The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘But no further,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to have him in a tent in the desert.’ They laughed. She leaned against the window and managed to sleep. He stood guard so that ticket collectors or people opening and closing the nearby door shouldn’t disturb her. He wondered, now that it was too late, whether they shouldn’t have stayed in Valencia.

  Myra had bought a guidebook, and he read it in calmer moments, opened the map and followed station names, mountain ranges, rivers. The train slowed between weedgrown walls in a suburb of flat-roofed houses: Alicante, stayed half an hour by the large harbour. That called for another swig of brandy. He found comfortable seats for them. For some reason he had picked up Spanish quicker than Myra, wielded it fluently at stations and cafés.

  The train passed along the sea edge, a blue gradient of mountains lifting from each cape on either side of the city. There were many ships in the harbour, and bathing huts along grey beach like sentry boxes put there to keep back encroaching surf. They turned inland, date palms and orange trees almost brushing the windows. Train wheels were thumping south-east – another eight hours for Granada – taking them over arid plains and within clear sight of grandiose mountains to the north, and villages propped on isolated hills, a huddle of poor houses baked in summer and frozen in winter, desolate and destitute. It was hot in the carriage, sun shining strongly through windowglass. Myra sat in her blouse, head now and again resting on her bare arms. Frank took off his jacket, walked through the carriage to bring water for Myra, and beer for himself.

  Hardly anyone was speaking, and the whine of the diesel engine drowned the voices of those who were. The carriage was wrapped in the afternoon silence of the outside landscape. It was perfectly still and not a word could come from it. It lacked meaning, took on a death-like quality. The wheels were circular hammers beating on the tracks. Such a time brought momentary boredom with life, and memories came in speed and secrecy to dam up and strengthen the crumbling walls of courage. Frank stared at the beige land, not seeing it, but seeing himself.

  The journey was enlivened when the train came to a bridge over a ravine. The driver stopped before it, uncertain whether it was possible to get his loaded train across. Frank looked along the track. Workmen on the upper banks of the ravine stood aside, waiting for the train to make up its mind.

  ‘We’ll be here all day,’ he said to Myra. ‘You should see that bridge.’ Planks formed a parapet only along part of its length, while tree-poles buttressed and reinforced its shaky girders. Frank thought he saw it sway, but knew that this was imagination, mirage, fatigue. The train inched forward, lurched, a hundred heads poking out to gauge its progress. Frank felt scared. The train stood full on the bridge, not a word spoken, only a grinding of wheels, a creak of structure.

  They were over. ‘I hope there aren’t any more like that.’

  Myra laughed. ‘I knew it would be all right.’ She had had this feeling, that all things would be all right, ever since leaving George, but as the afternoon spun itself slowly out it seemed that the magic weave was falling away, that the train was taking her to a stage beyond both George and Frank, not out of Frank’s love so much as into her own self where life would be lonelier and yet more solid, frightening, exhilarating and independent. The baby lulled her, and the journey went on and on.

  Plains on either side seemed without limit, as if they were going into the hinterland of a newly born and endless continent. Sunlight spread yellow wings through sparse cloud, turning the arid countryside into a blood-irrigated desert. Mile after mile without house or horse. They cat-napped through the dusk, Frank wondering whether he hadn’t, at last, encountered those vast and endless spaces dreamed about with such love and longing. He’d given up everything to find this, to find Myra, to find a new brain and absence of mind by drifting anchorless or, rather, attached to the built-in anchor of himself. But these weren’t the spaces, nor these the feelings. Wherever he was going, he was some way from it yet.

  When he opened his eyes and looked through the window the sun was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, but always lower down towards the horizon, until nothing could be seen and the world was confined to a train whose wheels were spinning towards Granada.

  21

  They walked the streets of Granada under a clear, cold, sun-blue sky, spiritually unable to leave. ‘I feel I’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘But I never have. Not in this life, anyway. George didn’t approve of the régime to let us come this far south. These smells of oranges and flowers, and snow in the air. It’s strange.’

  He didn’t know what she meant; it was new to him, but rich in its newness. ‘The Jews and Moors lived here at one time.’

  ‘Maybe it was that,’ she said. ‘It’s such a strong feeling. It exists right inside me.’

  ‘It could be that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe in that.’ Such new impressions overwhelmed him still, but he was strengthened by them, no longer disorientated. Having no time to think of himself, resolution grew firmer because decisions that moved him from one place to another were less hard to make. They walked in the garden of the Generalife, between the shadows of gigantic cypresses. ‘I was with George so long,’ she said, talking through the sound of spraying water, ‘that I forgot I was Jewish. But it’s been coming back to me since I met you, for some reason. And this place has given it to me strongest of all.’

  ‘Where did your grandparents come from, then?’

  ‘From Bessarabia. I think that’s in Russia now.’

  ‘Arabia,’ he smiled, ‘it doesn’t seem much different, does it? We’re in a bit of Arabia now. When the Jews left here they went to North Africa and Turkey. Maybe some ended up in Bessarabia.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘Myra of Bessarabia,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I never thought we’d be in Granada.’

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘What is it, love? Tell me what it is?’ A group of Germans armed with guidebooks, plans, cameras and measuring tapes trod gutterally past, pinkfaced and coatless, stepping over hosepipes with exaggerated care. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know why.’

  He embraced her by a tall tailored hedge: ‘I’m full of love for you. Everything will be all right. The baby will come, and we’ll be happy with it.’

  ‘It’s not even that,’ she said. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s more than that.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. Don’t cry.’

  But Myra felt a desolation of the soul, was a young girl again thinking of beautiful things, locked in an ancient world passed on to her from an exclusive state that only women can inhabit, and that men catch (if ever) in rare moments when they are happy. It was a sensation carried from one woman to another by some dying goddess who never quite died. To Myra it became a self-induced ivy-dream of queens and princesses in whom the beauty of physical mating was admitted to become the finality and further beginning of childbirth. It was a world they kept unjealously because of a divine right that seemed to flower in the alleyways and upper streets of the Albaicin. A parapet had guided her eyes directly across at the blood-coloured towers of the Alhambra buttressed by great snowbanks of the Sierra Nevada – where it also flowered. This desolation went through a procession of images towards something it could never quite reach, a dream containing all the animal realities of the earth. She saw in other women her perfect counterparts infused with the orgiastic motions of which childbirth was the last great cry and connected to the delicate inborn tendernesses in herself. She felt the force of living and was glad to be alive, a positive sensation for the first time which had nothing to do with Frank. The time was close when she could live in as complete a way as she would ever know, for this was the end of her life so far, the phosphorescent deadness that would give place to a new and unique person. It pointed the rebirth towards a life that would be hers only.

  He looked out at the white midnight roofs of Granada, steam-breath clouding the glass which he rubbed clear. The city was sleeping at last, and
smelled of snow. Noise still came from the hotel kitchen, Andaluz voices subdued and rapid, the clash of plates, a door banging as he got in bed and tried to sleep. He wanted to show her eyes beautiful landscapes, feed her heart with more tenderness and pity than it already possessed, fill her body with more sensations than it had ever known. But this was turning against himself. It was impossible because the end had been reached, not the end of love, but the beginning of something else in which the sort of love he had always known about and felt as fully as anyone was to be discarded as a fraud and a trick, the stone tied around a corpse to make it sink. To cut it loose would enable a man and woman to live in equality, with regard and respect for each other’s purpose in the world. Mutual destruction had to cease.

  Copulating cats roared like lions in the night. Myra was sleeping, curled in her nightdress. At dawn an inquisitorial roll of bells came loud and dissonant over luminous rooftops. In the street a ripped poster waved like a frantic hand. Leaves fell thick as copper snow over an autumn square. He had lived through a hundred seasons in one year. Hump-backed clouds looked like disappointed pilgrims returning from some mountain shrine, glad to be back over streets and houses. If you like a city, he thought, it protects you; if you don’t like it, it drives you away. I like this one, but still I’m going. He did not know what he would be doing a week from now. He did not remember what he dreamed last night. If he did not want to wake up, the dream had been good; if he had been glad to wake up, it had been a nightmare. He was uncertain about it.

  A fine rain fell as the train pulled along the ascending valley. Olive trees gridded the hillsides. Wet towns and villages in the distance were like wooden uneven nailheads hammered into the earth. The train was crowded and smoky, full of luggage, food hampers, people in black and grey, silent children. A man came in out of the rain, from one station, wearing dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigar and carrying two suitcases, alighting at a town twenty miles further on.

  ‘I like Spain,’ Frank said. ‘I like the people. They don’t seem to let things bother them.’

  ‘I felt that ever since I stepped over the border.’

  ‘I really think I’ll feel at home wherever I am,’ he said.

  ‘As long as you’re moving, on wheels,’ she joked. In the afternoon the train was descending, into clearer sky and sunlight. Ronda showed through a gap in the mountains, a far-off patch of towers and houses perched beyond the immediate circle of hills like an imagined dream in a saint’s vision. Then it was cut from view, and the rugged scenery reminded Myra of the engravings in an edition of Byron resting in the glass case among George’s books. She wondered whether she’d ever see them again, the first real question since setting out. She saw the titles, and the rich binding, the house, then the village, the edge of tall corn clipped near its summer roots, a brief run of pictures left to flower in her at a later time. How far would the thread that held her stretch before it snapped, while the new thread thickened into a rope?

  Tunnels took them into gorges – romantic for those that passed by in trains but not for people who lived roundabout, he thought. Barren limestone slopes sent swollen streams curving from tightly packed villages built in impossible hill positions. Why had it been Frank? she wondered, who had come into her life only a few months ago like a man with pick and mattock and hewn her out of it so savagely? Perhaps it was all so futile and unnecessary, and she’d have been better off staying where she was: the unlanced lake, calm and stagnant under an English sky.

  She looked forward to getting off the train. Beyond the window by a bleak-looking stream, a sinewy weather-beaten woman stood outside a house, pegging sheets onto a clothes-line, steadying them from the wind to watch the slow progress of the train. Her life must be hard and lonely, Myra thought, but less so than my own which never stops moving. Bent low in the saddle a man on horseback raced half a mile and beat them to the next bridge, then stood grinning, hat in hand, before sauntering back to his red-roofed and isolated house.

  Rolling hills and flat marshland drew them to the sea. Cattle browsed at sky-reflecting pools, between cork and carob trees. Across the bay lay the enormous slouching rock of Gibraltar. ‘We’ll get over the straits tomorrow,’ Frank said.

  ‘Tangier will have to be our last stop.’ She leaned back, pale, all life drained out. ‘I can’t go any further.’

  ‘You won’t,’ he said, concerned at the deathlike marks of fatigue, and wondering now why he had brought her so far.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘but we must stop in Tangier.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with love,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll find a house there, and you can rest for three or four months.’

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said, no complaint but a fact that wrenched his heart. At the hotel their room had a map of damp marks down the wall, and stank of fumigation powder, so he argued bluntly with the receptionist and made him find them another. Myra bathed, then ate soup, omelette, oranges. She was asleep before he left the room. Her dark hair, grown long in travelling, fell over the pillow away from her cool exhausted face. He touched her forehead. She didn’t hear the door close.

  He walked over the bridge, a cold breeze swelling in from the sea. Across the few miles of water Gibraltar lay like a long bank of burning coal. He ate at Arturo’s (recommended by Larry), then sat outside a harbour café to drink coffee and smoke at a bitter full-tasting cigar.

  He too was exhausted, in all things nearing the rock-bottom of his heart, touching the extremities, as if the end of some journey within himself was in sight. He had reached the limit of his concern for Myra. He loved, had no fear of that, but as a man and a human being, not as an adventurer, and so all inner directions were spent – or those were that he chose to consider. Whatever occurred within himself, in the rich mineral coal lump of his brain, he would always, being a strong character, decide what was going to happen to him.

  Sitting on the harbour front was like being at the world’s edge, and the only way he could move was on, across the world. To understand people, go into the desert, and do not come out until you understand yourself. Not to know this meant that the inner journey was suspended, and that could never be, though you kept it in its place by a richer surface life, so that it helped, not dragged you down as it had so far done. Thirty years had taught him nothing except that life was good but limited (the innerlife anyway that the society he’d been, brought up in told him existed) – limited in everything, depth, space, decision, strength. The soul was a load of bollocks; the heart was a useful depth gauge in the machine shops of social life; the mind was good for thinking, building, helping; the hands were right for making and doing. He felt at the forward point of the world. Death was nothing to write home about, to dwell on, think of. The shell went through you, the tank trundled over you, the hydrogen bomb flashed you up, old age put you to sleep – as long as you were doing something when any of this happened, lifting, helping, firing a gun.

  The only fear and cowardice in life was idleness, inactivity – either sitting still or doing work that nobody wanted or would benefit from. Hell wasn’t other people; it was the inability to work, to act, to do. Hell was having nothing to live for, a pit he’d steered away from without realizing how close he had been to it. Heart and soul, they were fetters that the new man of the world took to a blacksmith and had chopped away. The new man of the world must work and live as if he weren’t going to be alive the next day. This would make him more careful and tender to others, not less.

  It was a new way to live, and even now, he was trying it, the first kick-off started the day he left the Nottingham world of moribund William Posters. Let’s face it. I’ve got no love left in me – not of the kind I should have. It’s being burned out of everyone else as well, by the oxyacetylene glare of tube-light and telly-fire. We must love more people than just each other. The old idea of love is sliding away from the fingertips of the new man, like a thousand-coloured ferry boat heading for the open sea.

  They steamed i
n late morning through a zone of green water towards mid-channel blue. Land seemed to be all around, cloud obscuring the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the mouth of the Atlantic, mixing Gibraltar with African peaks above Ceuta and Tetuan. Huge liners and tankers drifted by as if hardly moving, then vanished or were mere dots when Frank looked again from the saloon window. They headed by the white houses of Tarifa, hugging the Spanish shore, with Cape Trafalgar dim and shifty in the distance. The Moroccan side was rocky and sheer, a sandy beach now and again visible as if someone had dropped a white handkerchief from the mountaintop above. It was peaceful at sea, the tilt and gentle pitch of the boat resting both of them after the night’s deep sleep.

  They went under the archway up the cobbled street, into the narrow lane of the Moorish town. The porter led them to the hotel off the Socco Chico. They entered by a small door from a side street and ascended the washed steps. Myra found it good to talk to the French proprietress after so long in Spain, felt civilized again with the edge on Frank’s Spanish which now sounded as rough and uncouth as north of England dialect. The woman was interested in Myra’s pregnancy, which meant a five-minute chat every time they went in or out.

  The hotel was a second-floor flat, which seemed to go along the whole length of the street, making it little more than an endless corridor of small rooms. At first there were so many women’s voices coming from them that Frank wondered if they hadn’t stumbled into a brothel, but since he heard no sounds of men he had to conclude differently – though in Tangier you could never be sure. In the next room was a Frenchwoman with two small dogs, and often through the paper-thin walls came the sound of clanking bowls and swilling water, great lip-smacking kisses, and the sliding of the dogs’ paws on the tiled floor.

  Their room was the largest in the hotel, the bed a rough frame nailed together, with bedding neatly and skilfully laid on top. There were two old basket chairs, and a small table for books, cigarettes, matches, tangerines and make-up. A sink in one corner had no plug, and one had to keep the faucet pressed to get water – as on a ship. Frank shaped a plug out of a cork, rather, he said, than give up washing. There were two huge coat pegs on the blue wall, and a small piece of Moroccan artisanry for matting on the floor. A single window looked onto a dim alley-street, so that even in daytime they needed the light on. The hotel was on its last legs, and so was more expensive than many others.