‘Going around Algeria. I’m fine, fit enough. Won’t you make me some tea?’ She’d altered little in thirty months, a few lines by the side of her hazel eyes, oval face paler — though everyone seemed pale in this country.
‘You’ve got a cheek,’ she cried, ‘leaving me all this time and then walking back in here as large as life and asking for a cup of tea.’
‘You didn’t expect me to crawl in, did you, and sup at the dog-bowl?’
She was trembling with surprise and anger, but managed to get the kettle under the tap and on the stove. ‘Why didn’t you send a telegram at least?’
‘You might have thought I was dead or something. I don’t like to frighten people.’
‘I suppose you wanted to see who I was living with?’
He noticed a uniform tunic hanging on the wall. ‘You live with who you like. I left you.’
‘You can hardly deny that.’
‘I don’t want to.’
She set out two cups. ‘Do you want some cheese on toast?’
‘Please.
‘I’m not living with anybody, except the kids, if you want to know. One bloody man’s enough in my life, especially if his name happens to be Frank Dawley.’
He pointed to the tunic. ‘Who’s is that? Where are the kids?’
‘The third degree. That tunic’s mine. I work on the buses, and I’m due on the afternoon shift in an hour. The kids are at school and when they finish they go to Mary’s for their tea. Then she comes and puts them to bed, so they’re fast asleep by the time I get home at eleven.’ She sliced dried-up mousetrap cheese onto toasted Miracle Bread and slid it back under the grill.
‘You look smart,’ he said, ‘in that shirt and skirt.’
‘I had to earn some money. I’t rather be independent than rely on a rotter like you.’
He embraced and kissed her. ‘It didn’t do either of us any harm.’
She snapped away. ‘The toast’ll burn. You do look altered, though, I must say. You’ve got less meat on you. And your hair’s gone grey. Did you have a lot to put up with out there?’
‘Not more than I could manage.’
‘So it seems. But still, you look in the prime as well.’
‘I had to get to it some time. Phone up the bus depot and tell them you’ve got flu.’
‘Pull up your chair and eat this. You make impossible demands on me.’
‘I don’t want you to dislike me, that’s why.’
They sat at the small kitchen table. Nancy drank tea. ‘I can’t dislike you, though that’s what you deserve.’
‘Is it? It’s not. You’ve never been out of my mind, you and the kids. In the tightest spots in Algeria, when I was close to being killed a dozen times — I don’t suppose you believe it — but you were all in my mind, you and others. I had to go out there for the sake of people like us, as well as to do what I could for the Algerians — all equally. I’ll tell you something about it soon. I’m not sentimental, but I couldn’t have kept up that sort of life for long if I hadn’t thought about certain people, good people whom I’d see again when it was over and if I got out of it.’
She looked at him, and their hands touched on the table. ‘Don’t let your toast get cold. You’d have wolfed that down at one time, without me telling you,’ she said. ‘I believe what you’re saying. But it’s been hard for us here. I’m not complaining though. I’m just telling you.’
‘I know, love, I know.’
‘But I won’t give up my job,’ she said. ‘Whether you’ve come back or not I’m going to stay independent. That’s one thing I believe in. If a man can be, a woman has a right to be. Nobody can take that from me any more.’
He stood to hang up his coat, then finished his meal. ‘Have you got four pennies for the phone?’ she asked.
Alone he wandered into the living-room. It was roughly tidy, the children’s toys swept into a corner. There was a new television set, and a transistor radio on the windowsill. The stair-carpet was badly worn. In their bedroom his record-player was closed up and wedged between the wardrobe and the wall, with a cardboard box of his books secured by string and set on top. On the dressing-table was a photo of himself taken three years ago, when he was twenty-seven, sporting his best suit and looking grim but youthful, a tight squat unopened face when compared to the grey middle-aged visage facing him in the mirror. Nearby was another photo, of a plain mannish sort of woman he did not know, with: ‘To Nancy, affectionately from Laura’ scrawled along the bottom. He assumed it to be some pal of hers from the bus depot — as if there weren’t enough men: though maybe not if they nipped off to Algeria and such places. The window looked on the untended plot of housing-estate garden, barren and frozen under the bitter haze of winter.
He went down and sat in the kitchen, poured himself another cup of tea, then ate an apple. He had come back out of friendliness to Nancy, and to see the children, and did not know what would come after this. He had undergone the discomfort of travel and war in order to obliterate and avoid the greater discomfort of life at home, she thought. But if that was so, why should he come back when the journey was finished? The truth was that for him it would never be ended.
She walked in, reddened by the cold air outside.
‘O.K.?’ he asked.
‘Just for today. I don’t like to let them down.’
‘Are you glad to see me back?’
‘You’re a stranger to me. I never expected to see you again. But the kids haven’t stopped asking for you, so they’ll be glad.’
‘That’s one thing’
She smiled. ‘Of course I’m happy to see you, you damn fool.’
‘I hoped you might be. You can’t kid me.’ Not that he would stay long, but he had gifts, and perhaps plans for them all. ‘Nobody ever leaves for good,’ he said, ‘unless they kick the bucket somewhere.’
In the living-room he emptied the scuttle onto the dying fire, moved coal around with the heel of his shoe, which he drew back to the carpet when a cloud of white smoke shrouded it. He remembered how he had left her two summers ago, packed and walked out one Saturday afternoon with few words, only the feeling of an unexploded bomb inside and the simple stark message that he had to go. His silence and her bitterness corroded all communication, so that the parting was inevitable and somehow too easy.
He sat by her on the sofa, drawn close to the flames. ‘You’ll have to tell me about Algeria,’ she said. ‘It must have been interesting doing something you’d always talked about. You are lucky. But I suppose you have lots of plans.’
‘Some,’ he said.
‘Do they include me? I’m not begging, don’t think that, but I just want to know.’
‘They’ll have to, I think. I’m glad the kids are all right.’
‘They’re fine.’ Simon was seven and Janet eight, and he saw a photo of them above the fire, augmented shadows of the smaller bodies he’d known yelling for first turn on his knee when back from work. He kissed her. Something had to take place before they could enter the sea of conversation both felt boiling inside and unable to break loose. ‘Let’s go up to bed, until they get back from their tea.’
She stood. ‘You won’t go for a few days though, will you? I’m glad you’re back for a while, anyway. Give me a few minutes, then follow me up.’
He didn’t wait for the bus, but made his own way to Myra’s from the station. He had grown accustomed to walking, finding the cross-country tracks and going from A to B in a straight line. It felt like a game he’d bought in a shop, a one-inch map from the bookstall and off he went on a seven-mile jaunt of mild English Trackopoly. Winter time, sludge on the footpaths — go back six squares; leave luggage at station — go forward ten. The space was small, but there was no one to run from yet, no need for lying low in copse or wood. Yet he was singling out patches of forest for the assembly of ambush groups, hideouts for murder gangs, secret routes for lone assassins, areas for concealing arms and food dumps, rearguard defence lines. At the edge of the town a car stopped and a man’s hand waved to give him a lift. ‘No thanks,’ he shouted. ‘I’m walking for my health.’ But the cold made his various scar-wounds ache, and he sat on stile or gate now and again for a smoke.