Her basic views were the same as before Frank had turned up. She liked the idea that he had stayed, like his loud unselfconscious concern for her, his tenderness in bed. Before, the solitary house seemed to die, to turn into a meaningless untidy shell whenever she shut the door behind her for a day’s visits; and returning to it, it hadn’t been so easy to get the breath of life going again. In fact it had become harder and harder, though she was resilient and self-possessed enough not to have admitted it to herself until now, when it didn’t matter. Things were different with a man in the house. Despite his long solitary walks a fire was always heaped up on the living-room grate, the radio just switched off, books put back on the shelves. If she thought to set a record on the wind-up gramophone, she didn’t need to work the handle or change the needle before it would go.
Her thoughts couldn’t much dwell on how he had come into the house. She must have been in some strange trance-like state, a dream almost, as Frank knocked at the door, and when she woke up, they were living together. It seemed like heresy to ripple the process of it by brute recollection — though at other times she felt ashamed that it had happened at all.
She knew little about Frank, though such a lack didn’t stop her liking him. Abiding by her natural talent for scrupulous honesty, she could like him for what he did rather than for what he was. Afraid of drawing too favourable conclusions, she could not let what he did act as a pointer to what he might become. Once bitten, shy forever. In that way, if there was a let down it would be gradual and not from very far up. If their love prospered and she really fell for him then that would be even more of a surprise and ten times as pleasant.
Frank went to the pub now and again, had his pint before closing time, and came back — more for the walk, he said, than the drink. One cold and starlit night he set out earlier. Pat had left the house at six on call, and he wasn’t at home when she returned at nine. She made a meal and ate by herself. The ten o’clock news was disturbed by the phone. ‘Hello?’ she answered. ‘Nurse Shipley.’
Button A was pressed. ‘Love? This is Frank.’
She smiled into the phone, surprised at her happiness: ‘Where are you?’
‘In the village.’ In spite of his closeness she thought the phone or line must be faulty. ‘But I’m blind drunk, so I thought I’d let you know. Then you won’t be shocked. I’m on my way back, but go to bed. Don’t see me. I’ll be O.K. I feel marvellous, but I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Even before the phone went dead she was laughing, her head back, happier than when she had first heard his voice a few minutes ago. She sat in the armchair, feeling as if she had just been told some hilarious story while still young enough not to have experience and age spoil it for her. The black years fell away, as if she were sixteen again and sensing the possibility of easier and freer days than those of puberty, waiting for a shattering experience that would release her from it.
She had no thought of going to bed and cutting off her day as he had wanted. This strange recall of youth and happiness was more mature than the actual one which had had the storms of her twenties before it. There were no storms before her now (she was so much a woman and sure of herself) and she was more capable of enjoying it because she knew what it meant without wanting to know the cause of it.
She looked around the living-room: decorated and set out with all the taste that remained from her marriage. She had scoured auction sales in the market towns, collecting furniture, books, lamps, odds-and-ends to achieve the harmony and comfort of a spiritual base. The house was her own — except for small mortgage payments each month. Twelve hundred pounds seemed paltry when set by the stature she now felt. The first payment and necessary modernization had taken her last penny. It was a venture, to accumulate all this, for who knew when she would have to give it up and go elsewhere? No one ever knew that, but if her life had taught her anything it had been to live where she was, to the maximum that could be achieved, and not to think about what she would be doing in a year so much as how she wanted to live at the moment. On reaching a new job, a new place, one must set down roots as if one were going to stay there forever. She had done this, and the fact of it was part of the present happiness that overwhelmed her.
She decided to put out all lights so that when he came in he’d think she was in bed. There wasn’t long to wait — which she was glad of, darkness not being a good cloak for the way she was feeling. His key turned, and she stifled her laughs as he bumped over the threshold.
It was hard to get much sense out of his words, but she felt his relief at thinking himself alone: ‘Blindoe,’ he kept saying. ‘Hate anybody to see me blindoe. Gutterdrunk. Where is she? Snoozing in a warm bed. What a night. A pint of mild and a double rum. A double rum and a pint of mild. The roundabout, as I explained; wouldn’t serve me. Well, I said, I’ll serve myself. Then he did. Didn’t want trouble. Neither did I. I wanted a drink.’
He was falling through the living-room. Hands, unable to get bearings, scooped a book off the table, went by her face. ‘Noise, noise — I’ll wake the goldfish. I’m in the bloody wrong room. Get upstairs, Frank.’ She thought it no joke at all, wondered how she could break it.
His hand touched her, and she laughed again, still at the same pitch of happiness. ‘I knew you were there because I’d seen you,’ he said. ‘Put the light on now, love. Only dead people sit in the dark, and I hate the darkness.’
‘You were so funny,’ she cried.
He blinked at the flooding light. ‘I’m sure I was. I suppose that’s your idea of a joke. Well, it’s better than snatching the chair from under me, I suppose.’ He pulled her out of the chair, dead sure and strong now back in the presence of her. The darkness had been grey and gridded, impenetrable. She spoke between his kisses: ‘You sit down, and I’ll make us some coffee.’
‘Don’t bother. I’m done for until morning.’ She had left him, was already plugging in the kettle, opening bread tin and cheese dish. He lay in the chair she had sat in, head back, feeling like a survivor on the rim of an explosion — thumped and thrown, drowsy and happy because it seemed that the earth, haying spared him, was his friend. He wondered: What am I doing here? This can’t be my home. I was never meant to land up here. But maybe I was. You end up where you were never meant to end up. He wondered what Nottingham looked like from the air, but fell like a stoned and frozen bird back near the middle of it. Recollections were never hazy: even half drunk they were sharp and concise in the meaning splayed out to him. I was meant to leave, and that’s true. On the Saturday morning of his departure, back from his car ride in the country when he’d given the soldier-lunatic a lift, he parked it and set off on foot down Boden Street, midday chips already steaming in their homely bins, a coalman coming back with his empty lorry, black-faced assistant resting his arse on the scales. The last few years had bored him to death and distraction. He’d even tried following his father’s advice and joining a working man’s club, but that was worse than sitting at home with the telly smashing one tab, and kids bruising the other with their screams and squabbles as he tried to get the guts out of some book or other. No politics, lads, and no religion. Just drink your pints and sling your darts, heads down for Bingo and look alive to win a fiver at the end. When you’re off sick we’ll look after you, lad, give you a bit of club money, like, and a seaside booze-up once a year. But no religion, no politics. Don’t think. Heads down. You’re all free as long as you do as you’re told. Legs eleven, bed and breakfast, key of the door. Heads down and look in, sink in that pound of treacle. Oh its own: number one; the messages fell sharp and fast.