He’d set out early, in spite of blackening rain. Carruthers had been difficult about three days off from the office, saying that the new Watkins table-sauce account was in urgent need of smart treatment for the next T V series which, he added, is worth a lot to the firm. But Keith was just as likely to come up with an incontrovertible dead-set image racing along the open road, as he was locked in the super modern office block above High Holborn. So Carruthers had no option but to drop his hidden persuader technique on someone already a master of it – a prize copywriter who earned every penny of his three thousand a year.
Hearing all the arguments, his psychoanalyst also disapproved. ‘If you succeed, I’ll be pleased and surprised. But the chances are that you’ll fail, which will put you back two years’ – as if advising a tubercular Sisyphus not to push his great stone once more up the mountain when the gods had ordained it.
But Keith had decided to isolate himself from all advice since Kevin called on his way through London and said Pat had a man in to share her bright little cottage. A high moral tone had always been her line, and now she wasn’t only having an affair but had let Kevin go up and live in the same rotten nest. He at least had always kept that part of his life separate from what he termed his ‘permanent domestic cage’.
He filled the car with a homely stench of French cigarettes – which made him feel somehow safe. The wipers cleared his vision, swilled rain and dust against the outside screen. A youth and rucksack at the next hilltop held up a thumb and smiled, as if the thumb were injured and he were putting a good face on it. But Keith pointed to the right, as if turning off too soon to bother stopping. He felt guilty again, but couldn’t stand fifty miles of chattering, having to think of that bloody image, as well as plan his gambits for when he bumped into Pat. Not that there’d be much room for manoeuvre. It’s plain as all hell, getting Kevin up there while she’s living with another man. I’m not against it, oh no, she can do what she likes for all I care, but not in front of my son, understand? Not in front of my son, for God’s sake. Kevin hadn’t even disliked the chap, which shows how successful she was at, well, corrupting him – there’s no other word for it.
He’d intended stopping the car to consult the R A C book and find a way towards Peterborough, but whenever a layby was signalled his hands wouldn’t react to the offer of it, and he held a steady sixty along the present road. I’ll stop now, he kept saying, and draw in – but it was impossible. As long as I’m going north: he consoled himself for the strange state of his will, as if to stop would end his life, make him call off his expedition, fall asleep over the wheel, burst into tears, turn round, begin to doubt himself all over again. He pressed on the accelerator, nearly hit a grass verge at the next bend, then slowed to fifty on the straight because he had frightened himself.
Crossing London he’d licked through Highgate, and Muswell Hill – the place he was born and lived at most of his life. It hadn’t altered, he saw, detouring along the avenue and stopping by his childhood house. The extrovert Keith loathed it, while the introvert tended a secret passion for the hidden depths and darknesses of it. He recalled those ideal days before the war, the long never-ending boyhood peace of them. Later he rebelled against all that house and suburb stood for, had even joined the Labour Party at one time. Who hadn’t rebelled? Rebellion was the anaesthetic of youth, and that was the only way to get through it for some people; though if someone would kindly point out the anaesthetic for middle-age he’d be bloody glad.
Cambridge showed on the roadsigns: there was no point in turning off now, so he stopped for a legstretch and petrol. He wanted four gallons, watched the big hand of the meter slowly register, fascinated by its unclogged movement, an unattainable harmony that men got from machines but not themselves. A pity, but then, maybe they just sent machines ahead as an advance guard, and one day they’d catch up with the way machines worked now. Take this car: care for it, feed it with oil and fuel, drive it lovingly, and it would give good use and service for years. Why couldn’t a man be like that? Because he can’t. He’s more mysterious, superstitious, clumsy, despondent, clever. There’s too much we don’t understand about the light and darknesses of his insides. Isolate a specimen, do everything right both flesh and mental, and what happens? He dies one day from something you can’t trace. Not a hope. Even I’m like that, one time poet and now a mechanic of the wormy depths in the service of advertising, an instigator of conspicuous consumption which, as we all know, breeds spiritual cancer. But that’s my job, so what the hell? I’m not one of those who paid cash for his house.
One time he travelled around in a Jag, but they were getting too common, so he preferred the distinction of anonymity in a souped-up sports. In any case he’d soon be a shade too old for a Jag. Maybe after forty he’d change to a Mini, just to be on the safe side. He walked impatiently along the pumps, his appearance that of a well-dressed young middle-aging man, fairly tall, with fair wavy hair and the troubled aspect of someone whom smallpox had thought to attack but changed its mind at the last minute, merely branding him as a person who had gone through the mill in some indefinable manner. He had a high forehead, lined to match, and hazel eyes that looked out from a man-created hell, imploring as they looked, not at those they turned on, but begging the furnace within to make them less imploring. Such eyes resented what the mirror of his soul had turned them into, without questioning the soul itself. His small mouth, the sort that didn’t seem inclined to open often, would only say something if his soul in agony screamed at him to protest.
Working at the hidden springs of other people’s slothfulness, he had no time (or perhaps, after all, no desire) to turn these perceptions on himself. This he left to a psychiatrist who hadn’t till now made a good job of it. In spite of everything the expression of suffering was taken as sensitivity – which blended so well with his well-shaped chin and intelligent forehead that he not only inspired confidence in those he worked for, but was considered by women to be good looking.
The sun shone, driving through Trumpington, up past Fitzbilly’s and Pembroke. The sun had shone on it too during his three years reading English after the troopship crawl from Burma in forty-eight. Cambridge hadn’t altered. The students weren’t quite the sort he would have mixed with then, and might make good salesmen at Harrods, he thought, observing a scarved knot of them on the street. After leaving the Labour Club he had prayed many days in King’s chapel, entranced by the stained-glass windows, meditating on their pictures of Christ and the Virgin. Even in the bursting cold of midwinter he would behold them for hours, scribbling fervent impressions in his leatherbound notebook, nose red but scarf well drawn. After Burma he considered this extreme change good for his soul, and remembered Cambridge as part of a rich and varied life. While others were roistering and masturbating, he had revelled in the mellow, satisfying depths of tradition and scholarship.
Foregoing coffee, he got out with his memories as fast as he could, on the road to Ely. Twice in this short burst of the rainy day he’d stumbled on places that brought back disturbing echoes, made off from each with relief and guilt at having strayed into them against his will. Life, he had known for a long time, was something of a battle between his objective and subjective worlds, and neither treatment nor willpower could keep it level. If he looked out of the window one fine day and saw cleansing sunlight on opposite roof-slates, a voice within told him that all would be black rain before he got into his car for work. But if by then the sky was still clear and warm, he wouldn’t revel in it and bless his luck, but would see it as a sign of impaired reason, as another point scored by the interior subjective bully of himself. It won continually, by the bell and on points, but for once he felt the victor, saw his daylight swoop on Pat and her boy friend as a rational blow in a scheme to coax her back to the comfortable fold of his bijou gem and get some love and order once more into their lives.
But could he do it? He had doubts on this, as on everything, as each corpuscle of his blood must have had as it
entered his heart full of doubt, and left it with the same feeling. Yet blood moved just the same, flowed through and kept him alive. Doubts, in the end, looking back on things, didn’t matter. It was what you did that mattered, and what he did in this case seemed already halfway done. Confronting her, he would have to sell the product before she would buy – to put it in crude and workaday terms. His ability to probe the pseudo-masochistic impulses of the human soul, and lay them out as alluring symbols of acquisitiveness or greed, ought to help in an expedition such as this. He smiled at the thought. Christ, what haven’t I sold in my time? Persuaded people to buy? The bonfires of conspicuous consumption had lit up the housing estates, flames dead already, dustbins emptied, ash cleared away. The world is a furnace, a boiler house, wheels within dark satanic wheels moaning above the backs of the H P-paying multitude. It would be nice if the reality were so stark and clear. Yet he liked to dwell upon simplicities, no matter how exaggerated. Simplicity was oil on the wheels of his chronometer heart, reaching even the poetic cogs of them, the last hope of the divided man who could never really put humpty-dumpty together again.
He had always regarded himself as something of a poet, more so after he had stopped writing, on leaving Cambridge. Not only did his self-respect need this reassuring memory, but skill at his job proved some truth in it. At his desk, blinds drawn, ‘DONOTDISTURB’ hung on the door (not locked in case someone should need to on urgent matters), he sat with only a desk lamp shining on pen and paper, a dictionary and thesaurus to each hand while he struggled in the jungles of myth and nightmare, an unacknowledged legislator who, with others, ruled the world. He wrestled for days over a single phrase, surfacing with it in the end like a drowning man who had been pulled under more than three times, a cracker motto in his teeth that in a few weeks would be dazzling around millions of peak-hour television screens. He found his work profoundly satisfying, in spite of snide articles against his trade that popped up now and again in the toffee-nosed weeklies. Work kept him above the brimstone lake of final despair, and made him forget the pain of living without Pat. In the last year he had not suffered unbearably, it was true, but Kevin’s revelation that she was living with another man had filled him with a doomlike blackness. This was understandable, in spite of the bull and treaty of legal separation. Yet he thought the blackness should not have been so thick, nor the doom so heavy. It was the way that Kevin, in all innocence, had told it to him, for in spite of his eleven years he hadn’t really understood the full strength of what was going on. But if this was the case how could the force of Keith’s righteous anger be caused by his son’s corruption? He was given to honest and penetrating analysis, so long as it was in the interests of self-preservation, yet he was afraid to admit (half sensed and so shied back from) that he was jealous of Kevin being an approving witness of his mother’s new happiness. Kevin actually seemed to like the bloody man, which meant that Keith in time was going to lose his son as well (no matter what the law said) – or his son’s respect, which was even worse.
He swallowed all of it, the whole bloody lot, blinded by a diffused jealousy, afraid to drive too fast over the straight flat road. The one solution was for her to come back, so that Kevin could be at home, and the wheels of a blissful domestic interaction fall into place once more.
He began to feel dead beat on the tiresome crawl along the back end of Norfolk. Veering across the flat roads and frozen landscapes of English Holland, cutting the afternoon mist of the Wash only a few miles beyond the desolation of his right-hand side, the country was coated with frost, turned pink and blue by the sun, penetrated in all directions by the thin spires of village churches. In spite of his determination to hate the trip, he found this part inspiring, surrounding him with a beauty never expected, a soft glaze of green frost blending with mist and sky at every point that the car nose turned to. Cold, impersonal, natural beauty always mellowed him with optimism, burnished him with hope.
Fatigue grew easy on his back, and he imagined returning to London this long way with Pat, especially to show her such mysterious and favoured landscape, watch her face as she enjoyed it with him. Maybe they could get a cottage here, use it for long week-ends, and holidays with Kevin when he came from school. They could go to the desolate marsh beaches and swim in the high tide of the gulf, a map of which on a café wall showed intriguing names: Thief Sand, Roaring Middle, Blue Back, Mare Tail, Herring Hill, Inner Gat, The Scalp, Black Buoy Sand, Westmark Knock, Wrangle Flat – names to fascinate schoolboys, some perhaps that he could use in advertisements for a new brand of salt. Along the straight but minor road beyond Boston the Fen drains were grey with ice, and house roofs looked as if they had been patched with snow after a hailstorm or cyclone. The land was darker: ice and snow had been the last of his expectations.
Eyes ached at the constant road. A pain needled his back, gnawed at his ankles after the gear and acceleration work getting out of London and the long haul up. There’s no one more determined, he grinned, than the man who thinks he might fail. He would stay up here for days, if necessary, no matter how much it would upset Carruthers.
10
All the rest of that day it was her intention to pack him off, but he was out when she returned, and in the lighted solitude there was time to calm herself, to realize that such action against a man she loved would be a defeat for her as much as for him.
But he went to the stair-cupboard and drew out his rucksack: ‘All right. You don’t need to tell me. I’m off.’
‘Going away only proves you haven’t the guts to face what you’ve done.’
He threw the rucksack down, a pair of shoes still in one hand. ‘I have,’ he cried. ‘But have you? That’s why I’m off. If I was in your place I’d never want to see my face again.’
‘What’s the point in saying that? Leaving won’t do much good either, though do it if you really want to.’
The lines on his face stood out. In the last few months his features had lost flesh, due to walking, exertion in the garden, the gathering in of fuel, and various repairs to the house. When she mentioned it he said that’s what came from being in love, and living a new sort of life. At this moment his face was cast between the two big decisions. One of them she did not want him to make, but wouldn’t say so even though her life seemed to depend on it. She saw the sky full of menace, crossed by long-tailed rockets that exploded on meeting, that threatened to descend and burn her life back into a solitude she could no longer face.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he said. ‘You don’t even need to think of it. If I talk about what I’ve done I’ll smash my head against that wall. But if I don’t talk about it, I have to go away. You know what I mean? Yet you can’t know, can you, unless I talk, talk, talk? I’ve never been much of a talker at such times. A thing like this is sure to stop me talking, and this is the time when you’ve got to. But I love you though, and that’s true. If only I could talk, instead of eating myself up.’
I could talk to Nancy, he thought, and I can talk to other people ten to the dozen; I was fluent in the factory right enough, which caused all the trouble, but it was easier than this. He wanted to drag himself out by the roots, expose them for her, suffer. But it was impossible. She didn’t think their quarrel deserved it from him in any case. They should simply give in and end it all, pull out before the burns went deep, walk to opposite ends of the house, get caught up by a different and superficial topic. She herself was already surfacing, but the blows had left greater marks on Frank, though it now seemed wrong that they should have done so.
He walked over: ‘Stand up, Pat.’ She looked into a face from which no elaboration could be expected until the tension had worn off and so unblocked his heart, by which time they would be happy perhaps, and explanations would seem irrelevant.
Her face was level, faintly smiling. They stared at each other, and when they could no longer bear to, his arms were pressing her to him, as if she had been the one to think of running away.
She couldn’t imagin
e where Frank had gone. Where was there to go in such a place? She’d finished her rounds, laid her bag on the dining-room table, took off her coat and hat after a hard day. They had all been hard, lately. Maybe it was winter grinding its way like a juggernaut and presenting her with too many sick. Snow still scattered over the lanes had thinned and turned to a stonier grip of ice.
Fields were darkening, houses and cottages with yellow eyes shining in the sharp dip of land. She plugged in the kettle, opened a newspaper. The light oppressed her, seemed to curtail her sight rather than clarify the small print. Feeling tired – it must be that – she put on her glasses. But still she could not read, uneasy that Frank wasn’t in, surprised at it also, and smiling at how completely she lived with him.
The kettle shook her from drowsiness by a shrill cockcrow which she fled to stop. With Frank in the house there were two people to involve in her wishes, so no one could call her practical any more. She bent over a stack of logs by the hearth, to lay some on the coal. Practical people lived alone, had the run of their narrow earth. If they had any life in them they burned to death all by themselves. So it was either him or herself, and no one could tell who it would be. This was equilibrium perhaps, and maybe that was love. Balance, aid, interdependence, passion at the end burning these first three away like a sparkler, ever descending, ever decreasing, until the hand jumped and only the shock remained.
He had power over her, and she wasn’t used to it. He didn’t exude or revel in it, probably didn’t even know it was there, but its truth was proved by the fact that he had struck her and was still living in the house. That blow had taken her power, upset the balance, destroyed her independence. She saw it in simple terms: either it was true or, if she was exaggerating, her character was flawed. Even to think such denigration pointed to how much her self-reliance had cracked, compared to the days when, in London, she controlled her house, child, and husband. Memory let her down again, showing how Frank, on the day of his arrival, had helped to clear out a larder stamped with chaos, the mark of a woman anything but ruthlessly efficient and self-contained. So the rot, she thought, had started before his appearance. But when, when, when? The inner fires of agony blazed just as painfully with a person you loved as they did with someone you hated. They also burned when you lived alone, facts which proved you were alive and could feel how much there was to be thankful for.
The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1) Page 12