‘I haven’t read it,’ she told him.
He laughed. It was a long time ago. ‘One reads all sorts of books,’ he said, ‘in the Merchant Navy, from the misadventures of Elephant Bill to Charles Dickens and the Bible. You scan whatever you come across. My mind’s a tuppenny bin, and I remember them all.’
Beyond Montreuil it rained a few showers. Then the crooked road became straight, and the sky cleared. High white clouds let them through. At Arras he drove along the Rue St Aubert and turned into the hotel courtyard.
Fifty years before, his grandparents, mother and Aunt Clara had made their visit in a family motor with the spare tyre on the outside. A cap and cloche hats had been in fashion, as magazines and photos showed. Now he was here himself. A few months ago, he had not known. How had he lived so emptily? He hadn’t even known other things. Now he was someone else. You were composed of what information was revealed, the sort that took a grip because it was the deepest truth. Someone died: it hit you like a road accident in which, among the injuries, your soul was so smashed that you needed to be completely refurbished by the plastic surgery of memory. It was still going on, but he had already learned to live with the final effect.
The paving and surrounding windows seemed familiar, and he heard Clara shouting his mother’s name for the echo. ‘Ah yes, Monsieur,’ he expected an old woman in black at the reception desk to say, ‘I remember them well. Such a tragic family, come to visit the grave of their dead son!’
A pretty girl asked for his passport: name, address, nationality, and date of arrival to write on a bilingual form in exchange for a door key. Would they eat here? Yes, he told her. He’d never been inside France, he said as they walked up the stairs, though some harbours he knew. Their room overlooked the yard. She liked the flowered wallpaper. On trips to Spain she had stayed in new hotels with white walls, balcony and shower, and built-in noises from people in a similar box next door to embarrass you as much as your own sounds were doing the same to them.
She sat on the bed. ‘I’ll put a dress on.’
‘Then we’ll go to the Grand Place,’ he said, ‘for coffee and a sandwich.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘There’s a town plan in the guide book.’
‘Useful things.’ She opened the case. ‘Or maybe a cake to eat.’
He put his arms around her. ‘Why not? France is a good place to be hungry in.’
She stood in her slip. ‘Then again, maybe we won’t go out. It’s sexy, being in our first hotel room. So intimate and strange, don’t you think?’
‘I chose the right place,’ he said, ‘especially for you. There’s a guide book to sexy hotels, comes out every year, and this one has four stars!’
‘Really?’ She half believed him. Anything was possible these days, with so many sex shops, strip shows and dirty films everywhere. And who am I to talk? Here I am, a married woman, come away with a man I hardly know. Yes I do. I already know him more than I ever did George. It’s easier to know someone who is more complicated than someone who is not. He kissed her, and pushed the straps of her slip over her shoulders. She touched his face. Why not? Most hotels are still like this, he said. Shall we? He had to ask, and she wondered why. Shall we? she asked in her turn, smiling, kissing his face and throat. Yes, he said, unclipping her brassiere to run his hands beneath, then lowering his face to the nipples. The air was humid, and she stood in her pants. While he undressed she pulled back the bedclothes, freeing the top sheet to cover them against the draught. She didn’t want anybody to see them, and drew the curtains.
I’m tired, really, she said. I hardly slept last night. The pleasure had not been all hers, she knew. But she couldn’t sleep now, either. This was the only thing left if you did not know what you wanted out of life, or didn’t have any idea as to where you were travelling. How many more times are you going to say it? She wanted him with her all the time, his finger playing at her so that she never failed to come, then feeling him inside her as far as he was able to get. He filled her, nothing sacred any more. Her own smell excited her. He had explored in all ways, every other part, discovering responses that she herself had never known. Such orgasms left her feeling as if there was no spare flesh on her body. Immediately afterwards she knew how much they had separated her not only from him, but also from herself.
In the street her sight was sharper, all senses keen. In utter exhaustion, she was set totally within her own spirit. She laughed that she knew why it was that all the nice girls loved a sailor. He took her hand. It was as if the scale of their exhaustion was manifest only now that they were in another country. People spoke a different language, so they were more enclosed in themselves. She had not expected to make love during the afternoon, had imagined a decorous though perhaps less passionate encounter after a celebratory supper. Its intensity had divided her from him at a time when she wanted to be close, though the detachment seemed more in her than him. His care and attention was twice as necessary to get her back into the orbit of his affection, and therefore into her own. As time elapsed her tenderness and desire would return, and he was always sensitive to her when it did. What had started as an affair had become a prison that she could not bear to escape from, a prison in which she felt herself to be at least his equal because she was also her own jailer as much as he was his, prisoners and jailers both. He didn’t like the comparison, he said, but supposed it ought to be thought about, though for himself he never felt so liberated in his life – being on an extended holiday with someone he loved.
‘And it doesn’t frighten you?’
‘No. It’s unfamiliar, so fear can’t get a look-in. All I can do is thank God I’m alive, and enjoy it.’
They drank champagne at supper. ‘We’re not far from Reims,’ he told her. ‘When a German brigade had to pull out of the town in 1914 every man had two bottles in his knapsack. But we’ll drink to us, not robbery.’
She had never felt so deeply imprisoned in herself, packed hard into her limits by her own choice. It was a freedom she had often dreamed of, and wondered whether she could live with. If the spirit died, it would live again. Everything mattered. Her finger ends ached when they met against his limits. She liked it in her own prison, she told herself as he undressed her while she lay on the outer covers of the bed, taking the walls of prison within prison away. She wondered why she liked the prison of herself so much, why she preferred it here, and in fact whether she finally did or would for long. To be a prisoner meant that everything was so much clearer beyond the barred window. She could see it, but not yet get out.
Her clothes came off, and she couldn’t move, dead yet able to feel what he was doing, unable to look at him, and then spread out naked: I’m a respectable woman, and saying, ‘Fuck me!’ even while rage against having her unrelenting modesty violated went through her, and he organized her orgasm while any feeling at all was still with her and she felt that, as she came in a way that pierced her with both pain and pleasure, she was not any more or by any means a respectable woman, and hoped she never would be on feeling the implosion of his life discharging into her.
3
He moved her shoulder gently to and fro, and kissed her mouth. He was washed and dressed, spruced up in his jacket and open-necked shirt. She fought to focus, so that details of the room would become clear. Through her sweat she smelled his aftershave.
‘Time to get out of bed, my love.’
There was a knock at the door, and she pulled the sheet to her breasts. A maid came in with breakfast, and set the tray down, then gave a single accusing sniff (or so it seemed) and went out.
She wanted to shrink into the bed. ‘I’ve never felt so wrecked. Can I stay in oblivion for a week? Then I might recover.’
He smiled. ‘You look younger. Travelling agrees with you.’
She moaned, and wondered why he was so blind. She felt ninety. ‘For how long, though?’
He broke a croissant, and put a piece to her lips.
‘You’r
e spoiling me!’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘When you do it, I do.’ He was right. The world’s weight had fallen away. She sat on the side of the bed and looked for her nightdress. It was on the back of a chair, across the room. He ate hungrily, but paused to give her more coffee, pouring whisky from a leather-covered flask into both cups. ‘There’s nothing better for starting the day.’
Her underwear was on the floor, but she didn’t care. He picked it up and laid it on the bed, as if she ought to. But she liked it here. She was no longer respectable, and wanted to stay for weeks. ‘I wonder how Judy and the kids are managing?’
‘Well enough for us not to worry. While you’re having your bath, I’ll be downstairs paying our reckoning. Then I’ll nip along the street to visit a flower shop.’
4
The large-scale map, with burial grounds marked in green ink, had been specially produced from a War Office original by the War Graves Commission to illustrate the position of cemeteries in the Arras area. Percy had had it dissected and mounted on cloth, and folded into a leather case, with a flap which closed and buttoned over the front, and his initials embossed in gold lettering under the clasp.
Tom drove out of the valley of the Scarpe, and on to a minor road through Roclincourt towards Vimy and the Ridge. There was open land all round, and burial plots appearing by the roadside like allotments on well-fertilized soil sprouting their rows of headstones. She navigated him beyond the village and down a lane till they saw the green nameplate of the one they were searching for on a wall. He stopped on a gravel forecourt and switched off the ignition. ‘I’ll go in for a few minutes and find my uncle’s headstone. Do you want to come?’
She would, even if only to exercise her legs. He took the bouquet of lilies and carnations from the back seat. Such a notion of respect was an attempt to bring someone he had never known back to reality and place him squarely in a life they had never had together. At the same time, everything he did – she thought – seemed as if it would be the last action of its kind, a finality in each unfolding scheme, which made her feel unbearably sad, and protectively tender towards him. That he could be more vulnerable than she had ever been came as a shock, but that too helped to make their life together possible. She preferred not to ask what his plans were, wanting the childish satisfaction as each intention was revealed in action. She liked to indulge in the pleasure of receiving surprises, yet knew she had constructed these deceptions in order not to worry him with the desires in him which were so deep and personal that to bring them too abruptly into the open would cause him grief. Out of love she had manoeuvred this consideration of equals, assuming he would always do the same for her, since in so many ways he already had.
They walked between hundreds of headstones, some worn or slightly mildewed, but all in perfect alignment, the gravel neat, the grass clipped, not a weed to be seen. Most had crosses embossed, many had names, but scores were also nameless and bore the words KNOWN ONLY UNTO GOD. After sixty years they were cared for, perhaps still remembered in the families from which they had come.
He went a few yards in front with flowers held low. She was weeping with pity and a wracking pain, with terror and helplessness, sorrow and chagrin. She stopped. It was too much, this lake of graves. She hoped he would not see or hear, the wind turning her skin cold from tears that flowed on to her coat.
She rocked uncontrollably to and fro, with more despair than she had ever felt or given vent to, as if the collective spirit of so many dead were tearing out the life that so far had only raged uselessly in her. She couldn’t stop, but walked towards him.
He looked at the grave of Captain Phillips, Royal Engineers. Not under a cross, but the Jewish Star of David that his bereaved mother had arranged to be put there. A British soldier of the Star of David, he said. An officer and a gentleman in Jewry’s Book of Honour.
She held his arm while he talked. There were Jewish soldiers in the German Army too, he went on, Jews on either side doing their duty, and no doubt it happened that a bullet from one would find the heart of another. In the last war all Jews were on our side, except those who were caught and murdered by the Germans before they could be.
Her tears had stopped, though felt close to breaking out again. ‘There’s a lesson,’ he said. ‘We must never fight against ourselves. The two tribes in biblical days did, until the First Exile. Then it stopped, because there were other forces to contend with. After the so-called Emancipation, the European Jews served their countries as good soldiers, and as good everything else. But now we have a greater force against which to unite, and still for the sake of those countries that as often as not despise us.’
He placed his flowers under the Star of David. She kissed his cold face, and when he looked into her eyes he noticed her tears.
5
‘Where to now?’ They were back on the main road.
‘Boulogne. Navigate us via St Pol and Fruges,’ he said.
When the route became straight, he turned out behind a car to overtake. A horn screamed from close by, sending him in again. The driver of a yellow Ford pointed angrily to his side mirror to tell him he should be more careful.
‘He’s right,’ Tom said. ‘I must get a wing mirror to make it safer.’
‘When you want to overtake,’ she said, ‘let me know. I can look.’
Near Boulogne he followed signs for the port, and she wondered whether he had forgotten something in England that was important enough to go back for. If they made the crossing, she would feel Judy’s warm kiss, and tell her how full of uncertainty she was, how far afloat in spaces she did not understand, how lost among forces still incomprehensible. She would find comfort, even if only in talking for a few hours about things that didn’t much matter. It had taken her a long time to learn that one woman could mother another and call it friendship, and at the moment that’s all she wanted.
They were not going to England, but joined a queue by a railway line set apart from the quai. ‘We put our car on the train,’ he said, ‘and in the morning wake up in Italy!’
The heat burned into the car. They stood outside, and there was no breeze. She strolled to the end of the queue, wondering how to get a ticket and go back on the next ship whether he came or not. She could be with Judy by evening. She could be in London by tomorrow, and in Nottingham the day after that. She opened her bag. There was enough English money. But there was nowhere for her to go, nowhere she wanted to go to, only someone she needed without knowing why. It had become unthinkable not to be with him.
As if knowing what she thought, he left her alone. He would think the same. He stood, smoking a cigar, looking at long wagons on to which he would drive the car before they took their seats in the carriage. Their tickets were checked. The train was half an hour late in leaving, and he cursed the heat. A man in front cooled himself with a folded newspaper. Cars began to move. She watched him drive up the ramp. She had made her choice. On the way down, carrying their overnight suitcase, he didn’t get low enough under a girder, and bumped his head. When he swore she laughed.
6
He held her hand. ‘Let’s get on board.’
They leaned back in their seats and dozed, taken smoothly from the coast. By half-past five the train was east of Paris, stopped under a sunny sky among green fields, woods and orchards, with low hills in the distance. A halted train opposite was full of Spaniards, one of whom called out that they had come from Belgium and were going home on holiday. The heat was uncomfortable. A young Englishman understood Spanish, and translated what was said. There was a lot of unemployment in Belgium, they told him.
Pam was thirsty, and they went to the restaurant car. Tea and cakes cost five pounds, and she called it extravagance. ‘Blame the exchange rate,’ he said. The train rolled south and south-east. He took out a cloth map to show where they were. His grandfather’s signature was on the hardboard cover: ‘But the railway lines are the same.’
Window glass reflected their fac
es when it got dark. Inactivity made her sleepy. The noise and rattle was soporific. With darkness outside it seemed like travelling through an endless tunnel. They would never hit daylight again and see landscape. She would doze for ever, while Tom assiduously studied a multilingual phrase-book.
On her way from the toilet she opened the window of an outside door and heard the rush of wheels. If she unlatched the door and slipped she would be sucked underneath. The difference between life and death was a thrusting forward of the body, a twist of the foot. Even if there was nothing else to do she would never do it. Such impulses made life seem valuable.
‘I thought you’d got lost,’ he said.
‘I was standing by myself. One has to now and again. I might not be able to for much longer.’
He closed his book, wondering what she meant.
‘It sounds idiotic,’ she said, ‘and impossible perhaps, but I think I’m pregnant. I haven’t had a period for two months. Either that, or it’s something worse. But I don’t think so. I’ve been as sick as a dog the last few mornings.’
He hadn’t noticed. He should have done, he said. She’d mentioned it, but neither had made the connection. They hadn’t cared to. Neither had she – until now. So what else could the poor bloke do but smile? Pull the communication cord? He asked if she were sure. Who would be till it popped out? But the signs were there. It’s incredible, she said. I’m forty-one. She had lived in a dream and taken no pills. Maybe she was mistaken, but it had been impossible not to mention in this timeless train driving through nowhere. He was happy, she supposed, and certainly wouldn’t mind. She wondered whether there was any occurrence he would be disturbed at. If not, it was just as well.
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