‘And when I left I hoped with all my heart that everything would be peaceful and calm, that she would not betray me, that all would be forgotten and forgiven. I was in a good and optimistic mood on the way out and for the first few days, when no telegram arrived, I thought that life really could begin again. More days went by, and no news. I was happier, I think, than I’d ever been in my life. My business negotiations went very well. My brain was clear, and I bargained with more than usual firmness. I got to the stage of packing my suitcase, and I was on my way out of the hotel, with a taxi waiting by the kerb to take me to the airport, when a bellboy ran up and handed me a telegram. I read it in the taxi, lay back sweating and half fainting. I had visions of bloody entrails, while rain was pouring down the windows of the taxi. The streets outside glistened and jumped with rain — but it was a perfectly blue clear day, as you know. I felt my eyes change colour. I looked ahead and saw a huge horse lying dead in the middle of the road and blocking it, almost the whole of its side scooped out as if it had had some dreadful accident, a white horse, its head rearing in agony, as if trying to lick the vast red wound. She’d spent every night with him. I screamed at the taxi driver to stop, but he laughed and went right on through it. The white mare would be killed. There’s nothing else I can do.’ His hands were shaking so much that he dropped his fork. He didn’t try to pick it up or get another but finished the meal with his knife alone, which began to look sinister enough to me, as more and more champagne went into my stomach.
‘That’s no reason to kill somebody,’ I said. ‘Just throw her out — with her coat on.’
‘I don’t have the strength to do that.’
‘It’s still a bit rough, that she happened to marry a man who only had the strength to kill her when she did something like that.’
The stewardess poured our coffee. ‘I thought you were a writer,’ he sneered softly. ‘If you are, you ought to understand that there’s nothing else I can do.’
‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.
‘Time has stopped. There’s no more peace, not for one minute, any time, anywhere. That’s all gone and finished. No more peace, and no more love.’
‘You’re a saint,’ I said, ‘to try for those two things, the first saint I’ve met, on an aeroplane at thirty thousand feet as well!’
‘I suppose you think I’m old-fashioned?’ he said guardedly.
I thought he was drunk, but didn’t say so. ‘There’s no such thing as old-fashioned. I have enough understanding to know that much.’
With a sudden flush of good-will he reached over and shook my hand: ‘I’m glad you said that. You’ll go a long way as a writer.’ I held out my cup for more coffee, and got a hot spot on my trousers as the plane lurched. If it crashed, his wife would be quids in. ‘I feel better now,’ he said, ‘after that meal, and so much champagne. Perhaps I really have got a soul. I was beginning to doubt it after my ups and downs of the last week.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Maybe you won’t feel so bad when you get home.’
‘Oh, no. When I feel in this mood I loathe her more than ever. I can only murder when I feel in this mood. The bottom of the ocean is in my stomach. The top of the sky is in my lungs. My spirit’s flying between the two.’
He wasn’t crying, but tears were coming out. I lifted my glass: ‘Let’s drink to happy landings, anyway.’
He smiled, showing a very good-natured face, as if all his troubles had gone.
‘What I want,’ I said, confiding in him, ‘is to find a hideaway in the country where I can write in peace. The town is like a nutcracker crunching me. I feel I’ve got to get out and work.’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said. ‘While all this has been going on with my wife, we’ve occasionally talked about finding a place in the country where we can go now and again, and try to get back to our old basis of love. Of course, she never meant this to be possible, but it was a good reason for her to send me out of town to look at places as they came up for sale so that she could be free to go to her lover. Well, she won’t be free to go anywhere much longer. I shall be back in an hour, and then I’ll do it. I know exactly what I’ll do. But let me tell you what I found, an old disused railway station for sale in the Fen country. It’s been empty for some time, and nobody seems to want it, so I think you can get it for about twelve hundred. I’ll give you all the information on it.’ He reached for his briefcase, and handed me a few sheets of paper: ‘I’ve seen it, and you’ll want nothing more remote or quiet than that. I was going to take it before I came on this trip, but you might as well have it now. There’s a surveyor’s report in those papers. The place is in good condition, though it needs a few gallons of paint.’
I put them in my pocket: ‘Are you sure you won’t be needing them?’
‘Absolutely certain. I won’t need peace, or any place to hide from now on.’
‘Thanks, then,’ I said. ‘If you loathe your wife, don’t you think that’s a sort of love?’
‘In paradise maybe, but not here on Earth. I’ll never love her again. I can only love someone if I can finally trust them. Love is an extension of trust, and if you’re too young yet even as a writer to finally know what that means, Mr Blaskin, then you are lucky. But trust has nothing to do with whether a person can be trusted or not, if love is involved. The normal sort of trust is only an unspoken treaty of self-preservation between two or a group of people. When this has gone, and I am forty years old, there’s nothing left. The earth has slid from under me, and I am falling. There’s just one more thing to do on my way down.’
‘You know best,’ I said. ‘It’s your life. But thanks for telling me about that railway station.’
I followed him down the steps when we landed, stood far enough away in the bus to the customs hall to get a further look at him in his neat shirt and tie, well-trimmed beard, stylish hat, all of it impeccable enough to warn any woman off him. He stared out of the window and saw nothing, the corners of his mouth drooping so that nobody could say he wasn’t unhappy. I thought I ought to warn his wife about his intending homicidal crackdown, tell her to watch that split-level look to his eyes — that she had maybe spent all her life putting there. Still wondering whether I should do it I followed him from the bus and into the customs. By chance we went through at the same moment. I saw his head jerk, and he began to run, as if told to stop and surrender by someone only he could hear, but deciding to make a break for it against all chances.
Halfway across the hall was a woman, fair and slight in the quick view I got of her, wearing a discreet hat and a light grey suit, a faint smile of welcome on her face, as if not wanting to invest too much of a smile in case the bottom fell out of the market, and in case he shouldn’t see her smile but walk right through her like his taxi had driven through the dying mare. But I was wrong again, which is what comes of being a bastard, who is too often wrong. He ran towards her, and she saw him. I watched. They latched together like lovers who had not seen each other for weeks, a murmuring groan from each that I’d swear I heard if I claimed to have invented it. They kissed openly a couple of times, his grin fixed, hers still a modest smile with half-closed eyes as if she was taken up by a great force and couldn’t stop herself, but at the same time didn’t want to see anyone who might be noticing them, or indeed even acknowledge the strokes of lust that taunted her for coming straight to the airport from the Christian Woman’s Club. It was touching, and made me hungry for the same thing, a living advertisement for the love-shop. They walked towards the escalator, arms around each other as if they were both sixteen.