He mentioned it to Pat. ‘It must have been Waller,’ she said. ‘He’s not really so bad. He farms all the land down by Panton Moor, and owns the woods near Clayby. He breeds pheasants by the hundred, and his friends come up from London to shoot. He’s rich, one of a shipping family in Hull, and doesn’t get on with people around here though — the people at the Hall I mean. He’s one of the better ones, believe it or not. His children are great friends of Kevin’s. Waller lent him a pony last summer.’
‘He still sounded a right bastard to me,’ Frank said, thinking that maybe William Posters wasn’t dead after all, not by a long way. ‘He’s no right to have land that nobody else can walk on.’ Old Bill Posters of course would never have been caught, would have smelt the set-up and gone through gorse and pheasant farms in his usual sly way, so that even the watchdogs wouldn’t have stirred, and he’d have come out with a cockbird in every pocket and a hangdog daisy in his buttonhole.
They sat at the evening meaclass="underline" grilled steak and salad, bread and cheese. Lights were on, blinds drawn, and the fire humped red. ‘You see,’ she continued, ‘he gets a bit jumpy because people sometimes come in their cars from Scunthorpe and Grimsby, scare his pheasants and anything else that moves.’
‘I was on a peaceful stroll. Next time I won’t be.’ She saw him eating too well to be as angry as he made out. The walk must have seen to that. ‘If he’d known you were staying here he might not have been so brusque. He thought you were a stranger.’
‘Ah!’ he smiled. ‘You mean he smelt fifteen years of overalls on my back! The Lincolnshire wind hasn’t got rid of it yet. You’ve only got to stray a bit off a lane in England and you’ll find a notice stuck in front of you saying trespassers will be prosecuted.’
‘You’ll just have to ignore them, if you feel like it.’
‘But it’s still no good that you’ve got to.’
‘If you feel free, you are free.’
‘That’s the mentality of a slave. You’ve got to know that you are free.’ They were strangers still, and the hardest for her to bear were the long silences. Frank didn’t mind them, for they were his, and he could sit for an hour or through a meal without being embarrassed that neither spoke. He was unconscious of the silence until its meaning came to him, in a reminder of past noises that he was trying to forget. In the old days Nancy had always brought up the fact that something was wrong with their lives when the kids were crying, and he couldn’t stand crying kids, especially a baby — though he’d willingly agreed to himself that something indeed was rotten in their lives. He’d grown to put up with a lot since the first was born, of course, but the soulless noise of a crying baby lit up the dark spaces of emptiness within him, hammered in the roof to prove that no matter what vast emptiness was there at the moment, it would go on expanding into limitlessness if he didn’t flee from it. With such a noise and all its meaning it was a case of every man for himself, to run out and find something of substance with which to fill this vacuum lit by the cry of a baby. He didn’t follow his instinct and light off, but his reaction to it had at least pointed out that something was wrong.
Well, he had got over that, and didn’t know what reminded him of it so strongly, stuck in front of the fire with the village midwife who was now his mistress. A man’s manhood was tested by crying children and he had weathered it, or maybe only thought he had since it came back to him now with the force of an experience more agonizing than at the actual time. Why should he be noting his own rebirth by the memory of their birth, and grieving more for their loss than that of his wife?
Pat knew that he was only silent to her, and that in him were plenty of words that spoke loudly for himself, but because he never shared them she worried that one fine morning he would just get up and go, or that she would find the house empty on coming back from a call one rain-soaked afternoon. But perhaps one day these huge silences would melt into oceans of talk, to prove their growing regard for each other.
The fire blazed, in the wrong place, he thought, hardening himself to think so. It should be in me, instead of the damp ash I feel. She came back from the kitchen, and her face, utterly on its own and cut off from him, had nevertheless a beauty and dignity that he thought she might net even be aware of. He laid his hand on her wrist, squeezed it so that the veins met and hurt, held on as if the long hard grip were more necessary than the hour of unspoken words, a spiritual refuelling whose lifeline no words could latch into place.
She felt something good in his touch, a desperate healing of interrupted blood-flow, a contact between them that no words were at the back of — and that maybe joined both their wounds. He seemed to forget that she was there at all, as if, after the original impulse to touch her, he had lost all feeling for her consciousness close to his which had to be respected. This she did not like, drew her hand away, went off to the living-room and sat there with her thoughts — until he came in and greeted her with some pun or flippancy as if they’d not seen each other all day.
She asked about his parents, what sort of family he came from. ‘Your ancestors, for example.’
‘I ain’t got any,’ he smiled. Growing easier with her, homelier phrases occasionally tumbled through into his speech. ‘I don’t believe in ancestors. One grandfather was a foundry worker; the other a collier — as far as I remember the old man saying. Maybe we don’t go back any further than that. There’s no Adam and Eve in our sort of family.’ It was almost possible to believe him — his face momentarily bleak during the repose after his statement.
She wondered how much he thought of his wife and children, sensed that when he gripped her in a blind unspoken manner it was to hold back despair rather than prove undying love. She sympathized, yet disliked these moods that claimed him from her. When she had left her husband it needed countless solitary months before she could look at another man and think of love. But Frank had been away only a month so must still be neck-deep in the vat of it — and she refused to think that such upheavals were different for men, that they were more predatory, amorous, foot-loose and dominating (or whatever they liked to call it) than women. Maybe his love for this wife (or whatever he liked to call that, too) had been dug so deeply in after six years that the felled tree-roots still ached at contact with air and sky.
Frank complicated her existence, yet she was sure enough of herself not to refuse the first taste of love since leaving Keith. There had been no courtship with him on the morning he was supposed to leave, but neither of them needed the long sweet agonizing preliminaries that were essential for the naïve and inexperienced — or the idle and sensual. In these few weeks they had grown used to loving each other, love beginning from the middle of the fire and moving outwards to all its subtleties, delicacies and considerations from there. There was a liking between them; as between grown people who could never go back lightly on it.
He could know nothing of all this, she thought. Space and violence had been his lot, which wasn’t much to say for the world, but there had been more depth and contact in it. Now they were equals, which is to say that there was no depth yet for either of them, who shared the same house. But she reflected, intelligent and realistic, that they shared it at the moment anyway, for who could be sure when he would leave? To her the concept of love was based on a strong, honest, mutual exchange of feelings, and in this sense it was still impossible to think of the word love with regard to him. Maybe time was still to alter all that, though in spite of his gruffness, halfcocked jokes, occasional clumsiness, he was a comforting person to have in the house, to talk to, to have love from when they went to bed at night (sometimes when she came in from rounds that had dragged on all night).