Such intensities subdued them during the days that followed. Waking up, Frank felt he had been wrenched by a claw-hammer out of a week’s sleep. But he was downstairs before Pat, often while it was still dark. A lorry had dropped off a load of trunks, and he’d set up the horse by the back door, got to work in the bleak air with jacket loose, drawing back the teeth that he’d filed one by one to sharpness so that his rhythm caused streaks of sawdust to mark the asphalt, and created a log-pile by the kitchen wall. At eight he filled the house with a smell of bacon, took breakfast up. They talked, and he watched her put on her clothes as if, he thought, they belonged to someone else, looking at each item as if she’d never seen it before, examining it for cleanliness rather than colour or style. ‘You were up early.’
‘I felt like it. I always do after the sort of love we did last night. It turns me into a new man.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ she laughed. Sometimes when the phone snapped her out of bed she dressed in a few minutes, ruthlessly. He hated the noise of it, had used one rarely enough in his life to know he would never sound otherwise than a hung-over aborigine when forced to listen and make words at it. Her self-possession when called to it at certain moments never stopped surprising, and, in a way, pleasing him.
She pulled on her long woollen underwear, and fastened her brassiere — something which he considered her breasts could well live without. Occasionally she left it off, and he would kiss her from behind, his hands roaming the nakedness under her sweater. ‘I thought I’d get the bus today into Louth,’ he said. ‘Buy some things we need.’
‘Take Kevin if you would.’
‘I was going to. You know, love, I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be better for him to live here all the year round.’
‘I’ve thought about it, too. But I’m not sure he’s not better off at school. He’s settled there now, and likes it. Apart from that, his father wants him at school, and I’m afraid he has the final say. You see, I was the guilty woman who abandoned my husband and child.’
‘Well,’ he said, with a hollow laugh, ‘you can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.’ He thought she was making this up as an excuse, on the assumption that if they all settled happily together he’d go off one day and leave them high and dry, murder their bloody happiness. She must have had a few knocks in her life if she imagines that. He couldn’t tell her all this, but he put his arms around her. ‘I’m with you for good, love, you know that, don’t you?’
‘I know you are.’
‘Don’t smile. It means you’re not sure.’
‘If I didn’t smile I’d be lying.’ Her lips hardened, ends pointing downward, a sign of boiling sands beneath. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I want to believe that you feel sure about me,’ he answered, standing by the window, his back to her.
‘That’s up to you then, as well.’
‘I know.’ He turned, and she was already dressed: a heavy brown sweater, skirt, thick stockings and shoes. ‘You think I don’t know it? But it seems easier for me to feel sure.’
‘We’ll have to wait and see whether it does.’
He felt as if an axe had chipped through to the ashes in his stomach. Her eyes rounded, but she wasn’t smiling: ‘That shouldn’t have sounded as hard as it did.’
‘I’m able to wait and see whether it does, whether you’re sure of me.’
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
He turned on her: ‘That’s the trouble. We love each other. It’s too easy to say. Maybe we only think we do, which would be better as far as I’m concerned, because there’d be some hope for us of a real love then. There’s too much missing still. In the last few months I’ve had my guts ripped out and put back again. After last night I can’t stand to look at anything. I can’t think at all.’
Tears were falling: ‘What are you trying to do to me? To get from me?’
It was an effort to stay calm, and embrace her: ‘It’s what I want to give you,’ he whispered. ‘We’re trying to make something here.’
She grew quiet and they went downstairs.
The days were short, occasional sun. Frost would have been better, for mostly it rained out of low cloud that swirled as mist along rolling tops of the hills. Bare hedges and trees were laden with it, and the garden was waterlogged, spreading a heavy permeating smell of rain and soil and soaked wood. It was an odour Frank liked: every sight and tang of the countryside emphasized his complete limb-rip from the past, stamped his isolation from it even more than living with Pat. He stood at the end of the garden; watching far-off house-roofs wilting under rain.
One morning they stayed late in bed, a rare happening, and Kevin tapped at the door with a tray of breakfast he’d made. ‘Just a moment,’ Pat answered, reaching for a nightdress. Frank got into pyjamas, and all three ate a relaxed easy breakfast in the room.
After lunch, shadows drew in, leavened by silence. Frank kept lights burning all day, closed the blinds before night had time to thicken. Pat hated the winter. It made her work a double burden, depressed her with its dragging timelessness. Kevin was sent to bed at ten, so they sat in the lounge reading, a logfire scorching the small room, hissing and spitting as sap rolled into the flame.
One morning early they went for a walk. It was a winter’s day, the blue dazzling snowless heart of winter in high Lincolnshire. Kevin had stayed at the cottage and tuned in to French lessons on a set of records his father had found one year at the Portobello market. It was winter only because it was cold, air chipping like invisible scraps of steel at the dead flesh of the face. They stepped quickly along the southward lane, through fields of frosty grass, as if they were going somewhere. ‘I hate to stay still,’ Frank said. ‘There’s no work on days like this so I feel good to be walking.’
She grasped his hand, as if they had much to say to each other, but which her vanity had decided was unnecessary: ‘It’s a change to get away from the house and be alone like this.’ They climbed the sloping hillside of loam, a hard hour’s walk, edging slowly towards the top line that separated them from the touching sky.
The crest was gradual, shaved off, but suddenly there was nothing between them and the deep mist of the sky. The only sound that the world gave was that of their breathing. Up here, there was nothing else. They stood stilclass="underline" animals were underground, birds dead or far away, no roads, people, houses, nothing to make noise. Such uplands were a world on their own, not high, but isolated by the North Sea, the Fens and marshes, the Humber, and the subtle snakiness of the grey Trent that needed wide lowlands to breed and flood in to the west. Hamlets were half lost in frosty air. The rim of blue haze on the horizon was the pink of spring flowers, campion petals, premonitions of cuckoo spit and primroses, soft grass and tadpoles. The land was a whitened waste, copses and woods like dropped hoods set down to cover something special until spring, isolated farms and cottages hard to see but for minute darkenings of chimney-smoke. The hard breath of their climb subsided, until it could only be heard to each separated self; then they became aware of it, and it decreased again until they were as silent as the bitter unobtrusive air-touching hands and faces.
Unwanted words were spelt like a lit-up newsflash across the inside of his eyes: ‘Now what do we do?’ The noise of his own life had been taken away, and the sound of all others, too. A pool in one of the fields had turned to ice, as if molten lead had been poured into a hollow and left to set, unbreakable, fixed forever even through summer. He was immobilized by lack of sound.