She shook the pillow, put it back under her shoulder: ‘Who doesn’t get tired of the place they live in?’
‘I mean bone-tired, right from the guts?’
She smiled. ‘You want me to say I do, don’t you?’
‘I want you to say what you think.’
‘You’re a smug bastard. As if anybody ever says what they think. It’s always what somebody else thinks — in a different form. You just want me to say “Yes, I’m thoroughly tired of it, so let’s go away, this minute, tomorrow” — just because you want to disappear. Why don’t you come right out with it?’
‘Well, it doesn’t mean that much. I only feel like that because I’m in a snowbound cottage with the only woman I’ve ever really loved. I can’t be happier, so I think of the wide open spaces open to us.’
‘Open to “me”, you mean. If you had any love in you you’d keep such thoughts to yourself. The first sign of love is when you think about the person you love, and apply the thought to her before turning it to yourself. As it is, you just torment me.’
‘If that’s the way it makes you feel, forget I spoke. I don’t believe in that sort of self-sacrifice.’
‘I can’t forget. You can’t undo things just like that. If you want to go, go.’
‘Excuse me while I get my skis and foodbag.’
‘Why do you turn everything into a joke? You have no respect for people. Nothing is serious to you.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m shooting my mouth off. I love you. I like being here. But I’m alive. I talk because my arms and legs move.’
‘You think so? You talk, to show me your wounds.’
‘I’ve got less wounds than most people. I can wound more than most people, as well. Anyway, I didn’t say anything about going. What did I say? I forget. I can never remember what I said five minutes before. Five years, maybe.’
‘You said we should go away together.’
‘Is that all? Well that’s not much. Why are we fighting over that?’
‘I suppose it’s because I want to go too. But I can’t.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go, either.’
‘You said you were fed-up with the village.’
‘Let it drop.’
‘That’s what you said.’
‘Forget it, love.’
‘You say something, and then you say forget it, because the damage’s already done. If you’re really tired of living here, you must go. But don’t destroy everything bit by bit before you do. I won’t allow it. I have to stay, so leave something intact.’
His hand touched her shoulder, feeling its shape under the jacket and nightdress, a reminder of better hours than this. ‘You’re making a wrong sort of picture. It’s not true to our life here.’
‘It is. You want it to be.’
‘Make up your mind. I’ve already made more out of my life in the last three months, than in ten years before that. You know why? Because I met you. Since then everything’s changed, my whole mind. I feel as if my eyes are a different colour.’
This did the opposite of calm her: she couldn’t bear the responsibility for it: ‘It’s impossible to know what you want. You talk about going, then you try to tell me you’re in heaven.’
‘I only want what I’m getting,’ he said morosely, ‘what I’m able to get. If there’s anything bigger, it’ll come along without me wanting it.’
‘I suppose you want me to throw my life out of true before it comes to you? A little human sacrifice never goes amiss, especially when it’s someone who’s just taken ages to win a great personal battle. It makes it so much more satisfying.’
‘I hate sarcasm. It’s the worst disease I know.’ The stare in his grey eyes had emptied them. He seemed far away from her, beyond the house, in a seclusion private to himself, a step back and above any patch or person of the world.
‘Explain something to me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Anything. Whatever you like. Just explain something.’
He thought her mood had marvellously changed. ‘What, though?’
‘Whatever you like. Think something up, and explain it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m not being subtle or sarcastic. Just explain something about yourself.’
‘You’re trying to get it out of me with a knife, so I can’t.’
‘I didn’t think you could. Can’t you explain anything?’
‘No, not yet. I don’t see why I should, even if I could. Explanations don’t automatically solve things. They don’t always make life better, either.’
‘Ah, now we’re getting at the truth,’ she said. ‘You don’t talk at all. All you can do is deny, deny, deny.’
‘All you can do is destroy.’
‘But you know, you’re such a bloody letdown.’ The hackles of destruction were out, all the goodness he had brought between them gone bitter in her in an inspired unguarded unjustifiable moment. ‘You act as if you died at the age of five,’ she said, ‘and have been living ever since on what’s left. You’re soft. You can’t take it. You can start it, but you can’t take it. All you can do is mystify and bluster.’
He sprang to the bed and crashed his hand against her pale strained face: ‘What are you going on and on for?’ he exclaimed. ‘Let it drop, can’t you? All I asked was if ever you got fed-up with this one-eyed village.’
She fell sideways from the pillows, the bedside telephone spilling onto the floor. ‘You stupid fool’ — wrenched out by sobs of rage, words spinning at him like wheels of fire: ‘If you want to do that you can get back to your housing estate or slum. I suppose they love it there.’ This final end to a quarrel had never been imposed on her before. She felt a shame that stunned her, a rage spilling against him and herself. How Keith would laugh if he knew of this — but wasn’t that why she had left a man with such a mind? But her face burned more from the blows, and tears forced themselves through, until the effort of fighting them turned shame to anger.
He stood at the window: black frost glazed the snow-covered ground; he hated it. Before, it had been comforting, an ally to his love, a balm to life. It now held the world’s evil under whitened hoods and claws and clamped all things down that he wanted to spin out slowly from himself by way of explanation to Pat. By which time the snow and frost would have melted away.
She set the telephone back on its stand. It rang at the same instant, incising the four walls with urgent noise, and she spoke into it as if no quarrel had happened, perfectly ready for her work. He walked down the stairs.
8
Work served the same purpose as snow and frost — to cover up scabs and interior minefields, muffle the galleries of his mind leading to caved-in girders and smashed hydraulic props. The air was keen, snow heavy on the spade, granite and marble at deeper layers that he didn’t work at, but attacked. Frozen seams from previous hard weathers called on the dynamite of his total swinging strength to prise them free from the flagstoned path by the side of the house. He went deep into his mind, but syphoned-off energy prevented him getting anywhere near the end or bottom of it.
She’d put on her overcoat, gloves, hat, picked up her bag and gone out, climbing across snow towards the village, passing the school where, already and in such weather, children were gathering. Phrases came to him, but the sounds contradicted each other and kept his lips firm together, and she’d gone off without a word, face set hard, like his own heart and face, like the ice-snow he was trying to crack on either side of the drainpipe. He didn’t know what had sparked all of it off. It seemed as if her sort of love was meant to eat each other up, exactly the sort he was trying to escape. People should adjust themselves to the external world, not to each other, a diffuse connection with the whole world rather than the icy inbite of destruction. There is a natural tenderness in everybody which should make it possible for man and wife — or woman and man — to take care of each other, and ignore the fastenings of over-strung emotion which strangle at both of them.