by MARY HOCKING
‘Poor Robin.’ His words had no meaning, he was not really concerned about her childhood in a land so alien to his own. She said, without caring much herself, ‘I had an unhappy childhood.’
He looked down at her. The brilliant eyes were deep-set and gave an inward look to his face. Although she had laughed at his stories of hairbreadth escapes, she believed that had he chosen there were more fantastic stories he could have told. He said, ‘Poor Robin’ and bent to kiss her on the mouth. There was no harm in a kiss. She let him kiss her again and then eased away, her head against his shoulder. The wind ruffled her hair and when it stopped she could feel the sun on her upturned face. Jan ran his finger down her throat, his finger pressed in that tender little hollow. She closed her eyes. Later, when his hand caressed her breasts, she sighed, ‘No, no . . .’ and later still, she moaned, ‘No, Jan, no . . .’ and finally, with infinite regret, ‘No, my sweet, no.’
They came out of the wood and walked slowly towards the town. Robin pointed to a cluster of stone houses and a church on the far side of the Windrush.
‘That must be Taynton.’
Her face was alive, the skin clear, the eyes very bright. Her husband would think that the air had been very invigorating.
‘Doesn’t it look pretty, nestling there?’
Jan put his arm round her waist.
‘No!’ she said sharply. She was far too excited and relied on the walk back to calm her down. She moved away from him. ‘Not now, Jan.’
‘When?’
‘I’ll arrange something.’
She did not mean it, but he accepted it as a promise.
By the time they got back to the hotel she was able to tell herself that she had handled him rather well. It had been foolish to go into the wood, of course . . . At this point she became a little shaky. She decided to risk the bathroom. When Clyde returned she was in her dressing gown.
‘I had an awful morning,’ he grumbled. ‘He relived the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele . . .’
She turned away to collect her towel. ‘I met your Yugoslav. We went for a stroll.’
‘Did you? I’m so glad. He’s a bit lonely. Perhaps he could join us for lunch?’
‘No. He’s leaving before lunch.’
‘I thought we might go to Lower Slaughter this afternoon. I expect I can get some petrol off coupons at one of the smaller filling stations.’
But Robin had gone. He took off his jacket and laid it on the bed, taking out the wallet to look for petrol coupons. Robin’s skirt was lying on the bed. Hard earth and a few sprigs of grass clung to it. Clyde stood staring down at it for a moment, then he picked it up, brushed it clean and replaced it on the bed. He went to the window. He was still standing there when Robin returned.
‘You’re not ready!’ she complained.
‘I’m sorry.’
He turned round, his face amiable; his narrowed eyes looked pink and sore, but this she put down to the bright sunlight.
Chapter Twelve
Kerren seemed to have lived a long while with The Rags of Time. She tried to talk to John Hughes about it before she returned the manuscript to Adam. John had sent her a print of The Bull and Mouth Inn. Its L-shaped courtyard was overlooked by balconied windows from which travellers leant to look at the coach arriving; the scene was lit by the glow of lanterns. The inn seemed much livelier than the grey, undemonstrative building which had taken its place. Kerren met John for lunch and they talked about it.
‘Imagine the bustle and hullabaloo when the coach arrived and compare it to arrival at a hotel today.’
‘The real comparison is with trippers arriving in a charabanc. We shouldn’t think that exciting.’
‘That’s different.’
‘You’re a romantic.’
She led the conversation to romantic literature; he followed her so far, but stopped short of The Rags of Time. ‘You’re on your own,’ he told her. He meant that she was on her own in her search for Adam.
She was nervous when she went to Adam’s flat with the manuscript. She had been thinking about this meeting for a long time and had rehearsed it over and over again as she lay in bed at night or as she walked to work in the morning. She had made notes when she was not busy at the library and she had got her orders mixed up at the restaurant because her mind was on it. She had lived with The Rags of Time, but without, it must be admitted, achieving any real intimacy. The book, she had decided, was concerned with the nature of existence and this was no doubt a very complex subject. ‘Mr. Heseltyne,’ she had written in her notes, ‘leads us further and further into the labyrinth that we call life, to a point where the familiar sights and sounds gradually fall away, there are no signposts, the territory is uncharted. We are lost.’ The last sentence represented the one great truth about Mr. Heseltyne’s work as far as she was concerned. ‘But,’ she had continued gamely, ‘to be lost is in itself an acknowledgement of one of the great problems of our time, the sense that life is not as we had imagined it, that chaos is around us and must be faced and accepted as something through which we have to pass if we are to survive. If the book does nothing else, if it offers no solutions, provides no easy answer, indicates no path forward, it does at least make us aware of our predicament.’ This had seemed fine, she could see it on the dust cover.
But she had thought so much about the book, had imagined her talk with Adam, had seen the gradual dawning of his awareness of her remarkable literary perception, that when the actual moment came it was something of an anticlimax. It was a dull evening, a light drizzle was falling and London was grey and bedraggled. A drab of a city. She arrived at the flat conscious only that the rain had made her hair wispy and that mud had splashed the backs of her new nylon stockings. The gas pressure was low and Adam’s study was chilly, the windows steamed; the room looked sombre and dull, with no splash of colour to relieve it. Adam himself seemed tired and more interested in whisky than in the manuscript which he slung carelessly on the desk.
‘At times like this I wish I was back in the navy,’ he said, and quoted, “This damned English drizzle wakes a fever in my bones.” ’
She knew that he was going to talk about the China seas which he had sailed after he left Holly Green. He was always talking about Hong Kong which he had liked because it was so colourful and, she suspected, because the relaxed tempo of life had appealed to him. It piqued her that he should have enjoyed his service life after they parted.
‘You’re becoming a lotus eater,’ she told him.
‘You should approve of that,’ he answered, ‘It’s something for which the Irish have a natural talent.’
‘They may be vagrants, but they are much more austere than the lotus eaters,’ she retorted.
The remark reminded her of her notes on the book, but she could not rouse herself to point out the analogy – if there was one. The rain had douched her enthusiasm. Adam handed her a glass of whisky.
‘There’s nothing austere about that, anyway. I brought it back from America.’ He settled himself comfortably in an old leather armchair and held the glass up to the light. Kerren wondered whether he was drinking too much. ‘It’s Bourbon. See whether you like it.’
It would be difficult to tell whether Adam drank too much, he had tremendous control. She sipped the drink.
‘It’s better than whisky, anyway.’
He laughed at her grudging tone. ‘I’m sorry. Would you have preferred gin? I should have asked.’
This was going to be a deadly evening, she thought, looking at the rain-drenched windows. The room was darkening, she could not see Adam’s face properly in the thin light. She eased one foot up the back of the other leg, trying to get off the worst of the damp; her foot was cold as a toad. No wonder Adam talked so much about Hong Kong.
‘Are you sorry you left Reuters?’ she asked. ‘It must have been nearer to the lotus eater’s existence than starting up a new publishing company.’
‘It was that all right,’ he answered, taking up the part of her remark which requi
red no real answer.
‘Then why?’ she persisted.
‘It seemed better to get out before it went stale on me.’ It was only a part of the answer, she suspected. Before she could probe further, he changed the subject.
‘What did you make of the book?’
‘Oh, the book.’ She looked across at the manuscript. All the clever things that she had rehearsed seemed unimportant. ‘It’ll stay on the library shelves.’
‘You think that?’ Adam sounded surprised.
‘I’m sure of it.’
Adam got up and drew the curtains; he switched on a standard lamp, picked up the manuscript and returned to his chair. He looked fussed; she had seldom seen him less assured. It made him look younger, that greying hair was deceptive.
‘It won’t be a best seller, I admit.’ She thought that, for a publisher, he sounded rather too contemptuous of best sellers. ‘It’s not an easy read.’
‘It’s boring.’ Her responses were sharpening, but the result was not at all what she had expected. She seemed to have been storing up resentment against the book for a long time. ‘And in the end, what does it amount to?’
‘An escape story.’
‘Some escape story!’
‘Not the conventional kind, I agree.’
‘In order to escape, you have to be imprisoned.’
‘He’s in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.’
‘Then I should like to know about it.’
‘There will be plenty of books about that kind of horror,’ he said impatiently.’
‘Then I’d rather read them, because that is something I feel I ought to know about, even if I don’t enjoy it.’
He bit his lip. ‘Well, that’s a point of course . . . But there is room for a different treatment of the subject surely?’ He didn’t sound at all his masterful self; he was pleading for the book.
‘But it doesn’t come to terms with the subject.’ Her assurance was increasing minute by minute. She took a good swig of Bourbon; it seemed to have marvellous restorative powers, she was becoming very pugnacious.
‘You are still thinking of the conventional escape story,’ Adam persisted.
‘All right. I’ve missed the whole point of the book.’ She turned her back on all those fine thoughts about the modern predicament without a qualm. ‘Tell me what is so unconventional about the book. He doesn’t even escape, by the way.’
‘Ah, but he does!’ Adam caught at the statement with visible relief. ‘Only you are thinking in terms of a physical escape, of a man gradually tunnelling his way beyond the barbed wire barricade. But this is the story of a man who makes an escape within himself, a man who is gradually tunnelling deeper and deeper into himself until everything that is happening around him is unimportant. Even death is an irrelevance. Can’t you see? By the end of the book this man has effected an escape which is far more successful than that of the men who escape to the jungle and become the prisoners of the jungle.’ He relaxed. Kerren said:
‘Which men?’
‘What do you mean, which men?’ He looked at her angrily, rattled again.
‘There are no other men in this book. He refers every now and again to characters by name, they appear and exchange some highly unlikely dialogue. You talk about conventional books, the dialogue those characters indulge in went out with Dornford Yates! But at least he could tell a story and breathe some sort of life into his men. These people haven’t the animation of a puppet.’ She banged her glass down on the table and the jar sent the liquid shooting up one side of the glass.
‘It isn’t about the other men,’ Adam protested.
‘But you say there’s supposed to be some sort of contrast between what they achieve and what the hero achieves. How can you have a contrast when you simply don’t know what those men are doing? There isn’t one solitary action scene in the whole book. He doesn’t describe one “physical” escape.’
‘That wasn’t his purpose in writing this book. If he had included the kind of action scene you want it would have destroyed the inner world that he is trying to create . . .’
‘But if you are trying to create an inner world, under conditions of supreme difficulty, surely the reader has a right to know something about the world from which you are escaping! This is an escape from nowhere to nowhere. I had forgotten that it was a Jap. prisoner of war camp until you reminded me!’
Adam looked down at the book; his fingers turned the pages, but he was not really searching for anything, merely trying to collect his thoughts. She was aware that she was driving him into a corner. It was an exhilarating experience. For the first time since she had known him, he was on her level and fighting to stay on it. She hit hard.
‘And why is it necessary for him to make this escape into himself, surely we should know that? What is he running away from?’
‘I didn’t say he was running away.’ Adam spoke from a dry throat.
‘But he is. If you have to blot out the real world, it’s because you can’t face something in it.’
‘Possibly.’ He was sitting quite still now. She had always been afraid of Adam’s stillness before, it had been a part of his strength; now he was like someone who is waiting for a blow that he knows he cannot avoid.
‘And you talk as though his attitude is admirable.’ She had been waiting to say this for a long time, long, long before she read The Rags of Time. ‘You talk about conventional books, books about people who twist and squirm and cry out for help, as though this was something to be sneered at.’
He shook his head.
‘But you do! You do! You seem to think there is something superior about turning one’s back on life, withdrawing into oneself, closing the door on human relationships.’
He said, ‘This happens . . . it happens without your knowing it . . .’
‘But it’s so arrogant. And selfish.’
The heavy manuscript slid on to the floor. Neither of them noticed it. Adam said: ‘I can’t argue with you.’
‘Why not? Are your problems so different from those of common people?’
He put his hands to his face and held them there, the fingers pressing against his temples. Kerren sat back, staggered at her victory, not knowing what to do with it.
The light flickered and went very low, the gas fire whined in the grate. There was a tall bookcase behind him, a heavy, old-fashioned piece of furniture; the books were weighty volumes, the binding dark red with faded gold lettering. For some reason, the bookcase was imprinted on her mind and identified with his unhappiness. Adam would change with the years and her memories would become confused, but whenever she saw the bookcase it would be as though it had preserved the essence of his despair at this moment and it would arouse in her, long after she had forgotten the reason, a heavy, aching tenderness.
She got up and went across to him, she sat on the arm of his chair and put her hand on his shoulder.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.’ She slid her arm around his neck. Her fine flow of words had deserted her, now that her feelings were deeply involved she could only say, ‘You need to get out of yourself.’
‘I can’t.’ She felt him shudder and it moved her profoundly. ‘I can’t, I can’t. Do you think I haven’t tried!’
She put her arms round him and held him close. She could not think of one single thing to say. He was not in command of himself, after all; he was not a sophisticated man of the world; he was more lost than anyone she had ever known. She caressed his cheek and longed to be able to comfort him. After a time, the tension seemed to go out of him, he took her hand and held it against his lips. The light flickered again and for a moment it seemed that it would go out. They watched it. Adam said:
‘Is this a power cut or a fuse, I wonder?’
She eased back in the chair, sensing that he needed a way out of this situation.
‘The light has been poor all the evening, hasn’t it?’
‘You’re probably right.’ He passed his hand slowly over
his face in the way that people do when they have come to the end of an evening. ‘You’re probably right about a lot of things.’
He got up before she could say anything. ‘Would you like coffee? Because I would.’
She let him go into the kitchen on his own, then wondered if this was wise and followed him.
‘What are you going to do about The Rags of Time?’ she asked.
He was heating coffee in a saucepan. He laughed shakily, as though making a wary experiment. ‘Well, I’m not going to publish it!’
‘I’ve probably been unfair to Mr Heseltyne.’
‘Oh no.’ He stirred the coffee briskly and unnecessarily. ‘I don’t think you’ve damned a masterpiece. I shall obviously have to learn to be more professional about the manuscripts I read.’
‘Did John Hughes like it?’ she asked.
‘No. He said it gave him the bellyache.’
He was looking at the coffee intently. His face was unusually self-conscious, as though he was aware of his features and didn’t quite know what to do with them. It was a bitter thing for him to break down in front of anyone.
‘You’re not going to hate me for this, are you?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Hate you!’ His hand jerked on the handle of the saucepan and coffee spilt on to the stove. He said, ‘Oh, blast!’ His helpless exasperation amused them both and they laughed. Kerren fetched a cloth while Adam absently poured coffee into the milk jug. They went back to his study and talked easily about this and that. Kerren helped to wash up and he did not protest, neither of them wanted the evening to end.
‘It’s late,’ he said, when at last she was leaving. ‘I’ll walk to the station with you.’
He linked his arm in hers as they went out. The rain was still coming down, soft fine rain that would go on for a long time. They hunched close together as people do in the rain. The nearest station was St. Paul’s but Adam turned in the direction of Holborn. They walked in silence. His fingers moved on her arm and sometimes tightened involuntarily. They were too tired to talk any more. And, in any case, there would be time for that. This was one of the luxuries of peace. He bought her ticket for her at the booking office. It was nearly midnight. There was no one about.