The Death of William Posters (33 page)

He looked out at the white midnight roofs of Granada, steam-breath clouding the glass which he rubbed clear. The city was sleeping at last, and smelled of snow. Noise still came from the hotel kitchen, Andaluz voices subdued and rapid, the clash of plates, a door banging as he got in bed and tried to sleep. He wanted to show her eyes beautiful landscapes, feed her heart with more tenderness and pity than it already possessed, fill her body with more sensations than it had ever known. But this was turning against himself. It was impossible because the end had been reached, not the end of love, but the beginning of something else in which the sort of love he had always known about and felt as fully as anyone was to be discarded as a fraud and a trick, the stone tied around a corpse to make it sink. To cut it loose would enable a man and woman to live in equality, with regard and respect for each other's purpose in the world. Mutual destruction had to cease.

Copulating cats roared like lions in the night. Myra was sleeping, curled in her nightdress. At dawn an inquisitorial roll of bells came loud and dissonant over luminous rooftops. In the street a ripped poster waved like a frantic hand. Leaves fell thick as copper snow over an autumn square. He had lived through a hundred seasons in one year. Hump-backed clouds looked like disappointed pilgrims returning from some mountain shrine, glad to be back over streets and houses. If you like a city, he thought, it protects you; if you don't like it, it drives you away. I like this one, but still I'm going. He did not know what he would be doing a week from now. He did not remember what he dreamed last night. If he did not want to wake up, the dream had been good; if he had been glad to wake up, it had been a nightmare. He was uncertain about it.

A fine rain fell as the train pulled along the ascending valley. Olive trees gridded the hillsides. Wet towns and villages in the distance were like wooden uneven nailheads hammered into the earth. The train was crowded and smoky, full of luggage, food hampers, people in black and grey, silent children. A man came in out of the rain, from one station, wearing dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigar and carrying two suitcases, alighting at a town twenty miles further on.

‘I like Spain,' Frank said. ‘I like the people. They don't seem to let things bother them.'

‘I felt that ever since I stepped over the border.'

‘I really think I'll feel at home wherever I am,' he said.

‘As long as you're moving, on wheels,' she joked. In the afternoon the train was descending, into clearer sky and sunlight. Ronda showed through a gap in the mountains, a far-off patch of towers and houses perched beyond the immediate circle of hills like an imagined dream in a saint's vision. Then it was cut from view, and the rugged scenery reminded Myra of the engravings in an edition of Byron resting in the glass case among George's books. She wondered whether she'd ever see them again, the first real question since setting out. She saw the titles, and the rich binding, the house, then the village, the edge of tall corn clipped near its summer roots, a brief run of pictures left to flower in her at a later time. How far would the thread that held her stretch before it snapped, while the new thread thickened into a rope?

Tunnels took them into gorges – romantic for those that passed by in trains but not for people who lived roundabout, he thought. Barren limestone slopes sent swollen streams curving from tightly packed villages built in impossible hill positions. Why had it been Frank? she wondered, who had come into her life only a few months ago like a man with pick and mattock and hewn her out of it so savagely? Perhaps it was all so futile and unnecessary, and she'd have been better off staying where she was: the unlanced lake, calm and stagnant under an English sky.

She looked forward to getting off the train. Beyond the window by a bleak-looking stream, a sinewy weather-beaten woman stood outside a house, pegging sheets onto a clothes-line, steadying them from the wind to watch the slow progress of the train. Her life must be hard and lonely, Myra thought, but less so than my own which never stops moving. Bent low in the saddle a man on horseback raced half a mile and beat them to the next bridge, then stood grinning, hat in hand, before sauntering back to his red-roofed and isolated house.

Rolling hills and flat marshland drew them to the sea. Cattle browsed at sky-reflecting pools, between cork and carob trees. Across the bay lay the enormous slouching rock of Gibraltar. ‘We'll get over the straits tomorrow,' Frank said.

‘Tangier will have to be our last stop.' She leaned back, pale, all life drained out. ‘I can't go any further.'

‘You won't,' he said, concerned at the deathlike marks of fatigue, and wondering now why he had brought her so far.

‘I love you,' she said, ‘but we must stop in Tangier.'

‘It's nothing to do with love,' he said gently. ‘We'll find a house there, and you can rest for three or four months.'

‘I'm so tired,' she said, no complaint but a fact that wrenched his heart. At the hotel their room had a map of damp marks down the wall, and stank of fumigation powder, so he argued bluntly with the receptionist and made him find them another. Myra bathed, then ate soup, omelette, oranges. She was asleep before he left the room. Her dark hair, grown long in travelling, fell over the pillow away from her cool exhausted face. He touched her forehead. She didn't hear the door close.

He walked over the bridge, a cold breeze swelling in from the sea. Across the few miles of water Gibraltar lay like a long bank of burning coal. He ate at Arturo's (recommended by Larry), then sat outside a harbour café to drink coffee and smoke at a bitter full-tasting cigar.

He too was exhausted, in all things nearing the rock-bottom of his heart, touching the extremities, as if the end of some journey within himself was in sight. He had reached the limit of his concern for Myra. He loved, had no fear of that, but as a man and a human being, not as an adventurer, and so all inner directions were spent – or those were that he chose to consider. Whatever occurred within himself, in the rich mineral coal lump of his brain, he would always, being a strong character, decide what was going to happen to him.

Sitting on the harbour front was like being at the world's edge, and the only way he could move was on, across the world. To understand people, go into the desert, and do not come out until you understand yourself. Not to know this meant that the inner journey was suspended, and that could never be, though you kept it in its place by a richer surface life, so that it helped, not dragged you down as it had so far done. Thirty years had taught him nothing except that life was good but limited (the innerlife anyway that the society he'd been, brought up in told him existed) – limited in everything, depth, space, decision, strength. The soul was a load of bollocks; the heart was a useful depth gauge in the machine shops of social life; the mind was good for thinking, building, helping; the hands were right for making and doing. He felt at the forward point of the world. Death was nothing to write home about, to dwell on, think of. The shell went through you, the tank trundled over you, the hydrogen bomb flashed you up, old age put you to sleep – as long as you were
doing
something when any of this happened, lifting, helping, firing a gun.

The only fear and cowardice in life was idleness, inactivity – either sitting still or doing work that nobody wanted or would benefit from. Hell wasn't other people; it was the inability to work, to act, to do. Hell was having nothing to live for, a pit he'd steered away from without realizing how close he had been to it. Heart and soul, they were fetters that the new man of the world took to a blacksmith and had chopped away. The new man of the world must work and live as if he weren't going to be alive the next day. This would make him more careful and tender to others, not less.

It was a new way to live, and even now, he was trying it, the first kick-off started the day he left the Nottingham world of moribund William Posters. Let's face it. I've got no love left in me – not of the kind I should have. It's being burned out of everyone else as well, by the oxyacetylene glare of tube-light and telly-fire. We must love more people than just each other. The old idea of love is sliding away from the fingertips of the new man, like a thousand-coloured ferry boat heading for the open sea.

They steamed in late morning through a zone of green water towards mid-channel blue. Land seemed to be all around, cloud obscuring the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the mouth of the Atlantic, mixing Gibraltar with African peaks above Ceuta and Tetuan. Huge liners and tankers drifted by as if hardly moving, then vanished or were mere dots when Frank looked again from the saloon window. They headed by the white houses of Tarifa, hugging the Spanish shore, with Cape Trafalgar dim and shifty in the distance. The Moroccan side was rocky and sheer, a sandy beach now and again visible as if someone had dropped a white handkerchief from the mountaintop above. It was peaceful at sea, the tilt and gentle pitch of the boat resting both of them after the night's deep sleep.

They went under the archway up the cobbled street, into the narrow lane of the Moorish town. The porter led them to the hotel off the Socco Chico. They entered by a small door from a side street and ascended the washed steps. Myra found it good to talk to the French proprietress after so long in Spain, felt civilized again with the edge on Frank's Spanish which now sounded as rough and uncouth as north of England dialect. The woman was interested in Myra's pregnancy, which meant a five-minute chat every time they went in or out.

The hotel was a second-floor flat, which seemed to go along the whole length of the street, making it little more than an endless corridor of small rooms. At first there were so many women's voices coming from them that Frank wondered if they hadn't stumbled into a brothel, but since he heard no sounds of men he had to conclude differently – though in Tangier you could never be sure. In the next room was a Frenchwoman with two small dogs, and often through the paper-thin walls came the sound of clanking bowls and swilling water, great lip-smacking kisses, and the sliding of the dogs' paws on the tiled floor.

Their room was the largest in the hotel, the bed a rough frame nailed together, with bedding neatly and skilfully laid on top. There were two old basket chairs, and a small table for books, cigarettes, matches, tangerines and make-up. A sink in one corner had no plug, and one had to keep the faucet pressed to get water – as on a ship. Frank shaped a plug out of a cork, rather, he said, than give up washing. There were two huge coat pegs on the blue wall, and a small piece of Moroccan artisanry for matting on the floor. A single window looked onto a dim alley-street, so that even in daytime they needed the light on. The hotel was on its last legs, and so was more expensive than many others.

They lay at night listening to Moorish music that came from café radios and permeated the whole building, Frank feeling as if he were in the chill-middle of Arabia. Myra warmed him, her belly a stove, kisses still tasting of spice from Moslem food eaten on their day's wanderings through the winding alleyways of the medina, or of mint and sugar from the innumerable glasses of tea drunk before coming to bed. Frank had bought a spirit stove and cooked-up his own brand of Arab tea at night and morning. They lived in the room a fortnight, and revelled in the refurbishing powers of retreat, a calm hideout in a medieval walled town.

They were strangers there and knew no one, walked up the steep Rue des Siaghines and into, the flower-filled market at the top that smelled of mimosa and cloves. They went on into the new town, along the boulevards and among modern blocks of flats, then got a bus through the suburb of the Dradeb. They climbed up to a point overlooking the straits, with Spain a definite coast only thirteen miles away. A mule track led along the clifftops to Cape Spartel, the shoulder of Africa where Hercules was said to have shaped millstones in his solitary wave-bashed cave. The track climbed above the sea, up then down, from one headland to another, a violent Atlantic wind spitting at the prominent arbutus-horn of Africa. Jebel Kebir was forested, and they turned up into its shelter, a subtle mixture of juniper and eucalyptus smells, laurel and cedar and pine, a moving sky that drew their eyes during rest, as if up there a blacksmith were reshaping clouds that a storm had raged out from its own belly, the wind moving leaves and branches in an inspired concord of smells and shapes.

They made love under the trees (‘He should find his way out without too much bother when the time comes,' Frank joked on the way back), gently going into her, as if savouring it because a farewell was imminent. Flames from all her limbs leapt to the middle of her as if to greet the guest that slid so ceremoniously in, an unexpected climax far in front of his own. They hadn't come to her so easily of late, Myra believing that the enlarging animal processes of pregnancy held them back, compensating by the almost visionary light it threw on what was happening to her. Frank lived on the extremity of this influence, the man whom she loved and who, in his own way, looked after her well, out of his own sort of love. But during this mechanism of change he was the person closest to her, and what she dreaded most was the emerging fact that he would soon be removed from this intimate nearness. In calmer moments she realized that this was bound to happen when a child was born, a thought which toned off the sharper edges of her vision. Yet an uneasiness lingered through her dreams, dreams which, since pregnant, she could never remember.

The green hills of Tangier in winter were drenched and heavy. On walking back skyscraper blocks appeared white and pink between olive groves. It was enchanting and new, a fitting scenery in which to change gear and come back to life. Myra puzzled him by her unwillingness or inability to show more of what was going on in her own mind. She drifted uncomplaining, almost happily, enjoying new sights, physical love, the sensual effects of food and travel. He could put it down to pregnancy, but he knew better, wondered instead whether she didn't resent all that had happened to her since they met, blame him for some unwanted foreign upheaval that his appearance had caused. A sharp pride prevented him asking anything, and he thought maybe she hardly knew herself yet.