When Handley left, he switched on, out of despair and away from it, electricity easing its weasel way through the whole superheterodyne system of valves and condensers and impedences. The magic eye came alive, green growing deeper and more vivid as if lid, pupil and retina had been lifted off the middle Polyphemus eye of God’s forehead, and was there for him to stare into. He searched and listened, when noise swelled into the earphones.
Handley got into the Rambler, knocked over a dustbin on a quick three-point turn, slid down the muddly lane like a barge, and sank between a line of bare-branched elms. He laughed, not really upset by the events of the morning. The god of the family had roared and scorched his hair, but that was all. Rain stopped as he wheeled onto the paved camber through the misty village. A few mid-morning light-bulbs glowed in cottage windows, and a group of men were making their way to the pub from work. He turned right for Catham and climbed a steep hill as if to roar into the sky, but he levelled at the top and went at seventy along the narrow lane.
Steaming fields beyond the hedges were humped and rich after winter, smells of earth and moisture reaching him through open windows. It was good to get away from the pointless bloody savagery of that house, that fogbound ship without lifeboats, and liable any minute to sink or go up in flames. A band of faint smoke stood up straight from a farmhouse chimney, and when his eyes came back to the road a large black jack-rabbit slipped from hedge to hedge.
He stopped the car on Bluestone Ridge, tasting silence of the indeterminate season, spring emerging from a brittle rat-trap of winter. Air was clearing over Catham and the flattish patchwork of fields by the coast, and he imagined slugbreakers coming in on slow rebounds from the vast level sea, flaking phosphorous breaking on shrub and gravel, as he had seen it so many times when walking on empty bereft beaches without a shilling in his pocket, waiting till dusk before starting the twenty miles home if he didn’t get a lift, back to Enid and the kids with their reasonable wants and he unable to do much about them.
Buds were sharpening on hawthorn hedges, and when the wind stopped drifting it was almost warm. Below a wood on the opposite hillside a tractor crawled along the furrows, breaking silence, undisturbing under the clouds. Every so often he felt it was time to make a change in his life, yet he distrusted this as the promptings of chaos. To swing violently onto another course was certain to kill your work for a while, and at the moment it was going well. He was deep in the industry of it, and only questioned it after some heart-shaking quarrel at home that set him to wonder whether he was living in the best possible way for his work. Such quarrels fragmented his confidence, and that was always bad. Yet without such threats, he smiled in the sweet headclearing air, the very force behind his work would rot.
He joined the main road and dropped two hundred feet towards Catham where it was raining again, a steady drift of fine spray against slate roofs and cobbled streets. It was almost as quiet as the countryside when he drove under the railway-bridge towards newer houses sprawled on the far side of town. She was in, he saw, even before turning into the crescent. Smoke came from the chimneypots, and her Hillman Minx stood outside. He could smell the sea as he stood to lock his car, grains of wet sand crossing the flats from Toddle Fen. There’d been no thought of coming to see her, yet in fleeing from home he’d landed without thought on her doorstep.
He hurried up the gravel, a tall figure bending from wind hitting the back of his head. Curtains flicked at the window, and the fancy glass panelling of the door swung open before a hand came out of his pockets to knock.
‘Hello, Albert!’
He stepped by her into the halclass="underline" bookcase, holding Principles of Banking, Practical Knowledge for All, Complete Ornithology and a few deadbeat thrillers. Then an umbrella-stand, mirror and coat-rack. ‘I thought you’d be out, so I came to see you.’
Her laugh stayed. ‘As long as you aren’t disappointed.’
‘I can’t tell yet.’ He pulled her to him, tall and buxom, long brown hair falling away. ‘Breadwinner in?’
Her brown eyes opened wide. ‘He’s gone birdwatching. Heard of some wild geese mating near the Wash. Went out at four this morning — instead of going to the bank.’
‘I hope they take their time over it.’ Sitting by the coal fire in the living-room she asked how things were at home. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t betray my wife if everything weren’t perfect between us. That’s why I haven’t been to see you lately. Too many rows.’
She was thirty-eight, a schoolteacher, strictly career woman and to hell with her husband when it came to a sweet knock or two on the side. Handley had met her in the bank on a Saturday morning, dropped one of his cheque-books, and who could ever say whether it was accident or design? If a handkerchief’s the only thing a man’ll pick up that a woman drops, he thought, a cheque-book’s the only thing a woman will remind a man that he’s dropped, whether it’s her husband or no. He stood on the bank step admiring the beautiful seventeenth-century houses round about like a tourist from the Home Counties. She tapped his shoulder: ‘You seem to have dropped this.’
‘So I have,’ he smiled familiarly. ‘How would I have got through the weekend without it? I only found it this morning, and was getting used to affluence already.’ Large brown eyes looked back at him, lips opened in a smile to reveal teeth that went well with ear-rings and fur coat. Mrs Joan Quickie in his mind’s eye, until she gave her real name.
‘If you did find it,’ she said, though not too certain of his seriousness, ‘don’t you think it would be a good idea to give it back?’
The chill autumn went through to his glum face: ‘Would you like to come for a drink with me so that I can think about it?’ — offering her a cigarette while she made up her mind.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then let’s talk standing here. I’m very much attracted to you. Handley’s my name. I always am to someone who wants me to go straight. As a matter of fact I took it from the pocket of an old suit this morning before sending it to the cleaners. Did you think I’d really knocked it off?’
‘Not altogether,’ she said.
‘Let’s walk along. We’re nearly at the Queen’s Head. Good fire in there. You were coming out of the manager’s office. Been to get an overdraft?’
‘The bank manager’s my husband,’ she laughed, walking a few steps.
‘I’ve never known a bank manager to have such a personable wife,’ he said.
‘You live and learn,’ she said as they went in for a drink.
‘Now and again,’ he responded, taking her arm.
Her name, after all, was Joan, but Mallinson, though she was quick enough when it came to the point, which it did when he thought to call.
‘I’m glad to see you, though I don’t suppose I should say so to someone like you. Where have you been this last month?’
He took off his jacket and stood by the shelf. ‘Painting. Finished a few things.’ The morning papers were thrown over the padded velvet sofa. ‘I saw that article,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose your wife felt too good about it.’
‘Let’s not talk about that. Is there any coffee?’
‘I’ll get some.’ Before she could move he held her to him. ‘You had a quarrel,’ she said, a teasing smile.
‘Not exactly. The pots didn’t fly.’ He took off her glasses and set them on the shelf.
‘But you did,’ she said, ‘here.’
‘Shut up, and let me love you. I know you’re a happily married woman, but I’m a happily married man, so it’s not sinful.’ The day lay quiet over the house and whole road, keeping the world silent for them. Only the antique clock wrung out its bomb ticks from the shelf above. His hands were up under the back of her sweater, flattening between shoulder-blades, while her mouth writhed around his face, opened over his moustache and lips. ‘Come and see me more often,’ she said. ‘You can always phone to check whether it’s all right.’