The Death of William Posters (19 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Two

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.