The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  Unwanted words were spelt like a lit-up newsflash across the inside of his eyes: ‘Now what do we do?’ The noise of his own life had been taken away, and the sound of all others, too. A pool in one of the fields had turned to ice, as if molten lead had been poured into a hollow and left to set, unbreakable, fixed forever even through summer. He was immobilized by lack of sound.

  To break it he said, releasing her hand: ‘Let’s go down,’ and their feet moved with comforting heaviness over the frost as she took his hand and obeyed.

  7

  In four months he hadn’t seen a film. At the pub, he drank in a private room to get out of the death-ray of television. Once a week he made tracks there, had a pint, watched by those who speculated on his long sojourn at Nurse Shipley’s house.

  He offered to take her to Louth or Lincoln for an evening, but she said: ‘When I want you to, I’ll let you know. If you want to go, just do so. You know that I’m all right here.’ He too liked the peace and isolation – while often wondering how someone like Pat could stand so much of it since she’d already done a couple of years.

  He had cleaned out all he considered to be the good books of her library, and looked forward to the huge shiny-sided van drawing up outside the house to lend them more. ‘I’m happy here,’ he said, ‘lapping up these books like a cat lapping up milk’ – so that she wondered whether he were here for any other purpose than that. Still, in a discreet, offhand way, she advised him what to read, careful not to praise any book but merely putting it in his way by such phrases as: ‘This one isn’t bad’ or ‘You might like this one.’ He had an irresistible yen to fill his shattered mind, to separate himself from the world, and yet have something to talk about with Pat. He secretly wanted to catch up with her in all she had read, felt that such continual reading was altering the basic mechanism of his senses in a way that reading had never done for Pat. For her, books were an accepted part of life, even to the reading of them, whereas they had been something rare and foreign to him, seen in other people’s houses as part of the furniture – a showing-off part, at that. He had detested books at school as symbols of torment, employed only to prove in public what he had always known about himself in private – that he was dead ignorant. He assumed readily that Pat’s books must be good because he didn’t feel uneducated or foolish while reading them. Having tackled so few in the last ten years made them so much easier to absorb now.

  They weren’t the sort that taught electricity, plumbing, engineering or gardening, but they widened the world beyond the range of his eyes and softened the hitherto hard limits of his perceptions. Reading Homer or Sophocles, he couldn’t scorn the idea of gods or God if he wanted to enjoy and get any good out of them. This wasn’t easy. The many Greek names in a single book of the Odyssey bothered him, but Pat had a dictionary, so that he reduced his natural strong hankering to know what happened next, and actually enjoyed looking up every name until, towards the end, he had a rough idea who and what they meant, soon recognized them as clearly as he once had the names of players of his favourite rugby teams. He looked up words in the English dictionary, then lost his shyness at seeming half literate, and asked Pat what they meant to save himself the trouble of moving from the fire to the bookshelf. He’d previously bought or borrowed books to read about war or sex, but now he got pleasure from a story taking in neither. Or he found that if a book was well-written about love or war then it gave more satisfaction than a paperback half a notch above comic books. He’d liked Tom Jones, struggled through the peace parts of War and Peace, read Tess and Fude. One day he said: ‘I suppose a lot of those people gassed by the Germans had read good books like these.’

  ‘Of course. Many of them must have,’ she answered.

  ‘Those German bastards,’ he retorted, and went on reading in the savage light of illumination.

  Kevin was seen off from the crowded platform at Lincoln. Frank had been indifferent to his visit at first, only wondering what effect it would have on him and Pat, realizing finally that in a curious way it had enriched them. Frank had grown used to him, and by the time he left they’d become so attached to each other that Kevin had promised to write. ‘I’m glad you got on so well,’ Pat said on their way back from the station. ‘I was worried, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Frank said. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were, though, instead of letting it drop only now?’

  ‘What’s the point? It would have been useless to let you know I was worried before he came.’

  ‘We could have talked about it,’ he said. ‘Talk is the staff of life. You don’t think I’d have taken it the wrong way, do you? I’ve come to the conclusion people don’t talk enough. There’s not enough talk. The powerlines are cut when a person hasn’t anything to tell or say. I don’t believe in the strong silent type – he might be strong, but he’s dead. I’ve met enough of them to know this, looking back on it. I prided myself on being one, once. But talk is blood. It’s a bandage as well. You’re a nurse: you should know. You wrap it around your wounds and don’t bleed to death.’

  They drew in for petrol. ‘Honestly, I didn’t see the point of mentioning it.’

  He said, when they were on the road again: ‘If you didn’t, why do you mention it now that he’s gone back and the issue’s over?’

  ‘You say you think people should talk more. So do I. Which doesn’t mean only you, either. I suppose your ideal is really somebody who didn’t talk at all except to say “yes master” and “no master” to all that you had to say.’

  ‘If I didn’t want you to talk, the only way would be not to talk myself.’ It was pointless to bicker, as useless as the frostbitten sunshy road in front. ‘Anyway, I hate arguments while I’m driving. You know: careless talk costs lives. But I’m sorry Kevin’s gone. We’d got used to having him.’ He saw she was upset, about to weep. ‘Don’t worry, love. He’ll be back soon.’

  While still in bed at Pat’s warm side he sensed that more snow had drifted down, felt the cold presence of it beyond drawn curtains and shut windows, pressing thick over wolds and fields. Like a magnet it drew him out, silently to gather his clothes and tread naked to the kitchen where he dressed and saw by the clock that it was barely half past six.

  Eighteen inches of snow had fallen during the night, drifted against gates and fences up to double that depth. He looked across the garden, at sprout tops like deformed mushrooms humped above milkwhite snow. It was a silent, low-clouded dawn, steely and lifeless, without colour. A shiver started at the roots of him, shook its way out. Winter seemed to go on for ever. The quiet countryside was more savage when at the mercy of snow than were hard paved streets in the city that put an invincible layer of paving between you and the rich worms. He’d slung his hook at the wrong time, landed himself first in the rainy season, now in the ice-age.

  A path would need clearing to the road – though on first wielding the spade he didn’t know why, since no one would get up that route awhile to set down milk or newspapers. Still, a path looked good: if a ghost on skis passed by he would see from the sunken snowpath looped around half the house that someone lived there who was alive in it. The radio called this the worst winter for many a year, and no one could say it was lying.

  Dawn had not yet churned its full shoulder above the bleak land. It was half dark, half day, day surfacing after being half-drowned by final blackness. But it had fought its way out, a rebirth of the day in hard uncompromising silence. Not a twig cracked, not a lip of wind, not one muffled paw in the settled snow. Even his spade was soundless, slicing layers of snow up and on to long mounds on either side. A silver light shone from the open kitchen door, and when the kettle signalled its boiling guts his path was already by the house-wall and nearing the lane. The whistle was subdued by zero air, by frostbite hovering over the newly created path, sounded like a whistle found in a Christmas cracker rather than its usual full-blooded shriek that dominated the tiny cottage until Pat could stand it no longer and snapped it off. The path, he thou
ght, before turning to do so, will need cutting even further than the village if she gets called out today – which is bound to happen. Yet, strange to him, she’d hardly been summoned in the last week, beyond routine visits to the usual aging sick. ‘Snow is healthy,’ she explained, ‘but just wait for the thaw!’ Which was a fact: he loved the not-too-bitter silences of snow, the thick covering of whiteness and the hard digging needed to clear it. The ruthlessness when fighting it filled his heart to think of all that nature might still throw against him. He relished the shut-in evenings that seemed rich with life, more than he’d ever known; and if this wasn’t much, then it brought him back to life, which was everything.

  No papers this morning. He heard the news headlines and flicked up the switch. It was a day to start with a breakfast, spread rashers on the grill and run the opener round a tin of tomatoes, crack eggs into a pan. It was an enjoyable life: a pleasant loneliness filled in trying to bridge the here-and-now with Pat to his old life with Nancy, in which the gorge of chaos was wide and deep. But the effort annoyed him, because it was too early to throw out the bridge, spring the camber and tighten the hawsers. Better to look back on it over much land and time, when the gaping earth wound of now would be a mere slit to step back over. Living with Pat he felt a contentment more enjoyable because he sensed its precariousness in that they hadn’t been visited by any sort of fatal quarrel. He and Nancy went at it like cat and dog, but here, maybe they were too absorbed to argue yet. And perhaps it wasn’t true that quarrelling was proof of love, for it was marvellous that they didn’t, apart from occasional sour looks of a too-early morning.

  He cleared away breakfast and hatched a fire. There was a smell of tea, the subtle combined residues of tea made or about to be, a pleasant herbal odour joining generations of people and memories that persisted when the windows of summer were thrown open, went even beyond the drastic cleansing of renovation when Pat first came. Drawing back the curtains, thick flakes were drifting zig-zag in a hypnotic slow-motion down the outside windowpanes. It seemed strange, a snowfall in early morning. He’d always fixed the prevailing time for it as being towards dusk or during darkness. There was no telling where the base of the clouds began: the sky was particles of white, lapping slowly through the livid scar-blue of a day not yet wakened. In spite of the fire, he rubbed his hands: it was an ashen desolate marvellous window, but had to be turned from. Nothing would get through, not mail, milk, newspapers nor breadwagon – only perhaps the phone would ring for help from the village or beyond. He would have to dress up in compass and gumboots and brave the blizzard for provisions. Not that they needed much, for he’d taken care that they were well-stocked for such an undistinguished calamity, but he’d maybe slog it to the village just for the battle against piling snow.

  He took orange juice and tea up the steep stairs. She lay with pillows heaped behind, and a book in front, wore a heavy cream woollen bedjacket rolled slightly at the sleeves, showing her white wrists. ‘I heard you making the fire. I think before that I was wakened by the sound of snow coming down. It’s funny how it wakes you.’

  ‘I thought you’d be still deep in it,’ he said.

  ‘No. A day like this is like the end of the world, so you’ve got to be awake.’

  ‘It’s the beginning, more like.’ He sat on the bed-end. ‘Unless you get called out, we’ll be locked in all day.’

  ‘Not a hope,’ she laughed, pushing strands of hair back over her shoulder. ‘I’m usually looking at people in bed. It’s good to be resting for a change.’

  ‘I should be in with you,’ he joked. ‘But I like to look at you. It’s a bit of a change, anyhow. Maybe I’m getting old, or older. I feel more alive than when I was in Nottingham. It’s funny, that. It’s not so many months ago, either, but it seems years. A family kills you; it kills everybody, I think, the way it drags your spirit down unnecessarily.’

  ‘That’s the only way to live.’

  ‘It needn’t be. There must be a better way. If there isn’t I’d cut my throat. In China they reckon there is, but not here. Go on reading if you like. I’ll go down and throw something in the pan.’

  ‘No, sit here for a bit. You’re always so restless. The air’s muffled with so much snow around, as if I’ve gone a bit deaf. It’s good to talk when it’s so quiet: words mean something. You know, you don’t have such an accent in your speech as you did when you first came. It must be my influence!’

  ‘I’ll be giving out the news on the B B C if I’m not careful. “Here is the news, and this is William Posters reading it. An atom bomb got lobbed on London this morning, so will everybody with a sore throat please report to Nurse Shipley on their way north through Lincolnshire?” I can see that, right enough.’

  ‘You don’t take anyone or anything seriously.’

  ‘It was your joke,’ he said. ‘I do though, inside myself. But outwardly I’m cool, dead cool.’

  ‘If you’re so cool, you want to be careful the fire isn’t out.’

  ‘No danger of that. If I’m cool it’s because I’m burning up. I haven’t got guts but a firegrate full of prime pit dust that you get no flame from but can toast bread at.’

  She looked at him sitting there, smoking a cigarette, out of his depth, and not knowing where he belonged – a strong aura clinging to him that made her think she would one day wake up and find him gone. She couldn’t imagine the house without him. Or she could, in which case she couldn’t imagine staying in it, feeling that both she and it would collapse if something impelled him to leave as unexpectedly as he’d come. There was always a danger of it, but he would deny it in a blind rage if she mentioned it. So she never would, and maybe in this way it wouldn’t mystically lodge in his brain, and he would stay for as long as always turned out to be. He was downstairs, and came back with tea and fried eggs.

  ‘It’s stopped snowing. It’s freezing over where I cleared away. I wish I knew how to skate or ski, then I’d get to the village in no time for whatever we want.’

  She smiled: ‘There’s nothing we need. The pantry’s full.’

  ‘And the fire’s burning a treat. Even if you come down in your shimmy you won’t feel the cold. I’ve never known a house so warm in winter.’

  ‘As long as the taps don’t freeze.’

  ‘I’ll melt snow.’

  ‘I can ski,’ she said. ‘I went to Switzerland the year before last.’

  ‘Where are they?’ looking around as if they might be in the bedroom.

  ‘I don’t have any, rented some when I got there.’

  ‘You’ve been around,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind travelling a bit, out of this country. I never used to think about it. Maybe it’s reading books that set me going, and talking to somebody who’s travelled.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I’ve travelled,’ she said, a little too quickly.

  ‘Now you’re showing off,’ he laughed. ‘Maybe we’ll go one fine year, who knows? Hump our bags to Spain or Italy. I’d like to do that. I knew a bloke in our factory, about my age but single who set off to travel round the world. He saved up, and planned it for years, said he’d work when money ran out. I looked on him as a real adventurer, someone to envy. We had a party for him before he went, and it was even in the paper about him. I was sad to see him go, yet bucked at the idea of what he was doing. Six weeks later, he was back. He’d been through France, got as far as Barcelona I think. I was disappointed, almost didn’t want to know him. If I go away I’d want to do better than that. Don’t you ever get fed-up in this village?’

  She shook the pillow, put it back under her shoulder: ‘Who doesn’t get tired of the place they live in?’

  ‘I mean bone-tired, right from the guts?’

  She smiled. ‘You want me to say I do, don’t you?’

  ‘I want you to say what you think.’

  ‘You’re a smug bastard. As if anybody ever says what they think. It’s always what somebody else thinks – in a different form. You just want me to say “Yes, I’m thoro
ughly tired of it, so let’s go away, this minute, tomorrow” – just because you want to disappear. Why don’t you come right out with it?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t mean that much. I only feel like that because I’m in a snowbound cottage with the only woman I’ve ever really loved. I can’t be happier, so I think of the wide open spaces open to us.’

  ‘Open to “me”, you mean. If you had any love in you you’d keep such thoughts to yourself. The first sign of love is when you think about the person you love, and apply the thought to her before turning it to yourself. As it is, you just torment me.’

  ‘If that’s the way it makes you feel, forget I spoke. I don’t believe in that sort of self-sacrifice.’

  ‘I can’t forget. You can’t undo things just like that. If you want to go, go.’

  ‘Excuse me while I get my skis and foodbag.’

  ‘Why do you turn everything into a joke? You have no respect for people. Nothing is serious to you.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m shooting my mouth off. I love you. I like being here. But I’m alive. I talk because my arms and legs move.’

  ‘You think so? You talk, to show me your wounds.’

  ‘I’ve got less wounds than most people. I can wound more than most people, as well. Anyway, I didn’t say anything about going. What did I say? I forget. I can never remember what I said five minutes before. Five years, maybe.’