He walked over: ‘Stand up, Pat.’ She looked into a face from which no elaboration could be expected until the tension had worn off and so unblocked his heart, by which time they would be happy perhaps, and explanations would seem irrelevant.
Her face was level, faintly smiling. They stared at each other, and when they could no longer bear to, his arms were pressing her to him, as if she had been the one to think of running away.
She couldn’t imagine where Frank had gone. Where was there to go in such a place? She’d finished her rounds, laid her bag on the dining-room table, took off her coat and hat after a hard day. They had all been hard, lately. Maybe it was winter grinding its way like a juggernaut and presenting her with too many sick. Snow still scattered over the lanes had thinned and turned to a stonier grip of ice.
Fields were darkening, houses and cottages with yellow eyes shining in the sharp dip of land. She plugged in the kettle, opened a newspaper. The light oppressed her, seemed to curtail her sight rather than clarify the small print. Feeling tired — it must be that — she put on her glasses. But still she could not read, uneasy that Frank wasn’t in, surprised at it also, and smiling at how completely she lived with him.
The kettle shook her from drowsiness by a shrill cockcrow which she fled to stop. With Frank in the house there were two people to involve in her wishes, so no one could call her practical any more. She bent over a stack of logs by the hearth, to lay some on the coal. Practical people lived alone, had the run of their narrow earth. If they had any life in them they burned to death all by themselves. So it was either him or herself, and no one could tell who it would be. This was equilibrium perhaps, and maybe that was love. Balance, aid, interdependence, passion at the end burning these first three away like a sparkler, ever descending, ever decreasing, until the hand jumped and only the shock remained.
He had power over her, and she wasn’t used to it. He didn’t exude or revel in it, probably didn’t even know it was there, but its truth was proved by the fact that he had struck her and was still living in the house. That blow had taken her power, upset the balance, destroyed her independence. She saw it in simple terms: either it was true or, if she was exaggerating, her character was flawed. Even to think such denigration pointed to how much her self-reliance had cracked, compared to the days when, in London, she controlled her house, child, and husband. Memory let her down again, showing how Frank, on the day of his arrival, had helped to clear out a larder stamped with chaos, the mark of a woman anything but ruthlessly efficient and self-contained. So the rot, she thought, had started before his appearance. But when, when, when? The inner fires of agony blazed just as painfully with a person you loved as they did with someone you hated. They also burned when you lived alone, facts which proved you were alive and could feel how much there was to be thankful for.
Getting up to close the kitchen door and stop a slow draught eating into her legs, she heard a car coming down the lane, a deceleration as if for a final drift into the village. It pulled up outside, wheels crunching the glass of frozen snow. She wondered who could be wanting her. It didn’t have the weight of Dr Abel’s stationwagon, or a police car. Her last thought, before the iron knocker flapped like a gun, was thank God something had come to snap away her useless self-questioning mood.
A figure stood outside: ‘Hello, Pat. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ The voice penetrated her memory, a tranquil afternoon blown away by a cold wind nosing around. Neither of them knew how to make the next move. He immediately puts me into the same old role of deciding for us both. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘come in.’
Light dazzled him. Such unwelcoming words had, secretly, been one of his expectations. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of you to come and see me, though I don’t see why you thought it necessary.’ Such irony made him doubt his own reasons. By nature optimistic, he was easily discouraged. The greater his effort to wring success from impulse and optimism the more likely was he to back down at the first snub. When the great fire blazed, the drop of water frightened — though not for long, because optimism would eventually frog-march him back to his obligations.
He smiled, glad that whoever she was living with was not at home. ‘I’ve been meaning to visit you for a long time. Out of curiosity, let’s say. You seem to have a nice little place. How does work go?’
She was short of answers, except for blunt truth:. ‘All right. I bring babies into the world. Old people go out of it more comfortably than you’d imagine. I’m more use in a place like this. I feel a real person now.’
‘Meaning that I’m not?’
‘I only mean what I say. I’ve spent two years unravelling myself from that black knot we got into, so it’s no use trying to put meaning into things I didn’t even say. If you’ve satisfied your curiosity you can go.’ She was aware of speaking too quickly, of saying too much. But Frank could walk in any minute and she wanted her visitor out of it.
‘I didn’t come to stay. Merely to have a talk. In any case this isn’t a special trip to see you. I’ve taken three or four days off, and I’m just driving around the country. Quite without thinking, I found myself in Boston. Thought I’d call on you.’
‘You could have telephoned. Kevin has the number. Enquiries would have given it to you. As you can see though, I’m well. I have a house. I’m working.’
‘I think I could say the same.’ He recalled that the main consolation in being married to her had been the knowledge that domestic peace would mean a living death — and who wanted that?
‘You could,’ she said, ‘but I’m not interested in it. You’re the one who came to see me. I still can’t think why. Did you expect a better welcome than this?’ His opening gambits were being thrown back on him. No, he hadn’t hoped it would be easy, but she seemed more icy and bitter than he ever remembered. He’d give a lot to meet a woman who wasn’t as neurotic as they bloody-well come. ‘I suppose Kevin told you that I don’t live alone any more?’ she added.
‘He did. He gave me the idea you were living very informally, breakfast in bed and all that.’
She laughed. ‘What a way to put it! Though I suppose there’s no other way if you think it worth mentioning at all.’ He was bewildered, but hid it, had intended reaching this point only after, say, a couple of hours’ pleasant enough reminiscence. With a good memory and clear brain available for such occasions he’d planned it on the way up — but without anticipating the possible moves that would operate against him. The image of Pat in those few and far-off hours of peace between the great storms had been unclear, unrealistic, an ideal face of his own creation based on the best of her nature. He planned, but when the test came he only reacted. In the car, planted somewhere above his rear mirror, her face had smiled, but it was unlike the flesh-and-blood Pat before him now, tired from work, face lined, altered, but alert and full of energy at the opposing force of him.
The world, she found, was a different colour every day, and now the spectrum, usually sombre in winter, had swung to purple. The clock ticked, someone walked heavily by outside, and for one moment she thought the steps would stop at the door and Frank would enter. Keith waited for her to say something, while all she wanted was to see him walk out, hear him drive off and vanish; but she knew how hard it was to discourage him unless she stood up and told him directly to go, and if she did this it would only confirm in him that there was even more reason to stay. His tenacity scared her, and she wished Frank would come back.