An End and a Beginning (32 page)

“Why?”

“The world is not what you think it is,” he said.

And when I laughed he said, “And not like the long, innocent, lazy Irish days. Gelton is different.”

“D'you want me to go back?” I said.

How he clung to me then. “No. Don't go. Don't go. But you will write to your mother?”

“Yes,” I said, and in all that time it was the first occasion that I thought of Mother.

“Everything will be all right. Don't cry,” he said. Dark on the quay, on the bridge, dark in the city. “And that's how I came there, that's how it began.”

She thought of it sadly, with pain, with a certain revulsion. “I can't believe I'm home again. I can't believe it.”

She opens her eyes, and there is the room, her room, and the bed, and the man in it, stranger and brother, warm again, living again. She thought of this huge house, she thought of the letter to her father, the cable to her brother; she could see smoke curling high from chimneys, a warmth coming back to it, her home, it had never been anything else. But the moment she closes her eyes she is voyaging again, further back, further in, deeper down.

“How he changed, how jealous he became, how brutal, how unfeeling towards others about whose rights he was always shouting so loudly. How he cringed, crawled, how he sometimes revolted me. Yet he could also make me laugh. And I never could stop loving him. There
was
something there, at first, something splendid, shining, and such courage, such energy, such splendid faith.”

The letter is open again, she is reading it. “You can never say that
I
was afraid, that I wasn't always at your side, and I did strive to share a life with you that was totally strange, and sometimes terrifying. I'd never seen anything like it before, never. It wasn't my world, but I stayed in it because I loved you, I
did
, and you know I did. It took me a long time to understand Gelton. I'll admit that. The longer I lived in it the more I admired you. Sometimes I felt a loneliness in myself that nothing in your whole nature could remove. There were times, and I can say it now, there were times when I found that life disgusting, aimless, sometimes downright stupid. But I accepted the lot because I was in love with you, and perhaps I would be with you to-day but for the child. There is none, there will not be a child, because always you were afraid of it. I never understood, I don't now. Sometimes I think you were afraid of me. But I couldn't help being what I was. I am what I am. It was all so different on that first morning in Gelton, wasn't it? The world was full of banners, and you were carrying them. I shall always remember that first morning in Gelton, always. You were so good, so considerate, so gentle, and my God, I was afraid, you knew I was.” She watched herself real in those days, acting in those days, blind in them.

Arm in arm up a long floating bridge, and on to a road that was dark and narrow, a road that seemed to have no end. Splashes of light, great pools of darkness, more lights, the roar of a train, the struck hooves of a struggling horse, and the sparks, and the shouts, and suddenly a curious noise. A noise like thunder. And they stopped dead. “What's the matter, Sheila?” he said, and he put down the bag.

“It sounds like thunder,” I said. What is it?”

“Feet.”

“Feet?”

“Men,” he said, “men.”

“What are they doing?”

“Unless they're bloody fools they're running,” he said.

“Running? What for? Where to? At this time in the morning?”

“For work,” he said.

“Can I watch?”

“If you want to,” he said, and I knew at once that he didn't want to watch, didn't want to wait, only to press on to the mysterious hotel he had mentioned. And he drew me back against the wall, it seemed to be made of solid rock, and was damp, and I remember the water glistening on it, and I remember an enormous gate that at that moment threw itself open, and I watched and wondered. The thunderous noise came on. “What is it, Desmond?” I asked, still bewildered, and he said, “The world.”

I heard the feet more clearly, the men were coming in our direction, lots of men, scores, hundreds, and running, and waving their arms, and flying past us, and I stood out a little in the road to see those hundreds of flying backs, and hear the shouts as they ran, as they stopped, as the silence came, as more shouts struck the air, as the thunder began again, from stone to stone, from gate to gate. In through this one, like a wave, like a thunder in my ears.

“You and you and you.” I remember that, too. The voice that struck into them like whips.

“Enough. That's all,” I said. “No more. No,
no
bloody more.”

And a gate moving, a gate closing. The black mass runs away again, into the darkness, along the shining silver ribbon of railway line, through the patches of light, running, and running, as though they must, as though they can never stop.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Looking for work,” he said.

“Do they do this every day?” I asked.

“Every day, in the morning, and in the afternoons, and in the night time, and every week and every month, and every bloody year to the end of the world.”

“What are they, Desmond?”

“Dockers,” he said.

“What do they do?”

“Work at the ships.”

And the next morning I heard them again, and the morning after that, and many a night, and then I knew that these men were running against the clock, and against disaster. I remember Desmond leaning to me, and whispering in my ear, “I always think of them as lunatics running through the asylum,” but I only knew the noise of their flying feet, and saw a terrible need nailed to those flying backs.

“You'll get used to it,” he said. And I got used to it.

The days struck back at her, the moments lived. She saw herself live. “The noise of it, my God, shall I ever forget the first morning I woke up in my own home.”

One road is much like another, one street, one house, one window. One man is like another, one woman, one child. Miles of streets, rivers of roads.

“In one dark morning I had a whole clear picture of Gelton, of my new life. I saw them all, the men and women, and children. I saw the sailors and the ships, and the sea. The factories like forests, roads and streets like tunnels to this drawing down, sucking in, unsatisfied sea. I was close to it, and yet in a curious sort of way I was also detached from it. I remember one winter's day walking through that city as in a dream. The streets were alive with people. Great hordes of them moving down like waves to the places where for one whole day they would drive and hammer, blast and burn, haul and coil, climb and descend, into ships, into foundries and factories, into yards and docks. And the noise, the noise. I can still hear it,” as behind her closed eyes she sees, remembers. Every manner of vehicle on the move. The train roaring over my head, the tooting tugs, the calling sirens, the wailing foghorns, and always the cars and the horses and the lorries, and the running men. How dark that road was, how heavy the air. And yet those swarms seemed to give the whole thing a warmth, a something glowing and feverish. One evening I sat opposite my husband in our first home, and he explained it to me.

“A vast spider's web. The intricacies of it, the cunning of it. He talked to me of Gelton, of the life in it. What it was all about, what it meant to him. Those running men, that incessant roar, the continuous hammering and blasting, the ocean of energy, the mountain of labour. Quietly sat back in his chair, in the doll-size room.

“It was my first lesson in a new kind of language. A first lesson in survival. It made me think of my home, the well of idleness, the sink of inertia. How far away it seemed to me that evening, whole deserts away. I listened, and I went on listening, and I began to understand the man with whom I had run away, with whom I now shared my life.

“‘In Gelton,' he said, ‘everybody works. Very hard, you
have
to. It's that kind of a city. It's a nice habit, a useful one. It's a bad habit to be lazy. You mustn't be blind, it's a bad habit to be blind, to be incautious, to be slow, to be behind the clock, to be flat on your back instead of standing on your tiptoes. Fall down the once and others will crawl over you. Get up two minutes late and another man is eating your loaf. Look the wrong way at the man you work for, and at once
you
are less than a man. Here you fight to work. It's very different from the land of the long afternoons and the mornings that snore away under the Celtic twilight. When you get your work you hang on to it with your claws, you get a good grip on your luck. Here everything's chancy, and everything's final. No doddering, no dreaming aloud. In the morning, when I go off to my work, I always remember those who are behind me, watching me, never letting me out of their sight, and I always see to it that nobody catches up with me. If they did you'd see the picture that I wouldn't like, and you'd never once get the hang of it. Think of it, Sheila. Only a very few weeks ago you were living a very different kind of life, in a world that hasn't got any untouchables since they aren't there to touch, even if you wanted to. After you've been here a while you'll find out the things I found out, though perhaps in a different way. I found it out by accident. How? It hardly matters. I just found out. In Gelton life is in two separate compartments. Us, and the others. The others. The others keep us on the boil, keep stirring, a tremendous stew, and most of it Irish.'

“I can hear him laugh. ‘How odd,' he said, ‘whenever I use the word “others” your eyes widen. Perhaps it mystifies you. But it's a real word, and
they're
real too.'”

She can see the room, the chair, the man. “Never did I feel so far away from my own home and my own life as I did that evening. And it was still too strange to understand, this new country, this other way of life. I even wrote to Mother about it. Poor Mother. She never even replied to my letter. How odd that Mother should come into my mind, I don't think she even wanted to understand me, or why I ran away. Sometimes I was really sorry for Father. It wasn't always his fault. She could never forget her accident, never forget what she called her affliction. In the end it became our affliction, too. We were never allowed to forget it. I was sorry for Mother, we all were, she had always been so active, so full of life. But the accident changed her altogether. She almost ceased to be upright. She whimpered, she was afraid, suspicious, unfair, begrudging, in the end it got Father down. No wonder he threw himself into Winifred's arms, she was a most handsome girl then, not to mention the others. It
was
her fault, not his. I was glad to see the back of it. Too much of everything, and everything coming too easy. In Gelton it was the other way round. I wanted nothing myself except to be free, to live my own life. And I did. And here I am back again. What a long journey, what a waste—but was it, was it?

“No, it wasn't really, and I don't regret it, and I'm glad I was never afraid of it. It was a great experience. I saw for the first time how other people lived. It opened my eyes. I hadn't really run away from my parents, I never actually hated them, only the things that surrounded them, the sacred things. I saw them ever so clear in that tiny house in Price St. It was the way they just accepted them, without question, as if they were some special ordination of God Almighty. I disliked that most of all. The air was purer in the house that was small, and in the street that was narrow, and very long, the endless tunnel to the sea, and the sky always so begrudging. I hardly ever saw anybody look upwards, and afterwards I even forgot myself. All the roads were one road, I knew it, all the time they knew it. ‘This' they seemed to say, ‘is our road. The only one.'

“Criminal. I knew it was, from the very beginning. I knew it from the first sound of my own steps on a stone stair, and my first look out of a tiny window. That window. All those windows. I can see them now, the bars across them. To keep everybody in, Desmond said, ‘everybody'. ‘To keep everybody safe,' he said, ‘shut in, secure, anchored down. Stay where you are. Breathe where you stand. Don't move. That's how it is.' That's how it was, and I saw with his eyes, and after a time I had almost forgotten my home across the sea.

“‘Are you happy?' he said. ‘Are you sorry?' he asked. ‘You don't regret?' And I didn't. I was learning to grow up, I grew up. He was good to me then.”

If she opens her eyes this room will be no less dark, no less silent. There is only the man beside her, only his regular breathing, heavy, rhythmic as the throb of an engine. “I wonder what he'll do? Go back to Gelton. I can't think of anything else. Yes, he'll go back. Poor Peter, I'm sorry about his messed-up life.”

But she was back there before him, picking up the threads again, a pattern of days, she is lost in the noise, the tumult, the tight, tense, exacting life of Price St. She can feel the city, the man, she can remember the days, the hours, the uncertainties, the gropings. She was a wife again; she was up at five in the morning, he was; she was getting his breakfast, she was listening to the banging of doors, the strident, compelling ringing of clocks, the feet hurrying again into the new day, the feet past the window, the hurrying men, and the noise heard like the breaking of waves. She was preparing the food for his day; she was hoping for the best, expecting the worst. She sees each day as a hazard. She is cleaning down the house, and she is sitting quietly by the fire on all the evenings of her life, waiting for her husband to return home.

“I learned to be anxious, I learned to be really afraid, and I was sharing it with others. Mother continued to write to me and she had another name for it. The pilgrimage downwards. How little she knew. How little it matters. Yes, it was real, and the words were real. Bread, time, luck, cunning, the feet, the shouts. The days were real. How I used to hate those evenings, watching the clock, dreading the knock that was not his own. Once he was almost killed, but he never told me. I only heard the story later. How I admired him then, how I loved him.”