‘There’s no one here,’ Eva said. ‘No one can see.’
‘There’s those down there.’ The dog’s exuberant barks coming up to them.
‘As if they care!’ Her hands now at him, once his belt fell loose. Her face not against his but drawn back, watching him, his attempting to make a game of it as she was doing, so calmly, in command, amused, while Stephen stood, his hands flat against the wall behind him, nervous and yet insisting, yes, keep on. The joke of it and the pleasure now the same thing.
‘This belongs to the King. This whole place. It’s against the law in castles.’
‘You don’t come from here,’ she told him. She leaned forward and took the lobe of his ear between her teeth and bit. ‘They don’t arrest foreigners.’
‘Hey!’, drawing back.
‘Then do as you’re told.’ Her hand moving quickly on him. His head flinging back against the wall, hurting him.
‘Faster, then!’
Her hand tightening, slowing. Her other hand rising to her already undone blouse. Her commanding him, ‘There, then.’ Her fingers spread behind his head, drawing his mouth down on her.
‘They’re looking,’ he tried to tell her. He saw a man stand from among the picnickers, slapping a white hat against his leg, calling at the dog now lolloping up the slope towards them that then halted and turned when the man took a schoolyard whistle that shrilled across the park. The man watched them for a moment before he went back to the women on the rug.
Stephen said, ‘I know they’ve seen us.’
‘No,’ Eva said, ‘no they haven’t.’ Her breathing warm at his neck. The man had thrown a yellow ball down towards the road, the women turning that way to watch their dog retrieve it. The man had put his white hat back on his head.
Eva leaning then to rub her hand across the coarse web of the grass, her laughing, telling him ‘They might have liked it mightn’t they?’ as he turned towards the wall, settling his clothes. The excitement of it, the brazenness, still in his mind later in the afternoon as the train left the station and arced beneath the hill that rose up to the castle, each of them looking to it, Stephen saying nothing, Eva smiling. ‘A history lesson too.’
How she could startle him with her sudden aggressive turns. And yet a game, it was that as much as satisfaction, such certainty between them. The frankness of what they did so beyond anything they said, or referred to later on. ‘The freedom’ was the closest she came to speaking of it. The delight they took in each other was as if naming another world.
She liked the habit and routine and always too the discovery as they made love in the room they rented in Sam Abrams’s house. She insisted they leave the curtain drawn back, the fall of the streetlight across them. When they gasped back from each other and lay regaining their breath, You are like a fish, Stephen wanted to tell her, the length of her glistening and turning beside him. Yet his knowing when she said nothing could bring them closer, she was beyond him still, that it was there, as much as what they shared, she meant as she stood beside the bed at times and let her dressing gown fall from her in a way that she must have known startled with its suddenness, and said, as she came down to him, ‘the freedom’.
Eva knew how she pleased and shocked him, taking his hand at unexpected times and placing it against her, even as they sat up on the Heath where he first told her she was like a furnace to him, and she laughed and said people would never imagine what a romantic he was, so solemn, so much the polite young man in the shop. It was the contradiction in her that ‘so got to him’, as he tried to tell her, and her laughing at him again as he failed to find the words and settled for, ‘All right then, you’ll just never know’; know how whatever they did as lovers, as a married couple, ‘demure’ stayed with him as so singularly marking her, as much as it had that first evening when he watched her through the tinkle and make-believe of the parish dance they ran away from. ‘There is only us,’ she would say to him, quietly, when their hands moved across each other.
Yet how she hit it off with ‘old Sam’, as she called him, so liking his affection for the young man who had crossed the world and whom he would have taken into the business like a shot, if only the boy settled to a trade the older man might have taught him, had he not been content to stand in the darkness of a shop and smile at old ladies, selling them stuff to rub on their sore legs.
‘He will be a rich man in ten years,’ Sam promised Eva as he instructed her in his kitchen, the recipes and meals that he assured her would hold any man. Things he knew from his own mother. ‘You maybe lose everything else from your people,’ he chided her, ‘but your children will know at least what they like to eat. They will not have lost everything.’
There was an easiness between them as each overplayed how they saw each other. Mr Golson she came to like as well, but he was not a man to take things lightly. He was disappointed that she had no gift, as he called it, to prepare herself for the better world that was there for the taking, the new Israel where if he were only ten years younger he would go to, oh she might smile, but indeed he would, and teased her just a little. ‘Stephen would go if you asked him. You tell him Zion is there for all of us, he would go. A good man does what a good woman says. But I am a realist above all,’ he would also say. ‘It is no more your fault what has happened with you, what you have lost, than with any of us.’ He settled for giving her pamphlets and magazines to read so that when he said Bevan and Atlee and Arthur Isaacs, she knew who and what he meant. While Sam in his sharp-tongued way told her, as they stood at the table in his kitchen, ‘David is happy so long as he talks, because he believes you cannot listen to him without thinking David, my friend, you are right again. He is a socialist when he begins to talk and when he finishes he believes you are one as well.’ Making a popping noise with his lips, making a joke of himself as well, the bewildered foreigner. But it is good windows, he tells her as they chat over the knish he instructs her in, the windows that he crosses London to get from a friend in Stepney, a friend who makes new frames from broken buildings, and that Sam then installs in so many places there will never be an end to it. What is it people want most in life? Windows that open and shut. Windows that fit their frames. ‘Mr Bevan will tell you that but not David.’ He claps his hands and holds them open towards her. What can one do with a man who paints a shop without asking the advice of a friend who has painted a hundred houses? This very week a lady in Holland Park whose father is an artist, but who did she ask about the colour on her walls? Yet his loving Mr Golson like a brother, he insisted, ridiculing him slightly, envying that Stephen was close to him as a son.
The old man took a bagel from the plate that was cooling between them. ‘One day they will give you work in the Cosmo,’ he flatters her, the one place he swears to her where the food is good, the only one, this side of Golders Green. ‘David will talk about the Dorice but I tell you, and I am the one to know, it is the Cosmo.’ He liked to look at his new young friend, who reminded him of girls he once had known before he was even here, but they were gone like so much else. The girls. The town even, not even its name there if you looked for it. Although Sam hated it, had he not told her this more than once, hated this business some people come at of cry, cry whenever there is the chance, as if we cry things back? Yet when the mood is on him doing that himself, and Eva listened to him in silence, touching his hand, when he goes to find a photograph to show her, young people in those old swimming costumes on the edge of what he said was a lake, and another of a man in a uniform, his cheeks smooth as a woman’s, his cap with an elaborate badge on his crossed knee. He takes another slice of what she has just baked and tells her, ‘You will be the first person in the world to take these to Stephen’s country.’
It was now a matter of weeks until they sailed, until they left for whatever ‘home’ in another place might turn out to be. Once summer came, or the first watery weeks that stood in for it, she thought of places she and Stephen should visit together. There was that day at Hastings and then
another in Wales, a wide estuary whose tides and glintings altered as they stood above them, the cries of the wheeling birds, so much louder in the lull of a wind dabbing at them from the west. Her freedom there as well, their standing together above the village they had walked up from, Eva half-clothed as she leaned in towards him, the distant speck of walkers across a broad sweep of sand. He later told her in the room they had taken for the weekend how this is what he would never quite make out about her, her ease and shamelessness, her certainty which he knew he was unlikely ever to have himself. And yet what he so puzzled at, telling her, ‘A room is somehow quieter when you sit in it than when there is no one there.’ For they could go for hours without speaking more than a few sentences, just as at other times they chatted on to each other, the gossip from the Whitehall office where she worked as a typist, the stories of its dozens of women, its remote commanding male figures, and he told her of the less spectacular but oddly detailed lives of those who came through the shop. After doctors and vicars, Stephen guessed, chemists must be near the top of those who people confide in? Hadn’t Mr Golson said that to him, in utter seriousness, way back in his first weeks? How if a customer knew you stopped the ache in her elbow, she was ready to receive a political idea?
‘There is not a thing,’ Eva assured him, ‘that I know about myself that you don’t know as well.’
‘I’ve so much less to tell,’ he said. ‘So much less has happened to me.’ Thinking how uneventful his own life seemed as he recalled it, as remote and simple as though it were another person’s rather than his own. His conviction too that for Eva to love him was a gift that must come entirely from her own expansive kindness. It could not relate to anything he might deserve or be.
‘But there must be more to tell,’ she sometimes said to him. ‘More about the farm. When you were young. I want to know about that.’
His wanting to say back to her, ‘You cannot describe a wall even if you’ve lived against it.’ But no one says things like that. So ‘If you could understand the dreariness,’ he was content to tell her. ‘Not so much a memory even as just the feeling of it. The years when time did not seem divided to this day and then the next nor even one year followed by another, but a massive block that nothing might change or dissolve. That is how I remember it.’
He answered her quiet questioning but was unable to give her what she hoped to hear, some privileged understanding of what made him the man she loved. You must imagine, he tried to convey to her, a place along a flat road where there is not another house for half a mile on either side, a wooden house that you might mistake for a shed if you drove along the road with its low row of hills behind scrappy paddocks and on the other side the always huge and changeable sky, where the land slid towards the gradual seep of the tide at the end of an inlet, where the shallow water slid among mangroves and mud. And not waves as you usually think of them but as close to inert as water might get, a creeping fringe of scummed advancing tide, and hours later its drawing back. One of his persistent images, the emptiness of standing in the last paddock before the sea and land gracelessly came together, the boy’s sense of loneliness, and in the silence, or what seemed the dregs of silence between the shriek of gulls and the intermittent raking bellow of cattle back closer to the house, the sound that seemed below such silence rather than merely part of it, the hiss and suck of the mud beneath the roots and branches of the mangroves. ‘That must seem strange to you,’ Stephen said, ‘but that’s the sound that defines so much of what my memory now makes of it.’ Where he was the only child, where the woman who was his father’s second wife disliked him as she inevitably must. He had understood that by the time he was five, yet her not liking him was a secondary thing to her. The first was that she hated the man she had to sleep beside each night and feed through the day, and the quiet in the house as another tide they lived beneath. That feeling too. Of always under something else. But no, he said when Eva questioned him, no cruelty, like beatings and stuff, at least not that. Or, as he tried to joke, only that rarer kind of beating which never being touched with affection almost becomes. His father a tall memory of a shape in oilskins moving against persistent rain, although that of course is how one simplifies the past. And the sound not of his father’s voice so much as his grunts, his strained breathing, as he moved among the reeking but marvellously warm and stolid herd, and what seemed to the boy the cattle’s endless and unendurable patience as they waited for their turn in the stalls, their udders swollen and corded with veins, their plod back through the paddocks and the rain. Which is nonsense of course, Stephen laughed with Eva, pressing her fingers where they stroked against his arm. There were months of summer and I liked school because it was somewhere else, and the school bus that picked me up and dropped me off each morning and afternoon at the wooden stand at the gateway onto the road, where the great cans were left for the milk truck to pick up. He might tell her of the long summers and good things like eeling in the creek and building forts in the trees and the satisfaction of being good at what the school, with its war-memorial gate and its corrugated cricket pitch, expected of him, and the school footy jersey you got to wear if you stayed at school that long. Yet how packed Eva’s early life seemed when she spoke of it, compared with what little he offered in return.
‘And then she wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘All that and then so suddenly not there.’ One day his father came in from the rain, the mud from his boots leaving smears across the kitchen lino so the woman shouted at him before he stretched out his arm to take a pot from the kitchen range with its flicker of fire at the narrow bars of its grate, and flung it to where it rang and clattered to the floor and a clot of stew slid down the yellow wall. The woman’s screaming stopped and she and the boy stood unmoving as his father went through to the bedroom and the sound coming through to them as he not only yanked back the wardrobe door but cracked it from its hinges. There was the split of ripping wood and the falling of a chair and he was back in the kitchen with them, carrying the gun the boy had been told he was never to touch. His father walked back between his wife and son and flung back the door onto the veranda and they heard him step down into the yard and then again a silence that seemed as much a physical force as the mere absence of sound, the rain now pelting on the iron roof and when the woman raised her fist towards her mouth there was the beginning of a whimpering dribble that the two gunshots from the shed cut across and stopped. The boy felt a fear that was different from anything else he had known. Stephen touched the fall of Eva’s hair as he watched her troubled look. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘He had done no more than go out and shoot the two cows that enraged him because their milk had dried off earlier than the rest of the herd. That was the straw that broke him.’
‘There must be more.’
‘He stayed on at the farm until just before I left to come over here. Then some men came soon after that and my father went off to a hospital in Auckland, and the wife who had come to the house after my mother I never saw again. When I left secondary school I went to the city and found a job with a pharmacist in Ponsonby who had troubles of his own and went to prison for them, although he attempted none of what he was convicted for with me. I was supposed to be there to deliver things and help tidy up and he paid me next to nothing but I fell in love with coloured bottles and wanted to have my own. And here we are!’ And lying in their narrow bed he tried at times to tell her what he knew was her experience even more than his, the feeling that you are really two people and yet there is only one you know about, even though the other never leaves you.
‘So there are really four of us in bed together all the time?’ Eva teased him.
‘At the very least.’
She had laughed when he told her how his life was decided the moment a shy smart boy looked into a shop window with its outsize flasks of coloured liquid. Red and green, which had struck him as pure enchantment.
‘A good thing you didn’t look at a butcher’s window first. You might have fallen in lov
e with hams and we’d never have met.’
‘The butcher in the town I grew up in was what they called a snappy dresser and danced like Fred Astaire. I remember my aunt going on about that. So I might have asked you to dance that night at St Aiden’s and we wouldn’t be here now.’
They joked and made love and talked until they fell asleep as he was telling her, yet again, how he envied her that family who had brought her up, how they had passed on to her, they must have, so much that he admired in her. I was lucky, she had told him, I was lucky they were Quakers. Not that Stephen had ever met one. ‘Then take my word for it,’ Eva said.
Yet she had never thought of them, not really, as her only family, for all their goodness. In their honesty, in their thinking of her rather than just themselves, they insisted she know there was another world that might have been hers, at another time. In a different country. ‘But it was all so English, and polite, and I never knew much about the uglier things. Even the stories I read edged me away from life rather than closer to it.’ It was romantic stuff she had liked to read about, but that was part of England too in its curious way. She had gone through a stage at school when for a year she read nothing for fun that was not in some way about India. ‘Elephants meant more to me than the family car. The war was going on round us and I lived in rooms with punkahs and servants with turbans! There was a Walter Scott story I read over and over and at the end a bad man’s head was stood on by an elephant.’
When she came to London for her job and met two girls at a social who like herself had come to England as children, they had seemed as English as she was. And then the shock, for it came as strongly that. The shock of meeting another girl, a little older than herself, who had been taken by a family of their own people, Eva said, a girl called Becky who spoke in a London accent that seemed almost foreign to her. Becky had told her, ‘But you must come and meet the people we are,’ an invitation she had never taken up.
All This by Chance Page 4