Some force to touch was missing at the end of her fingers, and her mind raced through thoughts like a millwheel in space. Memories created even thinner air. Nothing inside or out had substance. She looked around the room in the hope of seeing some solid attachment that would tell her where she was.
She shook her head angrily, crushing back fraudulent tears till they seemed to burn her brain. The day was unlike any other, an island unto itself.
She took off her blouse and threw cold water on her face, over and over again, like an unstoppable machine. Judy was frightened that she would never stop unless her arms were pinned back, and pushed a towel roughly towards her: ‘Use this.’
Pam rubbed her face too hard for her skin to stay pale. She would erase all features. Nobody would recognize her, not even herself, no matter how clear the mirror. Having woken out of life’s worst dream she did not know what part of her existence to get back to.
Judy held her till she became still, and hardly breathing, as if she had gone to sleep while on her feet. There was a tinderish heat about her, not humid and animal, but a temperature the body provided to keep her inner warmth unsullied by cold from outside.
Judy touched the back of her icy hands. The palms were hot. She stirred, but did not move, her face pressed into a compatible darkness at Judy’s shoulder. She would willingly stay, but it was an impossible hiding place. To rest in it for more than a few minutes might tempt her to lie in similar places of refuge. Nothing mattered. Her arms relaxed, but hung around the large comforting shoulders and felt the strong beating of another heart, suggesting a world that would have no interest in wrecking her peace. All she hoped for was to arrange a demarcation within which she could live, surrounding a place where she could flourish and work without pain. If it wasn’t possible she would be nothing more than a grain of purposeless dust in the universe.
Different feelings were taking hold of Judy at this long embrace, making her afraid of doing something which would involve them too closely with each other. Impatience and embarrassment urged her to ease Pam away, to say it was time she pulled herself together and got back to normal life. She didn’t want to play mummy to a person who would become dependent and give nothing in return. She had often helped, and would do so again, but not by starting a relationship which couldn’t but end in a very ragged way indeed.
Pam put on a clean blouse. ‘I must go downstairs, before I burst!’
‘You poor kid!’ said Judy.
She didn’t like her tone. ‘Thanks very much. I’ll be all right now.’
4
He could imagine Judy saying that like every man he was only waiting for a woman to come and look after him. She was right. He was. Yet she was also wrong, because he wasn’t. All his life without a woman’s company for more than a few days at a time, someone to wash his shirts wasn’t essential for him. And for sex, the odd affair would see him right.
He’d been to Salik’s Polish delicatessen and bought cheeses, smoked fish, loaves and pastries, and picked up two bottles of Mount Carmel wine at an off-licence. There weren’t enough plates, so some of the food would stay on paper. It was easy to live in London, with so many shops, pubs, launderettes and eating places, a cosy and civilized north European refuge in which you wanted for nothing provided you had paper money for it.
He tasted the wine. The fish looked good. He sat in the armchair and read his newspaper. She may not come. It was impossible to read. He stood at the window. He needed a housekeeper for Clara’s flat if he was to stay there, someone to caretake the six rooms and other nooks branching therefrom. He would use it as a base to go back to, no matter where he wandered. Advertise for a competent middle-aged woman who wanted a haven and a job.
He wondered whether his soul would always be that of a sailor. With no family life during more than thirty years on board, and none before that, the sea had been his mother and the sky his father, two elements not known for their especial concern for anyone sandwiched between. To consider a room or flat as his settled home made him want to run back to the roughest elements, which would soothe him in a way nothing could on land where whoever he might live among could give that sensation of danger which he needed in order to feel alive. He watched. He walked in limbo, thinking while on the street that everyone he saw was dead. The occasional exception was a shock to the heart, and so rare that it was hard for him to believe that he would live for long in this country no matter how comfortable it might seem.
He thought of George Town harbour, and the cable railway going up the green-backed hillside of Penang Island, that dazzling and incomparable paradise on earth. From the hotel terrace at the top he saw the mainland of Malaya with its grand escarpments and jungle-covered mountains falling back layer by layer into the distance of dusk, or growing more distinct at the onset of a storm, enormous sweeps of monsoon rain darkening the livid foliage. There was a place for any man to languish in!
But there were still wilder and more remote localities, far from everywhere even in this day and age: dense forest on a mountain close by, or the bare slopes of a distant volcano, and the roar of heavy breakers beyond his window, places where typhoons, eruptions and storms were so loud and violent that he couldn’t believe they weren’t intending to engulf the world. There was meaning in life. But he had to taste it by the mouth and feel in every part of the skin that first plate-glass metallic fall of conjoined waterdrops when the monsoon burst over palm trees and fell in such a way that it seemed as if God had singled him out for a spectacular drowning. The weight of the sky wouldn’t let him breathe. Everything smelled of water. He was cold yet not cold. He should have hated it but didn’t because it was something to feel, an intense wash coming down with a noise that wouldn’t allow a normal voice to be heard, and he felt in some perverse way that it was a protective umbrella put over him to stop worse befalling. He was awed, and that too was beneficial. Such flashes of lightning came that, though enjoying it, he didn’t feel safe. He could die any moment, though the chances were remote. But he knew only too well that he was alive.
When the ship far from land tipped and tilted its way through a monsoon he also lived. But here he was, and such a life was finished. The floor didn’t drop away, or even rock gently, and he stood with dry skin looking out of a window at a street under a plastic-seeming sheet of benign drizzle, wondering why the fierce bite of life had gone out of him.
Clara had died, and done no favour by leaving her money into his keeping, though he had no intention of grumbling at that. At least she had hung on till he was fifty, at which she may well have smiled to herself and known that such an inheritance could hardly ruin him.
His chronometer on the sideboard, attended to at twelve each day by Greenwich Mean Time whether at sea or ashore, had been neglected. He had let go of time by one hour. The ticking, lost in another compartment of his mind, stayed quiet, till something in his consciousness pulled it back again. Not to notice its measured marking of his and everybody else’s life suggested that something vital was worrying him. It was, and through his acute irritation he wondered why he had been foolish enough to believe that she would ever care to face him again.
The universal clock could not be forced. Alterations brought by the passing of time stopped or furthered all maturing hopes. A chronometer with accurate pacing was part of a scheme devised by God, but needed the hand of a person to build and keep it going. Even in the stormiest seas, when every next moment could tip you to disaster, he had been on hand to wind the chronometer at its set hour. The regularity had been too long part of his life for him not to be annoyed at his lapse.
On his penultimate run from Central America he reflected, while winding the chronometer one day, that whenever he was back on land this was something he would always do, to remind himself of what he thought he could never bear to leave but was forced to because he’d had no say in the matter. All changes had happened whether or not he wanted them. An alteration in the weather had nothing to do with him, but he often felt him
self geared to the elements in too helpless a way to bear contemplation.
He did not like what had caused this condition, though knew that no master even of the biggest ship was ever captain of his fate. A lifetime at the mercy of uncertain sea and malign sky had emphasized his addiction to order and precision, and reinforced his scepticism that his own intrinsic self had ever been responsible for changes in his life.
For the sake of well-being he should put his chronometer and sextant out of sight, throw away log books and mementoes now irrelevant. To be tidy in the past had protected himself and others but, in having forgotten to carry out his daily winding of the chronometer, even if only for an hour, he needed such qualities no more.
He had wound it, nevertheless. Face down in its gimbal ring, he turned the tipsy key gently four and three-quarter turns, and the sound of the ratchet calmed him. The odour and movement of the sea was not to be thrown off so easily. Habits die hard – if ever – in a man of fifty, but in the process of change he felt more adrift than ever, and it was with relief that he heard a faint knock at the door.
5
She sat by the table, and he poured wine. ‘I don’t suppose a drop of this will hurt.’
She wore lipstick, eye shadow, face cream. That stuff on women does more harm than good, Judy had said before going out to the shops. I know, she answered, maybe it does. I feel better, though. I haven’t used it for a month. She wore no bra – don’t need one – a white blouse with an open beige cardigan, and a skirt. A change of clothes might give a new start in life. Anything was worth trying.
She looked at his pale face, freckles, tonsure of red hair, uneven teeth when he smiled, broad nose, well-shaped but pronounced lower lip, firm chin slightly squared: an attractive ugliness, a determined intelligence. Why him, and not somebody else?
He put smoked fish on to their plates, and observed her by glances, unwilling to embarrass by staring. With so much to look at, there was something to hope for, and a long time was necessary to take in what lay behind those angled, intriguing blue eyes. She laughed. ‘Do you think I should be starving because I tried to do something daft?’
‘I didn’t really think, except that you can’t have eaten since last night.’
She drank the wine. ‘You’re right, though.’ I don’t want to get drunk in front of a stranger. ‘I’ll give up my room and go back to Nottingham.’ She had nothing to say, but the silence, even for a few seconds, alarmed her. ‘I’ve got to do something.’
He refilled both glasses. ‘If you’re uncertain, don’t. Whatever’s going to happen will, without you interfering in the process. My experience suggests that it’s just as likely to be good as bad. The time to do things is when they start doing them to you, and until then the only worthwhile course is to take your mind off what problems you have, by eating something, for example.’
He spoke unhurriedly, a slight pause now and again as if to let her know that at least he thought before opening his mouth, a mannerism which made him sound very right indeed, and also wise, since each phrase touched similar words in her mind. He lifted his glass. ‘Let’s drink to a long life.’
She sipped.
Neither did he give her time to agree nor disagree with whatever he said. ‘In my job I learned that you could anticipate problems, but never create them. They came right enough – how they came, at times! – but it never did to brood about them.’
The room had a timelessness that only an unmarried man could create. The stove gurgled, and they were warm. The ticking of his special clock made it even more timeless. She was sincere, almost fearful. ‘I left my husband, and don’t manage well on my own.’
To have shelter in a fair haven, provisions and clothes, was certainly a start. ‘Do you have any money?’
‘Enough to be going on with. But is that everything?’
He put food on her plate. ‘Perhaps not. I’ve always lived by myself, but I suppose it’s difficult if you never have.’
‘It might not even be that,’ she said.
What the hell is it, then? ‘You have to ride a storm day after day, sometimes for a week or more. In life it can last months, but eventually it goes.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘everything goes.’ He didn’t understand, though his words were true enough, and comforting. It was all right for a man. The depths below her seemed immense, as if she still had a long way to fall. Beyond the room there was an emptiness which she couldn’t bear to think about, and whatever lurked out there wanted to annihilate her hopes and expectations.
He touched her hand. ‘Nobody understands anybody, but if you can look and listen and talk, and even laugh, then a glimmer of a solution might come through the mist. The only person I ever understood was my aunt, and I had little enough information to go on. In everybody’s life there can’t be more than one or two people they’ll ever understand, or be understood by. More than that is too much to wish for.’
She felt numb. ‘I suppose so.’ She hoped he was wrong. She had come from a land of big families, and couldn’t live like that.
‘The only reason for staying alive is so that sooner or later you’ll understand one person. Those who try to kill themselves do so only because they have given up hope of trying to understand one person in their lives. Or they don’t know anyone who wants to try and understand them. They may have tried, and think they’ve failed, and don’t have the heart to make another attempt. There are lots of duties in life that you’ve got to look sharp about. The only thing I was brought up on was duty, and I don’t regret it now. It often saved me from despair, and stopped me doing much harm to others. Or so I like to think.’
She nodded, content to listen, and wondered why he was trying to send her back to George.
‘But the main duty, bigger than all the others, is to go on living even when you can’t bear the thought of facing the world a minute longer. When you feel that way, just grit your teeth and live it out till the threat goes. It’s the one duty that matters. If you survive that, whatever else you want will come.’
He only ever spoke in such a way to himself, and feared he was being pompous, but words were taken from his control, and though he didn’t like it, neither did he regret it when he saw how she seemed absorbed by what he was saying. When the heart gave out its own words in the form of advice for someone else, that advice could also be meant, he knew, for oneself.
‘Put your decisions off for a while.’ He was glad Judy wasn’t at their lunch to accuse him of self-interest. ‘And get out of London for a day or two.’
‘You don’t need to be anxious about me.’ She hadn’t left George’s prison to walk blindfold into another. ‘I’ll be happy enough living on my own when I know what I’m going to do, and what I’m not going to do.’
He once met a second mate who, he told her, being dead drunk, related that when at home with his wife he always peeled her fruit. He called for a plate of Jaffas to demonstrate, and Tom observed that stripping an orange of its skin was like taking a globe of the world to pieces: cutting off the two poles, scoring with great precision along the meridians of longitude about sixty degrees apart, then pulling each segment off intact, much like an instructor at a navigation class demonstrating a theory of map projections. At the third orange the second mate fell on to the floor and had to be carried back to his ship, smelling as much of citrus fruit as whisky. Even though dead drunk one could be precise, though it was wise not to push the spirit too far.
She smiled, and watched his fingers dextrously working as he peeled her an orange in the same neat way. ‘You spoil me.’
‘You’re my guest.’ Responsibility for any other person but himself had been shunned, unless within the hierarchy of a crew. His relationship with Clara had been possible because she had been equally responsible for him. Half a packet of coffee went into the pot, and he stood while the grounds settled. It was a day for staying awake. One must never ask questions, but he’d got her back from the dark, and his curiosity was intense.
&n
bsp; ‘I’ll wash up, at least.’ She smiled, and thought he probably had a pinafore hidden in the cupboard.
‘We once had a steward,’ he said, ‘who threw the dishes overboard after meals. By the time we discovered it, we were eating off bare boards and old newspapers. He was flown home in a strait-jacket, poor chap.’
He put a tick against the question as to whether she would laugh. Its sound came as the first real sign of life. ‘An aunt of mine died,’ he said, ‘who left me a flat in Brighton, and I’ll be going there in a day or two. I haven’t yet sifted through the stuff she left.’ He came back to the table. From previously thinking he had nothing to lose by certain proposals, he felt that care was needed because something more was at stake. ‘I was brought up as an orphan, so I might find out a few things about my past.’
The food and wine made her drowsy. ‘Don’t you know enough already?’
‘Sufficient to breathe on, I suppose. But who knows everything? There’s a lot more somewhere. Wouldn’t you think there is?’
‘There might be – I daresay.’
‘I never asked my aunt direct questions, thinking that any information would come to me in its own good time. I suppose I could have, but now it’s too late. For some reason I didn’t have the burning curiosity about myself until now, nor to get through to anything even deeper than information, if you see what I mean.’
‘I think I do.’
He felt as if he had never spoken what was truly in his mind. ‘Young kids these days take drugs to blast a hole in the wall that they think keeps them from knowing themselves. Either it doesn’t work, or there’s nothing to know, and so they find they’ve turned into zombies when the smoke of the explosion’s drifted away. You can’t get through to something that you are not, or even into something that you might wish you were. I prefer to know myself in my own good time, at the rate my mind was born to move at. Maybe there’s nothing there, but if not then at least I won’t get brain damage trying to find out.’
Her Victory Page 25
