The German Numbers Woman (35 page)

If it meant getting killed, what better way to die, though it was only her unreasonable fear that suggested such might happen, while his premonition of danger was due only to a childish dread at being apart.

‘You're denying me a holiday,' he said. ‘It's as simple as that. I'll go away for a few weeks, and then come back. We'll have something to talk about for a change.' It was impossible to do anything without being cruel. He was seared, but unrepentant and more determined. If Richard called to say it was no go, this anguish would be for nothing. Yet nothing was for nothing. Everything that happened was good in a life where nothing happened, and no more so than to a blind man. She disliked him, therefore he was noticed, more real to her, a more separate person than he'd ever been. He said as much, assumed he was becoming like the man he would have been if he had come back from the air raid with no injury. She was the only obstacle to this progress, but the power of his infatuation with Judy wouldn't let her stop him going to sea. Judy was the glow drawing him on, and no amount of resistance could deflect him from the beam.

‘It's not so much that I mind you leaving me, though I do, wouldn't be human if I didn't, but it's what might happen. You surely see that.'

He touched her hand, but she drew it petulantly away. ‘Nothing bad will happen. I'll have a wonderful time. I can't tell you how much it means to me, how much I'm looking forward to it. You'll have to trust me.'

‘It's not that.' There was steel in her tone. ‘I just can't let you go. Won't. You can't go. It's not a matter of you leaving me on my own. Anywhere else. But not to sea. I couldn't bear it. I won't let you go.'

‘Well, I shall.'

‘I'll talk to Richard. He'll understand.'

‘It was his idea.' Lies had become easy because the limits to his freedom had fallen down. ‘He wants me on the boat. He thought I needed to get away for a while.'

‘I don't believe it.' Richard was man enough of the world. He would never make such an outlandish offer, but if it were true she had only herself to blame for having introduced them. And if Howard was lying, which he probably was, how could she hold it against him when she had married him to escape the pain of what she could never mention, thus lying to him by omission? It was as if he guessed, or definitely knew, and felt free to crush her with this kind of revenge. The possibility of him having found out gave her more strength. ‘You can't go, though. I'm quite determined. You're not fit for such an adventure. There are ways of stopping you. I'll discuss it with a social worker, to see what we can do.'

‘The cat's going to eat well today, if you don't finish your meat. He's putting on too much weight as it is. Everything balances out. How can you think anything will happen to me, or that I won't come back? I don't see it.'

Her instinct was as good as his. The journey might be easy to set out on but hard to get back from, or perhaps the obstacles to going were so difficult that the return couldn't enter the mind. Departures for her were fraught with terrors and desolation, while with him they stimulated and filled with joy. Her despair was understandable, always worse for the person left behind.

If he fell in love with a woman on the street, say, and she showed a sudden (though unaccountable) passion for him, both knowing it was forever and that a break must be made with their present lives, say, for instance, that he met Judy and they went away together: Laura would feel the same when he told her he had found someone else. She would have preferred that, as being more understandable according to her views, while he felt the same whatever it was, a liberation from which no one could deter him.

‘I understand how you feel, my love.'

‘You don't. You can't possibly.' She clattered the chair back and saw herself whitefaced from surprise and chagrin, from a powerlessness which must be caused by more than his announcement. She should smile, indeed she should, and kiss him, arms around his neck; ‘Yes, do go. It's an opportunity not to be missed. It'll be so wonderful for you. It'll do you good to get away from the house and dull old me for a while. I know Richard will take care of you.'

‘I do understand,' he said, ‘but I still can't think of a valid reason not to go.'

She couldn't respond. Wouldn't anyway. There was every reason for him not to go. He was in the coils of some madness. God knows, she felt close to it herself, but with his obsession pulling her more deeply, words could do nothing, though there was little else to use. No doubt she ought to talk calmly, like a doctor perhaps, or the kind of guru people went to when they were in spiritual trouble. A guru would only confirm him in his determination, tell him to live it through, such people so unscrupulous. ‘I don't understand.' She sat down to face him, hands and legs trembling.

‘There's nothing to understand. It's all very plain and straightforward.'

‘No, it's not,' she said sharply, ‘and you know it.' She couldn't get the right tone into her voice, the effort almost strangling her. The windows shivered in their sockets from the gale, rain smearing the panes. ‘How would you survive, in weather like this?'

No problem. A lightness of spirit made him a different person, reconnected to his youth, as if that youth had led a conventional life all these years. He wasn't certain what had done it, only that some kind of magic must have fused him and that other person together, finally mysterious, as if the seed had been there all along and waiting only for certain factors to enrich the soil from which the unity could flower. He felt irresponsible, accountable only to himself. What you can't see you feel, and when you feel you act, and when you act you see more than if you had stayed still.

‘We have a radio to warn us,' he told her. ‘You go around the worst of the weather. And there's always a harbour to run for. I'll get the atlas out soon, and show you where the Azores are.'

‘I don't want to see. It's the end of the world for me. You'll never get there. I feel it. Or if you do you won't get back.'

‘I'm sorry to have to tell you, but you're talking nonsense.' He sometimes felt he would never see the place, either, but supposed you always did think that before you left for somewhere, confident he would feel differently after the first day at sea.

‘I only wish I was. I'm in a bad dream.'

‘And I'm in a good one, and wish you could share it.'

‘I want to wake up from mine.' Hard to believe she wasn't going to. ‘But let's not talk about it anymore. Not for a while. I can't think properly while we're talking.' She was hungry but unable to eat, farnished but didn't know for what, in an altered mental state to an hour ago, isolated, floating in uncertainty and misery, everything that was comforting and familiar blown away. She began to cry.

We've woken up, he thought, into the real world, and it took so little, an announcement that I intend setting out on a trip without her. Her crying was muted, made dreadful by her fight to control it. ‘Please, my love, it's no big thing. I'll be gone and back before you know it.'

Not one word of concession, of giving in on a single point. ‘I can't take any more. I can't listen to you.'

‘Yes, I see that.'

It must be a practical joke, a test of loyalty and love. Perhaps he had found a way of getting into the locked drawer of her armoire and read the diary account of the times with her uncle, and all the details of the abortion – but how could he, without eyes to see? She had kept a diary as a solace to her distress, written through tears. At the worst of times she recalled the scratching of her pen, the speedy turning of pages, words scribbled so fast that some lines were a jumble impossible to make out whenever she was forced to look at it again, trying to still her mind. She ought to have known that nothing in the past could be buried.

She had always assumed the book to be safe, because even if she forgot to lock the drawer, and Howard looked inside, the words were braille only to her, though maybe he had secretly taken the diary to Richard, who had read everything to him in his measured uncaring voice. Or Richard, with new-found malevolence, which she supposed every man to have, had tapped out the choicest excerpts in morse and posted the tape back for Howard to run and re-run.

He was bringing up this detestable stunt of a boat trip by way of revenge for her lifetime's silence, not knowing that in doing so he was parting them forever. And yet revenge wasn't part of him – no matter by how much he seemed to have altered – because even if he knew he would understand and forgive. There would be nothing else for him to do.

Such a fantasy showed how low one could fall in the face of the unexpected. Her mind raced cruelly, not letting her alone. It wouldn't from now on, a horrifying thought. Even if he suddenly laughed that his plan had been a joke, and he wasn't going on any such trip, the damage could never be made good. Out of the blue, just like that, he had blasted their lives. ‘I don't think you'll ever be able to understand,' she said.

Nor would she. He felt young enough to no longer know himself, laughed at his severed connection from whoever he had been a few months ago. The mechanism of how it had come about was clearly part of him. He had been two people most of his life, even before the disaster of going blind, and the dormant person had emerged at last from Sleepy Hollow, the two fusing into himself, not knowing how or why it had taken so long, a transformation impossible to explain.

‘I think I do,' he said. ‘I understand very well. But I would rather go with your blessing than without it.'

‘I know.' She noticed a blackhead on the left side of his forehead, couldn't think where he had got it in the clean sea air, but decided not to tell him. ‘And you never will.'

‘I'm sad about that.'

‘Give me time,' was all she could say. ‘I'd like to lie down' – being as sleepy as if she had taken a drug.

‘We could have some coffee.'

‘That won't do it.' He had been well looked after for so long that the reason for her being upset was beyond his power to comprehend. How long would they have stayed together if he hadn't been blind, and if this was what he was really like – making up his mind on such an important issue without any discussion? Not very long. The storm had slackened, birds whistling in the bushes, glad of better weather. ‘I'm your wife,' she said. ‘I have rights in these matters.'

If the modern trend of women's liberation hadn't passed her by they might not have argued like this, and he would have been on his way with her approval. But any article on women's lib in the papers, or something mentioned on the radio, had always brought scornful remarks – he would never understand why, though now he did. It was loggerheads, and no mistake, neither of them with any more to say, until:

‘I'm going upstairs to sleep, though don't suppose I shall.'

But she did, fell off immediately, every corpuscle so weary she didn't even dream.

Planes weren't calling for Vanya's electronic pinpoints, so no hope of playing ‘Spot the Bomber'. The German Numbers Woman was having her day off, and Portishead told of front after front coming in from the grey Atlantic. On Judy's wavelength the crackling mush was interrupted by a Russian operator sending widdershins in morse.

He hoped for better weather when the boat set out, wondering how he would take to the turbulent water, since he had never been on a small boat. At moments he had wanted to tell Laura he wouldn't go, to forget it, he was sorry, I love you, and everything's all right, so forgive me if I've tormented you, and let's carry on as before.

No one could say that he would still be going. Things went wrong in any enterprise. He could tell Richard that such a jaunt was out of the question if it meant the end of his marriage. And Richard, knowing he must come on the trip because of all he knew, would make whatever obstacles disappear. Some ingenuity in persuasion could do no harm, even if not really necessary. To cause Richard worry was an exercise in power, and he felt no shame in stating it. Let him also believe nothing was certain. He couldn't think of anything to prevent him going, but if some factor did arise, there was a pressure moving him forward that couldn't be resisted.

When Massachusetts tinkled in he found the sounds banal, couldn't sit still, paced up and down the familiar room, picked up books and earphones and various pieces of equipment, wanted to go this minute, saying no goodbyes, oblivious to objections or tears, get his stick and walk down the hill with a song on his lips, relishing a madness that was more to him than life itself.

On Judy's frequency again he found, as expected, nothing. Emptiness. She was with Carla in Malaga, and he could only hope they were happy. He missed the throaty richness of her voice with an intensity that almost made him faint.

TWENTY-TWO

‘Richard?'

‘That's me.'

‘Howard here.'

‘I was going to get in touch.'

‘Beat you to it. I'm in a phone box on the front. I got a woman to punch in the numbers for me. Could have done it myself, I suppose, but I didn't want to take any chances, or delay matters.'

Bloody fool, to let a passer-by have my unlisted number. She might have been following for just such a clue. ‘Why all the urgency?'

‘I have to talk to you.'

‘Don't say a word about you know what. Somebody may be listening in. You never can tell.'

He managed a laugh, to reassure. ‘Who would know better than me?'

‘That's right.' Who indeed? ‘Me as well, you might say.'

‘We're two of a feather.'

‘As long as you like to think so.' Let him talk, even though time was crucial. He had to be pulled on board, with no argument, otherwise the trip might be called off. It would be like walking into prison if they left him behind. ‘Are you ready for the big sea trip?'