— It’s always been Elizabeth with you, hasn’t it? You wouldn’t be likely to forget her, would you? Why in the hell didn’t you marry her? Why—I—can’t—think. Or was it she didn’t want to? She saw what was coming—I’ll give her that, she saw what a smug-faced, self-satisfied bore she had coming. Look at you, sitting there—why don’t you open your bloody mouth?
She sat erect, back not touching the cushions, braced, eager. Bristling up like a fighting bird, breathing hard. He raised his eyes and hers were there staring straight unflinching and too bright into his—he tried to fix them but found his own instead fixed, her fury sucked the strength from him. Unjust then that he feeling guiltless should have to turn down uncomfortably his eyes—physically it gave her the truth. So—still keeping an embattled silence—he allowed himself the relief of a smile, a thin amusement of the corner of a lip.
But instantly Ruth took this as a weakness, she had been looking for it—and it stopped her shouting. She had had her effect. She leant back against the cushions, pretending ease and time, nodding. Twice, long and scornfully, she swore: ‘God!’ At such a moment one can act in two ways. One can act unselfconsciously, exercising the body without the mind, as one stretches purely one’s arms on waking from sleep: or selfconsciously, as one can stretch one’s arms imagining the stretch, romanticizing the stretching, seeing in the mind’s eye how dramatically it shapes. It was in this second way that Ruth now poured herself another drink, another half-glassful. She knew and felt every mocking expression of her lips, every breath of scorn, each snap of her eyes. Nor did these gestures suffer from their actedness, rather they were strengthened.
But they needed finality, a dropping of the dramatic curtain. That creature opposite might respond in slight ways, she could see him even now uncomfortable—but he would never break. Only by drumming, drumming, drumming on the same insistent note could she goad him inside to some sort of pain, and so draining that whisky she raised again her voice and repeated and repeated what she knew he had heard before. Beginning to move with it too, swaying on her seat, thumping the table, turning on with one flat sharp stroke the wireless switch, flooding thus the caravan with sound against his silence—so that again he moved his hand wearily across his forehead. And suddenly she wrenched herself up, pulling at the same time the table-cloth, crashing down plates and food and the mess of gravy, shaking the caravan, screaming. He looked up again, now tapped his head, made the expression of wincing from her—and this only set her screaming the louder, she took up a tea-pot and threw it against the wall, and as so much sound and violence crashed away out of her that same very need for finality overtook her own senses, the known act was flushed over with hysteria, the room took charge mounting into a headache and a blackening of light—until she could only get to the door and fling this open and, screaming, bundle down the steps into the night air.
The width of the night cleared her head—she still ran on, but stumbled little, and her lungs drew in deep cool breaths. Sobs came now like the echo of sobs, no longer forced out but dribbling like a stream that falls empty. It was quite light, still a half-moon. The two great barrows of slate rose huge and sharply black. Smells of mist came from the turf and the near wet hill, a drift of sea-smell from the salt loch. She ran on in between those great pylons of slate—and found a road snaking in between high walls of the stuff. No grass, no trees—only the metal road, the mineral slate piled high on each side, the moon-sky above—the breathless overpowering alley of a bad dream. Such monstrous piles of shattered stuff might move in: the beginnings of panic took her breath again. So that when she saw a declivity in the wall, and a high wooden gate, she broke off to it—it was shut, but there was an opening to the side and up a mound, she slipped through and climbed a few feet. And suddenly found herself out in the open, facing a great space that should not have been there, space that should have been mountain, dream-country found through a forbidden gate. A mountain-side had been torn away and in the half-mile crater left there dropped, deep and cold, a still mineral lake glowing deep green in the moonlight, bounded only by precipice, a lunar-scape of frightful width and depth. She paused a moment, unbelieving, her mind cleared, horrified. Then, drawn by her horror, she began slowly, excitedly, to move in towards it.
*
Back in the caravan, that husband sat for some minutes staring at the wall in front of him. Notes now forgotten. Muddled by noise and violence. Furious at her lack of logic. Angry at the wider injustice. Shamed by his own quiet cruelty. Emasculated by his failure to play a prettier and larger-hearted part.
Such rows always sucked him in—and though in a way he had started this one with his tight silence, he would dearly like to have relented, to have played the big heart giving in. But he was no proof against the goading, and now he felt too weak to marshal and examine what had been said. Thus at much of a loss he got up and slowly began tidying the breakage. This took him several minutes, he placed the broken pieces of china neatly on top of one another, for no purpose it seemed, only perhaps because not thinking he was trying to think. Thus it was a full five minutes before he found himself outside the caravan, suddenly aware of the night, and not knowing what had brought him there. He first thought of re-entering the trailer to try and remember—but instead paused, and walked a few steps further up the turf.
Why did Ross go to the door at that particular moment? Why did he take those few further steps along the turf? He certainly never knew himself: though afterwards he liked to wonder. Perhaps, without fully realizing it, he heard her faint cry coming from the quarry? Perhaps an aural sense, as with some animals, recorded sounds too subtle to be registered by the conscious brain? Or did he respond instead to a telepathic pull exerted by his wife’s great danger—such energies undoubtedly existed. Or was it something less palpable—regret, now that there had been a breathing space, a move towards her? Or a feeling that he had won and could afford thus to make up? But these last two would not easily have accounted for his going out at that precise moment. Perhaps it was simply coincidence—that still exists. But however it was he did go out, and walked nearer the quarry, and from somewhere beyond those lowering pylons heard distinctly the hopeless echo of her second long wailing cry. He broke into a run, then raced in through the slate. He passed right by that door she had entered, he raced on through the slate mounds out into a wasteland beyond.
It was no wasteland, but the beginning of the quarrying village, the outcrop of the quarrying works. Everything slate—cottages roofed in slate, walled with slate, the ground about surfaced with slate-chips, small piles of slate about, huts of slate disused, old chimneys of slate. A desolate horseshoe harbour of slate-coloured water, the hills beyond dark slate and the moon-cold sky slate. Yet here in this waste people lived, yellow lights shone steady like cats’ eyes from the dark cottages. But nobody was about. Ross stood there breathing hard, lost, not knowing which way to go.
But then again the cry came, now several times, anguished and failing. His name he thought he heard. He turned back, swifter now for knowing, quickly found the gateway, quickly climbed up and faced abruptly, as she had, that gigantic lunar chasm. Once more the cry came, echoing up the cliffs, down somewhere from the deeply silent water.
His eyes strained to the echo, to the wide precipitous walls. Their dark slate was flecked with white brilliant marble. Now he saw suddenly one of these flecks move. His breath went, it had moved two hundred sheer feet aloft. But then he saw further another move, and then a movement half a mile across the moon-green water. Goats. Not knowing what to do, he began scrambling down the slate-scree towards the water-edge below: and scrambling slipped: and slithering on down-flying scree, as on an erratic escalator, in his unbalance realized what most likely must have happend to Ruth.
Those slates clattered down hollowly echoing in the great lunar basin. Hearing their hard echo he felt his own danger. But for the green water so far below he did not know where his slope led. If to be any help he must clutch first his own bala
nce—what precipice lay just below he could not see: he flung himself off his unsteady feet, he splayed his body out on the running slate and slowed himself, his eyes took in what was now more slowly passing and he saw a red projection that he could grasp. He caught it, his hand slipped on rust, then held.
He had grasped a light railway line. Breathless, bruised, he half-sat up and looked more surely round and down. In the moon it was quite light, dark shadows cut everywhere. But queerly in such a slate place and in waning moonlight some colours came out bright—the green water, and now the pale brown-red rust of rails, they led up and down slopes, they ran far round the edge of that chasmic depth of water. Rails, he saw, for small tip-wagons; and he saw standing about everywhere like the noiseless goats themselves such small reddish trucks. Derricks there were too, like long-necked birds, and rusted spiked winches lying like the husks of giant urchins. The cry came again—and his eyes went to the water. Into that monstrous green lake he saw a bridge stretched far out, a promontory more, an embankment upon which a rail of trucks stood and which ended abruptly in the centre of deep water. It was as though the embankment, the bridge had broken off—it gave dizzily the nightmare feeling of a bridge ending in the centre of space, of night, of deep water. But no cry came from there, it was far—yet it contained within itself a character of terror greater than all the rest of that place, it spoke the note of nowhereness, of indirection in a manless land where things ended suddenly nowhere, where nothing was safe and though moveless everything might suddenly lurch into motion. Then he saw that the water was moving.
First it looked as though all of it moved, then it was only a wide ripple forging out from the bank just beneath. That rail led straight down. He could see its course. Shuffling and sliding urgently he put himself into motion down the rail and to the end, where it tapered into the water—and where something clung and moved, where he was sure it was Ruth. Nearer, he saw her head in the water, saw white hands clutching the broken-off ends of the rail—and simultaneously heard behind a creaking and rumbling as, at first ponderously then moving slowly into faster motion, the iron wheels of a disturbed wagon gathered momentum to pound down from above.
He could see now how on the green luminiscent water her dark hair flowed out in a fan: now no cry—her face lay it seemed flat on water, she hung at full stretch only by soft hands on the rail. And Ross, who had forgotten all their differences, who felt for her so that he could never have known them, who ached only to bring her out of that water to himself and safe warmth, Ross who heard now the blunt iron wagon rumbling down from above—how it had moved, what rail might have been pulled, what slates disturbed he never wondered, he knew simply it was coming—Ross saw how the only way to save her was to hurt her further. Time only was important, to get to her fast. So he let go the rail and in his last jumping slide could not care how many slates fell sharp on her arms—until he had his fists hitting hard on her fingers.
Silently they let go the rail and with her gently sank.
Beneath the breathless water Ross reached her and kicked his legs in two great thrusts to move from where the truck would plunge in after them. But that truck above wheeled in fact slower, the rails themselves had levelled out at the end to be there uptwisted for greater safety—the truck groaned to a tired halt. He made the effort to the bank in hard strokes against the cold: but clutched there only slates that loosed themselves as he grasped at them. So again it was the rails—and by these, slowly, through minutes of cold wet and bruising and lung-torn effort he laboured her body up against the bank and out. It was a further time before he could get again strength to hoist himself up. But then they were out.
She was nowhere near drowned, hardly any water loosened from her mouth as he worked her arms about. Doing this, though, he praised the earth—the slates on which she lay, the red-dust of the wagon-slide, the iron wheels by her head. All that had seemed fearful now befriended him, such elements were dry and airful compared with the abyss of wet deep cold water.
Signs of colour showed in her white lax face. He shifted her head to a smoother slate. Her hair dragged wet—and this too might in its pull have helped to revive her the faster. At length she opened her eyes.
For a while they stayed staring straight up at the deep sky. She might have seen there a long thin cloud drawn like a windless line high above. This might have shown her the sky, for soon after her eyes turned slowly and saw instead of sky his head bent over above. A light came into them, a soft lightening of relief, and he murmued: ‘Ruth, Ruth—it’s me.’
She said nothing but her lips moved into a smile, a slow luxurious smile—and a small groan came, as if she was waking from a deep and pleasant sleep. He tried to warm her in those ice-wet clothes. He kept repeating, like some warm secret, her name, and she only smiled.
It must have hurt her, as thawing aches, when the full warmth began to come back. For suddenly gaining strength—she had not been drowned, but really no more than shocked and fainted—she forced herself up and leaning looked round. A frown began:
— … where, where? What happened? What happened?
She looked round fearful as that landscape dawned on her again. But it looked now more predictable, she had met it and it had acted. Ross watched her face carefully as the fear left it—and as the frown reappeared. He murmured:
— You slipped right in. I fished you out.
— In there?
— You were hanging on the edge, you sank—
— You should never have let me come. Never.
This last she said with definition, a tired bitterness in her voice. Slowly her face took on its old assurance. He watched with wonder the disapproval and the bitterness come naturally back. She repeated:
— Why did you let me come? A lot you cared….
She could not, he knew, have known anything of his part in it—the truck, that time underneath the water. She was shocked, done up. Yet what allowances he might have made dissolved under the old look her face took on so easily, the look of their bad hours, the unforgiving goading disapproval of all sour evenings. Return to normal. An impossible normal. He was astonished—but his lips set themselves and beyond all other feelings a rage came. But he managed to say still softly:
— Come on, darling—up, we’ve got to get back, get off your wet things—
— For God’s sake let me alone!
But she rose up with him, half-shrugging away his arm. Still weak she kept muttering: he heard it only as spite, words to shame him. Suddenly he stood still, his arm round her. And the idea came to him then.
Carefully he listened to the silence away for miles around them. But there was no sound. There was no movement. The village was hidden. There was no soul about. His arm gripped round her tight, his mind cold with steady anger raced back over his journey into that place. No one had seen him. Even if they had, there was nothing to show that he had not simply come to her forlorn help. He looked down at the water, it seemed to glow a deeper green, a welcome shone coldly from it as flat surfaces of water welcome what might be thrown in.
He drew in his breath and moved his arm further behind her—they were still no more than a few feet away from the deep edge—and looked for the last time round that basin of loneliness. Then, quite suddenly, she raised her free hand and made a gesture to move the hair from her eyes, to smooth open her brow. A movement well known to him, simple, a gesture both efficient and helplessly feminine.
And then it was over.
He began to walk slowly up the slate-ramp. Something like a mixture of pity and endurance, something between a knowledge of all the long time that must be lived by all people and how pitiful they must be alone in all that time, something near to compassion had come to him. As he walked up, back to their caravan, he clutched her wet small shoulder much closer to him.
A Game of Billiards
IT is not easy to say whether this is the account of how Patten met his wife: or of why she in particular became his wife. Perhaps both.
In the mind or heart of everyone there is thought to exist an archetype to whom he or she inevitably is attracted—an archetype founded on the vision of some early strange face that once leaned down to entertain the pram with its first erotic shock. That is one belief. Otherwise—and one is tempted to think otherwise in Patten’s case—a man’s first meeting with a woman may coincide with a certain moment of distended nerve, of enlarged comprehension—and simply because of this the meeting assumed an exaggerated significance, personalities are photographed on a more deeply sensitive plate.
How many times do we meet and pass by those whom possibly we could love—because the moment of impact is dulled by circumstance, by a sloth of digestion, an empty pocket, a complacence of spirit! Yet—had the moment been propitious, a free moment of joy, of shock! … However.
That Monday Patten was forced to lunch late. It was already two o’clock by the time he had settled into his veal loaf and salad. By five past two this was finished. He refused the cheese, and asked instead for a glass of beer. The saloon bar was empty—other lunchers had already left, a few week-end drinkers had dawdled finally away. About the enamel-white counter, the tired scarlet of the stools, the yellow plaster crab-shell, the up-curling sandwiches and a last strand of parsley on an empty plate—there hovered a ticking of long, clock-long tedium. Under dark Victorian overshelves a barmaid and a pale chef stood side by side, not talking. Upon everyone and everything was engraved one inevitable fact—that until three o’clock the room must remain open.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 22