To break it he said, releasing her hand: ‘Let’s go down,’ and their feet moved with comforting heaviness over the frost as she took his hand and obeyed.
7
In four months he hadn’t seen a film. At the pub, he drank in a private room to get out of the death-ray of television. Once a week he made tracks there, had a pint, watched by those who speculated on his long sojourn at Nurse Shipley’s house.
He offered to take her to Louth or Lincoln for an evening, but she said: ‘When I want you to, I’ll let you know. If you want to go, just do so. You know that I’m all right here.’ He too liked the peace and isolation — while often wondering how someone like Pat could stand so much of it since she’d already done a couple of years.
He had cleaned out all he considered to be the good books of her library, and looked forward to the huge shiny-sided van drawing up outside the house to lend them more. ‘I’m happy here,’ he said, ‘lapping up these books like a cat lapping up milk’ — so that she wondered whether he were here for any other purpose than that. Still, in a discreet, offhand way, she advised him what to read, careful not to praise any book but merely putting it in his way by such phrases as: ‘This one isn’t bad’ or ‘You might like this one.’ He had an irresistible yen to fill his shattered mind, to separate himself from the world, and yet have something to talk about with Pat. He secretly wanted to catch up with her in all she had read, felt that such continual reading was altering the basic mechanism of his senses in a way that reading had never done for Pat. For her, books were an accepted part of life, even to the reading of them, whereas they had been something rare and foreign to him, seen in other people’s houses as part of the furniture — a showing-off part, at that. He had detested books at school as symbols of torment, employed only to prove in public what he had always known about himself in private — that he was dead ignorant. He assumed readily that Pat’s books must be good because he didn’t feel uneducated or foolish while reading them. Having tackled so few in the last ten years made them so much easier to absorb now.
They weren’t the sort that taught electricity, plumbing, engineering or gardening, but they widened the world beyond the range of his eyes and softened the hitherto hard limits of his perceptions. Reading Homer or Sophocles, he couldn’t scorn the idea of gods or God if he wanted to enjoy and get any good out of them. This wasn’t easy. The many Greek names in a single book of the Odyssey bothered him, but Pat had a dictionary, so that he reduced his natural strong hankering to know what happened next, and actually enjoyed looking up every name until, towards the end, he had a rough idea who and what they meant, soon recognized them as clearly as he once had the names of players of his favourite rugby teams. He looked up words in the English dictionary, then lost his shyness at seeming half literate, and asked Pat what they meant to save himself the trouble of moving from the fire to the bookshelf. He’d previously bought or borrowed books to read about war or sex, but now he got pleasure from a story taking in neither. Or he found that if a book was well-written about love or war then it gave more satisfaction than a paperback half a notch above comic books. He’d liked Tom Jones, struggled through the peace parts of War and Peace, read Tess and Fude. One day he said: ‘I suppose a lot of those people gassed by the Germans had read good books like these.’
‘Of course. Many of them must have,’ she answered.
‘Those German bastards,’ he retorted, and went on reading in the savage light of illumination.
Kevin was seen off from the crowded platform at Lincoln. Frank had been indifferent to his visit at first, only wondering what effect it would have on him and Pat, realizing finally that in a curious way it had enriched them. Frank had grown used to him, and by the time he left they’d become so attached to each other that Kevin had promised to write. ‘I’m glad you got on so well,’ Pat said on their way back from the station. ‘I was worried, naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ Frank said. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were, though, instead of letting it drop only now?’
‘What’s the point? It would have been useless to let you know I was worried before he came.’
‘We could have talked about it,’ he said. ‘Talk is the staff of life. You don’t think I’d have taken it the wrong way, do you? I’ve come to the conclusion people don’t talk enough. There’s not enough talk. The powerlines are cut when a person hasn’t anything to tell or say. I don’t believe in the strong silent type — he might be strong, but he’s dead. I’ve met enough of them to know this, looking back on it. I prided myself on being one, once. But talk is blood. It’s a bandage as well. You’re a nurse: you should know. You wrap it around your wounds and don’t bleed to death.’
They drew in for petrol. ‘Honestly, I didn’t see the point of mentioning it.’
He said, when they were on the road again: ‘If you didn’t, why do you mention it now that he’s gone back and the issue’s over?’
‘You say you think people should talk more. So do I. Which doesn’t mean only you, either. I suppose your ideal is really somebody who didn’t talk at all except to say “yes master” and “no master” to all that you had to say.’
‘If I didn’t want you to talk, the only way would be not to talk myself.’ It was pointless to bicker, as useless as the frostbitten sunshy road in front. ‘Anyway, I hate arguments while I’m driving. You know: careless talk costs lives. But I’m sorry Kevin’s gone. We’d got used to having him.’ He saw she was upset, about to weep. ‘Don’t worry, love. He’ll be back soon.’
While still in bed at Pat’s warm side he sensed that more snow had drifted down, felt the cold presence of it beyond drawn curtains and shut windows, pressing thick over wolds and fields. Like a magnet it drew him out, silently to gather his clothes and tread naked to the kitchen where he dressed and saw by the clock that it was barely half past six.
Eighteen inches of snow had fallen during the night, drifted against gates and fences up to double that depth. He looked across the garden, at sprout tops like deformed mushrooms humped above milkwhite snow. It was a silent, low-clouded dawn, steely and lifeless, without colour. A shiver started at the roots of him, shook its way out. Winter seemed to go on for ever. The quiet countryside was more savage when at the mercy of snow than were hard paved streets in the city that put an invincible layer of paving between you and the rich worms. He’d slung his hook at the wrong time, landed himself first in the rainy season, now in the ice-age.
A path would need clearing to the road — though on first wielding the spade he didn’t know why, since no one would get up that route awhile to set down milk or newspapers. Still, a path looked good: if a ghost on skis passed by he would see from the sunken snowpath looped around half the house that someone lived there who was alive in it. The radio called this the worst winter for many a year, and no one could say it was lying.
Dawn had not yet churned its full shoulder above the bleak land. It was half dark, half day, day surfacing after being half-drowned by final blackness. But it had fought its way out, a rebirth of the day in hard uncompromising silence. Not a twig cracked, not a lip of wind, not one muffled paw in the settled snow. Even his spade was soundless, slicing layers of snow up and on to long mounds on either side. A silver light shone from the open kitchen door, and when the kettle signalled its boiling guts his path was already by the house-wall and nearing the lane. The whistle was subdued by zero air, by frostbite hovering over the newly created path, sounded like a whistle found in a Christmas cracker rather than its usual full-blooded shriek that dominated the tiny cottage until Pat could stand it no longer and snapped it off. The path, he thought, before turning to do so, will need cutting even further than the village if she gets called out today — which is bound to happen. Yet, strange to him, she’d hardly been summoned in the last week, beyond routine visits to the usual aging sick. ‘Snow is healthy,’ she explained, ‘but just wait for the thaw!’ Which was a fact: he loved the not-too-bitter silences of snow, the thick covering of whiteness and the hard digging needed to clear it. The ruthlessness when fighting it filled his heart to think of all that nature might still throw against him. He relished the shut-in evenings that seemed rich with life, more than he’d ever known; and if this wasn’t much, then it brought him back to life, which was everything.