To the North (36 page)

Appalled, Emmeline said. “Have I done you harm?”

“That all depends,” said Markie, and looked at her quickly. “You can’t just leave me. No one is dropped, you know, without being damaged.”

“Then forgive me; I ought to have seen.”

“So you can’t do that,” he repeated. “You can’t do anyone in. It’s a thing you couldn’t do.”

“One does oneself in,” said Emmeline.

A drop in her voice, less resolution than deadness, as though this had for years been over, shook him from speech into panic: he fumbled a hand out, gripping her dress. She slowed up the car; he, letting slip the cold silver fabric as though it melted, pushed his hat back, rubbed at his forehead gone clammy and swore in i:he dark. She stopped the car, dropping both hands from the wheel in mute acquiescence, as though there were something here they could not get past. Aware of her stillness, of her remoteness that seemed more in time than in space, he said: “But you must,” and dragged her into his arms. Relaxed in distraction or pity she pressed a cold cheek to his. Night silence surrounded his hurried breathing, her unhappy sigh: he looked in her eyes closely; her senses stirred. But having found only night in her pupils, sensing an absence in her surrender he let her go: “As you feel,” he said and stared at the two lit dials: the clock, the speedometer.

Still passive on his slackening arm, but as though she were quite alone now, Emmeline looked through the night that like grey water clearing let her distinguish the folded country and hanging darkness of woods. Through this not-quite oblivion— that not a car, while they waited, came by to disturb—their headlights sent unmoving arrows that died ahead. This breathing outline of earth, these little mysterious woods each aloof from the other and moulded like clouds in the air brought to her desolation a healing stillness that had eluded her happy and living, so that she touched for a moment the chilly hand of peace. A sense of standstill, a hush pervaded this half-seen country. Friendly darkness, as over a pillow, and silence in which a clock striking still pinned her to time hung trancelike over this early halt in their journey. But, from beyond, the North—ice and unbreathed air, lights whose reflections since childhood had brightened and chilled her sky, touching to life at all points a sense of unshared beauty—reclaimed her for its clear solitude.

Markie’s hand moved under her shoulder. “Where are you?” he said.

“Still here.”

“No. Come back.”

“I can’t.”

“Then why are we stopping?”

“Very well,” she said, leaning forward to the self-starter, “then we’ll go on.”

Fields and woods vanished unknown beyond the headlights. Speed, mounting through her nerves with the consciousness of direction, began to possess Emmeline—who sat fixed, immovable with excitement—and shocked back his numbing faculties into alarm. ‘“
Not so fast
,” he said again.

If she slowed down at all it was imperceptible.

Collecting himself, he found in her furious driving response, were it only an apprehension, to his own pressure: her speed had the startled wildness of flight. He was now quite certain he had not lost her, for she was like someone who plays the piano wildly to drown some crisis they cannot even admit, or question to which there can only be one answer… . Banks rushed up to take their light each side of the bye-pass: afterwards, ghostly young beeches along the kerb. His tension betrayed itself by an unconscious contraction at every car that approached: dawning behind the skyline headlights appeared, widened, dazzled them blind a moment—while he felt their own light car sway under Emmeline’s fingers—then sheered past, each time a hair’s breadth nearer, leaving him icy with apprehension about the roof of the mouth. He looked sideways, trying to fix himself by an idea of fixity: three cars, standing empty, nosed into the jaded glare of an all-night café. Lit banks and low dark running skyline plaited their alternation over his brain; beside him she sat in frozen singleness, drinking speed. He thought: “One must move again; not much time now; we shall be at Baldock.” But this was Hatfield: they slipped round the town like thieves. People still stood in doorways or shadowed blinds. Renewed by this distant flash of town life and warm breath from windows he said, leaning into the cold air close to her cheek as they cleared the last of the town with its sleepy villas: “Keep driving all night, angel: you won’t get away from this!”

Emmeline said nothing.

But, startled by his alternations of panic and triumph, his cold resolution to keep her and bitter enraged desire to throw her off, she turned his way, after a moment of silence, that same dilated and musing look of enquiry that, breaking again and again across their intimacy, had made him feel her no more than delayed on a journey elsewhere, and marked their unchanging distance from one another. This look’s familiar strangeness—calling up trees at St. Cloud, skylines about Devizes, firelight in his claret on rainy evenings, their closeness in small rooms and smiling encounters in streets—strung and tightened together these memories on a taut cord whose pull at the heart—dull, dragging and sharp like the wrench of a muscle—was far-reaching: this was unforeseen pain. The cold breadth and dark depths of his loss appeared suddenly: his thoughts at a standstill seemed to resound agony or started in disarray from this unheard-of finality, breaking down every control. With some desperate idea of assault, but not daring to touch heir, not daring to formulate what he could not express till she was in his arms, he moved her way in the car, shouting into the darkness between their faces invective, entreaties, reproaches, stripping the whole past and taxing her with their ruin. He exposed every nerve in their feeling: nothing remained unsaid… . Nervously shaking her hair back, gripping the wheel beside Markie, Emmeline, who said nothing, drove, as though away from the ashy destruction of everything, not looking back. Running dark under their wheels the miles mounted by tens: she felt nothing— Like a shout from the top of a bank, like a loud chord struck on the dark, she saw “TO THE NORTH” written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow.

Something gave way.

An immense idea of departure—expresses getting steam up and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert—possessed her spirit, now launched like the long arrow. The traveller solitary with his uncertainties, with apprehensions he cannot communicate, seeing the strands of the known snap like paper ribbons, is sustained and more than himself on a great impetus: the faint pain of parting sets free the heart. Blind with new light she was like somebody suddenly not blind, or, after a miracle, somebody moving perplexed by the absence of pain. Like earth shrinking and sinking, irrelevant, under the rising wings of a plane, love with its unseen plan, its constrictions and urgencies, dropped to a depth below Emmeline, who now looked down unmoved at the shadowy map of her pain. For this levitation a total loss of her faculties, of every sense of his presence, the car and herself driving were very little to pay. She was lost to her own identity, a confining husk. Calmly, exaltedly rising and balancing in this ignorance she looked at her hands on the wheel, the silver hem of her dress and asked herself who she was: turning his way, with one unmeasured swerve of the wheel, she tried to recall Markie.

“Look
out
—” he began: and stopped at her glittering look that while so intently fixing him showed in its absence of object a fixed vacancy. She looked into his eyes without consciousness, as though in at the windows of an empty house. His throat tightened, the roof of his mouth went dry: she was not here, he was alone. Little more than his memory ruled her still animate body, so peacefully empty as not to be even haunted.

“Emmeline—”

Her state rushed at him with an appalling perception of physical danger, his sense of her unrelaxed grip on the wheel and unknowing pressure on the accelerator. His old recurring dread of her, latent and long disregarded, must have pointed to this: his dependence, this moment, for life on these long ignorant fingers and silent brain.

“Stop for a moment,” he pleaded, mustering some kind of calm.

What he had said meant nothing: speed streamed from her unawares. The road was not empty; swinging almost up the right bank she got ahead of a lorry: traffic approached them, twice she seemed magnetised into, twice he was stupefied by rushing arcs of light, in which for two moments he felt her suspended by him, fingers just on the wheel. Their survival was barest fortuity: one car pulled up behind them and someone, shouting, looked back… . “Emmeline,” he repeated, in desperately wary approach.

Still she heard nothing, or heard some singing silence inside her brain: as the wild swing of their lights scythed the dark ahead his agonised apprehension, a thousand vibrations of impact drew a sharp line, like fog round a lamp, round the circle of mindless serenity where she sat merciless, ignorant of their two lives. Dreading as much as a breath’s touch on this taut ungoverned speed, Markie, sweating, bit back exclamations, keeping his hand from her hand. He coaxing her gently, he reasoned; as often when they had been alone together. He watched the next lights dawn like doom, make a harsh aurora, bite into the road’s hard horizon and, widening, flood the Great North Road from bank to bank. His fingers an inch from the wheel, wondering if he dared stun her, he said hopelessly: “
Emmeline
…” with the last calm of impotence. As though hearing her name on his lips for the first time, dazzled, she turned to smile. Head-on, magnetised up the heart of the fan of approaching brightness, the little car, strung on speed, held unswerving way. Someone, shrieking, wrenched at a brake ahead: the great car, bounding, swerved on its impetus. Markie dragged their wheel left: like gnats the two hung in the glare with unmoving faces. Shocked back by the moment, Emmeline saw what was past averting. She said: “Sorry,” shutting her eyes.

Julian drew the curtains, after the others had left them, over the strip of cold night that disturbed Cecilia. They did not at once settle down: she picked the
Evening Standard
up from the hearthrug and dropped it behind the sofa, shook out some cushions and stood looking into an empty coffee-cup on the mantelpiece. She said: “You are very good to me,” sorry to have been foolish. She said she thought the evening had gone off quite well, considering; Julian agreed. Her eyes just missed his look but she said no more. The uninterrupted quiet of evenings to come already covered this evening; standing before the fire he tinkled a lustre idly, half sorry this was not to be their home. For her part, her fancy, already leaving these walls, was a little homeless: she thought of their unknown house and the marriage they must achieve there between his serious pictures, her Dresden clock. The tinkling lustre subsided; Cecilia lay on the sofa in front of the fire, her face turned his way, her cheek on a cushion. Still finding her very mysterious he said: “Your dress
is
lovely,” watching the firelight creep up the thin pink folds.

“It’s my trousseau,” she said. “I shouldn’t be wearing it, but one has no control.”

“I’ll forget it,” he smiled, “then see it all over again.”

“No, never forget!” she cried. “Never forget any moment; they are too few.”

To count this moment utterly free of oblivion she smiled; he came closer; the lemony scent of the Chinese peonies, mounting, enchanted the quietly lamplit room where the fire rustled. She put her arms round his neck and her big chiffon sleeves, warm from her arms and the fire, fell back softly against his face.

Benito was restless tonight: he slipped round the door ajar, a small presence flitting and dark as a thought, a wide wild look over the cushions, something springing and turning and never still. Julian said: “He’s quite a cat now.” “Yes, he’s a dear little bore,” she said. “Emmeline’s fond of him.” She pressed her cheek to the cushion, her dark eyes went from shadow to shadow after the restless kitten. Julian, a little disturbed, said: “Shall we put him to bed?”

Benito slept in the basement, though morning had often found him in Emmeline’s room. Julian cornered the kitten and caught him; after a moment Cecilia followed them into the hall. Here it was chilly: the house seemed still to echo the others’ departure. Standing under the light with its hanging crystals Cecilia looked upstairs and saw in the half-dark Emmeline’s door ajar. It was later than she expected: she saw by the telephone Markie’s white scarf that he had forgotten, Emmeline’s gloves that she would not wear.

Suddenly nervous, Cecilia said, turning to Julian: “Stay with me till she comes home.”