‘You’ll go back to it,’ she said, ‘like I had to come back to this work after so long away.’ She liked people of integrity, but wasn’t sure that she liked his brand of it, so foreign to all the things she had been brought up to believe.
‘What do you do on these long nights?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t see any dance halls on my way into the village.’
‘I keep a journal when I can. I read, listen to music, make dresses sometimes, knit. I’ll show you where you’re to sleep.’
The stairs were steep, straight up, and narrow, and he followed a few steps behind. The long cardigan gave her figure a squarish, rather old-fashioned look, though the shape of her legs and the unmistakable sway above them redeemed her femininity. When she stopped on the tiny landing, there was some hesitation in her face. He was tempted to put out his arms, kiss her if she responded. But they had been talking too long which, for the moment, killed him with hesitation.
She pointed to the bedroom opening to the, right: ‘Go in, and I’ll get you some blankets. There’s only one sheet, so you’ll have to double it.’
A camp bed lay under the window, and in one corner a tank of four goldfish on a table. It had been the kid’s room; shelf of books, a football, boxing gloves, crayons and paint tin, whistles and Dinky toys jumbled into a tea chest. The walls were whitewashed — the first time he’d seen it used for other than ceilings — and it made the small cottage bedroom look bigger than it was. ‘A nurse in the next village is standing in for me,’ she said, dropping his blankets, ‘so I’m off for the next three days. Which means that I’m not getting up till nine in the morning, so you can just let yourself out early. Slam the door behind you to make sure it locks.’
‘I can’t thank you enough. I was done-for when I knocked at your door.’
‘You looked it,’ she smiled. ‘I must say. I expect you’re tired now, as well.’ They shook hands. ‘If I don’t see you, good luck.’ Then she went out, closing the door.
That was quick, he thought. She couldn’t get out fast enough. As if I might jump her here by the fish tank, and me on my last legs at that, though I’ve knee-trembled on no legs at all before now. It was hard to tell whether she wanted me to or not. It was hard to tell whether I wanted to as well. And on that, he was sleeping.
4
It was half past six and still dark, and a driving, wind-crazed rain rattled the windows. Gutters and drainpipes shuttled it musically across the garden path and Frank listened to its stream of consciousness from the warmth of his camp bed, hoping it might stop before he set out towards Lincoln. His first thought on waking was always, nowadays: ‘Where am I?’ The less comfortable his night’s lodging, the quicker came the answer. The space between oblivion and full consciousness was always disturbing, a basalt twilit vacuity, such a depth of neutrality that it was alien and torment to him. In factory days there was no space between deep sleep and dressing, and this new zone had crept into his experience since leaving them.
He stood on the landing. Outside, rain scattered its pellets across shining slates and the heavy blackening evergreen of autumn. No sound came from the nurse’s room and, shoes in hand, he stepped softly down stairs that creaked, vibrating so strongly into every room that he expected her door to flick open.
The kitchen was cold, in spite of the single burner left glowing, so he switched on others and set a kettle to boil, washed dishes from the previous night to the futile dizzying beat of Light Programme light music coming from an eye-level radio. An S O S message before the news requested Mr Albert Handley, last heard of at Skegness in 1943, to please ring Leicester Infirmary where his mother Mrs Clara Handley was dangerously ill. The dragnet was out for some poor bastard who lit off nearly twenty years ago, and even if he wanted to ignore this message he couldn’t because his mates at work this morning would say: ‘Hey, Bert Handley, is that you the wireless meant? Hard luck about your poor mam. When are you going? There’s a train at eleven-five.’ And maybe poor Albert will spit on his luck, or change his job, or hotfoot it back to his mam’s, just to see her out as a good son should. Which only goes to show how you can never be left alone.
A loud fry-up drowned the news. He sat to breakfast at the kitchen table, hoping the sky would run out of rain and let him walk dry-shod over the wolds. An hour had slid by since opening his eyes, and at this speed he wouldn’t be leaving till four o’clock. Newspapers flapped through the letterbox. He lit a cigarette, put up his feet to read. The Mirror and The Times. Out of curiosity he looked at The Times first: adverts on the front page, and most of the back ones full of stock exchange and company reports. A property firm made a profit of seventeen million, and a woman had lost her dog.
Eight o’clock. The kettle on again. Her larder was well stocked with the essentials of life. It didn’t seem right to leave without saying good-bye and thank you after she’d picked him up off the doorstep half dead from exposure and crippled feet, nursed him back to life even though he was a stranger. What a legend! Talking so much last night, it seemed as if he’d known her for years, even though he hadn’t been to bed with her. She was handsome as well as generous, an unbeatable combination which only came to him forcefully on the point of leaving.
He opened the back door and slopped out tea leaves. Daylight and rain showed a garden ending at a meadow, a clump of trees on the rise of it like a secret meeting of amateurish burglars whispering to decide which house to do tonight. The garden was dug over in patches, other parts gone to bush and speckled weedgrass, a few dead potato heads overlapping what remained of a path. A good plot — with a few months’ loving care, strong arm and boot. He remembered his night in the hut on Harry’s allotment before leaving Nottingham. The soil and damp smell was the same. But then, at that time, there had still been the scent of stubbled wheat and fallen poppy heads, potato tops, snapped runner beans and updug soil, vanishing scents of a receding summer that barely penetrated his rubbed-out brain as he zig-zagged towards the hut.
He had wakened to Harry’s spade rhythmically shifting soil outside. There was no one else he could visit after his goodbye to Nancy, so he’d left his car at Bobber’s Mill, drunk half the whisky neat between switching off the ignition and opening the door, then cut across the maze of gardens towards Harry’s. He let himself in with the spare key under the waterbarrel, sat on a stool and finished off the whisky, then slid to the floor.
He had twelve eyes in his face all trying to look into one another and, when succeeding, only meeting twelve more staring back into each fragmentation, and then into his heart calling him a bloody fool like the opening mouths of ten million goldfish. He pulled a hand to his face, sensing he could put his head in the crook of his arm and crush it like a walnut. Nothing remained but the fleshless knot of his headache, a fizzled-out brain. He stood up to find a cigarette, but fell down again, head thumping painlessly against the floor, a rubber ball dropped by somebody else.
Harry said: ‘I see you’ve had a drink or two?’ A fist came from Frank’s guts: that’s the way to talk! Harry the railway shunter out of contact with the acid and battery world; or was it just sarcasm? He was too far in to tell. Harry lit a paraffin lamp, stepping around as if Frank were a normal feature of the hut floor, some garden novelty such as a little boy pissing in a fish tank taken in out of the rain. Frank lay waiting until the anchoring ropes of earth and moon unknotted themselves from his head. He watched Harry pump a primus, and promise tea, while all he could do was tap his ankle and croak: ‘Water!’ when he bent down to hear what he wanted.