‘Read a book,’ she said, busy with a shopping list. ‘Put a record on.’
And he hardly noticed her return: ‘What are you reading?’
He looked at the cover: ‘The Naked Lunch. I thought it was a dirty book, with the word naked in the title.’
‘I can’t tell when you’re being serious,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ Indignant tone confusing her even more, though she didn’t show it. He was many moves ahead in being familiar with her, and she envied his uncomplicated social ease when she didn’t resent it. ‘Where did you get this sort of book?’
‘In Paris, last year.’
‘You’ve been to Paris?’
‘You sound impressed. Only on holiday.’
‘I’d like to travel one day. I can tell it’s a good book though from the writing. I hope they banned it. It’ll make the bloke who wrote it a lot of money. I reckon they should ban every book that comes out so that more people would read.’
She laughed, taking off her coat. ‘Would you like coffee?’
‘Aye, one for the road,’ standing up to kiss her.
‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You’ll get me drummed out of the village. I’m supposed to be a pillar of the community: irreproachable, but invisible as long as I’m alone.’
‘Let’s go upstairs then,’ he said, ‘so that we won’t be seen. It’s lucky there is an upstairs. If there’s two things in the world I can’t stand it’s twin beds and bungalows. If somebody left me a bungalow in their will I’d put a double bed on the roof and saw a hole in the ceiling, so that we could go upstairs when we wanted it.’ His hands roamed at her waist and hips, and any moment he expected a swingback from her – as he might have got from Nancy even after years of marriage. But she turned by the top step, forced his arms around her; ‘I love it when you do that.’
‘I’m not shy,’ he said, unable to recognize her unassailable self-possession of last night.
Neither was she; undressing, she asked if he had anything: ‘You know, precautions and all that.’ He’d never seen a woman get stripped so quickly, yet without hurrying, in a casual and graceful way. It was all off before he could get a good look in and enjoy it – no fumbling with hooks and buttons that crazed him well before glimpsing the real thing. Having regarded it as inevitable, and lacking the patience not to make it so, it was partly shyness that made her undress so quickly. Now that she mentioned it, he hadn’t got any: ‘I started out with a gross, but somebody picked my pocket in a pub the other night. Everywhere was shut yesterday.’
‘I’ll cope then,’ she said. What’s the use being a nurse, he thought, if she can’t? The room was white-washed, brilliant, bare pictureless walls showing the flesh dazzle of her body plain before him. The curtains were closed and electric light on, so that it might have been two in the morning, and this seemed like the limit of sloth to him, real sin compared to the fact that he was about to make love to someone a complete stranger now that she was naked. She seemed taller, with long legs and well-shaped thighs, a tapering waist not noticed when clothed. There were faint stretch marks on her stomach from having the baby all those years ago, but her muscles were flat and the navel distinct, while her breasts were small and round, purple-ringed at the nipples. His hands went over them, shaking at the soft velvet touch as if he’d never made love before. Her arms pressed around his neck. I’ll shoot my bolt before I get there if I go on like this, so out of practice, and nervous as if I was fourteen.
He lay by her side, and they were content to kiss tenderly. The silence of the house and the day outside made him think they were in the sky, or the smack centre of a millpond ocean. How was it possible for such quiet to be in the world? Her eyes closed, and he knew she was waiting, that the time had come. But he didn’t want to move. He couldn’t shift. For some reason, for the first time in his life, the will wasn’t in him at the crucial moment. Her kisses grew harder, blinder, and the more they increased the less was he able to follow. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘come on, love.’
But he couldn’t. Or, in the deepest layers of himself, he would not. Unable to satisfy such scalding lust, they lay for some time: ‘Are you nervous of me?’ she said at last. He sat up. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ve never been nervous of anybody like that in my life.’
‘Maybe you don’t love me,’ she smiled.
‘Love?’ he said. That had never bothered him before.
‘Some people can’t do it unless they’re in love, been seeing each other for a while first.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Any reason gave him heart, though it was so unique and stunning he could hardly feel ashamed. Yet beneath all this, a subdued rage was ebbing away: ‘I think I’ll be off’ – standing to get dressed.
‘Why are you in such a hurry?’
‘I stopped yesterday for a drink of water. I can’t swallow the tap as well.’
She frowned, drew on her dressing-gown. ‘That would sound like folk wisdom to some. To me it sounds like the cold shoulder, as they say.’
‘Well, we’ll see. I was meaning to give that garden of yours a dig over when it stops raining. When was it last done?’
‘I can’t remember. I’ve been too busy to bother.’
‘It’s heavy for you, that sort of work. A man should do it.’ He went downstairs in his socks, put on his shoes by the still burning fire. ‘What was that woodwork you wanted done?’ he called out to the kitchen.
She laughed: ‘I thought I’d have a couple of shelves above the stove. There’s nowhere to put things.’
He went to look. ‘I’ll get some brackets and plugs. Are there any tools?’
‘Under the stairs. I had the wood cut last week, thinking I might try it myself, but I don’t suppose I really wanted to.’ She peeled potatoes, dropped them into the pot – cooking without an apron, which was something new to him, better in that she didn’t hide the goodness of herself in the paraphernalia of domesticity. He stood close behind, kissed her neck, and held his hands over her breasts.
There was less formality about it than the deliberation of walking upstairs and going into the bedroom, and stripping as if to a drill, an exhibition as if performed before all the generations of the world to prove that you were with them in their unconscious battle for survival against the ravages of nature. She turned and lay her face in his shoulder. His hands were below her waist, body pressing stiffly but without urgency. He walked her into the sitting-room. There were no fires of impotence this time; his madness was controlled, hard at the loins, and the hundreds of miles journeying during which he had almost forgotten the need for love had only made him forget it in order to overwhelm him now with an unexpected force and sweetness he’d never known before.
They lay on the floor, clothes hardly disturbed, crying out together as if they had been burnt.
5
The village, when he explored the roundabouts of it, was set in a horseshoe of the wolds. After a few weeks he seemed never to have been anything but a countryman, as if much of William Posters had, for what it was worth, been excised from his backbone. Walking alone through the bracken earth of the autumn woods on a long, purposeless, satisfying stroll (while Pat was out in her red Mini on some errand of mercy) he could watch for pheasants, squirrels, or the erratic flip among upper branches of birds tough enough not to go south at the first chill breath of October damp.
He was surprised at how much life there still was. Two squirrels in the middle of a lane fixed each other, until his appearance sped them apart. One, with a handsome grey tail and upright back, had a small red disc for an eye, after fighting the rival which had already made off. The other eye must have been uninjured, for the squirrel flitted among a confusion of trees and bushes without tearing its hide.
Apart from mistily remembered bus-rides as a child, the only times he had seen the country was from his car-screen, stopping now and again to eat sandwiches with the window open, or dashing across fifty yards of greensward to gulp down pints in some sh
eltering pub. Now he not only lived in it, but spoke about gardens and poaching with men in the Keaner’s Head when he sometimes called there. Words like covert, lodge, hill, grange, flew from him – and only a month ago he had been at his machine, driving a car, in bed with Nancy, bawling at the kids. Yet in those days the dominant feeling was that of not living his proper and allotted life, of being enmeshed in a totally wrong sort of existence no matter how plain and real it was said to be. The present life at least was too new to give any such feeling.
Even so, his mind was at all points of the cardiac compass, unsettled and drifting. Out of the wood, he walked along an open lane, beet fields on either side. A Land Rover was coming and he stepped aside for it. A lean-faced man of about fifty called: ‘Where are you going?’
Frank looked at the grey, non-penetrating eyes, and said nothing. The man spoke: ‘This is a private road. If you go any further you’re liable to be shot at by one of my keepers. I’d turn back if I were you.’ His head withdrew, quicker than any argument that could follow, and the car rumbled towards a distant farmhouse.
He mentioned it to Pat. ‘It must have been Waller,’ she said. ‘He’s not really so bad. He farms all the land down by Panton Moor, and owns the woods near Clayby. He breeds pheasants by the hundred, and his friends come up from London to shoot. He’s rich, one of a shipping family in Hull, and doesn’t get on with people around here though – the people at the Hall I mean. He’s one of the better ones, believe it or not. His children are great friends of Kevin’s. Waller lent him a pony last summer.’
‘He still sounded a right bastard to me,’ Frank said, thinking that maybe William Posters wasn’t dead after all, not by a long way. ‘He’s no right to have land that nobody else can walk on.’ Old Bill Posters of course would never have been caught, would have smelt the set-up and gone through gorse and pheasant farms in his usual sly way, so that even the watchdogs wouldn’t have stirred, and he’d have come out with a cockbird in every pocket and a hangdog daisy in his buttonhole.
They sat at the evening meal: grilled steak and salad, bread and cheese. Lights were on, blinds drawn, and the fire humped red. ‘You see,’ she continued, ‘he gets a bit jumpy because people sometimes come in their cars from Scunthorpe and Grimsby, scare his pheasants and anything else that moves.’
‘I was on a peaceful stroll. Next time I won’t be.’ She saw him eating too well to be as angry as he made out. The walk must have seen to that. ‘If he’d known you were staying here he might not have been so brusque. He thought you were a stranger.’
‘Ah!’ he smiled. ‘You mean he smelt fifteen years of overalls on my back! The Lincolnshire wind hasn’t got rid of it yet. You’ve only got to stray a bit off a lane in England and you’ll find a notice stuck in front of you saying trespassers will be prosecuted.’
‘You’ll just have to ignore them, if you feel like it.’
‘But it’s still no good that you’ve got to.’
‘If you feel free, you are free.’
‘That’s the mentality of a slave. You’ve got to know that you are free.’ They were strangers still, and the hardest for her to bear were the long silences. Frank didn’t mind them, for they were his, and he could sit for an hour or through a meal without being embarrassed that neither spoke. He was unconscious of the silence until its meaning came to him, in a reminder of past noises that he was trying to forget. In the old days Nancy had always brought up the fact that something was wrong with their lives when the kids were crying, and he couldn’t stand crying kids, especially a baby – though he’d willingly agreed to himself that something indeed was rotten in their lives. He’d grown to put up with a lot since the first was born, of course, but the soulless noise of a crying baby lit up the dark spaces of emptiness within him, hammered in the roof to prove that no matter what vast emptiness was there at the moment, it would go on expanding into limitlessness if he didn’t flee from it. With such a noise and all its meaning it was a case of every man for himself, to run out and find something of substance with which to fill this vacuum lit by the cry of a baby. He didn’t follow his instinct and light off, but his reaction to it had at least pointed out that something was wrong.
Well, he had got over that, and didn’t know what reminded him of it so strongly, stuck in front of the fire with the village midwife who was now his mistress. A man’s manhood was tested by crying children and he had weathered it, or maybe only thought he had since it came back to him now with the force of an experience more agonizing than at the actual time. Why should he be noting his own rebirth by the memory of their birth, and grieving more for their loss than that of his wife?
Pat knew that he was only silent to her, and that in him were plenty of words that spoke loudly for himself, but because he never shared them she worried that one fine morning he would just get up and go, or that she would find the house empty on coming back from a call one rain-soaked afternoon. But perhaps one day these huge silences would melt into oceans of talk, to prove their growing regard for each other.
The fire blazed, in the wrong place, he thought, hardening himself to think so. It should be in me, instead of the damp ash I feel. She came back from the kitchen, and her face, utterly on its own and cut off from him, had nevertheless a beauty and dignity that he thought she might net even be aware of. He laid his hand on her wrist, squeezed it so that the veins met and hurt, held on as if the long hard grip were more necessary than the hour of unspoken words, a spiritual refuelling whose lifeline no words could latch into place.
She felt something good in his touch, a desperate healing of interrupted blood-flow, a contact between them that no words were at the back of – and that maybe joined both their wounds. He seemed to forget that she was there at all, as if, after the original impulse to touch her, he had lost all feeling for her consciousness close to his which had to be respected. This she did not like, drew her hand away, went off to the living-room and sat there with her thoughts – until he came in and greeted her with some pun or flippancy as if they’d not seen each other all day.
She asked about his parents, what sort of family he came from. ‘Your ancestors, for example.’
‘I ain’t got any,’ he smiled. Growing easier with her, homelier phrases occasionally tumbled through into his speech. ‘I don’t believe in ancestors. One grandfather was a foundry worker; the other a collier – as far as I remember the old man saying. Maybe we don’t go back any further than that. There’s no Adam and Eve in our sort of family.’ It was almost possible to believe him – his face momentarily bleak during the repose after his statement.
She wondered how much he thought of his wife and children, sensed that when he gripped her in a blind unspoken manner it was to hold back despair rather than prove undying love. She sympathized, yet disliked these moods that claimed him from her. When she had left her husband it needed countless solitary months before she could look at another man and think of love. But Frank had been away only a month so must still be neck-deep in the vat of it – and she refused to think that such upheavals were different for men, that they were more predatory, amorous, foot-loose and dominating (or whatever they liked to call it) than women. Maybe his love for this wife (or whatever he liked to call that, too) had been dug so deeply in after six years that the felled tree-roots still ached at contact with air and sky.
Frank complicated her existence, yet she was sure enough of herself not to refuse the first taste of love since leaving Keith. There had been no courtship with him on the morning he was supposed to leave, but neither of them needed the long sweet agonizing preliminaries that were essential for the naïve and inexperienced – or the idle and sensual. In these few weeks they had grown used to loving each other, love beginning from the middle of the fire and moving outwards to all its subtleties, delicacies and considerations from there. There was a liking between them; as between grown people who could never go back lightly on it.
He could know nothing of all this, she thought. Space and violenc
e had been his lot, which wasn’t much to say for the world, but there had been more depth and contact in it. Now they were equals, which is to say that there was no depth yet for either of them, who shared the same house. But she reflected, intelligent and realistic, that they shared it at the moment anyway, for who could be sure when he would leave? To her the concept of love was based on a strong, honest, mutual exchange of feelings, and in this sense it was still impossible to think of the word love with regard to him. Maybe time was still to alter all that, though in spite of his gruffness, halfcocked jokes, occasional clumsiness, he was a comforting person to have in the house, to talk to, to have love from when they went to bed at night (sometimes when she came in from rounds that had dragged on all night).
Her basic views were the same as before Frank had turned up. She liked the idea that he had stayed, like his loud unselfconscious concern for her, his tenderness in bed. Before, the solitary house seemed to die, to turn into a meaningless untidy shell whenever she shut the door behind her for a day’s visits; and returning to it, it hadn’t been so easy to get the breath of life going again. In fact it had become harder and harder, though she was resilient and self-possessed enough not to have admitted it to herself until now, when it didn’t matter. Things were different with a man in the house. Despite his long solitary walks a fire was always heaped up on the living-room grate, the radio just switched off, books put back on the shelves. If she thought to set a record on the wind-up gramophone, she didn’t need to work the handle or change the needle before it would go.
Her thoughts couldn’t much dwell on how he had come into the house. She must have been in some strange trance-like state, a dream almost, as Frank knocked at the door, and when she woke up, they were living together. It seemed like heresy to ripple the process of it by brute recollection – though at other times she felt ashamed that it had happened at all.
The Death of William Posters Page 6
