by P. D. James
Amy was typing envelopes, sending out the final copies of the newsletter. A pile was already to hand, and he began folding the pamphlets and inserting them into the envelopes. The job wasn’t easy. He had tried to economize with the size and quality, and the envelopes were in danger of splitting. He now had a mailing list of 250, only a small minority of whom were active supporters of PANUP. Most never paid any dues towards the organization, and the majority of the pamphlets went unsolicited to public authorities, local firms and industry in the vicinity of Larksoken and Sizewell. He wondered how many of the 250 were read and thought with a sudden spasm of anxiety and depression of the total cost of even this small enterprise. And this month’s newsletter wasn’t his best. Rereading one before he put it in the envelope, it seemed to him to be ill organized, to have no coherent theme. The principal aim now was to refute the growing argument that nuclear power could avoid the damage to the environment through the greenhouse effect, but the mixture of suggestions ranging from solar power to replacing light bulbs with those which consumed seventy-five per cent less energy seemed naïve and hardly convincing. His article argued that nuclear-generated electricity couldn’t realistically replace oil and fossil fuels unless all nations built sixteen new reactors a week in the five years from 1995, a programme impossible to achieve and one which, if practicable, would add intolerably to the nuclear threat. But the statistics, like all his figures, were culled from a variety of sources and lacked authority. Nothing he produced seemed to him genuinely his own work. And the rest of the newsletter was a jumble of the usual scare stories, most of which he had used before: allegations of safety breaches which had been covered up, doubts about the safety of the ageing Magnox stations, the unsolved problem of storing and transporting nuclear waste. And for this issue he had been hard put to find a couple of intelligent letters for the correspondence page; sometimes it seemed that every crackbrain in north-east Norfolk read the PANUP newsletter but that no one else did.
Amy was picking at the letters of the typewriter, which had a persistent tendency to stick. She said: “Neil, this is a bloody awful machine. It would be quicker to write the addresses by hand.”
“It’s better since you cleaned it, and the new ribbon looks fine.”
“It’s still diabolical. Why don’t you buy a new one? It would save time in the end.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“You can’t afford a new typewriter and you think you’re going to save the world.”
“You don’t need possessions to save the world, Amy. Jesus Christ had nothing: no home, no money, no property.”
“I thought you said when I came here that you weren’t religious.”
It always surprised him that, apparently taking no account of him, she could yet recall comments he had made months earlier. He said: “I don’t believe Christ was God. I don’t believe there is a God. But I believe in what He taught.”
“If He wasn’t a God, I don’t see that it matters much what He taught. Anyway, all I can remember is something about turning the other cheek, which I don’t believe in. I mean, that’s daft. If someone slaps your left cheek, then you slap his right, only harder. Anyway, I do know they hung Him up on the cross, so it didn’t do Him a lot of good. That’s what turning the other cheek does for you.”
He said: “I’ve got a Bible here somewhere. You could read about Him if you wanted to. Make a start with St. Mark’s Gospel.”
“No thanks. I had enough of that in the home.”
“What home?”
“Just a home, before the baby was born.”
“How long were you there?”
“Two weeks. Two weeks too bloody many. Then I ran away and found a squat.”
“Where was that, the squat?”
“Islington, Camden, King’s Cross, Stoke Newington. Does it matter? I’m here now, OK?”
“It’s OK by me, Amy.”
Lost in his thoughts, he hardly realized that he had given up folding the pamphlets.
Amy said: “Look, if you’re not going to help with these envelopes you might as well go and put a new washer on that tap. It’s been dripping for weeks and Timmy’s always falling about in the mud.”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll do it now.”
He took down his tool kit from the high cupboard where it was kept well out of Timmy’s reach. He was glad to be out of the caravan. It had become increasingly claustrophobic in the last few weeks. Outside, he bent to talk to Timmy, caged in his playpen. He and Amy had collected large stones from the beach, looking for those with holes in them—and he had strung them onto strong cord and tied them along one side of the playpen. Timmy would spend hours happily banging them together or against the bars or, as now, slobbering against one of the stones in an attempt to get it into his mouth. Sometimes he would communicate with individual flints, a continuous admonitory prattle broken by sudden triumphant squeals. Kneeling down, Neil clutched the bars, rubbed his nose against Timmy’s and was rewarded by his huge, heart-tugging smile. He looked very like his mother, with the same round head on a fragile neck, the same beautifully shaped mouth. Only his eyes, widely spaced, were differently shaped, large blue spheres with, above them, straight bushy eyebrows which reminded Neil of pale and delicate caterpillars. The tenderness he felt for the child was equal to, if different from, the tenderness he felt for his mother. He could not now imagine life on the headland without either of them.
But the tap defeated him. Despite his tuggings with the wrench he couldn’t get the screw to shift. Even this minor domestic task was apparently beyond his powers. He could hear Amy’s derisive voice. You want to change the world and you can’t change a washer. After a couple of minutes he gave up the attempt, left the tool box by the cottage wall and walked to the edge of the cliff, then slithered down to the beach. Crunching over the ridges of stones, he went down to the edge of the sea and almost violently wrenched off his shoes. It was thus, when the weight of anxiety about his failed ambitions, his uncertain future became too heavy, that he would find his peace, standing motionless to watch the veined curve of the poised wave, the tumult of crashing foam breaking over his feet, the wide intersecting arches washing over the smooth sand as the wave retreated to leave its tenuous lip of foam. But today even this wonder, continually repeated, failed to comfort his spirit. He gazed out to the horizon with unseeing eyes and thought about his present life, the hopelessness of the future, about Amy, about his family. Thrusting his hand in his pocket, he felt the crumpled envelope of his mother’s last letter.
He knew that his parents were disappointed in him although they never said so openly, since oblique hints were just as effective: “Mrs. Reilly keeps on asking me, What is Neil doing? I don’t like to say that you’re living in a caravan with no proper job.” She certainly didn’t like to say that he was living there with a girl. He had written to tell them about Amy since his parents constantly threatened to visit and, unlikely as this was actually to happen, the prospect had added an intolerable anxiety to his already anxiety-ridden life.
“I’m giving a temporary home to an unmarried mother in return for typing help. Don’t worry, I shan’t suddenly present you with a bastard grandchild.”
After the letter had been posted he had felt ashamed. The cheap attempt at humour had been too like a treacherous repudiation of Timmy, whom he loved. And his mother hadn’t found it either funny or reassuring. His letter had produced an almost incoherent farrago of warnings, pained reproaches and veiled references to the possible reaction of Mrs. Reilly if she ever got to know. Only his two brothers surreptitiously welcomed his way of life. They hadn’t made university and the difference between their comfortable lifestyle—houses on an executive estate, en suite bathrooms, artificial coal fires in what they called the lounge, working wives, a new car every two years and time-shares in Majorca—provided both with agreeable hours of self-satisfied comparisons which he knew would always end with the same conclusion, that he ought to pull himself together,
that it wasn’t right, not after all the sacrifices Mum and Dad had made to send him to college, and a fine waste of money that had proved.
He had told Amy none of this but would have happily confided had she shown the least interest. But she asked no questions about his past life and told him nothing about hers. Her voice, her body, her smell were as familiar to him as his own, but essentially he knew no more about her now than when she had arrived. She refused to collect any welfare benefits, saying that she wasn’t going to have DHSS snoopers visiting the caravan to see if she and Neil were sleeping together.He sympathized. He didn’t want them either, but he felt that for Timmy’s sake she should take what was on offer. He had given her no money but he did feed both of them, and this was difficult enough on his grant. No one visited her and no one telephoned. Occasionally she would receive a postcard, coloured views usually of London with non-descript, meaningless messages, but as far as he knew she never replied.
They had so little in common. She helped spasmodically with PANUP but he was never sure how far she was actually committed. And he knew that she found his pacifism stupid. He could recall a conversation only this morning.
“Look, if I live next door to an enemy and he has a knife, a gun and a machine gun and I’ve got the same, I’m not going to chuck mine before he chucks his. I’ll say, OK, let the knife go, then the gun maybe, then the machine gun. Him and me at the same time. Why should I throw mine away and leave him with his?”
“But one of you has to make a start, Amy. There has to be a beginning of trust. Whether it’s people or nations, we have to find the faith to open our hearts and hands and say, ‘Look, I’ve nothing. I’ve only my humanity. We inhabit the same planet. The world is full of pain but we needn’t add to it. There has to be an end of fear.’”
She had said obstinately: “I don’t see why he should chuck his weapons once he knows I’ve got nothing.”
“Why should he keep them? He’s got nothing to fear from you any more.”
“He’d keep them because he liked the feeling of having them and because he might like to use them some day. He’d like the power and he’d like knowing he had me where he wanted me. Honestly, Neil, you’re so naïve sometimes. That’s how people are.”
“But we can’t argue like that any more, Amy. We aren’t talking about knives and guns and machine guns. We’re talking about weapons neither of us could use without destroying ourselves and probably our whole planet. But it’s good of you to help with PANUP when you don’t sympathize.”
She had said: “PANUP’s different. And I sympathize all right. I just think that you’re wasting your time writing letters, making speeches, sending out all those pamphlets. It won’t do any good. You’ve got to fight people their way.”
“But it’s done good already. All over the world ordinary people are marching, demonstrating, making their voices heard, letting the people in power know that what they want is a peaceful world for themselves and their children. Ordinary people like you.”
And then she had almost shouted at him: “I’m not ordinary! Don’t you call me ordinary! If there are ordinary people, I’m not one of them.”
“I’m sorry, Amy. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then don’t say it.”
The only cause they had in common was a refusal to eat meat. Soon after she arrived at the caravan he had said: “I’m vegetarian but I don’t expect you to be, or Timmy.” He had wondered as he spoke whether Timmy was old enough to eat meat. He had added: “You can buy a chop occasionally in Norwich if you feel like it.”
“What you have is all right by me. Animals don’t eat me, and I don’t eat them.”
“And Timmy?”
“Timmy has what I give him. He’s not fussy.”
Nor was he. Neil couldn’t imagine a more accommodating child nor, for most of the time, a more contented one. He had found the second-hand playpen advertised on a newsagent’s board in Norwich and had brought it back on the top of the van. In it Timmy would crawl for hours or pull himself up and stand, precariously balancing, his napkin invariably falling about his knees. When thwarted, he would rage, shutting his eyes tight, opening his mouth and holding his breath before letting out a bellow of such terrifying power that Neil half-expected the whole of Lydsett to come running to see which of them was tormenting the child. Amy never smacked him but would jerk him onto her hip and dump him on her bed saying: “Bloody awful noise.”
“Shouldn’t you stay with him? Holding his breath like that, he could kill himself.”
“You daft? He won’t kill himself. They never do.”
And he knew now that he wanted her, wanted her when it was obvious that she didn’t want him and would never again risk rejection. On the second night at the caravan she had slid back the partition between his bed and hers and had walked quietly up to his bed and had stood gravely looking down at him. She had been completely naked. He had said: “Look, Amy, you don’t have to pay me.”
“I never pay for anything, at least not like that. But have it your own way.” After a pause she had said: “You gay or something?”
“No, it’s just that I don’t like casual affairs.”
“You mean you don’t like them, or you don’t think you ought to have them?”
“I suppose I mean that I don’t think I ought to have them.”
“You religious, then?”
“No, I’m not religious, not in the ordinary way. It’s just that I think sex is too important to be casual about. You see, if we slept together and I—if I disappointed you—we might quarrel and then you’d walk out. You’d feel that you had to. You’d leave, you and Timmy.”
“So what, I walk out.”
“I wouldn’t want you to do that, not because of anything I’d done.”
“Or hadn’t done. OK, I expect you’re right.” Another pause, and then she had added: “You’d mind, then, if I walked out?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’d mind.”
She had turned away. “I always do walk out in the end. No one has ever minded before.”
It was the only sexual advance she had ever made to him, and he knew it would be the last. Now they slept with Timmy’s cot wedged between the partition and his bed. Sometimes in the night, wakeful because the child had stirred, he would put out his hands and clasp the bars and long to shake this frail barrier that symbolized the unbridgeable gulf between them. She lay there, sleek and curved as a fish or a gull, so close that he could hear the rise and fall of her breath faintly echoing the suspiration of the sea. His body ached for her, and he would press his face into the lumpy pillow, groaning with the hopelessness of his need. What could she possibly see in him to make her want him, except, as on that one night, out of gratitude, pity, curiosity or boredom? He hated his body, the scrawny legs on which the kneecaps protruded like deformities, the small blinking eyes too closely set, the sparse beard which couldn’t disguise the weakness of the mouth and chin. Sometimes, too, he was tormented by jealousy. Without proof he had convinced himself that there was someone else. She would say that she wanted to walk alone on the headland. And he would watch her go with the certainty that she was meeting a lover. And when she returned he would imagine that he could see the glow of the skin, the satisfied smile of remembered happiness, could almost smell that she had been making love.
He had already heard from the university that his research grant wouldn’t be extended. The decision wasn’t surprising; he had been warned to expect it. He had been saving as much as possible from the grant in the hope of amassing a small sum which would tide him over until he could find a local job. It hardly mattered what. Anything that would pay enough to live and allow him to remain on the headland to carry on the campaign. In theory, he supposed he could organize PANUP from anywhere in the U.K., but he knew that it was irrevocably bound to Larksoken headland, to the caravan, to that concrete mass five miles to the north which had power, apparently, to dominate his will as it did his imagination. He had already put
out feelers with local employers, but they hadn’t been too keen on employing a well-known agitator; even those who seemed sympathetic to the anti-nuclear cause didn’t actually have work on offer. Perhaps they feared that too many of his energies would be diverted to the campaign. And his small capital was draining away with the extra expense of Amy, Timmy and even the cats. And now there was the threat of this libel action, less of a threat than a certainty.
When, ten minutes later, he returned to the caravan, Amy, too, had given up working. She was lying on her bed looking up at the ceiling, Smudge and Whisky curled on her stomach.
Looking down at her, he said abruptly: “If the Robarts legal action goes ahead I’ll need money. We’re not going to be able to go on as we are. We’ve got to make plans.”
She sat up smartly and stared at him. The kittens, affronted, squealed their protest and fled.
“You mean we might have to leave here?”
The “we” would normally have lifted his heart; now he hardly noticed it.
“It’s possible.”
“But why? I mean, you aren’t going to find anything cheaper than the caravan. Try getting a single room for two pounds a week. We’re bloody lucky to have this place.”
“But there’s no work here, Amy. If I have huge damages to pay I’ll have to get a job. That means London.”
“What sort of a job?”
“Any sort. I’ve got my degree.”
“Well, I can’t see the sense of leaving here even if there isn’t any work. You can go to the DHSS. Draw the dole.”
“That isn’t going to pay damages.”
“Well, if you have to go maybe I’ll stay on. I can pay the rent here. After all, what’s the difference to the owner? He’ll get his two quid, whoever pays it.”
“You couldn’t live here alone.”
“Why not? I’ve lived in worse places.”
“On what? What would you do for money?”