The Death of William Posters (16 page)

Foregoing coffee, he got out with his memories as fast as he could, on the road to Ely. Twice in this short burst of the rainy day he'd stumbled on places that brought back disturbing echoes, made off from each with relief and guilt at having strayed into them against his will. Life, he had known for a long time, was something of a battle between his objective and subjective worlds, and neither treatment nor willpower could keep it level. If he looked out of the window one fine day and saw cleansing sunlight on opposite roof-slates, a voice within told him that all would be black rain before he got into his car for work. But if by then the sky was still clear and warm, he wouldn't revel in it and bless his luck, but would see it as a sign of impaired reason, as another point scored by the interior subjective bully of himself. It won continually, by the bell and on points, but for once he felt the victor, saw his daylight swoop on Pat and her boy friend as a rational blow in a scheme to coax her back to the comfortable fold of his bijou gem and get some love and order once more into their lives.

But could he do it? He had doubts on this, as on everything, as each corpuscle of his blood must have had as it entered his heart full of doubt, and left it with the same feeling. Yet blood moved just the same, flowed through and kept him alive. Doubts, in the end, looking back on things, didn't matter. It was what you did that mattered, and what he did in this case seemed already halfway done. Confronting her, he would have to sell the product before she would buy – to put it in crude and workaday terms. His ability to probe the pseudo-masochistic impulses of the human soul, and lay them out as alluring symbols of acquisitiveness or greed, ought to help in an expedition such as this. He smiled at the thought. Christ, what haven't I sold in my time? Persuaded people to buy? The bonfires of conspicuous consumption had lit up the housing estates, flames dead already, dustbins emptied, ash cleared away. The world is a furnace, a boiler house, wheels within dark satanic wheels moaning above the backs of the H P-paying multitude. It would be nice if the reality were so stark and clear. Yet he liked to dwell upon simplicities, no matter how exaggerated. Simplicity was oil on the wheels of his chronometer heart, reaching even the poetic cogs of them, the last hope of the divided man who could never really put humpty-dumpty together again.

He had always regarded himself as something of a poet, more so after he had stopped writing, on leaving Cambridge. Not only did his self-respect need this reassuring memory, but skill at his job proved some truth in it. At his desk, blinds drawn, ‘
DONOTDISTURB
' hung on the door (not locked in case someone should need to on urgent matters), he sat with only a desk lamp shining on pen and paper, a dictionary and thesaurus to each hand while he struggled in the jungles of myth and nightmare, an unacknowledged legislator who, with others, ruled the world. He wrestled for days over a single phrase, surfacing with it in the end like a drowning man who had been pulled under more than three times, a cracker motto in his teeth that in a few weeks would be dazzling around millions of peak-hour television screens. He found his work profoundly satisfying, in spite of snide articles against his trade that popped up now and again in the toffee-nosed weeklies. Work kept him above the brimstone lake of final despair, and made him forget the pain of living without Pat. In the last year he had not suffered unbearably, it was true, but Kevin's revelation that she was living with another man had filled him with a doomlike blackness. This was understandable, in spite of the bull and treaty of legal separation. Yet he thought the blackness should not have been so thick, nor the doom so heavy. It was the way that Kevin, in all innocence, had told it to him, for in spite of his eleven years he hadn't really understood the full strength of what was going on. But if this was the case how could the force of Keith's righteous anger be caused by his son's corruption? He was given to honest and penetrating analysis, so long as it was in the interests of self-preservation, yet he was afraid to admit (half sensed and so shied back from) that he was jealous of Kevin being an approving witness of his mother's new happiness. Kevin actually seemed to like the bloody man, which meant that Keith in time was going to lose his son as well (no matter what the law said) – or his son's respect, which was even worse.

He swallowed all of it, the whole bloody lot, blinded by a diffused jealousy, afraid to drive too fast over the straight flat road. The one solution was for her to come back, so that Kevin could be at home, and the wheels of a blissful domestic interaction fall into place once more.

He began to feel dead beat on the tiresome crawl along the back end of Norfolk. Veering across the flat roads and frozen landscapes of English Holland, cutting the afternoon mist of the Wash only a few miles beyond the desolation of his right-hand side, the country was coated with frost, turned pink and blue by the sun, penetrated in all directions by the thin spires of village churches. In spite of his determination to hate the trip, he found this part inspiring, surrounding him with a beauty never expected, a soft glaze of green frost blending with mist and sky at every point that the car nose turned to. Cold, impersonal, natural beauty always mellowed him with optimism, burnished him with hope.

Fatigue grew easy on his back, and he imagined returning to London this long way with Pat, especially to show her such mysterious and favoured landscape, watch her face as she enjoyed it with him. Maybe they could get a cottage here, use it for long week-ends, and holidays with Kevin when he came from school. They could go to the desolate marsh beaches and swim in the high tide of the gulf, a map of which on a café wall showed intriguing names: Thief Sand, Roaring Middle, Blue Back, Mare Tail, Herring Hill, Inner Gat, The Scalp, Black Buoy Sand, Westmark Knock, Wrangle Flat – names to fascinate schoolboys, some perhaps that he could use in advertisements for a new brand of salt. Along the straight but minor road beyond Boston the Fen drains were grey with ice, and house roofs looked as if they had been patched with snow after a hailstorm or cyclone. The land was darker: ice and snow had been the last of his expectations.

Eyes ached at the constant road. A pain needled his back, gnawed at his ankles after the gear and acceleration work getting out of London and the long haul up. There's no one more determined, he grinned, than the man who thinks he might fail. He would stay up here for days, if necessary, no matter how much it would upset Carruthers.

10

All the rest of that day it was her intention to pack him off, but he was out when she returned, and in the lighted solitude there was time to calm herself, to realize that such action against a man she loved would be a defeat for her as much as for him.

But he went to the stair-cupboard and drew out his rucksack: ‘All right. You don't need to tell me. I'm off.'

‘Going away only proves you haven't the guts to face what you've done.'

He threw the rucksack down, a pair of shoes still in one hand. ‘I have,' he cried. ‘But have you? That's why I'm off. If I was in your place I'd never want to see my face again.'

‘What's the point in saying that? Leaving won't do much good either, though do it if you really want to.'

The lines on his face stood out. In the last few months his features had lost flesh, due to walking, exertion in the garden, the gathering in of fuel, and various repairs to the house. When she mentioned it he said that's what came from being in love, and living a new sort of life. At this moment his face was cast between the two big decisions. One of them she did not want him to make, but wouldn't say so even though her life seemed to depend on it. She saw the sky full of menace, crossed by long-tailed rockets that exploded on meeting, that threatened to descend and burn her life back into a solitude she could no longer face.

‘I don't want to go,' he said. ‘You don't even need to think of it. If I talk about what I've done I'll smash my head against that wall. But if I don't talk about it, I have to go away. You know what I mean? Yet you can't know, can you, unless I talk, talk, talk? I've never been much of a talker at such times. A thing like this is sure to stop me talking, and this is the time when you've got to. But I love you though, and that's true. If only I could talk, instead of eating myself up.'

I could talk to Nancy, he thought, and I can talk to other people ten to the dozen; I was fluent in the factory right enough, which caused all the trouble, but it was easier than this. He wanted to drag himself out by the roots, expose them for her, suffer. But it was impossible. She didn't think their quarrel deserved it from him in any case. They should simply give in and end it all, pull out before the burns went deep, walk to opposite ends of the house, get caught up by a different and superficial topic. She herself was already surfacing, but the blows had left greater marks on Frank, though it now seemed wrong that they should have done so.

He walked over: ‘Stand up, Pat.' She looked into a face from which no elaboration could be expected until the tension had worn off and so unblocked his heart, by which time they would be happy perhaps, and explanations would seem irrelevant.

Her face was level, faintly smiling. They stared at each other, and when they could no longer bear to, his arms were pressing her to him, as if she had been the one to think of running away.

She couldn't imagine where Frank had gone. Where was there to go in such a place? She'd finished her rounds, laid her bag on the dining-room table, took off her coat and hat after a hard day. They had all been hard, lately. Maybe it was winter grinding its way like a juggernaut and presenting her with too many sick. Snow still scattered over the lanes had thinned and turned to a stonier grip of ice.

Fields were darkening, houses and cottages with yellow eyes shining in the sharp dip of land. She plugged in the kettle, opened a newspaper. The light oppressed her, seemed to curtail her sight rather than clarify the small print. Feeling tired – it must be that – she put on her glasses. But still she could not read, uneasy that Frank wasn't in, surprised at it also, and smiling at how completely she lived with him.

The kettle shook her from drowsiness by a shrill cockcrow which she fled to stop. With Frank in the house there were two people to involve in her wishes, so no one could call her practical any more. She bent over a stack of logs by the hearth, to lay some on the coal. Practical people lived alone, had the run of their narrow earth. If they had any life in them they burned to death all by themselves. So it was either him or herself, and no one could tell who it would be. This was equilibrium perhaps, and maybe that was love. Balance, aid, interdependence, passion at the end burning these first three away like a sparkler, ever descending, ever decreasing, until the hand jumped and only the shock remained.

He had power over her, and she wasn't used to it. He didn't exude or revel in it, probably didn't even know it was there, but its truth was proved by the fact that he had struck her and was still living in the house. That blow had taken her power, upset the balance, destroyed her independence. She saw it in simple terms: either it was true or, if she was exaggerating, her character was flawed. Even to think such denigration pointed to how much her self-reliance had cracked, compared to the days when, in London, she controlled her house, child, and husband. Memory let her down again, showing how Frank, on the day of his arrival, had helped to clear out a larder stamped with chaos, the mark of a woman anything but ruthlessly efficient and self-contained. So the rot, she thought, had started before his appearance. But when, when, when? The inner fires of agony blazed just as painfully with a person you loved as they did with someone you hated. They also burned when you lived alone, facts which proved you were alive and could feel how much there was to be thankful for.

Getting up to close the kitchen door and stop a slow draught eating into her legs, she heard a car coming down the lane, a deceleration as if for a final drift into the village. It pulled up outside, wheels crunching the glass of frozen snow. She wondered who could be wanting her. It didn't have the weight of Dr Abel's stationwagon, or a police car. Her last thought, before the iron knocker flapped like a gun, was thank God something had come to snap away her useless self-questioning mood.

A figure stood outside: ‘Hello, Pat. Aren't you going to ask me in?' The voice penetrated her memory, a tranquil afternoon blown away by a cold wind nosing around. Neither of them knew how to make the next move. He immediately puts me into the same old role of deciding for us both. ‘All right,' she said, ‘come in.'

Light dazzled him. Such unwelcoming words had, secretly, been one of his expectations. ‘Sit down,' she said. ‘It's nice of you to come and see me, though I don't see why you thought it necessary.' Such irony made him doubt his own reasons. By nature optimistic, he was easily discouraged. The greater his effort to wring success from impulse and optimism the more likely was he to back down at the first snub. When the great fire blazed, the drop of water frightened – though not for long, because optimism would eventually frog-march him back to his obligations.

He smiled, glad that whoever she was living with was not at home. ‘I've been meaning to visit you for a long time. Out of curiosity, let's say. You seem to have a nice little place. How does work go?'

She was short of answers, except for blunt truth:. ‘All right. I bring babies into the world. Old people go out of it more comfortably than you'd imagine. I'm more use in a place like this. I feel a real person now.'

‘Meaning that I'm not?'

‘I only mean what I say. I've spent two years unravelling myself from that black knot we got into, so it's no use trying to put meaning into things I didn't even say. If you've satisfied your curiosity you can go.' She was aware of speaking too quickly, of saying too much. But Frank could walk in any minute and she wanted her visitor out of it.