‘As you said, we end up doing what we want to do.’
‘Now you’re throwing my own words back at me.’ On the next corner, along a length of recently demolished buildings, was a barrow of burning timber, ancient dry wood from gutted houses shaking its flames and sparks into clear sky. They stood by the fence watching it, his thoughts dimmed by the collective roar. It seemed as if mysteriously started, no one around its flanks, half-eaten beams of glowing geodetic pattern, smoke boiling darkly. If you can’t light up the sky and make daylight for everybody to see in, he thought, burn it down. Darkness is a rotten castle for setting fire to.
They walked along Euston Road. ‘Let’s stay out all night,’ he said. ‘It’s good to wander round a town like this.’ His suggestion seemed crazy, until she remembered wanting to do such a thing before meeting George, but never able to because a girl alone might not be safe. ‘My husband’s at home,’ she said, the final refuge. ‘I have a train to catch.’
‘I’ll see you to the station.’ She was tired, unable to walk all night even if she were free to. The shoes weren’t right for it, and burns under her feet already promised blisters for tomorrow. Frank waved a taxi.
He said good-bye at Paddington. The train was crowded, but he found her a seat. ‘What time will you get home?’ he asked at the door of the compartment.
‘About two.’ People were looking over his shoulder for empty places. Neither was inclined to end the evening. The station had revived their nerves with its unexpected machine-noises, mysterious hangings, variously pitched lights, people going through barriers for last trains as if street-tentacles would drag them back into a hostile city if they were missed. In the taxi, calm, purring, cocooned, they had accepted it as the end, but now the excitement had returned. Frank had walked along as with an acquaintance for whom he had little feeling, but imagining the memory of it from next week, saw clearly that it would turn out to be more than that. He wouldn’t kiss her, or even shake her hand, for fear she’d be embarrassed by so many people, yet he felt the impulse to fix the evening as memorable in some way. Not that you had to fall in love with a woman before taking the first kiss. He even wanted to see her again. Maybe that’s what railway stations did, and perhaps if she’d just nipped off in a taxi or dodged into the underground he’d have forgotten her in two minutes.
The train jolted under his feet. ‘I expect we’ll bump into each other again,’ he said, for want of anything better, hating to say good-bye on trains. The evening had already lost its casual nature.
‘Perhaps,’ she answered, leaving it all to chance, empty also at the end of the evening. A deep-noted whistle, like the cry of a caged bird who realizes that its door is open but can’t move, echoed around the station. ‘See you,’ he said, turned and walked leisurely to the door, dropped to the platform as the carriage moved. She settled in her seat, took a book from her handbag.
16
Three daily papers fell through the letterbox. The two that he termed easy-to-read were left for Myra; the heavy, top-people newspaper he folded up and took to his job – wearing trilby hat, trench coat and heavy boots, for he was supervising a new agricultural survey on the bleak uplands of Bedfordshire.
Few people knew the land of England as well as George, or had a deeper feeling for it. There was little he hadn’t hitchhiked, biked, motored or walked over in what already seemed, at thirty-five, an immensely long life. He was alone, the complete man while making base lines out of far-off hills and woods, triangulation from church spires or the jutting shoulders of valley buffs. Derbyshire stone, Kentish chalk, Fenland sedge, each atmosphere felt different to his skin and lungs, bred way-out dialects, forced various dwellings on each landscape, was a geo-meteorology moulding the common psyche of its inhabitants. The subtleties of land and people were profoundly fascinating, and George was lord of all he surveyed when their composite reactions to land and air tied in with his knowledge and sympathy.
His sensitivity to the interdependence of land, animals and people was reflected in his calm and intelligent eyes, and in his now rather stolid features. As a young man his mind had been open and his brain limber, golden theories adorned and carried through – or rejected with a cry that there were more where that came from. Now he was at that middle-age when he tried to make ideas fit into harder traditional patterns – a style of personal and intellectual advancement in tune to the country he lived in. His visionary eyes did not seek harmony any more, but fixity into which people and the three elements slotted with neatness and safety. Any discrepancy, rather than point the way to philosophical adventure, was regarded as a mistake, a failure of logic, a miscasting of knowledge. He was building limits to defend his self-assured integrity against a greater awareness that middle-age threatened him with. These limits were also applied to Myra, who was an entirely different person. George had stayed very much the same since their marriage, his attitudes merely hardening, while Myra had changed as much as it was possible to while living with a man unable to recognize the fact that she was changing.
Yet he suspected some change between them in the last year, and if this feeling turned out to be correct something had to be done to keep them on the accustomed emotional lines. Blood ran deep but bloodiness ran deeper, he had once quipped about a couple they knew, who were unwilling to save their marriage by emotional compromise. In one of his rare moments of expatiation he said to Myra that such people were so shallow and spiritually null that any policy of give and take meant a living death to them. A vicious quarrel spelt life – while too many quarrels drove them apart. The great chisel wedge of domestic realism eventually finished them off. For a marriage to survive needed stamina, intelligence, tolerance, a backbone of unique qualities that few people possessed. If peace were broken, how could one work? Domestic battles were the most savage time-consumers of any man’s career.
Myra agreed. It was true. Everything he said was true. He was full of staid, obvious, incontrovertibles, a parson in reverse, a congregation preaching to one when at rare times the speech-stops were out. Yet from his lips, words flayed the empty air, certainly didn’t cut into the parts of her consciousness deadened after six years married to him. Nothing was wrong. They’d held back from quarrelling because it was unreasonable to do so, immature, a waste of George’s working time. But this wasn’t it at all, she thought when on her way back from town after her stroll with Frank. People in love shouldn’t be afraid to quarrel. People in love didn’t think about quarrelling: they just did or they didn’t. If you’re in love what harm can it do? If you’ve never quarrelled how can you go on living together? While persuading yourself that you love him, love him, the years roll by between house and garden, velvet hands over your eyes concealing the true reasons, so that the marks of these multiple deceptions end up only on your mouth.
The meeting with Frank had lit fires in her mind, matched them to the metallic light-clusters beyond the train window. These far-off tinderous flames were pleasant to warm the petrified limbs of the past by. There had been nothing memorable attached to the walk – maybe that was why it had been memorable. She hadn’t even thought of her tasks for tomorrow, the lecture on Roman remains in Buckinghamshire for the W E A to be prepared, a visit to Mrs Wilkins to check entries for Friday’s cake competition at the W I. These pleasant enough jobs she often looked forward to, and to have them vanish from her mind for five hours was alarming – looking back on it.
George sometimes hinted that she gave too much time to village work, meaning she’d neglected to do more typing for his book of geographical essays which he hoped to finish this year. It was more or less a collection of lectures given over the last decade, and the first draft lay in his study. The crucial workout lay ahead, that of excising, re-writing, polishing with the thesaurus, shaping each sentence for rhythm and texture and content – a harmoniousness finally gained by reading aloud. The slow sweet labour of getting it down in the first place was over, a matter of regret and relief, and in seeing the end of this work h
e recognized the trick that his achievement had played, that it had marked out the end of one phase of his life – a fact only occurring to him this morning as he turned off the alarm clock and left Myra asleep after her late night in town.
The house was silent, the smell of comfort everywhere, slightly damp odour of carpets, books and part central heating. In the unwakened house he alone was master, and his carpet slippers creaking the stairs seemed the only sound in the smokeless and recumbent village beyond the windows.
He shaved over the kitchen sink (memories of student and bedsitter days), the kettle squat on the electric stove. Myra, he told himself, was a marvellous wife to have kept such a perfect house for so long, which confirmed his feeling that one stage of their life should come to a finish with the final draft of his book. Myra had suggested the title: New Aspects of Geography by George Bassingfield, and he could feel and foresee the time when they would need a, drastic change in their existence. In the last few months Myra had been weighed down by something that he had been too occupied to try and fathom. Driving to and from work he brooded on it, ended by inward raging when he got no answer whose authority he could have faith in. It showed his affection, and the strength of their marriage, that he had detected this prolonged mood in her and was trying to find its cause. But he must also unearth the reasons and do something about it. Best of all to do both, but one thing at a time. The routine they had for so long enjoyed with a mellow almost sensual pleasure in this agreeable house had outlived both its usefulness and necessity. A change was coming, and when it was truly on them maybe what was bothering Myra would be revealed. It was a matter of patience, the interplay of acting and waiting, because one must first look to one’s job, career, house, material necessities, and then search out the lesser plagues that burden the spirit.
He boiled an egg, made coffee and toast, a matter of minutes in such a kitchen. The perfection of it backed up his half-made decision: Dishmaster, Stovemaster, Wastemaster, Toastmaster, a circle of masters over which the mistress was master, an overpowering accumulation of labour-savers, to save your soul for what? You went to work in your Road-master, ate by Feedmaster, and died, no doubt, by Death-master. It was like that E. M. Forster story. He wanted to escape its paralysing effect. Maybe Myra felt crushed by it as well, and that was her trouble. Surveyors were wanted in places like Ghana, Malaya, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, zones of rain and sun and steaming jungle, a beige dust-road running between granite rocks, a vast revolutionary switch from this idyllic piece of England, and his eyes would rove down advertisements, weighing salaries, prospects, tours of duty, allowances for living, home leave – reaching out for an atlas now and again to check a remote or altered placename. He saw this as a personal desire, and also as a solution to whatever subterranean difficulties were taking hold of Myra, and so of himself.
The idea of moving had started as a pastime, a dream, an exercise in transmigration of unequal physical comforts. The reality of it increased, shaded the outlines of an appealing picture and in spite of the English soil he mapped and trod on at present, it made him feel that a long time out would augment his love for it. He wouldn’t dream of applying such an argument to Myra. The deepest love could only go so far, that is, to inanimate things such as earth and animals. To apply it to human beings, who were capable of reasoning could only degrade them, and he was the last person impious enough to attempt that. Life was like a Roman road: straight as a die, even when it went over the hills. It wasn’t easy to construct this road, still less maintain it, but the surfacing went far enough down never to be washed away by time or storms. Most people made spidery trails through woods and wilderness, tracks that doubled back and tangled hopelessly in some morass: in real terms they fought like cat and dog, held on for as long as they could perhaps, then almost took pleasure in throwing down the barriers to let hate and chaos pour in. When the first passion vanished they moved to other beds and lovers.
Most of George and Myra’s friends were either divorced or living apart, children scattered like so much ash over the eroded roads they had failed to build. So it had become almost a point of honour with George to keep his marriage going, as if it were a competition of which only he knew the rules, or even the existence of the game. Myra didn’t know of it, but he had no fear of her ever going off with other men, betraying him in the worst way possible. Of course, if she said: ‘Look, George, it’s finished, I want to go. I’m in love with someone else,’ he’d say: ‘All right. If that’s how things have worked out. It’s good of you to be so straight about it,’ then he’d understand. He would suffer, of course, but he was capable of that, and in any case it wouldn’t be so bad as if she betrayed him while still living with him. There was only one way for the heart to move – honestly. Many people hadn’t the strength of character for it, regarded honesty only as a valve to keep them safe from the worst of life’s agonies, but George considered this to be false reasoning. To him the purpose of civilization was to make you aware of such agonies, to merge the undercurrents and the surface into one clear comprehensible mirror to life. To try and get behind such a mirror would mean wielding your fist to smash it, and that was the action of a madman.
He poured more coffee, and went to get the newspapers. He needn’t leave the house for another hour, never liked to leave it at all unless Myra were up first. A house with no one awake in it during the day was like a dead beehive, generating an unnecessarily sinister ambience.
On one page a civil war loomed in Cyprus, on another Algeria was blazing from end to end. He couldn’t see the sense of it with so much new work to be done. Clipping open to the middle he saw a caption: THE LINCOLNSHIRE POACHER CELEBRATES, above a photograph of a man with alarmingly open eyes who looked as if he had mistakenly stumbled into a firing squad. On one side of him was a younger man trying to hold him up, and on the other arm was Myra.
Eyes half closed, as if too much light had stabbed into them, his heart beat against the dozen questions that were crushed to death in the door of his mind. A smile covered the idea of not believing it. Good plain Myra in her new dress was wearing the faintest smile, a cross between contempt and modesty that he had often seen on her face but not defined so clearly until the shock of seeing her in a newspaper deepened his perceptions more than he would ever have thought either necessary or possible.
She was looking down at this famous Lincolnshire painter, who had sagged from the liquid weight of his own success. The other young man (he and Myra were described as friends of the artist) had a rather stalwart appearance as far as one could tell from such a picture, for the flash had caught him with a look of stolid disgust, as if, should Albert Handley really collapse, he would go over to the photographers and scatter them and their equipment up and down the space created by their lights. It was a visage made up of belligerence and sensibility, of intelligent spirit trying to push its way into a strong yet troubled face not easy to forget.
Sitting at the table by the kitchen window, with the morning light streaming over his large hands on the newspaper, George leafed open the top-people journal and found a review of the painter’s work though not, thank God, any mention of Myra. It was a perceptive though longwinded write-up. A certain flippancy was held against Albert Handley, but the reviewer balanced this by assuming that further development was sure to iron it out. Handley was compared to the unlettered primitive painters sometimes found in the nineteenth-century craftsmen’s guilds in the north of England, men with minds of simple outline and sombre colour who had disciplined their exuberant souls into rough conventional scenes of workbench or churchyard, hovel or chimney stack, a comrade in voluminous apron wielding outsize calipers and hammer with a motto on unity and brotherhood underneath. This was Handley’s tradition, the reviewer went on, but due to influences of the modern age, he had burst the bounds of these narrow limits and turned out something which was, after all, quite unique and original in that he had spanned both worlds. It was to be hoped that success would not ruin all this, and that he w
ould respect his roots by leaving them as soon as possible and showing us the rest of the world coloured by his unique vision. The article ended by suggesting – tentatively – that perhaps Mr Handley’s appearance marked the beginning of some new wave in the bloodless and disorientated world of contemporary English painting.
George was not impressed, would like to have known how Myra had got mixed up with him and the other fellow to the extent of being shown on the middle page of the worst gutter newspaper of them all. There was no real harm in it, of course, no harm at all – reaching for his pipe, jacket and briefcase. It made him see Myra in a light never wondered at before.
He settled himself in his car and drove along the village street, passing shop, vicarage, and row of crumbled cottages, nodding at the milk-girl rattling her bottles towards the policeman’s door. He swung left at the mildewed war memorial. The river was still belly-swollen from last week’s rain, flowing heavily into the lowest meadows on either side. With the window open, the air smelt fresh and moist, having already tasted the sap of green buds, the jewelled balances of morning dew. The countryside was soddened, sunny and peaceful, a mosaic of livid green and brown. There was no evil in this part of England. Woods closed into the road, primroses matted along its banks. Even the low purring of his engine in top gear couldn’t hold back the languid harmonics of the birds. The other day he had heard the first cuckoo, a sound which gave him great pleasure. It would be a shame to leave this, find work in a harsher, hotter country at cross purposes to what his spirit really needed.
17
While Albert was down at the gents Teddy Greensleaves slipped Frank a bundle of fivers. Frank promptly slipped them back. ‘What was that for?’
‘Keeping an eye on Albert. You’ve done nothing else in the last fortnight.’
‘I don’t need paying for it,’ he said, in no way insulted at the offer.
The Death of William Posters Page 19