The train going across northern France, towards a country he loved but never wanted to see again, seemed like a new home to him, a place he would like to settle down in on condition that it never stopped. He talked to a young man who had been teaching English in Madrid. A pale face, threadbare jacket and long hair made it seem a parsimonious living he had made. He was not glad to be going back to England, he said, hated the food, expense of wine and cigarettes, dourness and compliance of the people, weather, dirt, hard life and dogshit, ravelled up in his own tautologies and complaints. ‘Not that I dislike England,’ he went on. ‘I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as long as I can feel like a tourist. When that feeling stops I’ll have to swim the Channel, get back to sanity and the mainland.’
John’s eyes blazed, and the man grew silent, reaching for a bottle of Fundador brandy from one of his kitbags. He offered a drink, but John refused. Words went through John’s mind, insistent bangings at the back of his head so that he did not know whether or not he was breaking the sound-barrier and the person opposite was able to hear what he was saying. The country he was born in had, in the final throes of imperial rottenness, sent him to Malaya to fight for the retention of greedy mercantile piracy that he had no heart for and could never believe in. He had seen men starved and tortured to death — human, pathetic, mercy-pleading men — for wicked principles, a policy of grab-all and keep-all by the free use of men’s backs and blood. Since there was such base evil on all sides what was the use of surviving? And yet, around him during his imprisonment had been those who looked on with patience and cunning, waiting to assume the noble privilege of their own government and destiny. The soft-brained words blazed through him, circling at great speed the nearer he got to the coast. He let the window down for a fullblast smell of the sea, saw the open landscape billowing towards clifftops and a moving rash of white birds mute above the inexorable tread of the train.
He went to the door and opened it, held it from swinging out by the strength of his wiry suit-covered arm. As for England, he thought of its ageless and gentle countryside, mellow people with smooth and matey lives, and the ingrown spite of a failed and debased empire. Casual days without intelligence or equality, an octopus sinking back in clouds of inkiness and sloth, fobbed off by dreams and nostalgia for its vanishing manacled days. After all, one could see it at last, the English were an island people who had once been thrown into temporary greatness by a hundred-year bout of energy. They were insular plain-speakers once more who muddled through by clan and hierarchy, the eternal mean categorisation of a rattled élite, and a dead bourgeoisie, and the people who knew their place because they had taken into their systems the poison of centuries from this so-called élite, and into their bodies the serf-bones of degradation — except for the chosen few who were buried under the common mass. They stared such poison in the face as they flopped before telly or radio every evening after eight hours of labour which they at least enjoyed more though they would never admit it. They were all in all a good people, safe on their island, pottering around in rundown factories and protected farms. Frank had faith and patience, and did not believe any of this, and for him who had these qualities it need not be true with such devastating force that struck at John. Many people in the country had twentieth-century brains and energy but were held under by the eternal sub-strata of hierarchical soil-souled England. They didn’t even know how to pull themselves up by their own bootlaces, because they were made of silk and gold-tipped and might snap if yanked too hard. The soul of indoctrinated England was sprayed at the people every night like deadly insecticide, spew created by intellectual semi-demi-masterminds in the form of advertisements and songs of yesteryear, and those were the days, and these you have loved, and scrapbook for this and that, and as you were, and this is how you are as others see us, and O’Grady says, as you were then exactly and nothing more, and you’ll never be any different because that is how God made this right-little-tight-little offshore island and you should be proud of its past greatnesses.
He managed to close the door, sweat shining on his face. The train drew into the town and towards docks. Tonight he would be talking to Albert, Enid, Richard, Adam, Ralph, Mandy, Myra and perhaps even Frank if he was back already from Nottingham. He had neither sent nor received news since leaving two months ago, so was anxious to get the late train for Lincolnshire and bask in their congratulations for a great job safely done.
Yet when the ship crept out of Calais he considered staying in London for a few days. The delights of the wolds, and of his family, seemed as empty and unacceptable as the rest of the world. He did not even want to see Frank. There was no hurry, unless you lacked confidence and did not believe in what you were hurrying towards. He stood on the top deck of the ship, case at his feet, alone. A strong cold wind that rocked it among the waves buffeted him and played weird tunes in the aerial wires. Morse sang from the radio-operator’s cabin telling of gale-warnings and rising seas, the incoming weather of the final world in a language he understood. The last word was weather, elemental weather fearful to ships ploughing the white-green waves, a ship that bucked and furrowed, engines burning underneath it all.
The gullshit cliffs loomed out of drizzle and mist, sending a pain of hopeless love through him. England, he thought, if only you could begin again from nakedness, become a green infant born from the soil and salt sea, put a coat of all colours on your back of all colours, and start in intelligence and gentleness, but without me, without me.
He opened his suitcase on a wooden bench and hastily searched through it. Under the clothes lay stacks of loose papers in foolscap sheets, years of radio-logs compiled in his Lincolnshire room out of loneliness, a tenacious persistence in taking down radio-messages from a thousand sources in the hope of finding and hearing and recording for himself and everyone a message from some non-existent God or god-like fountain beyond all the layers of the stars that might contain the precious message of life that would fill him with energy, imagination and intelligence.
As the hundreds of sheets of paper covered with his neat writing scattered like birds and snowflakes and dead leaves over the arms of the harbour that the ship now entered John’s hand gripped the butt of his long guarded and loaded revolver. Forgive me, Lord; I know what I am doing. He opened his mouth wide, as if to shout at the pampered disputatious gulls of Dover and tell them to watch out for what was coming. Placing the barrel of the gun well inside, he tilted it to what he hoped in his final lucid moment was the correct angle, and pulled the trigger. The nearest gulls wheeled away sharply at the noise, and the humble abrasive boat-siren announced that he was home at last.
Chapter Thirty-three
‘Where have you been?’ Nancy demanded, as if he’d gone to the pub for some fags and come back two hours after the dinner had burned to a cinder. She stood aside so that he could set his suitcase in the hall. ‘The bad penny turned up again.’
‘How are you, love?’ he said, kissing her.
‘I’m all right. What the bleddy-hell was you doing all this time? How are you?