“It’s him,” she said without looking round, just as Leslie, climbing downwards and backwards, descended into the cabin. Sometimes he did that, although the steps were broad enough for a person to come down the other way. I supposed he had been drinking heavily after I left.
When he turned round my first thought was that he knew about Ella and me. He looked at us, from one to the other, without speaking, and then he slipped off his raincoat and hung it up on a peg. He sat down at the table opposite me and looked at his folded hands on the table in front of him. The lamplight accentuated the scarred and dust-pitted surfaces of his stubby fingers.
“You two are bloody quiet,” he said.
“Pity you aren’t,” Ella said without turning round.
I glanced at her. It was as though she had suddenly become herself again. She was putting on her apron. When I looked back at Leslie I saw that his face had changed too. He had that hurt, sullen expression on his face that a drunk man has when he is afraid of a woman and unable to answer her back. He looked out of the corner of his eye at me.
“What’s up, Leslie?” I said.
“I know damn well what’s up!” Ella said harshly, still without turning round. “He’s been losing money at darts again. Then he comes back here and tries to take it out of me! Just you shut your damn mouth, Leslie Gault! You’ll get no rise out of me!”
“I never lost a penny at darts!”
“You’re a liar!”
He looked as though he was about to strike her, but evidently he thought better of it. He said instead, a cowed tone entering his voice: “Is the tea ready yet?”
“Wait your hurry! Do you expect to come back at this time of night and have us all at your beck and call?”
Leslie drooped. Ella’s back was still towards us. Looking at her now I realized that you had to think in terms of two women, his and mine. His was hard. I could understand his dumb frustration, even sympathize with it. Mine he had probably never known. It was difficult to square what I supposed was his experience of her with the woman who, half an hour previously, had bared her belly for me against the boarding and then sunk downwards through my arms on the grass.
The cabin clock, a little brass clock nailed above their bunk, struck ten. Ella was now brewing the tea, and Leslie, apparently recovered from his loss of face, asked me what I thought of the mangy write-up of our discovery in the paper.
I said I wasn’t really interested.
“They always catch them in the end,” Leslie said.
I didn’t reply.
Ella poured the tea. She had removed her apron again and I felt her leg close to mine under the table. I put my hand on her knee under her dress and let it lie there, just moving my fingers slightly. The flesh was warm and putty-like. She made no attempt to restrain me. But she didn’t respond nor show in any way what was happening to her either. We sat like that, talking in a desultory way of nothing in particular for about half an hour, and then I turned in and left them together in the main cabin. I could hear their voices talking on for a while as I lay there in the bunk with the blanket drawn over me until the light in their cabin, which penetrated through the seam between two of the planks in the partition about a yard from where my feet were, was suddenly put out. After that I couldn’t hear what they were saying and anyway wasn’t interested. They were talking as husband and wife talk, and that had nothing to do with Ella and me and our coming together. Leslie was irrelevant. Presently he began to snore. It suddenly occurred to me that she might risk visiting me during the night, but I put the thought away from me again. She wouldn’t do that. I lay awake for a while. I could still feel her skin against mine, like smooth rubber surfaces meeting, and I supposed she could still feel me, even though she was in a bunk with another man. In a sense she wasn’t with Leslie at all but there with me all the time, in touch, in smell, in traces on my skin and in my nostrils as I fell asleep.
I closed my eyes. I listened to the lapping of the water against the side of the barge.
5
THE SLOW LICK OF THE WATER against the belly of the barge was still present when I awoke, as though during the night it had guarded the connection between states of waking and sleeping, the noise of the water only, for my cabin had changed under the pale log of light which entered at the port, defining clearly the greyness of the blanket, the chipped varnish of the plank walls which closed me in. Often when I woke up I had the feeling that I was in a coffin and each time that happened I recognized the falseness to fact of the thought a moment later, for one could never be visually aware of being enclosed on all sides by coffin walls. As soon as one saw the walls, as soon as light entered one would no longer be cut off and so the finality of the coffin would have disintegrated. And then I would be conscious again of the sound of the water and of the almost imperceptible movement of the barge in relation to it.
That morning I was awakened by the smell of cooking bacon and by Leslie coughing in the main cabin. Leslie always coughed in the morning. You would have thought he was coughing his insides out, a big rasping cough which began somewhere deep down in his chest and ended with a struggle in his throat, as though all the poisons in his body had collected in his lungs during the night.
The convulsion lasted about five minutes and then I heard him banging out the dottle in his pipe on the side of his bunk. A moment later he would have it filled again and he would be sucking the flickering match flame into the heavy sweet black tobacco.
I ate a square of chocolate and as I screwed up the wrapper the fact of Ella gradually dawned upon me again, a small needle-sharp excitement above and behind my loins. Ella. I was glad the day had arrived. Everything was changed, including my attitude towards the barge, towards the canal. For the first time for weeks, I was looking forward to getting out of bed.
Not long afterwards, Ella opened the door and came in with my morning cup of tea. She gave us both a cup of tea in bed every morning. Usually she came into my compartment, laid the cup on the orange box which served as a bedside table and went out again. Usually, if I bothered to look at her face, I saw hostility there, at least impatience. This morning it was different. I watched her hesitate in the doorway with the cup in her hand. Then, without speaking, she put the cup on the box but instead of going out immediately she dropped down on her knees beside the bunk and ran her hand under the blanket over my body and down the side of my flank. I tried to lay hands on her, but she evaded me with a laugh.
“Drink your tea,” she said.
She waited until she saw me drinking it before she went out again, and then I heard her heavy walk on the wooden floor of the main cabin. I closed my eyes. Each time her feet moved, the impact of her foot on the floor would send a minute quiver up the sinews of her leg into the ambiguous and tensile mass of her broad thighs. I could almost smell her again. I felt suddenly relaxed.
I was standing on deck. I was looking along the canal bank, and there, about a hundred yards ahead, was the hoarding and the grass verge where we had lain down. About twenty yards behind the hoarding was a cottage of whose presence we had been unaware the previous night. We had made love almost in its garden.
“Nice little house,” Leslie said.
I nodded.
We both looked at it for a moment and I wondered if the situation was as artificial for Leslie as it was for me. It was as though, because we had nothing to say to each other, we had tacitly agreed to feign interest in the same thing, for the cottage must have had different associations for him and for me, and it occurred to me that human beings often compromise with each other in this way, choosing what is apparently, but each knows certainly not to be, a point of contact, simply because to admit openly that no point of contact exists is to imply the superfluity of the other, and thus to undermine his very existence. And so we looked together at the same cottage and I said: “It needs reslating, though.” And Leslie, catching the thread, a matter of unconscious habit for him perhaps, went on to say that reslating was expensive these days
, and so the shuttle moved backwards and forwards between us, neither of us willing to interfere with the glib mechanism, not at least until an alternative point of contact suggested itself, and what we said was trivial but our saying of it was not. That was often the way between Leslie and me, and since the previous night the actual distance between us had increased immeasurably because I was aware of something which concerned him intimately and was unable to speak of it.
Conversation was difficult that morning. Leslie thought of something for us to do, I forget what exactly, with a hammer and nails, and Ella came on deck with her shopping basket while we were doing it. She watched for a few moments and then, without saying anything, she went along the canal bank and out of sight into the road leading up to the church. Leslie was more involved in the job than I was. As I bent down over the wood, I watched her walk away swinging the wicker basket by her side. I never get tired of watching women walk, especially if they walk as Ella did, with slow, heavy movements and a spring that did not come to the surface but vibrated at the thighs and at the haunches like a force held in check.
“Mind your thumb,” Leslie said, “or I’ll cut it off.”
He was grinning at me and I found myself steadying a plank for him, and Leslie with a three-foot saw in his hands. That surprised me because I had not been conscious before either of the presence of the saw or of the new position I had taken up. I moved my hand slightly.
The moving saw began to retch its way into the wood.
“Think it’ll rain?”
I looked up. The sky was beginning to be overcast, as though part of it were being stained gradually at its edges by the other part, while the sun, obscured now, was bright in reflection, quite cold, and appeared behind the darker part as a shatter in glass.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“We’ll go down and make a cup of tea,” Leslie said. “There’s nothing much to do anyway.”
The canal was choppy at the surface.
We were drinking tea when Ella came back. She had been caught in the rain, soaked to the skin, she said, and she got behind me and changed her dress. Leslie was reading the morning paper which she had brought back with her, and presently he looked up from the paper and said: “Not a word about it here, Joe. An old woman’s had her head bashed in in Paisley, but there’s nothing about our one.”
Behind me, I could hear Ella’s movement and her breath seemingly caught up and let out again as she stepped into dry clothes, and there was a sliding sound, soft, prickling slightly, as they passed upwards over her legs and thighs. I was conscious of the smell flesh has when it has been close to garments soaked by the rain. I fought an impulse to turn round. Then her voice said:
“What’s it to you anyway? Can’t you leave her alone now she’s dead?”
Leslie grunted inarticulately. When he spoke it was to say that the old woman had sat upright in her armchair for three days after she was dead and if the milkman had not noticed that her milk remained uncollected at the doorstep and reported it to the police she would still be there dead, with her head bashed in, in the empty house.
“Funny that,” said Leslie brightly. “Sometimes you don’t know what’s under your own nose.”
Lunch went much as usual. I touched Ella once under the table. She flushed faintly and went on eating. The kid talked incessantly but none of us was interested in what he was saying. When we went on deck, the rain was off, but over the fields and the canal gusts of whiteness blew, not rain, but damply wild, visible only when they thickened under the force of the wind, making the atmosphere bracing and uncertain.
As I stood at the wheel and we moved slowly along the canal, that uncertainty communicated itself to me, making me impatient to be with Ella again, and I wondered what she was doing, thinking, if she was waiting down there below, also fidgeting and impatient. I imagined the warmth of the cabin, the wood, the leather, the stove. Had I been alone on the barge with Ella, I would have tied up to the bank. In the cabin we would have been aware of the weather but untouched by it. The barge would have rocked gently as she climbed naked on to the bunk for me.
Later in the afternoon, Ella came on deck to hang up some wet dish towels. She did this near the stern where the wheel was and I had an opportunity to speak to her, but she was evasive, pretending in the wind not to catch what I said, and when she had hung up the towels she went below again. I had the impression that she was slipping away from me. Leslie went below then. About ten minutes later, he came back on deck with a cup of tea for me. He took the wheel while I drank and my eyes returned to the landscape where, whitely, in gusts, the trees and fields were swept as though by invisible brushes.
As evening approached, Clowes came in sight: another small canal town, more industrial than Lairs.
We noticed the fair immediately. The marquees were pitched in the fields to the left which bordered the canal, and the hurdy-gurdy music was suspended in the atmosphere for a long time before we saw them, or the stalls or the brightly painted caravans and lorries. Jim was up at the bows in his usual place, only now he was excited and gesticulating frantically and soon Leslie went forward to him and they spoke and then Leslie lifted the kid on his shoulders so that he could see better what was there. Ella too came up from below, looking questioningly up round the hatch. She had heard the music.
I realized then that the fields were out of the question that night, even supposing I succeeded in getting Leslie away from the barge and got back myself. I felt Ella look at me and look away. She was finding fault with me, I felt. Ever since she had come on deck to hang the towels up, the feeling that she was sliding away from me had persisted like a toothache all afternoon, and now her glance and the way in which she turned away again without a sign and without speaking confirmed my doubt. I almost called out to her, but when she disappeared below again I was glad that I hadn’t because I would not have known what to say. Leslie came back along the deck towards me.
“See it?” he said, nodding backwards over his shoulder. I nodded.
Leslie sat down beside me and we both looked and listened. Then, on the towpath not far ahead, we saw a man. He was sitting on the grass verge, leaning forwards, his shoulders hunched, his chin on his chest. As we approached him he did not look up.
“Tramp,” Leslie said.
“Not much of him.”
Leslie glanced at me.
“The tramp,” I said. “Look at his boots.”
Two white sticks, the shins unsocked, like a thin neck from a collar, thrust upwards from split boots. The man’s head under the old fedora remained tilted upwards as we passed.
“Can’t hear us,” Leslie said.
“He’s not interested.”
Leslie tapped out his pipe on the deck.
“Scare the birds,” he said.
“Poor bugger.”
“A man won’t work,” Leslie said.
“Not much work left there,” I said.
“For the crows,” Leslie said.
“Or the rain, Leslie.”
“You’d be surprised,” Leslie said. “A few nights in the open. They get toughened to it.”
And we both looked backwards but the man hadn’t moved. He was folded like a penknife at the waist as though for the last time.
“Might be dead just sitting there.”
Leslie laughed incredulously.
“You never saw a dead tramp,” he said. “They don’t die like the rest of us.”
“Who buries them?”
“A pauper’s grave,” Leslie said. “But they don’t die in the open. They go indoors to die.”
The music from the fairground was louder now and we could see the brass poles of the roundabouts spiralling upwards and downwards, faintly flashing gold.
“Not much farther,” Leslie said. “We’ll tie up along there.” He indicated with his pipe: “See, just beyond those trees.”
“Do you think he was dying?”
“Who?”
“The tramp.”
/> “Drunk more likely. Might take a look at the fair tonight, Joe... what d’you say?”
“Sure,” I said, “it might be interesting.”
Leslie was looking back again.
“There he goes,” he said. “Jesus, just look at that, will you?”
The tramp had shifted. Still bent, the crumpled trousers tight on his shanks, he was moving off in the opposite direction, more like a windmill than a man.
We tied up a few minutes later. And then Ella was calling on us to come down for our tea. The kid had had his hair brushed. It was wet round the edges and stood up like stalks on his flat head.
“You can think of your son for once and take him over to the fair for a while after,” Ella said.
“What about you?”
“I’ve got work to do. You take the boy.”
Ella hadn’t looked at me since I had come down, but the thought hadn’t occurred to me until she spoke because I had been thinking almost exclusively about the tramp and wondering whom he reminded me of.
It wasn’t a direct resemblance, but there was a connection somewhere with someone. Something vaguely familiar. I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until later. The familiarity was the familiarity of limbs out of control, of something missing that should have been there, the absence of which, more telling than what remains, strikes at one deeply, almost personally, making one feel that one is face to face with the subhuman. The dead are like that, and the maimed, and the tramp was. As he moved off in the opposite direction, a triangle of white afternoon light dangled between the raking black legs, the hoop of his back supported arms twisted horizontally, like a tuberous root above them, and the head, a knob under the hat brim, looked in no direction as though direction were irrelevant now, and the canal and time and the barge which had passed him while he sat folded up on the grass verge were irrelevant too, all except the gratuitous movement in which he was involved and which was not his own because somehow the man was absent from it. He had come close then to my memory of the corpse in the water, which was only a movement of limbs, less rigid than his but in some unmistakable way the same.
Young Adam Page 6
