The Death of William Posters (24 page)

‘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.