The Railway Station Man (16 page)

Bugger.

Oh God, she whispered a quick prayer up to the sky where he might or might not be watching over her well-being … don't let there be any hassle. No demoralising happening … Please God, I promise I'll buy some bathing togs. I promise I'll wear them, if that's what you really want … but oh bugger … Dear God, why isn't he digging flower-beds or turning table legs. The ground was under her feet now. She stood and began to walk slowly through the breaking sea. He bent down and picked up her towel from the sand. He shook it, both hands cracking it into the breeze, then he walked down to the water's edge to meet her. She stopped when the water was about knee-high and, catching her hair in her hands, twisted it into a rope, wringing the wetness out of it.

‘It looks freezing,' he shouted to her.

She shook her head.

‘I thought you were never going to come back. You don't swim well enough to go away out there. Were you not frightened?'

‘A bit.'

She stepped onto the dry sand and took the towel from his hand. She wrapped it tightly round herself. It was cold now. She rubbed at her running nose with the back of her hand.

‘It's lovely,' she said. ‘You ought to try it yourself.'

‘I've more sense.'

She sniffed and laughed.

‘I've no sense. It's a well-known fact.'

She picked up her shirt and jumper and pulled them, still attached, together over her head. She rubbed at her legs with the towel, thumping at herself with her fists to keep the circulation speeding. She turned round towards him. He was jogging naked towards the edge of the sea. I hope to God he doesn't catch pneumonia, she thought. I bet he hasn't been in there for years.

Scrawny.

She dropped down on her knees and picked up her sketch book. Stringy. Jack wasn't like that.

He loitered on the edge of the water, his energy dissipated by the cold. His shoulders were hunched, his arms wrapped round his chest.

Jack was well covered, no sign of the framework.

He stepped cautiously like one of the wading birds across the first ripple of the waves.

Jack was pale. He took a sudden plunge across the waves and was down under the water. His arms worked for a few moments and then he stood up again and began to move back towards the shore. Suddenly in a great explosion of energy he rolled into the foam and leapt up into the air again. He twirled round, his arms high above his head and then down he went again, rolling again. Up he came and ran through the shallow water kicking great sparkling fountains up ahead of him as he ran. He ran towards her, shaking the water from his body as a dog does after a swim.

‘Can I have a borrow of your towel, missus?' He put on a whiny child's voice.

She handed it up to him. ‘You're all covered in sand. You should go in and wash it off?

‘Do you want to kill me?' He walked back to where his clothes lay, rubbing at himself savagely. She continued to draw as he dressed himself, as he rubbed hopelessly at the sand clinging to his legs and arms. He turned his back to her and stood on one leg and then the other, pulling on his pants and then his trousers. When he was dressed save for his shoes and socks he came back and dropped the towel beside her.

‘What are you drawing?'

‘You.'

He blushed suddenly and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked away from her out towards the horizon.

‘Me?'

‘Yes. Here, do you want to look?'

He squatted down beside her and she handed him the book.

‘They're only sketches, but you can look if you want to.'

He looked carefully at each page. The trials and errors, scorings, shadings, heavy lines, light, almost invisible, wisps of grey. Stones, sand, wings, claws, beaks, sea, an arm, a leg, movement, stillness. After he had finished he handed her back the book.

‘It looks like you're trying to teach yourself something. It's like a school book.'

She nodded.

‘Do I look like that?'

‘More or less. I haven't drawn a human figure for years. It was great to have you there miraculously … when I was in the mood.'

‘I was up there.' He pointed up towards the hill. ‘I couldn't think what you were drawing. There didn't seem to be anything to draw. I watched you for a long time.'

‘You must have.'

‘When you went in to swim I thought I'd better come down. I felt …' he blushed again ‘… if I'd stayed up there, it would have been like spying on you. So I came down.'

She smiled.

‘Thank you for coming down.'

‘What will you do with those now?' He nodded towards the book.

‘I have a plan in my head for a series of shorescapes. It's just an idea at the moment … a wriggling germ, but I hope it will grow when I start to paint. I know it will.'

‘Will you put me in it?'

‘You'll have to wait and see. I'll have to wait and see.'

He leaned forward and began to draw on the sand with his finger. He made deep grooves in the sand and then swept away the scattered grains as they got in his way. A small high-bowed boat, plain, heavy-looking, sitting squatly down into the sea. A long bowsprit and one mast. His finger drew tiny waves and a mainsail filling with wind.

‘Do you know what that is?'

‘It looks a bit like a hooker. I'm not much good on boats, but they're very recognisable.'

‘You're next best to right. A gleoiteog. That's what I'm going to build myself. I have a model made at home. Sails and all. To scale you know. I'll bring it round to show you some time.' He scrubbed the picture out with his hand. ‘If you're interested, that is. You mightn't be interested. About this size.' He held his hands up to show her. ‘A perfect model. I just thought you might …'

‘Yes. I'd like to see it very much.'

‘I was rude yesterday.'

‘Oh no, that's all right. I was a bit silly. Motherish. I forget sometimes that everyone grows up. That sort of thing can become so boring.'

‘My mother's boring,' he said. ‘But I wouldn't have thought you were.'

‘Jack thinks I am.'

‘She's nice, mind you. I didn't mean anything like that … but boring. She knits for the sweater people. The sweated-labour people, I tell her she should call them. Sometimes I want to throw something at those clicking needles. I restrain myself. Jack's coming home, you said?'

‘Yes. Next weekend.'

‘Bringing a friend?'

‘So he said. I thought at first it might be a girl. I got all motherly and excited again.'

‘But it's not a girl.'

‘No.'

‘I suppose he does that quite a lot? Brings down friends?'

‘No. I think he likes to protect his friends from me.'

He looked away out to sea. He looked, she thought, as if he were trying to see America.

‘Did he say who he was bringing down?'

‘I asked him, but I don't think he heard me. Why?' She gathered together the book and her pencils, the wet sandy towel.

‘I just wondered. I thought maybe it was someone I knew.'

‘Oh hardly … I mean … well … hardly.'

‘Yes. Hardly. I'd better be getting back to my work.'

‘You're mitching today.'

‘I work my own hours. He's very reasonable like that.'

She stood up.

‘I hope I didn't bother you.'

‘Of course not. I hope you won't suffer any ill effects from your swim.'

‘Not a bit of it. Sometimes he's not well at all. It's quite hard then for the both of us. He gets these moods, like. You have to understand.'

‘Do you think he'd like it if I asked him over for dinner one evening?'

‘Aye. I think he'd like it. Goodbye then.' He took a few steps. ‘Helen.'

‘Goodbye, Damian. See you soon.'

He walked away up the beach, his shoes and socks dangling from his right hand, leaving deep footmarks in the sand.

For the next two days she lived in the shed, making short trips across the yard from time to time to make herself a cup of tea, boil an egg, feed the cat, who took quite unkindly to what he considered to be desertion. Bananas were useful, she thought. In Africa native tribes had existed for thousands of years on bananas; now, presumably, the glories of the sliced loaf and instant coffee had reached them. Monkeys too, very healthy, very energetic. A lot could be said in favour of the banana. Elephants even ate them with the peels on. She didn't bother to sit down to eat, just moved restlessly around the kitchen, watched by the disapproving eyes of the cat. The cups had brown stains inside them, a sign of true sordidness, she thought.

She remembered a moment with Dan. She blotted at the toast crumbs with a damp cloth as he sat watching, also, like a cat, disapproving.

‘The really dreadful, debilitating thing about housework, domesticity, whatever you like to call it, is that over and over again you're doing the same bloody thing.' He hated that word. She only used it when she really wanted to annoy him. ‘Bloody,' she repeated. ‘You clear the table.' She threw the cloth across the room towards the sink. The cloth landed on the floor. ‘You lay the table again. You wash the bloody saucepans and then you dirty them again. You wash them specifically to dirty them. You lay and unlay. Make beds in order to get into them and crumple them. On and on and on for ever until you die … or end up in the local bin, gaga, incontinent and unloved.'

‘Your problem is that you're a slut.'

‘No,' she said sharply. ‘I wish I were. If I were a slut I wouldn't care. I'm just a boring woman with a boring sense of duty. I feel my whole life is rushing down that bloody sink with the Fairy Liquid bubbles'

‘I do wish you wouldn't use that word.'

‘Bloody,' she said just to show that she wasn't intimidated by him.

She laughed at the memory of it and went out into the yard, closing the door on the banana skins and the brown-stained cups and the crumbs on the table and the cat.

The first painting was growing. The canvas had become a magnet drawing out of her head an implacable coherence that she had never felt before. Each stroke had its purpose, its truth. The gaunt bones of the young man became a great stalk growing up through the centre of the canvas, from its own black shadow on the sand. She painted fast, the fear always in her mind that if she faltered, looked back even for a moment over her shoulder, Orpheus-like, she would lose her vision. She spoke words to herself as she worked, meaningless jumbles of sound, and sang snatches of songs that had become embedded in her head for no reason. Over and over again the same phrase would burst out of her into the room, until sometimes she would put down her brush and give a sharp slap to the side of her face to try and dislodge the irritation.

‘What day is it?' she asked aloud.

No one answered.

She put down her brush and stood up. She stretched her arms up above her head. Stiff. Every bone, joint, muscle, whatever they all were, seemed to be locked hopelessly together. Grey cloud pushed down on the glass roof.

‘Thursday,' she answered herself.

She bent down and, carefully lifting the canvas, she carried it across the room and propped it against the wall. She stood for a moment or two staring at it.

‘Thursday it is.'

No one disagreed.

She looked around.

‘Bloody pigsty.'

She went over and opened the window. She emptied the ashtrays into a plastic bag and then threw in some tissues that were lying on the floor. Stiff back as she bent. Some dirty rags, and then some rolled-up used tubes of paint. Marginally less like a pigsty.

She went out into the yard and put the plastic bag in the bin, then she got her bicycle out of its shed and set off for the station. It wasn't raining, but the west wind was damp and squally. She had to struggle quite hard to keep the bike on the left-hand side of the road.

She didn't hear the car until it passed her coming round a corner. Roger put his hand on the horn in greeting and then stopped. She got off the bike and crossed the road.

‘Hello.'

‘Good morning … perhaps it's afternoon, I'm not sure. I was just going to call on you.'

‘Snap,' he said.

He looked tired. The scars on his face were bunched together and shiny … somewhat grotesque. She felt suddenly guilty at thinking such a thing. She put her hand through the window of the car and touched his shoulder briefly.

‘Go on ahead,' she said. ‘I'll follow you back. I've finished a picture and I'd like to show it to you … well … to someone. I just suddenly thought I'd like to show it to someone. You seemed to be …'

He nodded. The car gave a slight shudder and then moved slowly down the road. She turned the bike round and pedalled after him.

She brought him in through the little glass porch. Several of the geraniums still flowered bravely and the air was sweet. They walked across the hall and out into the yard.

‘I've just been down looking for Damian,' he said. ‘There was no sign of him this morning so I thought I'd go down and find out what was up. I thought he might be ill. He is usually so meticulous about everything he does.'

‘I hope nothing's the matter with him.'

‘No. His mother says he's gone away for a few days. Just took off last night. Odd he didn't say.'

‘Yes. Odd.'

She opened the door of the shed as the first raindrops pattered around them.

‘Rain,' she said.

She crossed the room and closed the window.

‘I also wanted to see you,' he said.

The rain thickened suddenly, almost startlingly, rattling off the roof, splashing down into the yard. Everything in sight changed its colour.

‘Gosh, we were only in in time.'

‘For several days, I've wanted to come and see you. I don't quite know why I didn't come. Some kind of reticence prevented me.'