk. ‘They don’t know what to do. What few lights they’ve got go out when they look at one of my pictures. Ah! Don’t think I’m saying they’re good pictures. That’s not the point. But I go cold when I see somebody looking at them, their eyes skimming over the outside top skin. They can’t get through that little bit of surface and fly underneath. I never thought it would be like this. I’ll be months getting over it.’

‘You’re drunk,’ Frank said. ‘It shouldn’t upset you like that. Come out for a breath of air.’ A beautiful, thin, middle-aged woman smiled before phrasing a question. Her dress was superb, rich, simple, subtle perfume penetrating even the cigarette smells and heat of people. A dull silver bracelet hung from her wrist, matched the neck-brooch. The dark, piled hair showed a pale, faintly lined forehead. She had a splendidly intelligent face, grey exposed eyes, a softly curving nose with slightly spread nostrils, and lips whose real shape could not be made out because of artfully applied lipstick.

‘Not yet,’ Albert answered, his eyes clearing. ‘Somebody wants to ask me a question.’

‘You’re Mr Handley,’ she said, pointing her folder.

‘I think so. At the moment. I’m not always sure.’

‘I’ve been looking at your paintings. They’re absolutely wonderful. Quite original. A fine depth. How long have you been painting?’

‘Ages,’ he said, swaying.

‘Ages?’

‘Ages. Kiss me.’

‘Hmmm?’ Startled eyes. ‘I’m Lady Ritmeester.’

‘Kiss me again.’

‘I haven’t kissed you at all yet.’

‘Albert’ — Frank took his arm, firmly. ‘Let’s get him to a taxi, Myra.’

‘My husband is here tonight,’ Lady Ritmeester said, disturbed though not angry.

‘You’ve looked at my paintings,’ Albert went on, with a sad, lunatic persistence. ‘That’s like having been to bed with me. Go on, kiss me. We’re in a crowd. Nobody’ll see.’

She laughed. ‘You are a strange man.’

‘I’m a man, I suppose that makes me strange.’

She beamed. ‘Witty, too.’

‘Come on, Albert, let’s get you back to the old Metropole.’

‘I’m sure many other women would oblige you,’ she said.

‘But it’s you I want.’ He shook Frank’s hand away and took her fingers. ‘Lady Ritmeester?’

‘Yes?’

‘If I haven’t got you, I haven’t got anything.’

‘How charming!’

He fell back into Frank’s arms, eyes bloodshot, limbs twitching quickly again into cohesion and strength.

‘A really charming person!’ exclaimed Lady Ritmeester.

With Myra’s help they walked him to a larger space near the door. An overcoat flashed by the cloakroom. Frank recognized him first. Two months had not blunted his eyes, though Keith’s face was less sharp, a little grosser, smooth and more satisfied now that he’d been robbed of his suffering. His confident stance of lighting a cigarette had more imitation in its movement than unique feeling, and Frank recalled his face at the cottage aged by marks of agony in spite of himself. But now, he had lost even that. Something had happened. His wife had come back. He had got what he wanted, and had gone soft over it.

He called: ‘What happened to Albert?’

‘He drank too much. He’s had a few hard days.’ He noticed Keith looking at Myra. Who was she? Myra the darkish and married woman who’d come to the gallery on her own, wears glasses which give an attractive softening effect to her eyes. A smart dress showed the figure well: Frank liked to see tits on a woman, not too small, not too big, just so that they moved a bit when she walked.

Outside, photographers were waiting, cars drifting in with more and more people. Other traffic was being thrown towards Oxford Street. What shadow remained was filled with press cameramen fighting for position, to record this one-in-a-hundred shot of some stupefied-drunk painter celebrating what looked like an enormous piece of financial luck. Their readers would want to know all about that.

It was as if they’d walked into the focus of an electric storm, each flash freezing forever the limp form of Albert, held from the pavement, it seemed, by the startled angrily-set faces of Frank and Myra.

15

With Albert safely in bed at the Metropole they walked back along the Strand. When Frank left the gallery he’d felt savage and mysogynistic, but his mood softened because the night was clear, a fresh breeze lapping up from the river. It had rained, and lights were mellow and far-spreading, traffic quieter. Myra felt free of her normal life, walking with someone she didn’t know, the house forgotten in its dark owl-fold forty miles away. Champagne had relaxed her. Frank asked where she lived, whether she had any children, if she had a job. He wanted talk, but realized he was spoiling her mood, so they skirted Trafalgar Square in silence. The fountains were two great stationary flowers of light and colour, stamens of smoke trying to rise above the highest reach of spray, like Lady Ritmeester’s orgiastic wig tinted against the sky. Reflected light turned them blue, pink, gunmetal blue, snow blue, grey, flown across by odd pigeons left among people still sauntering around. A camera flashed near one of the lions: someone stood between its paws. A policeman dragged him down. ‘I fed pigeons here the other day,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t want to eat. One of them was so fat that when it tried to walk away it fell over. I made a grab for it, meaning to tuck it under my coat, but it just managed to flutter up onto a lion’s head. It was safe up there.’

A midnight train would soon draw Myra and her dreams out of Paddington, clattering its wheels back into the darkness. But not yet. Spring was felt more vividly and sweetly in the block-middle of the city than in the fields around her home. The air with which she would later embalm the deep mood of this rare evening was almost warm. It detached her from George and the house, made her feel closer to this young man by her side, as if he were responsible for it.

‘Take my arm,’ he said. Lulled by the noise of their own footsteps they walked towards Soho. ‘We’ll have something to eat. I know a Greek place, down in a cellar, used to be an old tube station. I sometimes go there after work, sit and read. It’s more cheerful than my crumby room in Camden Town.’

An old deadbeat of Soho asked them for money and Frank dropped him a shilling. Smells from Wimpy bars chafed his hunger, yet he savoured it, in no hurry to eat. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

She tugged his arm: ‘Let’s walk. I live in the country, and like streets. I don’t come often to Town.’

‘If you don’t like it, why do you live there?’

‘I’m married to someone who does like it. We can’t all choose what we want to do.’

‘We can. If we don’t it gets chosen for us. We end up doing what we want to do.’

‘You believe that?’

‘Yes.’ Frank was sure of it, dead sure of all he said, because he was empty and without thought, desire or aim. He was walking with a woman, enjoying himself because of this, going off for a meal with the glittering impression of the party gnawed at by vague thoughts of work in the morning. You could do exactly what your heart and soul wanted to do, if you had the courage and endurance to face the lifelessness it left in you. Emptiness was the terrible weapon fate bashed you with, but somehow you walked and worked through it, forgetting if you could the mechanics of those decisions that had landed you in the middle of a colourless psychic battlefield.

She liked his calm, quiet way of talking, and the comforting unimportant silences when he said nothing. At home with George such silences were only proof that they had little more to say to each other, a mutual reproach since both had never allowed the common areas of love to ignite and flare. Present silence was nothing to do with love, since they had only just drifted together for a few hours, though real love could come out of it. It gave her peace and rest, a sense of adventure without obligation, of easy loneliness that was only possible with a stranger. Everyone sensed the change of air and temperature, the renewed oxygen of night, and it was difficult to walk arm in arm along the pavement.

They went downstairs, sat at a rough wooden table without taking their coats off. The waiter brought two plates of rice, rained with a lava of exotic-chaotic meat sauce, a bottle of Cypriot wine, and chunks of saltless bread. It was a meal for the ravenous and she’d never felt so hungry, nor so unconnected with people and the world around — yet grateful for their continued presence, which she thought hardly deserved because she was doing so little in return. Smells of the meal and tobacco smoke in the tunnel-shaped cellar, the rough grapeyard taste of the wine, and this man called Frank busily eating in front of her, stopping now and again to rain salt on his food, had a sharp intimacy as if her senses had come back after years of nullity. It was no use searching for the cause. There’d be plenty of time for that when it had gone. The fact that it would go saddened her, as if a dagger were pressing into her side to end this good feeling in a matter of seconds. Tears were scalding her eyes, then cool on her cheeks. His hand went out to her wrist. ‘What’s the matter?’

Her happiness was so real she wasn’t even ashamed of her tears. ‘Nothing.’

‘Whatever it is don’t think about it. It’ll go away then. If it won’t go away though, tell me what it is.’

She smiled. ‘It was nothing, truly’ — surprised that at her age, after an era buried in a country-and-domestic life with a normally loving husband she should be sentimental enough to think that an hour of happiness could go on forever. Still, maybe that hope, even if sentimental, was part of that happiness. She couldn’t finish her meal.

They walked up Tottenham Court Road, plenty of time before her train left. Cinemas were spreading people over pedestrian crossings, lining them up for buses. ‘I could spend years in London,’ he said, ‘and not get tired of it. I’ve lived most of my life in the Midlands.’

‘I thought you had. You still have the accent. I was brought up in London — Hampstead.’

‘You’ve got no accent at all.’

‘I know. It’s nondescript.’

‘It sounds good to me. I like clear speech.’

‘Do you have any friends in London?’

‘Only Albert. He’ll be back in Lincolnshire soon.’

‘How did you come to meet him?’

‘Lived in the same village. I was having an affair with a woman up there, until it blew up in my face.’

‘What happened?’

He couldn’t say that he’d left her so that she wouldn’t be parted from her son, and that such an act of self-sacrifice was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. ‘She loved her son,’ he said, ‘more than she loved me. We decided we’d had enough’ — and having said that, he put an arm around her as they walked. ‘You know the way it goes? Maybe you don’t if you’re still living with your husband. Do you have many friends where you live?’

‘Not really. I’ve been ten years in the village, but that’s not enough.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘My old friends are scattered all over the place. My best friend is a girl who lives in Majorca. She’s married to an American writer. We write about every three months. She’s happy enough, as far as anybody can tell with someone who’s married.’

‘Why should anybody be happy when they’re married?’ he said. ‘That’s a load o’ rammel. Even living together, it’s not realistic to expect happiness. I used to think it was necessary, even possible, but as soon as two people start thinking about happiness then they’re finished. If only one of them thinks about it, it blows up even quicker.’

‘You wouldn’t want them to think at all, then?’

‘It’s not that. But people are chewed up by a dog-rat inside them called passion. Cannibals eat each other, which is bad, but it’s even worse to eat yourself. Don’t think I haven’t done it, or don’t still. This passion is the wrong side of the moon. It poisons the liver. Everything is geared to making you eat yourself — the way this society works. Look around, talk to anybody about their job or life, switch on the wireless or telly, and it says: “Eat yourself. Go on, eat yourself — crunch-crunch.” I feel it in here all right. My blood circles round and round, day after day, year after year, and where does it get you in the end? There ought to be some way of snapping out of this feeling except by cyanide or a knife in your back. It’s time we discovered how to break it.’

‘I suppose you want a war?’

‘I used to wonder. Civil war, maybe. But even that’s a bit too traditional, out of date. We need something new.’

‘A new religion?’ she smiled.

‘That’s all bitten out of me. You can’t go back, not even to look for a fresh direction. You’ve got to start from where your feet are planted. So don’t mock me about religion.’

‘I’m not mocking you. Show me how to break out of all this.’

‘Maybe I will, but I can’t tell you how. When you see the moon in a pond, like the three loons of Gotham, it’s easier to reach it by sputnik than pull it in with a net, or swim out to it and freeze your fingers. As soon as you have patience you begin to go places. The only thing is, it takes longer. A year ago I didn’t even know this. I’d give a lot to know what I’ll know next year.’

‘I’d give a lot to know where I’ll be next year,’ she said.

‘You sound sad about it.’

‘That’s because I think I’ll be in the same place as I am now.’

‘You might as well put your head in the gas-oven if you think that.’

‘That’s a helpful suggestion.’

‘It isn’t easy to help anybody in that way.’

‘Not if you can’t help yourself. I don’t need help, in any case.’

‘We all need it. We’ve got to make it out of ourselves, out of each other, but in a new sort of way.’ While living with Nancy and the kids he felt encircled by a high brick wall dozens of feet thick. This wall had gone down in a cloud of smoke, but another had formed, of equal height and thickness, though a little further out which anyway left him with more room in which to move, enough to haul out the answers she wanted. If he’d loved her it might have been impossible. ‘People can act,’ he said. ‘They can do things. I came to London — which isn’t much of an act, I admit, but things happen to me.’

‘It’s dull, living in the country,’ she said, afraid of burning herself on the heat of his words. ‘I suppose if you have children and lots of family nearby you don’t notice it.’

‘Don’t you want any kids?’

‘My husband does, but so far I haven’t been able to have any.’

‘Is that because you don’t want any?’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘I’ve got two in Nottingham, which is a pity for them.’

‘As you said, we end up doing what we want to do.’

‘Now you’re throwing my own words back at me.’ On the next corner, along a length of recently demolished buildings, was a barrow of burning timber, ancient dry wood from gutted houses shaking its flames and sparks into clear sky. They stood by the fence watching it, his thoughts dimmed by the collective roar. It seemed as if mysteriously started, no one around its flanks, half-eaten beams of glowing geodetic pattern, smoke boiling darkly. If you can’t light up the sky and make daylight for everybody to see in, he thought, burn it down. Darkness is a rotten castle for setting fire to.

They walked along Euston Road. ‘Let’s stay out all night,’ he said. ‘It’s good to wander round a town like this.’ His suggestion seemed crazy, until she remembered wanting to do such a thing before meeting George, but never able to because a girl alone might not be safe. ‘My husband’s at home,’ she said, the final refuge. ‘I have a train to catch.’

‘I’ll see you to the station.’ She was tired, unable to walk all night even if she were free to. The shoes weren’t right for it, and burns under her feet already promised blisters for tomorrow. Frank waved a taxi.

He said good-bye at Paddington. The train was crowded, but he found her a seat. ‘What time will you get home?’ he asked at the door of the compartment.

‘About two.’ People were looking over his shoulder for empty places. Neither was inclined to end the evening. The station had revived their nerves with its unexpected machine-noises, mysterious hangings, variously pitched lights, people going through barriers for last trains as if street-tentacles would drag them back into a hostile city if they were missed. In the taxi, calm, purring, cocooned, they had accepted it as the end, but now the excitement had returned. Frank had walked along as with an acquaintance for whom he had little feeling, but imagining the memory of it from next week, saw clearly that it would turn out to be more than that. He wouldn’t kiss her, or even shake her hand, for fear she’d be embarrassed by so many people, yet he felt the impulse to fix the evening as memorable in some way. Not that you had to fall in love with a woman before taking the first kiss. He even wanted to see her again. Maybe that’s what railway stations did, and perhaps if she’d just nipped off in a taxi or dodged into the underground he’d have forgotten her in two minutes.

The train jolted under his feet. ‘I expect we’ll bump into each other again,’ he said, for want of anything better, hating to say good-bye on trains. The evening had already lost its casual nature.

‘Perhaps,’ she answered, leaving it all to chance, empty also at the end of the evening. A deep-noted whistle, like the cry of a caged bird who realizes that its door is open but can’t move, echoed around the station. ‘See you,’ he said, turned and walked leisurely to the door, dropped to the platform as the carriage moved. She settled in her seat, took a book from her handbag.

16

Three daily papers fell through the letterbox. The two that he termed easy-to-read were left for Myra; the heavy, top-people newspaper he folded up and took to his job — wearing trilby hat, trench coat and heavy boots, for he was supervising a new agricultural survey on the bleak uplands of Bedfordshire.

Few people knew the land of England as well as George, or had a deeper feeling for it. There was little he hadn’t hitchhiked, biked, motored or walked over in what already seemed, at thirty-five, an immensely long life. He was alone, the complete man while making base lines out of far-off hills and woods, triangulation from church spires or the jutting shoulders of valley buffs. Derbyshire stone, Kentish chalk, Fenland sedge, each atmosphere felt different to his skin and lungs, bred way-out dialects, forced various dwellings on each landscape, was a geo-meteorology moulding the common psyche of its inhabitants. The subtleties of land and people were profoundly fascinating, and George was lord of all he surveyed when their composite reactions to land and air tied in with his knowledge and sympathy.

His sensitivity to the interdependence of land, animals and people was reflected in his calm and intelligent eyes, and in his now rather stolid features. As a young man his mind had been open and his brain limber, golden theories adorned and carried through — or rejected with a cry that there were more where that came from. Now he was at that middle-age when he tried to make ideas fit into harder traditional patterns — a style of personal and intellectual advancement in tune to the country he lived in. His visionary eyes did not seek harmony any more, but fixity into which people and the three elements slotted with neatness and safety. Any discrepancy, rather than point the way to philosophical adventure, was regarded as a mistake, a failure of logic, a miscasting of knowledge. He was building limits to defend his self-assured integrity against a greater awareness that middle-age threatened him with. These limits were also applied to Myra, who was an entirely different person. George had stayed very much the same since their marriage, his attitudes merely hardening, while Myra had changed as much as it was possible to while living with a man unable to recognize the fact that she was changing.

Yet he suspected some change between them in the last year, and if this feeling turned out to be correct something had to be done to keep them on the accustomed emotional lines. Blood ran deep but bloodiness ran deeper, he had once quipped about a couple they knew, who were unwilling to save their marriage by emotional compromise. In one of his rare moments of expatiation he said to Myra that such people were so shallow and spiritually null that any policy of give and take meant a living death to them. A vicious quarrel spelt life — while too many quarrels drove them apart. The great chisel wedge of domestic realism eventually finished them off. For a marriage to survive needed stamina, intelligence, tolerance, a backbone of unique qualities that few people possessed. If peace were broken, how could one work? Domestic battles were the most savage time-consumers of any man’s career.

Myra agreed. It was true. Everything he said was true. He was full of staid, obvious, incontrovertibles, a parson in reverse, a congregation preaching to one when at rare times the speech-stops were out. Yet from his lips, words flayed the empty air, certainly didn’t cut into the parts of her consciousness deadened after six years married to him. Nothing was wrong. They’d held back from quarrelling because it was unreasonable to do so, immature, a waste of George’s working time. But this wasn’t it at all, she thought when on her way back from town after her stroll with Frank. People in love shouldn’t be afraid to quarrel. People in love didn’t think about quarrelling: they just did or they didn’t. If you’re in love what harm can it do? If you’ve never quarrelled how can you go on living together? While persuading yourself that you love him, love him, the years roll by between house and garden, velvet hands over your eyes concealing the true reasons, so that the marks of these multiple deceptions end up only on your mouth.

The meeting with Frank had lit fires in her mind, matched them to the metallic light-clusters beyond the train window. These far-off tinderous flames were pleasant to warm the petrified limbs of the past by. There had been nothing memorable attached to the walk — maybe that was why it had been memorable. She hadn’t even thought of her tasks for tomorrow, the lecture on Roman remains in Buckinghamshire for the W E A to be prepared, a visit to Mrs Wilkins to check entries for Friday’s cake competition at the W I. These pleasant enough jobs she often looked forward to, and to have them vanish from her mind for five hours was alarming — looking back on it.

George sometimes hinted that she gave too much time to village work, meaning she’d neglected to do more typing for his book of geographical essays which he hoped to finish this year. It was more or less a collection of lectures given over the last decade, and the first draft lay in his study. The crucial workout lay ahead, that of excising, re-writing, polishing with the thesaurus, shaping each sentence for rhythm and texture and content — a harmoniousness finally gained by reading aloud. The slow sweet labour of getting it down in the first place was over, a matter of regret and relief, and in seeing the end of this work he recognized the trick that his achievement had played, that it had marked out the end of one phase of his life — a fact only occurring to him this morning as he turned off the alarm clock and left Myra asleep after her late night in town.

The house was silent, the smell of comfort everywhere, slightly damp odour of carpets, books and part central heating. In the unwakened house he alone was master, and his carpet slippers creaking the stairs seemed the only sound in the smokeless and recumbent village beyond the windows.

He shaved over the kitchen sink (memories of student and bedsitter days), the kettle squat on the electric stove. Myra, he told himself, was a marvellous wife to have kept such a perfect house for so long, which confirmed his feeling that one stage of their life should come to a finish with the final draft of his book. Myra had suggested the title: New Aspects of Geography by George Bassingfield, and he could feel and foresee the time when they would need a, drastic change in their existence. In the last few months Myra had been weighed down by something that he had been too occupied to try and fathom. Driving to and from work he brooded on it, ended by inward raging when he got no answer whose authority he could have faith in. It showed his affection, and the strength of their marriage, that he had detected this prolonged mood in her and was trying to find its cause. But he must also unearth the reasons and do something about it. Best of all to do both, but one thing at a time. The routine they had for so long enjoyed with a mellow almost sensual pleasure in this agreeable house had outlived both its usefulness and necessity. A change was coming, and when it was truly on them maybe what was bothering Myra would be revealed. It was a matter of patience, the interplay of acting and waiting, because one must first look to one’s job, career, house, material necessities, and then search out the lesser plagues that burden the spirit.

He boiled an egg, made coffee and toast, a matter of minutes in such a kitchen. The perfection of it backed up his half-made decision: Dishmaster, Stovemaster, Wastemaster, Toastmaster, a circle of masters over which the mistress was master, an overpowering accumulation of labour-savers, to save your soul for what? You went to work in your Road-master, ate by Feedmaster, and died, no doubt, by Death-master. It was like that E. M. Forster story. He wanted to escape its paralysing effect. Maybe Myra felt crushed by it as well, and that was her trouble. Surveyors were wanted in places like Ghana, Malaya, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, zones of rain and sun and steaming jungle, a beige dust-road running between granite rocks, a vast revolutionary switch from this idyllic piece of England, and his eyes would rove down advertisements, weighing salaries, prospects, tours of duty, allowances for living, home leave — reaching out for an atlas now and again to check a remote or altered placename. He saw this as a personal desire, and also as a solution to whatever subterranean difficulties were taking hold of Myra, and so of himself.

The idea of moving had started as a pastime, a dream, an exercise in transmigration of unequal physical comforts. The reality of it increased, shaded the outlines of an appealing picture and in spite of the English soil he mapped and trod on at present, it made him feel that a long time out would augment his love for it. He wouldn’t dream of applying such an argument to Myra. The deepest love could only go so far, that is, to inanimate things such as earth and animals. To apply it to human beings, who were capable of reasoning could only degrade them, and he was the last person impious enough to attempt that. Life was like a Roman road: straight as a die, even when it went over the hills. It wasn’t easy to construct this road, still less maintain it, but the surfacing went far enough down never to be washed away by time or storms. Most people made spidery trails through woods and wilderness, tracks that doubled back and tangled hopelessly in some morass: in real terms they fought like cat and dog, held on for as long as they could perhaps, then almost took pleasure in throwing down the barriers to let hate and chaos pour in. When the first passion vanished they moved to other beds and lovers.

Most of George and Myra’s friends were either divorced or living apart, children scattered like so much ash over the eroded roads they had failed to build. So it had become almost a point of honour with George to keep his marriage going, as if it were a competition of which only he knew the rules, or even the existence of the game. Myra didn’t know of it, but he had no fear of her ever going off with other men, betraying him in the worst way possible. Of course, if she said: ‘Look, George, it’s finished, I want to go. I’m in love with someone else,’ he’d say: ‘All right. If that’s how things have worked out. It’s good of you to be so straight about it,’ then he’d understand. He would suffer, of course, but he was capable of that, and in any case it wouldn’t be so bad as if she betrayed him while still living with him. There was only one way for the heart to move — honestly. Many people hadn’t the strength of character for it, regarded honesty only as a valve to keep them safe from the worst of life’s agonies, but George considered this to be false reasoning. To him the purpose of civilization was to make you aware of such agonies, to merge the undercurrents and the surface into one clear comprehensible mirror to life. To try and get behind such a mirror would mean wielding your fist to smash it, and that was the action of a madman.

He poured more coffee, and went to get the newspapers. He needn’t leave the house for another hour, never liked to leave it at all unless Myra were up first. A house with no one awake in it during the day was like a dead beehive, generating an unnecessarily sinister ambience.

On one page a civil war loomed in Cyprus, on another Algeria was blazing from end to end. He couldn’t see the sense of it with so much new work to be done. Clipping open to the middle he saw a caption: THE LINCOLNSHIRE POACHER CELEBRATES, above a photograph of a man with alarmingly open eyes who looked as if he had mistakenly stumbled into a firing squad. On one side of him was a younger man trying to hold him up, and on the other arm was Myra.

Eyes half closed, as if too much light had stabbed into them, his heart beat against the dozen questions that were crushed to death in the door of his mind. A smile covered the idea of not believing it. Good plain Myra in her new dress was wearing the faintest smile, a cross between contempt and modesty that he had often seen on her face but not defined so clearly until the shock of seeing her in a newspaper deepened his perceptions more than he would ever have thought either necessary or possible.

She was looking down at this famous Lincolnshire painter, who had sagged from the liquid weight of his own success. The other young man (he and Myra were described as friends of the artist) had a rather stalwart appearance as far as one could tell from such a picture, for the flash had caught him with a look of stolid disgust, as if, should Albert Handley really collapse, he would go over to the photographers and scatter them and their equipment up and down the space created by their lights. It was a visage made up of belligerence and sensibility, of intelligent spirit trying to push its way into a strong yet troubled face not easy to forget.

Sitting at the table by the kitchen window, with the morning light streaming over his large hands on the newspaper, George leafed open the top-people journal and found a review of the painter’s work though not, thank God, any mention of Myra. It was a perceptive though longwinded write-up. A certain flippancy was held against Albert Handley, but the reviewer balanced this by assuming that further development was sure to iron it out. Handley was compared to the unlettered primitive painters sometimes found in the nineteenth-century craftsmen’s guilds in the north of England, men with minds of simple outline and sombre colour who had disciplined their exuberant souls into rough conventional scenes of workbench or churchyard, hovel or chimney stack, a comrade in voluminous apron wielding outsize calipers and hammer with a motto on unity and brotherhood underneath. This was Handley’s tradition, the reviewer went on, but due to influences of the modern age, he had burst the bounds of these narrow limits and turned out something which was, after all, quite unique and original in that he had spanned both worlds. It was to be hoped that success would not ruin all this, and that he would respect his roots by leaving them as soon as possible and showing us the rest of the world coloured by his unique vision. The article ended by suggesting — tentatively — that perhaps Mr Handley’s appearance marked the beginning of some new wave in the bloodless and disorientated world of contemporary English painting.

George was not impressed, would like to have known how Myra had got mixed up with him and the other fellow to the extent of being shown on the middle page of the worst gutter newspaper of them all. There was no real harm in it, of course, no harm at all — reaching for his pipe, jacket and briefcase. It made him see Myra in a light never wondered at before.

He settled himself in his car and drove along the village street, passing shop, vicarage, and row of crumbled cottages, nodding at the milk-girl rattling her bottles towards the policeman’s door. He swung left at the mildewed war memorial. The river was still belly-swollen from last week’s rain, flowing heavily into the lowest meadows on either side. With the window open, the air smelt fresh and moist, having already tasted the sap of green buds, the jewelled balances of morning dew. The countryside was soddened, sunny and peaceful, a mosaic of livid green and brown. There was no evil in this part of England. Woods closed into the road, primroses matted along its banks. Even the low purring of his engine in top gear couldn’t hold back the languid harmonics of the birds. The other day he had heard the first cuckoo, a sound which gave him great pleasure. It would be a shame to leave this, find work in a harsher, hotter country at cross purposes to what his spirit really needed.

17

While Albert was down at the gents Teddy Greensleaves slipped Frank a bundle of fivers. Frank promptly slipped them back. ‘What was that for?’

‘Keeping an eye on Albert. You’ve done nothing else in the last fortnight.’

‘I don’t need paying for it,’ he said, in no way insulted at the offer.

‘You haven’t been to work, I notice. You have to live.’

‘I’ve got enough to live on.’

‘All the more reason for taking it,’ Teddy laughed. ‘If you had nothing you could be proud and refuse. People get kicks out of that. But go on, take it, Frank. We’ve got to keep Albert in one piece, see that he gets back to a long stretch of work in Lincolnshire.’

Frank took it: ‘I’d better give you a receipt so that it’ll come off your tax.’

‘We’ll settle that in the office,’ Teddy said. Big Teddy wasn’t only rolling in it — it was rolling in him. Every time he had an attack of asthma Frank expected great bundles of money to shoot out. He didn’t dislike him, for Teddy was generous, outspoken, intellectual and rich, and who could ask for pleasanter company in which to learn about this sort of world? Albert came back: ‘You haven’t ordered yet? I’m starving.’

‘We waited for you,’ Teddy said.

‘I’ve had no breakfast. I wouldn’t mind if you’d ordered for me.’

Teddy guarded him like a prize dog. ‘How did I know what you’d want, Albert?’

‘If you’d ordered me the same as what you’re having I wouldn’t have gone far wrong.’ Teddy picked up the menu and signalled the waiter, who floated over like a female dancer from Azerbaijan. ‘What would you like, then?’

The menu was so big it seemed like a fireguard in front of Albert’s face. ‘I think I’ll start with a little bit of pâté, go on to a Dover sole, and try a pepper steak. Maybe end up with crêpes Suzette — order it now because it takes them ages. How about you, Frank?’ He slid the menu over. Frank wanted cannelloni and chicken Portuguaise, then cheese. Teddy ordered, and arranged for the wine. When it came he picked off the cork like a true connoisseur, sniffed it judiciously, as if at one time it had been up somebody’s arse. He nodded to the waiter: ‘It’s all right.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I was reading my reviews again today,’ Albert said, ‘and the critics are so patronizing I could slay the bastards.’

‘They were good reviews though,’ Teddy said gently. ‘You’ve sold every picture in the exhibition. They’re clamouring for more.’

‘I know. But if there’s one thing I hate more than a bad review, it’s a good review. As for those who show superlative understanding of my whole artistic project and endeavour, unquote, I hate them most of all, and would stand them up against a wall and shoot them down like dogs if ever I got the chance. They’re my real enemies. They’re all dogs sniffing at the same wall. They turn my guts, I’m not joking. You’d think I’d just come out of the jungle, the way they talk.’

‘They’re only human,’ Teddy said. ‘They’re eating out of your hand at the moment, but don’t think it will stay like that, because it won’t.’

‘Don’t worry, if I keep on getting good reviews I’ll hang myself.’

‘It’s the space that counts,’ Teddy said, breaking his roll and spreading it with butter. ‘As long as you get the space, I’ll be happy.’

‘That’s all that matters. I realize that. I reckon six feet of space would make you even happier.’ The soft lighting of the midday restaurant pitched them into irritating candle-shadow in which nothing could be seen with real clarity. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘how you gave me lessons on what to say when I was interviewed? He was dead clever, Frank, was old Teddy-bear. Whatever they asked me, I was never to answer with a direct yes or no. That would be playing into their hands. If they ask if you’ve stopped beating your wife just go into a long spiel on the rights of women, such as I only go for her when she slings a sizzling flat-iron at my mug and scores a bull’s-eye. Teddy gave me two hours of his valuable time on that technique. I took it to heart, and talked so much with never a yes or no that I was bloody-well incoherent and the reporters had to bodge up their articles.’

‘Don’t sulk,’ Teddy said. ‘They’d have bodged them up anyway. You should be happy now.’

‘You should,’ Albert said. ‘You’ve made as much money as I have, just about. Let’s climb out of our trenches and slam each other, you mudstained bugger.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Teddy said. ‘Let’s eat first, at any rate.’ Frank knew that this went on whenever they met, with sometimes such a mask of despair and loathing on Albert’s face that he wondered why he bothered to stay in London. The experience of it was eating into his soul. Yet he wouldn’t hear of leaving until the last day of his exhibition. ‘Why?’ Frank had asked. ‘You must have some good reason.’ ‘I want to keep my eye on Greensleaves.’ ‘Come off it. He’s honest enough.’ ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I want to get myself known to as many people as I can before I go back, because I don’t want to come down again for another two years, not at all if I can help it. I want people to come up and see me in Lincolnshire and buy paintings off me there. The less I sell to Greensleaves the better. I’ve got myself fixed up with an accountant and a lawyer as well — to help me with the tax bullies, and contracts.’

‘I’m fed-up with all this newspaper runaround,’ he said. ‘They even had Frank’s picture on that first-night spree, not to mention that woman he got acquainted with. I expect her husband blacked her eye when he saw it next morning.’

‘The meat’s raw in these cannelloni. I didn’t worry myself,’ Frank said. ‘She’s not the sort to marry a man like that. I hated seeing myself in the papers though.’

Teddy said he didn’t think there was any harm in it. ‘I’ve got some blow-ups back at the office, which I forgot to give you. A souvenir of the big opening.’ He refilled their glasses, topped up his own. ‘I had some good mail this morning, Albert. They want some of your work at the Museum of Graphic Art in New York. Then there were a couple of feelers from Zürich. Of course I’ll put them off: “Mr Handley is far from prolific, but I shall be glad to see your representative when next in London in order to discuss terms should any of Mr Handley’s work become available in the meantime.” Something like that. One must be cool, or they’d never forgive us later. A publisher phoned me as well, wanted to do a book of reproductions. I told him it was too early to think about it yet, and to phone me back in a couple of years. A letter also came for you, Frank.’

He was busy with his food. It surprised him how much people managed to talk during a meal, while his own mouth was too full to say much. A slow rhythm of death-jazz drifted through the restaurant, and Albert, thinking it interfered with his argument, told the waiter to can it. The music flowed away, and off. He took the letter with a plain thanks, puzzled as to whom it could be from. While Teddy and Albert discussed prospects and figures, made plans, he opened the letter and found it was from Myra, simply to say she’d be coming to London a week next Thursday to have a real look at Albert’s work, so maybe he could meet her at Paddington, the seven minutes past ten train, if, that is, he was still in London and hadn’t already taken off for other places, in which case he wouldn’t be reading this letter anyway.

Teddy stopped talking, to point out a couple of famous actors. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Albert said. ‘Lick their boots or fall on my back? I’d rather see them on the stage, for a real thrill, to see if they’re really any good. The thing about famous people is that they just aren’t interesting.’

It was impossible to say why Teddy baulked at certain moments and not at others, but Albert’s outrageous remarks weighed on him when he thought the actors may have heard them too. In the first week or so Teddy would simply blush pyjama-pink and lift up a hand to hide the giggles. But it wasn’t funny any more. It had certainly ceased to be funny. ‘You’ll have to learn to behave yourself.’

Frank looked on, for after so long it bored him. Perhaps that’s what Myra had sensed when she thought he might already have left. Where can you go in this country? Bristol? Dover? Liverpool? Nowhere was where he was, because it was the same place she had left him in.

‘You think I can’t behave myself with the people I find in your sort of world?’ Albert raged. ‘They’re either queers, frauds, playboys, or brainless public school sacks of blood living off newspapers and advertising.’

‘My sort of world is now your world,’ Teddy smiled, face reddening. There wasn’t enough truth in this to subdue Albert: ‘You’d never get half a foot in my world, not in a hundred years, mate. With all your lights and glitter you couldn’t come anywhere near it. I might be eating the food of your world, but that’s about all. It doesn’t even taste all that good. My only reaction to your sort of world, when you throw it at me like you did with the party, is to get drunk, have a black out so that in record time I don’t see it, I just don’t see it, hear it, or smell it.’ Albert had regained some of his youth. His sharp saturnine Norse face had given a Latin self-assurance to his eyes, a gesturing manner that comes of thinking you have a good reason for being alive. Before his success it had only occasionally flashed, but now it was part of him.

‘I’m not asking for thanks, Albert. But your steak’s getting chilled.’

‘I know, but all this meat-eating makes me feel like Eric-the-bleedirig-Bloodaxe. I’m not being too personal, Teddy, but there’s got to be people like you in the world, otherwise how could I show my paintings?’

‘Not to mention sell them. You put it in a very charming way,’ Teddy said, temper smoothed, half smiling. Albert jumped up, smashing knife and fork on his plate: ‘Will you stop patronizing me, you overfed fuck-monk?’

A wave of distress passed through Teddy. He also stood, his great body shaking. ‘I’m not patronizing you,’ he cried, almost weeping. ‘That’s the only way I can talk.’

Frank looked up at them: ‘If you don’t drop dead I’ll kill you. I’ve had my fill of this. I’ll go back to the jungle if this goes on.’

A waiter drifted close. ‘Anything else, gentlemen?’

‘Not at the moment,’ Teddy said, still glaring into Albert’s demonic eyes.

‘The manager would appreciate it then,’ the waiter said, ‘if you two gentlemen would stop quarrelling.’

They sat, unable to say who had broken off the staring match. Albert cheered up over his crêpe Suzette. ‘You see,’ Teddy said to him, ‘you’re a fairly rich man, so you may as well begin to accept the responsibility of it.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do everything I can to see that I end up in the gutter. It’ll be cleaner than this place. Sure, I can slosh down this stuff and smoke a fat cigar that stinks like arse-shit, drink from a skull-cup till I’m as bricked as a wall, but a mutton stew and a Woodbine would keep me just as happy, has done this last twenty years, hasn’t it, Frank?’

‘True,’ he muttered, thinking of Myra and wondering why she had bothered to write, glad that she had. He remembered, on his way back from the station, a nagging agreeable need to see her again, and next day, the first time ever, he deliberately stopped himself hoping for it, cut off his wish at the roots and went on working as Albert’s bodyguard. The letter had reopened all that, showed him the river again, the broad curving descending flood of the arterial river on whose bank he stood. Bodies, houses, trees were carried forcefully down it in the grey unearthly light of dawn, everything flowing away in the silence, the bleak scene composed of a single indefinable mood. He had often seen the river in his dreams, water clipping his feet and wanting him to be sucked in and swept away — as if he hadn’t been in it all his life.

‘I’ll have no liver left by the time I get back,’ Albert said cheerfully.

Teddy poured more coffee, drew on his cigar. ‘Grow another in your rural retreat. It sounds idyllic, the way you talk about it.’

‘It is,’ Frank put in. ‘I lived in the same place for a while.’

‘You aren’t going back there?’ Teddy asked him.

‘I’m not. Don’t ask me where I am going though. Maybe I’ll get a job in some factory around London. Settle down, sort of.’

‘Why do that? I can find use for you. At a better wage, I should think.’

‘We’ll see,’ Frank said.

‘I think you’ll end up back in Nottingham,’ Albert said.

‘I might if I was born in Timbuctou.’

‘He’s got a wife and two kids up there.’

‘I had. She’s in with somebody else now.’

‘It’s shocking,’ Teddy winked.

‘You could always get her back,’ Albert suggested.

‘That’s all finished. Nobody wants anybody back.’

‘You people from the north,’ Teddy said, ‘make everything sound so final and full of fate.’

‘They’re exactly like people in the south,’ Frank said. ‘You see the gut-ache written on their faces just the same. The difference about London though is the underground. Have you ever been in it at rush-hour, Teddy?’

‘Not in thirty years,’ he admitted, ‘and it wasn’t such a rush-hour then — or so I understand.’

‘I stood near a phone box once watching ’em come down the steps. I just looked at their faces. First, I thought they were dead people going into corned-beef tins. Then I saw that underneath these death-masks was a joy, a happiness that they’d accepted even though they felt wicked about it: this tragic face was put on to hide it, but it didn’t kid me. They were going back into the tripes of the earth like worms, into these tapeworms that scoot around in the real guts of London. That’s what they lived for every day. In their offices or shops they keep looking at the clock, thinking it’s because they want to knock off, but it’s only to get back for half an hour into these tripes, to be worms for a bit inside Great Mother Tripe. I wouldn’t like to get caught down there if the four-minute warning went.’

‘You’re pessimistic,’ Teddy nodded. ‘Life is hard for anyone, but there’s no need to make a virtue of it. I spent years keeping my head above water.’

‘Yes,’ Albert butted in, ‘and when you climbed out everybody was surprised to see how fat you were.’

‘They didn’t have time,’ Teddy said, pleased at such after-dinner wit. ‘I bought them all up.’

‘They must have had their backs to you.’

‘Perhaps,’ Teddy said, flushed by the meal.

‘The trouble with you,’ Albert said, mustering all his London venom, ‘is that in that masculine great frame of yours there’s a spiteful little bitch doing its bi-sexual nut.’

Teddy took it well: ‘I’m learning quite a bit from you, certainly. Have another cigar. You still haven’t explained why you’re so pessimistic, Frank. You’re always dark-browed and quiet.’

‘You’ve no right to ask questions like that,’ he said.

‘Are we bringing human rights into it already? I thought we were just talking?’

Frank lit his cigar. ‘Nobody has the right to ask me why I am how I’m not. The only questions I’ll answer are those I’ve already asked myself and been able to answer. Those will be the ones I’ve spent my life answering — or trying to. Since coming to London I’ve not been getting very far.’

‘I’m with you there,’ Albert said. ‘It’s a dust bowl. All your time goes on drinking to keep alive. Any more wine in that bottle?’

Teddy slid it over: ‘I get all my answers from other people. It’s the best I can do, but I’m satisfied.’

‘You have to be,’ Handley said.

‘I don’t know where mine come from,’ Frank said. ‘So I suppose they come from myself.’

‘The best thing is just to go on living, and doing the best sort of work you can,’ Albert reflected. ‘Pessimism is everybody’s right, as long as they earn it.’

‘You’ve got to break through that sort of thing though,’ Frank said, ‘unless you want to die young — or be dead in everything after a certain age, which is the same thing. That’s why I left home and lit off. Pessimism is an idleness inside you, a spiritual deadness, if you like. It’s a load on your back that you’ve got to throw off.’

‘Pessimism,’ Teddy said, ‘is a creative force for an artist. It puts spirit into his work. If he knows how to channel it properly it becomes genius.’

‘Well, I’m not an artist,’ Frank said. ‘Not that I believe you. If I did I wouldn’t want to read a book or look at a picture again.’

‘You’d be starved of culture if you didn’t,’ Teddy laughed.

‘That would be the fault of people like you, then.’

Teddy called the waiter. ‘Why are you so quarrelsome, Frank? I suspect too much food does this to people, don’t you, Albert? Your brains can addle from rich food.’

‘Why don’t you lay off?’ Albert said. ‘Keep your nail file out of him. I’ve seen you do this to people before, and I don’t like it.’

Frank felt as if his head were about to shatter. He had wit enough to counter Teddy’s low-powered stabs, but not the patience to tolerate Albert coming to his defence. ‘It’s time I was on my way,’ he said, standing up. ‘All the best of luck to you two money-faced bastards. I don’t think any harm will ever come to you.’

‘Don’t go,’ Teddy called. ‘We were only talking. Come on, Frank, sit down.’

Albert caught him up at the door. ‘For God’s sake don’t take things like that. Teddy’s all right. He’s a good sort, you know that.’ He held his arm, to draw him back.

‘If you don’t let go of me,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll kick you into the floor.’ He went outside, and walked in the warm, humid sun down Greek Street.

18

Days drifted through warm and open weather, city air softened by spring, wind flapping between streets, getting a lift on the backs of red buses then jumping off to charge around the next corner at oncoming cars. He didn’t see Handley or Greensleaves again. Neither did he go back to work at the car park. For the moment, maybe for good, he had finished with all that. He still had money from saved wages, even from the sold car in Nottingham. Living on a few pounds a week he discovered in himself a talent for thrift which at one time he would have squashed with ridicule but now regarded as the equipment necessary for survival. He felt a healthy leanness, existed within a thinner casing of flesh which gave a more direct and brittle contact with the world.

His life-long habit of getting up at six wouldn’t leave him, and he sat by the window, reading until eight o’clock, pages punctuated by some black train shouldering a rapid pock-thumping way through the cutting. The window rattled and pages turned in its noise. He washed on the landing, where a bathroom and lavatory had been built into one of the single rooms, then sat in his shirtsleeves, ignoring the still sharp air of morning. He boiled tea, and drank the pot out. The room had lost its grimness, for he had adapted himself to London standards of isolation, discomfort and independence. He offered to paint the room white if the landlord paid for the paint. When this was agreed to, he borrowed brushes, pushed the furniture into one half of the room and covered it with newspaper — halfway one day, all white the next. It looked clean, felt more comfortable, a haven after climbing the gloomy stairs.

Not working, and seeing no one, increased his perceptions and sensibility, such moods in the past coming on only in illness or the half-fever of a bad cold. His ability to connect with these moods now, when the fever did not exist, provided a springboard for numerous other comparisons. It was as if he’d worn glasses all his life and suddenly thought to clean them: his sight seemed sharper, thoughts quicker.

Many of his days were spent in Highgate library. He went through books that he couldn’t take out, took books out that he couldn’t read there. He was able to extract the kernel of a book, having read much and quickly while at Pat’s. A history of Europe was absorbed by examining the list of contents — joining and cementing what he already knew, concentrating on English social history of the nineteenth century to find some explanation for the world he had grown up in. He learned botany and anatomy by diagrams, geography by reading and comparing maps, reinforcing and drawing together the scattered islands of his past knowledge which, he discovered, were more numerous than he’d imagined. It was a game for the uneducated: books of reproductions tied up what he had seen in the galleries.

Large areas of a jigsaw were forming. The encyclopaedia, dictionary, atlas, were three dormer windows high enough to embrace new views. Fiction was the depth gauge, plumb-line and echometer fathoming his deepest needs and feelings. Knowledge for its own sake was bare-faced and domineering, but each title of a novel was the top winch of a fairy-tale well whose storyline of chain and bucket let you down with varying degrees of speed into the waters of illumination. Knowledge confirmed the structure of the outside world, while a novel prised open previously unknown regions within yourself. Conrad, Melville, Stendhal — the giants. In war novels, detective novels, shit novels, you put a scarf over your eyes before going into their unconvincing strait-jackets; in the others, one had to take this scarf off before reading the first word. He wondered why he had not been born with this understanding, why nearly thirty years had gone by before touching the possibility of it. How many people had it in them, but never saw it?

He fought free of a narrow sort of life and began to wonder what he had let himself in for — though it didn’t destroy his patience with this new existence. Calmness is death, he knew, but at the moment he enjoyed it, took advantage of the unlimited days to see if any meaning would come out of his life. To solve the enigma of anyone else’s would only be possible after the unfettering of his own spirit.

Walking one day he recalled some words from Moby Dick: ‘And if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive.…’ In the Old Testament there is a story (he remembered it from school, being full of memories in the sunny desert of London), of two armies face to face, one far larger than the other, a host as it is called. During the night God sent rats into the tents of the biggest army and they ruined it by chewing the leather of their shield straps. Rats are unacknowledged legislators that rule the world. They started the Black Death that wiped out half Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars, besieging a Crimean city, catapulted a bubonic corpse over its walls, so that plague as well as famine broke its obstinacy. Out of that town, the plague-scythe cut down Europe as if it were a single head of corn. A man’s body is a battlefield of rat and anti-rat — the rat to kill, and the other to keep him human. Every man has his rat, his own brown rat sitting like an alter ego on his shoulder, dodging inside when storms flash and adversity baffles the air to stoke the inner chaos that such sights cause.

The legend of the rats had been a long time forming, a legend which for some reason exuded the heavy smell of a sagebush growing in sand. In some far-off time people didn’t like the rats. They threatened to destroy the real souls in them, so the Pied Piper came and drew the rats away. But the people refused him the bread they had promised as his fee, called him a trickster. So the Pied Piper sent back the rats, but charmed away the people’s children to inherit the innocence their parents had known before the rats came. The truth was that the parents couldn’t live without the rats, wanted them back, took them to their bosoms and became one with them.

The Pied Piper was hunted for his never-ending hostility to the rats. The rats were a disease of society and also of the soul, and society, being imperfect, enabled them to survive. The rats were the carriers of this disease. They perpetuated it. The Pied Piper wanted to take this disease of society away. When people, used by those who desired power and not just to live, wanted the rats to stay with them they turned the Pied Piper into Bill Posters and hunted him forever as they had formerly, in their innocence, hunted the rats.

The rats, of course, became invisible: there weren’t any to be seen. But they were continually breeding, ardently proliferating their rodent species in the various underworlds of oblivion. They dwelt far below the surface even of a child’s dilatory mind, quick, cruel, whiskered and ordured noses exploring dark caverns and nibbling the energized vapours of cloaca that kept them alive. They lived in the rat-filled banks and hollows of ashtips and streams, feet planted, heads turned in momentary awareness against the outside world, on the forced refuse, the hopes, the gangrenous wrecks of people’s lives, a thousand seams below. It was an evil impossible to fathom, excavate, analyse: the depths were too packed, putrescent, liquid, unrecognizable, a mud-death of suffocation, cone-roads descending. Such depths were wardened by rats, the only true history impossible to classify by seam or layer. One fell into it by turning on the gas-tap. One walked away from it — by walking away, or by the body taking you off if the spirit wanted you to stay by the world-wide rat-pit of rat-darkness which is body-death and soul-death.

Frank desired neither, fought both, wanted body-life and soul-life, to steer a narrow course on the narrowing tightrope across the top of the world’s circus tent, balanced safe above the rat pits spreading below, the world-width of black mud surrounded on every far distance by dim faces of spectators in thrall to the rats laughing and waiting for his fall.

He hoped there was no question of falling. He would not fall, hoped his limbs, blood and bones would hold him back. But it was necessary to fight in order to keep the same dignity and independence he had known in his more stable, traditional, less knowing existence where the rats had been less likely to get at him.

He forgot about the future. Living alone, it didn’t exist. He hadn’t talked to anyone for days, and thought he never wanted to again.

Wearing jacket, trousers and jersey shirt, and a pair of boots he’d splashed ten guineas on, he went to meet Myra at Paddington, her letter still in his pocket. He picked her out from the barrier as she stepped off the train dressed in a light brown coat and carrying a shopping basket. He had forgotten what she looked like and was afraid of not recognizing her. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ she said, handing in her ticket.

‘It’s a good beginning,’ he joked, remembering his impression of her as someone cold and half awake, while thinking that you don’t know what a house is like to live in until you’ve made a fire in it. They walked to the cafeteria. He was surprised that they didn’t feel like strangers to each other as he stood in line for coffee and buns. She recalled writing her letter out in the garden one sunny day, sitting on the steps and trying to stop the wind flicking her pages. She’d wanted to be among streets and traffic, away from the so-called peace which was noisy enough to drown the real feelings in her. But silence wasn’t finding it so easy to hold them down any more, and in becoming real again she hoped she wasn’t making Frank too responsible for something that couldn’t yet be seen as either good or bad. The few paintings glimpsed at Albert’s party, the crush of people, the meal and walk with Frank, were important because she was inclined to overrate them. She shouldn’t have written the letter, but had no power to resist it.

She asked how Albert was. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him for a while. Nor have I been to the gallery. I packed all that in.’

‘You did seem a bit out of place there. What happened?’

‘We were having some dinner, the day Teddy handed me your letter, and the talk went on and on, so vicious and useless that I couldn’t stand it. It was starting to pull me in. When you feel that something’s played itself out, you’ve just got to go.’

He seemed more real now that he was free from a world that had no genuine use for him. Some re-humanizing process had occurred in the time elapsed. The other night had been an artifact in which they were not quite being themselves. It seemed clearer now, with the reality of traffic roaring outside and a train journey behind her. There was so little emotion between them that it couldn’t possibly be false. Sun softened into the room and she felt drawn to his rather large hands resting by the cup, eating, pushing the plate away. ‘I suppose you saw our photo in the newspaper?’

They talked in a clatter of metal trays. ‘I did. But I hoped you hadn’t, by some miracle. What did your husband say?’

‘Not much, though he didn’t like it. I said it was all chance and coincidence, that I happened to be there when the painter needed help.’ It hadn’t been easy, for George must have brooded on it all day, pacing it out in the fields, encasing it from hedge to fence to looping footpath. His high standards would tell him to ignore it, but they let him down as the endless belt of daytime wore on. By evening he was incensed, and only her calm talking smoothed things out for the hours that followed. It was a unique experience at her age, and in this so far quiet marriage. Why had such an innocent photo pitched him from accepted order and unthinking peace to a life of suspicion — that he hid very well but that she now felt in him all the time? It was mysterious to her. Could a man hold that stupid photograph responsible for portents which must always have been with him? The answer came now that she was sitting with Frank.

‘My plan for today,’ she said, to prove that thoughts of George did not worry her, ‘is to visit my sister-in-law, then go to the gallery and see Albert’s pictures. It closes soon, doesn’t it?’

‘You ought to go today. It’s worth seeing. I hope his next show is as well.’

‘What makes you unsure about it? You don’t envy him, do you?’

He put down his cup. ‘I used to, when I first met him in Lincolnshire and saw his paintings. I envied him then, if that’s the right word. But now I don’t. He gets into blind rages, attacking the art dealers, critics, and other painters’ work. That’s the sort of thing that’ll ruin him unless he goes back to Lincolnshire for ten years and sees nobody, like before. I’m not saying all those people aren’t worth attacking, but the best way you can do it is by ignoring their existence — I should think. Teddy doesn’t really want him to go back to Lincolnshire, keeps trying to get him to go to Italy or Greece for a year or two. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Albert has to make his own way there, not go under Teddy’s auspices. The less people he has looking after him, the more he’ll be able to look after himself again. Then he’ll be all right.’

‘What about you, though?’

He laughed, cigarette smoke rolling across at her. ‘Me? Whatever happens I’ll be all right — as long as something happens.’ She’d never thought of it that way. ‘That’s the only way I can look at it,’ he said.

‘You’re lucky, then.’

‘I know. Every time I take a breath, or eat some bread and cheese I say to myself: “You lucky bastard!” I was born lucky in that way.’ He told her the skeletal facts about himself. ‘Up to last autumn I was buried in three feet of cold soil, unable to move except for my arms and breath. Now my feet are free, at least.’

He belonged nowhere, she reflected, but he had belonged somewhere so solidly once that it would take him years to find some natural way of life again. He was the sort of man who could not turn back. His face was a mask of animation and strength, grey piercing eyes, highish cheeks, firm jaw and the sort of mouth that bends easily into anger — a man of character shifting between two coastlines of existence. His senses seemed out of tune with the rowdy and continuous traffic-flow along Euston Road where they now walked, and his face had a natural serenity whose only violence might be to protect that serenity from the forces of history. She found it impossible to guess where it would lead him; and difficult to imagine from where he had set out. To try and deflect him from his wilful half-conscious drifting would be an underhand way of helping herself, for his limbo was only noticeable in that it seemed to give more purpose to her own life, while she didn’t yet know what that purpose might serve.

They took a bus to the Embankment, walked up the steps and on to Hungerford Bridge. ‘This is my favourite view,’ he said, leaning on the parapet. ‘I often come here, look at the river for hours, watch it change colour as the sky alters. I kid myself I’m looking at London because I can see up the river to St Paul’s.’ He reached down, closing a hand over her fingers so that she had no thought of drawing away. ‘The river’s moving, going somewhere.’

‘Which is more than we are,’ she said, seeing it swirling along, dark and grey.

‘I want to stay here a while,’ he teased, pressing her hand, feeling like one of those young lovers often walking this way. A train moved slowly out of Charing Cross, shook the bridge under their feet, a noise of steel and thunder that stopped her replying. ‘If I travel,’ he said, ‘it’s got to be out of England. There’s no place for me on this right little tight little island.’

‘Where, though?’

‘I’d go to the moon if I could. I want to go over the water, onto a continent. The sky eats into my brain here.’

‘You’re running away from yourself.’

‘I know. If that’s the only way to find yourself, then you’ll sooner or later run into what you’re running away from, even if you don’t know what it is. You’ll recognize it when you hit it — or it hits you.’ She smiled: he talked as if he’d just discovered the abstract and, like Columbus blundering into America, wanted to pull the whole world over into it. ‘Maybe you won’t like it when you meet it,’ she said.

‘It’s a case of surviving, not liking.’ They walked off the bridge, through the tube station hall and up Villiers Street. ‘If I decide to take off,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come with me?’

His question flew into her heart like a piece of sharpened stone. She stopped walking, as if it would compromise her to answer while her feet still moved: ‘Are you afraid of doing things on your own?’

He laughed. ‘Maybe two can be saved for the price of one! I just think it’s better with somebody else, and I thought you might have an idea of lighting off as well.’

‘I hadn’t,’ she lied, which she knew came too quickly for him to believe it. They had a shepherd’s-pie meal in a pub off Leicester Square, sitting away from the businessmen’s crush at the counter. ‘If you’d like to go to the gallery,’ he said, ‘I’ll meet you somewhere later.’

She wanted to stay with him. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll go another time perhaps.’

‘When I’ve gone away?’

‘I didn’t mean that. Why do I have to explain myself step by step?’

‘Because you want to. Have another glass of red plonk. I’ll get more beer for myself’ — the waitress saw him wave.

‘Beer and wine don’t mix,’ she smiled.

‘Anything mixes. Get me a quart of each in the same bowl and I’ll drink ’em. In fact I’m almost beginning to feel like it.’

‘The very idea makes me sick.’

‘Add a cup of whisky if you like. Let’s drink to a long life — wherever it is.’

‘That’s innocent enough,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should go to the Arlington after all.’

‘What about your sister-in-law?’

‘Yes, I must go there.’

‘I’ll wait for you. Meet you later.’

‘Come up with me. She lives in Hampstead.’

‘Isn’t it risky? They’ll twig something. It’ll get back to your husband.’

‘It might, but I don’t mind.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, wondering whether she liked him more than she hated her husband. ‘Let’s go then.’

The underground shuffled them north. She sat by his side, unspeaking, as if she had made a decision and to open her mouth might turn her from it. Leaving home this morning was an event beyond the far rim of the earth, and as usual in London she felt, with handbag and shopping basket, without a bed to go back to that night. It was alarming and exhilarating, a sort of soul-drift in a desert of streets where she felt no responsibility for the nomad state of her psychic life. At the moment only Frank was real, and the rattle of the carriage going under Belsize Park.

It was a two-floored house in a row of forty-year-olds, comfortable red-brick set on a slope with superb views towards Highgate. The front door was painted yellow, with a mosaic of different coloured heavily-leaded glass — pulling away when Myra tipped the bell.

Frank was introduced to Pamela, a tall buxom young woman wearing corduroy slacks and a green jumper. She looked at him with a half smile, as if surprised that Myra could ever have met a man apart from her husband.

With so much house he was surprised they sat in the kitchen, big as it was. Two small children played at a box of toys, a boy and girl who seemed rather subdued. He winked and tried to catch their eyes, but it was some time before they smiled.

‘Are you going to see mother?’ Pam asked. Myra said she wouldn’t have time today, but might well call on them next time. ‘They won’t like it,’ Pam told her, ‘when they know you haven’t been to see them.’

‘I have a show to see at the Arlington,’ Myra said, ‘a new painter from Lincolnshire.’

‘I read about him,’ Pam said, filling the kettle to make them some tea. ‘His work sounds marvellous, and I’d love to see it too, but I always have too much on with the sprogs’ — meaning the children, Frank gathered. She must have been cleaning up when they came, because a heap of Observers and Woman’s Owns still lay by the draining board. Or maybe she’d been reading, because he noticed some sort of manual called: How to Deal with the Outstanding Child lying near the sugar dish.

They drank tea, and talked, and he was happy to see Myra so animated over news of family and old friends, and the chitchat of what was on in town. He put in his comments now and again, but couldn’t feel himself part of the main thread because he was so much a stranger. He couldn’t tell whether Pam looked at him so openly out of curiosity, or whether she was giving him the eye. He smiled, to find out, and got a smile back, none the wiser. When Myra went to the bathroom she asked if he’d known her long.

‘A couple of years,’ he lied, and when she asked him what he did for a living he said he was a writer, though it didn’t pay enough to keep an illiterate in postage stamps.

‘Oh, and what do you write?’

‘Stories,’ he said. ‘No luck yet though. I’m off to France in a couple of weeks. Bum around a bit. I can’t stand England.’

‘I’ve always wanted to leave it,’ she said, ‘teach in some exotic place like Persia or India. But there’s no hope of that, I’m afraid.’

‘You could teach in England,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I will when the sprogs are older.’

He felt sorry for her. ‘Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the sort of world we live in?’

‘I’d never thought of it,’ she answered. ‘It is difficult, that’s true. But I suppose it’s up to us as individuals, really.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not really. It’s about time we got past all that, grew up, you might say.’ Myra came back, only catching the last sentence. It was a rich house, as far as Frank could see, must be run on about forty pounds a week from Pam’s photographer husband. Yet there was a squalor about it that he had always imagined such money could eliminate, an educated squalor, admitted, a stench of untidy intellect that didn’t appeal to him. Myra had told him that Pam had a degree from Cambridge, in English, and he had been naïve enough to expect an impeccable house. Even the tea was weak.

By the time he left he had both children on his knees asking him to come again, and he saw how blind and irrevocable had been his own action in leaving his children.

Pam also asked him to call again, though gave a firm pressurized sort of handshake that could have meant good-bye for good.

They walked to a bus stop in Highgate. ‘I can’t go back on the underground,’ he said. ‘Let’s go overland to my place for a drink. The house looks squalid, but the room’s clean. Do you know Camden Town?’

‘I wandered around it in my student days.’

‘What were you studying?’

‘I read economics, and got a first.’

‘What are you doing then, being a wife? Maybe you get a kick out of wasting yourself.’

‘I’m not wasting anything. I’m living.’

‘It’s not enough. You’ve got to do something with it.’ His words disturbed her after the visit to Pam’s. He knew it, and she wondered why he kept on when a more sensitive and considerate person would have let her fall back into pleasant sloth.

They sat on the top deck, descending into the smoke and view, and she told him about her work in the village so that it sounded worthwhile and even important, until she caught a note of justification in her voice, and stopped. ‘I suppose London is full of women like Pam,’ he said. ‘Places like Hampstead and Highgate. I’ve seen ’em around, dragged down by snotty and petulant kids, and wasting their educated lives out of inertia. I guess it’s the fault of the country though, as much as them. They could do useful work, but there’s just no need of it. It’s a rare world.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked, and he had no answer. She took his arm when they left the bus. ‘If I hadn’t met Albert in Lincolnshire I wouldn’t have met you in London,’ he said.

‘Does it seem so important, to trace it back like that?’

‘It’s fate,’ he said. ‘By politics I’m a socialist, but I believe in fate.’

She laughed: ‘You want it both ways.’

‘At the moment it’s got me both ways. I was wondering what moves I went through to meet you.’ They came to a road of dilapidated early Victorian houses. One or two had been fixed up, cleaned and painted, adorned with shiny brass knockers and fancy numbers, cars outside like metal watchdogs. They walked to the far end, through a gang of playing children.

Stepping out of the sun Frank went up the stairs first, refusing to comment on how much of a dump it was because maybe she was thinking the same. Which was true. He certainly had no right to rail against Pam’s house. She wondered whether it would be possible to sit down when she reached his room — until the door opened. ‘I painted it out,’ he explained. ‘It was so bad even I couldn’t stand it. Take this chair. The others are clean, but only this one’s safe. I’ll sit on the bed.’ The walls were bare, like a top-floor cell, oblong and simple, a few books on a table, a suit behind the door, two pair of shoes showing under the made bed. How lucky he was to be so free, she thought, no more belongings — material or spiritual — than could fit in a suitcase. He looked at her: ‘If ever you want to make a decision, just say yes, whatever it is.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of anything.’

‘That’s impossible. You’ve always got something on your mind. I’m good at thinking on nothing, though it’s getting less easy. I’m thinking plenty at the moment.’

‘Such as what?’ It was a dangerous question, as if she had said yes to something by making it.

‘The same as before. I think we ought to go away.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. ‘Do you think I’m blind and stupid? It’s got to be talked about. I’ve never seen a woman so much at the end of her tether. You’re like a sea being drained. The first time you meet somebody you get to know as much as you’re ever likely to, even if all the pennies don’t drop for a while. Something’s been eating you alive for a long time.’

‘Going away with you won’t stop it.’

‘If that won’t, nothing will.’

‘It sounds like boasting. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t know what you’d be doing.’

‘All you need do is say yes.’ She wanted to say it, to overwhelm him with it, but it just couldn’t be so easy for him, or her. The house and room and the street outside were silent except for their own voices. No traffic sounded and the children had run off to fresh pastures of brick and pavement. The afternoon had reached its deep middle, a silent and stale sheet on the bed of the day, a blue sky at the square window, an emptiness all around them and through it in which no feelings could be hidden. ‘Where do you think you’d go?’

‘Off this island, then I’d tell you where.’

‘I’m using the singular, not the plural. What would you do?’

‘Why do you make a question out of everything?’

‘Because I want to know.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘call it a holiday; call it the end of the world. What more do you want? I don’t care whether the sun’s shining or not. I don’t expect to sprout wings and be a bloody angel. I just want us to crash this rotten barrier. I want to look at my life from the outside. My life and this big island are meshed up and I’ve got to separate them. I’m caught in a press, and I want to struggle out of it. Maybe then I’ll fight my way back in, but then it’ll be different.’

She listened in amazement: ‘What does all this have to do with me?’

He sat, hands pressing against his head. ‘Nothing, if you feel nothing when I say it. I thought you might.’

‘Why did you choose me?’ she said in a low voice.

‘Who can say who chose who? I want you to come.’ She trembled, drawn easily to her feet.

‘No,’ she cried, pushing him away. ‘I want to come. I want to come more than you want me to, but the answer’s no. It’s got to be. I can’t do it.’

She was weeping with a bitterness he’d never heard before, but he held her loosely, though knowing that she needed no support with such salt tears. ‘Myra, don’t cry. We’re all right.’

‘I’m a happy woman,’ she wept. ‘Leave me alone.’ It would end well, he felt, so it would, but he could only hold her, his arms around and face close, eyes open blankly at the vacant window beyond her shoulders.

They stood, and he smiled at the window, the blank space. A pressure from her arms forced him away so that she could kiss him. Then she softened against him, limp and exhausted, her body shaking.

Her eyes were closed, and he lay by her side. The kisses she gave froze him. They felt so remote, so far away and detached that they came out of a dream he had nothing to do with, a form of revenge against what he hoped would not turn out to be himself. He stroked her hair and kissed her closed eyes. He wondered if she were asleep, as a lethargy matched to the blue window seemed to creep over her, attuned to the soft folds of her body, under the coat that she hadn’t thought to take off. A train rumbled, and behind the silence there was traffic along the main road.

19

He brought in food from a Greek shop down the road — fruit, olives, bread, sausage, wine and halva. They were like people mildly drunk, never mentioning plans or hopes, who understood each other perfectly. ‘Will it matter, me staying here?’ she asked the first night. They talked with the light off, but the curtains open, a faint moaning noise entering on sodium reflections and the softened beams of passing cars.

‘Nobody asks questions in this place.’

‘I didn’t come out with luggage,’ she laughed, ‘but I came out with money. We could have gone to a hotel.’ She had only a handbag and an empty basket — nothing to spend any sort of night with, except a night like this. ‘To me,’ she said, ‘the only sort of love I feel is when it seems as if I know nothing, when I’m so inflamed and infatuated that I think I’m a teenager and have never met a man before, as if there’s no past behind me except the non-sexual golden age of childhood that can’t be divided into years. Everything to do with the world draws away from me, except the man I’m with. I forget everything else.’

He turned from the wall, wondering how many lovers she’d had, to talk like that. Several columns of shillings were stacked on the table, waiting to feed the gas fire whose bars glowed under the opposite shelf. ‘The only sort of love for me is when it feels as if I know a lot — and when it doesn’t matter whether I know anything at all. Love’s not much more than a holiday in life. I think everything should be put in its place. The most important thing is work — to do something that means something. When two people meet who want to live together they should spend a fortnight in bed. There should be special hotels where you hand in your clothes, and then they lock you in, and slide your meals under the door every so often, so that when you come out you’ll know all about each other and won’t let it obsess you — for a while anyway. In my ideal society all advertisements would be ripped off the streets, and instead there’d be well-placed neon signs in red saying: “Work! Work! Work!” Maybe now and again there’d be a little one going on and off saying: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” — which I don’t suppose would be necessary, though it’d get people on the hop a bit more.’

She laughed: ‘What would they have to believe in?’

‘Aren’t work and fucking enough? Both of them excite me equally — though maybe that’s because I haven’t done any work for a few weeks, and have only just made love.’ He stood up and poured wine, his broad-shouldered nakedness looming in the half light. She lay on her side, the room even dimmer as she was not wearing her glasses. Speech and darkness were healing. In spite of the black passion of his desires, her body seemed to belong to her again, was beginning to reinstate itself as part of her mind and thought.

She slept with an arm over his body, accustomed now to the Lysol smell of the room, the faint reek from the blankets, odours of tobacco-smoke and food, sour wine on their lips, the taste of their bodies. They didn’t sleep well, and Frank was up by the first chorus of traffic. She hadn’t opened her eyes, but he held a cup of tea near her face: ‘Myra, get this. You’ll sleep after it.’ On seeing her awake, George’s first act had been to kiss her, a formal passionless greeting that meant nothing after the first year.

Frank was crouching over the gas ring to boil more water, as if she weren’t there. They slept till midday, a cold wind banging at the window to get them up.

She didn’t leave the house for four days, fastened into the sensual timelessness of its warm room. She said: ‘I suppose this idyll must be brought to a close some time. I want to see daylight again. I think I can take it now.’ He had already been out, stood by the table unloading provisions. Blue sky and daylight filled the room, an open window letting in the chill air. ‘You don’t seem interested.’

‘The only way I can be,’ he said, ‘is if you go back to your house, and finish with everything there. I’ll go with you. Then we can take off somewhere.’

‘Are you sure you want that?’

He held her: ‘Myra, if this is the end, let’s begin something. I know it’s time we did.’

‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘But come with me then.’

They ate at a good restaurant in Soho. ‘It’s so perfect,’ she said, ‘I hope it isn’t a last supper.’

‘It won’t be. Everything’s settled, except for the details. Where do you want to go first?’

‘I’d like to see my friend in Majorca. She’s always inviting me down.’

‘That’s in Spain, isn’t it? We can call on Franco as well, with a bomb. It’s about time somebody got him.’

‘I’d like to see my friend first,’ she smiled.

‘We could take in some propaganda, anyway. Teddy Greensleaves was telling me about somebody he knew who took a great trunk of it in his Jaguar. He didn’t get searched, and handed it over in Barcelona, where his contacts had been fixed up.’

‘It must be strange,’ she said to him, ‘how much your life’s changed in this last year. I wish mine had.’

It will, he thought. It will. ‘I’ve swum out of something but I’ve not swum into anything else. It’s impossible to in England, if you’re true to yourself, unless the whole way of life changes through some political switch. I’m nowhere yet. Albert thought his life had changed, but he’ll be sound enough to see that it hasn’t once he hits Lincolnshire again.’

‘Are you sure you want to leave England?’

‘Yes,’ he said coolly. ‘I’m finished with it. That fat staggering pigeon safe on a lion’s head, and the lion is made of stone: that’s how I see it. One blow from a catapult and its fat corn spills out. It’s not what people are that matters; it’s what they want to become.’

‘Perhaps you only want to go for a while,’ she said.

‘I won’t know till I get there.’

‘Get where?’

He still did not know, and felt foolish at having to admit he didn’t by an empty sounding ‘Ah’ — which he had heard snap from so many fatuous mouths in restaurants and bars he’d gone into with Albert. It’s catching; he thought, so that’s one good reason I’ve got to scat.

It took George little time to realize that, after six years of comfortable marriage, Myra wasn’t coming back, unless to collect her belongings. He knew he was in for one of those fatal hammerblows that he had comfortably chuckled over when dealt out to one of his friends. She hadn’t been run over, obviously, or met with any accident: such a sound reason would at least make her absence less humiliating. His waking moments showed him another glimpse of the newspaper photo which undoubtedly held some clue as to what was in store for him. That night was ominous in that she had told so little about it, whereas before that she’d described her runs to Town in such detail that he’d found it impossible not to show boredom — almost irritation if he had papers to go over.

His mood swung between indifference, and a resentful bitterness. At times of indifference he nevertheless told Mrs Harrod that Myra had gone to her sister’s in Somerset. In moments of despair he told himself that they had needed a rest from each other for a long time, and that Myra had merely gone to stay in some coastal place until her peace of mind came back. Then she would return — by which time he would be accustomed to living on his own.

In the long hours of evening he put the final touches to his book, working in the deep unscarred silence of the house. The same quiet had existed when Myra was there, but then he believed she had purposely created it so that he could work in peace. He now realized it was a part of the house and of himself, a silence which battened onto his spirit and robbed him of the will to work. He preferred the silence of two people to that of himself alone.

It was unjust and thoughtless of her not to let him know. It was downright bloody cruel, in fact. A letter saying she had gone off for good would have been better than this uncertainty. The saying that no news was good news didn’t work between man and wife. No news could only mean indifference, and there was nothing good about that. The world hadn’t shattered in colourful explosion, but it was breaking under his feet, even in this silence, ice in a slow thaw. Without Myra his occupation of the house seemed temporary by the third day, a place he’d moved into for a few weeks while somewhere else was got ready. He worked at the kitchen table, instead of in his commodious study, and if the kitchen had been big enough he would have slept there as well, concentrated himself into a single room as in the days before he met Myra.

He could, of course, go to London and look for her. But where? The only lead was the photo, flashed outside the Arlington Gallery. He could call on her parents, or a few friends, but sensed these to be useless. If Myra had gone to such places she would have phoned him already out of boredom. He didn’t want to move outside the axis of work and home.

On the fourth day he went up to Town, a desultory visit, calling at Stanford’s to buy survey plans, then looking through the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He reconnoitred the Arlington Gallery, but saw nothing of Myra. He was back in the village by six, vanguard of the rush hour spreading north out of London. The air smelled of evening when he came out of the garage, sun glowing lampwise down the green slightly inclining land of the valley. It would linger there, slipping gently from heavy cloud to dun-coloured fields and silver trees. He’d take a walk later, after tea, along one of the quiet lanes towards the woods that would darken first. He felt more tired than after a normal day — irritable, ragged, fundamentally disturbed — hoped a stroll would clear his body of lung-destroying air. Walking to the door, he caught the pungent sweetness of fresh-scythed grass — coming to him as if pulled out of the hard grip of winter’s teeth, though spring was far enough on into the year.

This switched him into the gear of a good mood, and he looked forward to the long solitary evening to follow his walk. Where Myra was he did not know, and he was beginning not to care.

The door gave even before he turned the key. Taking off his coat in the hall he heard talking from upstairs, and the sound of music playing softly on the bedroom transistor.

‘Myra!’ he called, in the same voice he would use after a satisfying day at work. It was the only way he could tolerate the giant spider latched with all claws inside his chest.

The music stopped. He went into the lounge, sat with legs stretched out, trying to read a newspaper as if she still had not returned. He was too sick to move, at the thought of her bringing back the man she had presumably stayed with.

‘I’ve come to say good-bye,’ she said, ‘and get my things.’

He didn’t look at her: ‘Sit down.’

‘I’d better not. We want to catch the last bus back to the station.’

‘You can phone for a taxi.’ He was robbing her of a deadline, a time she clung to as the unalterable mark of departure. ‘Sit down,’ he repeated.

‘I’ve told you, I’m in a hurry.’ He stood quickly, took her by the shoulders and pushed her into a chair. It was an unknown violence and she smiled slightly, a sardonic expression to conceal her first and sudden hatred of him. ‘I’ve something to tell you before you finally make up your mind:’

‘Everything’s set. It’s no use, George.’

‘Perhaps not, but while your boy friend is getting your things downstairs I want to say that I’m giving up the house. A while ago I applied for a job as surveyor with a company that’s looking for oil in Tripolitania. I’ve known for a long time that you weren’t happy with the humdrum life here, and I’ve been wanting a change, as well as to do something useful in a country that needs help and patience and knowledge. I thought all this would appeal to you, and as far as I’m concerned, if you want to change your mind, then I’ll be glad. In six weeks we’ll have sold this place and be out there. I got confirmation of the appointment this morning.’

To the one left behind the world becomes unreal, timeless, dead. The air itself alters, an alien covering of roof and sky that only action can throw off. He held himself tight at the centre, showing a calm almost lethargic exterior — that sharpened to hopelessness and a damaging inability to say anything else.

She stood up. ‘I can’t stay with you. I wish you luck in your new job.’ Frank waited in the hall, trunk and suitcase by the stair rail. Myra was surprised that what she wanted to take fitted into so little, which gave her the feeling of really leaving.

There was no shaking of hands when she introduced them. George could not force his eyes onto Frank, and this, more than Myra’s going away, caused a painful rage to burn in him. Frank found it a strange and sterile experience, enmeshed in such a polite but deadly ritual. ‘Let’s sit down and have a drink,’ George said.

In the living-room he poured generous portions of whisky, emptying the last of the bottle into his own glass. Equal to his rage was the desire to know something about Frank, which also made him ashamed because the only way of finding out was to talk, to be calm and amiable at a time when it was not possible.

Frank accepted the drink, knowing that if he made any remark at all on the present situation, a man with a face as bunched and putty-coloured as George’s would go berserk, smash the house from top to bottom — which would be a shame since he had to go on living in it after they had gone. He would also maybe smash anyone who got in his way, so Frank was ready, watching for any move that might lead to this. ‘It’s good whisky,’ he said. ‘I needed that’ — and even this was too near the mark, as George’s face took on a subtle but new shade of choler.

‘I’m glad you did,’ George said. ‘It’s not easy for any of us.’

‘It isn’t,’ Frank said.

George could not talk. Why do people go away? he wondered. Because they are going to die and so hope to escape their fate; because out of impatience they can’t wait to know their fate and future. Even the gypsy in them can’t tell them that, unless they move. Movement is like gunpowder — needs a flame to set it off. People move because they haven’t started to live to the fullest extent of their basic personality. Those who are always on the move have no personality.

‘The trunk’s labelled,’ Myra said. ‘I’d like the railway to pick it up tomorrow.’ She sat down again, unable to stand, and dreading every second. George wished she had come alone. Not that he would have stopped her, but he would have spoken more freely. It was a vile blow to deal, to stand this other person in front of him when there was so much to say that he had never been able to say before.

‘We must make that bus,’ Frank said.

George had an idea, to do something that would open them all to the sky, and end everything in the only way possible. ‘I’ll drive you to the station. You can take your trunk then, at the same time.’

‘Don’t trouble,’ Myra said.

‘I can be back in forty minutes.’

‘No,’ she said. Frank had his coat on, the case by him. ‘You’ve been at work all day.’

He couldn’t insist. ‘I was in Town, looking for you.’

‘I’m sorry, George.’

His grey eyes smouldered lifelessly: ‘Go on, then. Get out.’

They left him standing, looking into the tall drawn curtains that opened onto the back garden where she had worked so often, and with the mindless pleasure one often finds in a false role. Fresh cool air snapped at them. It was dark, with only a solitary lamp lit along the deserted street.

George was unable to believe that nothing else could be done. Clarity of mind existed, it seemed, but only at the restricted middle of the most complex labyrinth. He felt it, but had no way of reaching it. Life had always seemed a straight road, and he hadn’t even been foxed by a simple dead-end or caught in a false cul-de-sac. Instead, he was now trapped in an unsurveyable maze of footpaths darkened by tall hedges. Such a labyrinth was extreme torment for a mind that could exist only on order and calm, which wanted everything measured and shaped, reduced to a beautiful design and set down on paper. The last few days had drawn him into the labyrinth, like a doomed fly fixed in helplessness until the spider-god came out for him. Or maybe he had been going towards it all his life, slowly and more deliberately than he’d known. Tonight there were a thousand routes open all around him, but none indicating with more certainty than any other either a track to the middle, or an exit to the outside world.

He got up, to follow them out.

Though it was a long walk to the bus stop, the heavy case didn’t bother Frank. But the size was awkward, and now and again it slammed against his leg. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he said, to bring Myra out of the dark silence by his side.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘At last. It’s happened. You don’t know what it means.’

‘We can set off in a few days, when you’ve got your passport renewed.’

The departure hadn’t been as bad as she’d imagined. She knew they’d both been dreading it, but now, as Frank said, it was over, and she couldn’t think of anything except the freedom and emptiness ahead. A few lights glowed from cottage windows, but the two shops were shut, and the pub hadn’t yet taken on its dim spark of evening life. Now and again a loud television set penetrated door and curtains. The street had no pavement, and they walked well into the road, away from the overhanging thatch. The bus and train would make a relaxing journey back to town.

He changed the suitcase to his outward side, not feeling much like speech — a silence which spread out the road to a greater length than when they’d walked it that afternoon. It was always longer travelling in the dark than by day. As a youth he’d often set off on the bike with friends, for the Peak District after a night at the pictures, and the journey seemed fifty times harder than in sunlight or even day-rain.

But now it gave time to let thoughts run through, a good moment for it because in a few days they’d be on the water, an end dropped like a dead fish into the sea, and a beginning drawn up like a corpse for resuscitation. In this unreal evening he had the feeling of already slipping out from the bank of an old life, not too much noise as he hit the water on a quiet stretch of this interior coast, and striking across the solitude of an unknown sea. For what? To go where? Getting out of your mother’s womb you were already there. Maybe you were even there at the first shot of your father’s prick. Life was wide, and maybe death was the only place where you could think about it. Or maybe life was death, and life was the only place where you could cogitate. If it was though, where was life? Life is in my eyes and my own two feet, and nothing more. Travelling across such water made for a cold journey, in spite of sun and daylight interspersing night and the presence of accompanying fishes. Dawns were cold and bitter, and only the first hours of darkness comfortable — like now, walking with Myra.

He switched the case over to the inside. ‘There won’t be long to wait,’ she said. Lights prowled a long way behind, somewhere on the road, like lions let out of a cage, skirting across the far flank of the eye as Frank half turned in changing the case over. A car engine snarled, as if some mad bastard was hell bent for his favourite country pub. He moved out of the way, giving him room to pass, Myra almost into the doors of the cottages.

The dimly lit bus shelter was a hundred yards away, no one else there. A lamp flickered on and off. The car seemed close, revved-up to choking point, but he didn’t turn round to see the make of it. Myra gripped his arm, as if she knew what would happen when it was too late.

It struck him, spun him against a garden hedge, a spade at his back and a thousand knives all going for his eyes at the same time. He heard a scream, then a tremendous shuddering smash as the car went out of control and hit the solid perpendicular wall of the church. He was falling through the red and black, the vast acreage of intestines in a vat as wide as the world and in which there was no stopping as black beat red and closed over him.