‘I don’t see what else you could have come for,’ Frank said.
Keith remembered the advice of his analyst, that speech was always less harmful than silence, often a definite advantage. ‘I object to Kevin being up here when another man was in the house.’
Frank laughed: ‘It’s better for him to see a man here than not. Gives him a sense of security. It’s even healthy for him. I’d like my wife to take up with another man, in case the kids grew up kinky. You never know.’
‘I have different views,’ Keith said. ‘I happen to be still in love with my wife. I object to my son witnessing the life she leads with someone who isn’t his father.’ Frank thought that was the way people only talked in books and on the BBC. He was amazed to confront it in real life.
‘There’s nothing wrong with what he sees here,’ Pat said. ‘You’re just turning it into something unwholesome.’
‘I don’t see the point of this,’ Frank told him almost gently. ‘Pat stays with me. There’s no need to bring Kevin into it.’
‘You think not?’ Keith said. ‘You obviously haven’t the power even to begin to understand my point of view, though it’s simple enough.’
‘We’re different people, you and I,’ Frank smiled, ‘brought up in different ways. Is that what you mean?’
‘You’re saying it. I’m not.’
‘You bet I am, when you can’t come out with it straight. If I was in your shoes I’d pull out without any fuss.’
The tone was falling below standards that Keith had been moulded to respect and live up to. This man knew no rules, had an undisciplined uneducated mind, and was actually trying to tell him what to do, to give advice, insults which he had no way of countering. ‘I’m sure Kevin would be better going to France or Austria for his holidays. If I were in his place I’d have had Lincolnshire by now. I’d want a change.’
‘You mean that if we were divorced,’ Pat said, a smile which made her lips seem thinner, ‘and I was married again — all respectably — there’d be no objection to Kevin coming up here?’
Keith also smiled: ‘Don’t you know that we’re living in an age of conformity?’
‘Why try to soften it?’ she said. ‘Frank won’t mind.’ They all still sat, and she saw this as a help towards no real quarrel breaking out.
‘I’ll take anything from a cunning bastard,’ Frank said, ‘except action. Let’s make it plain: you want Pat to choose between me and Kevin; and you think that if you can blackmail her into choosing Kevin, then I’ll just quietly sling my hook and leave you on the field? How long does it take to put you off? Do we have to make a declaration of solidarity, or something?’ He understood Pat’s diffidence about provoking a row, but he saw there was nothing to be gained by listening. Keith might have the whip-hand but he couldn’t have it all in tea-party manners.
‘I don’t see why we can’t settle it in a civilized manner,’ Keith said.
‘I suppose by civilized you mean your way? There’s nothing to settle. It’s no use using your subtleties here. It won’t work. You’re not persuading anybody to buy Daz or vote Tory, so don’t come it.’
Keith laughed. ‘It’s no use trying that line with me. I’m completely apolitical. I dropped all the political stuff years ago. I’m simply asking you to choose,’ he turned to Pat.
‘How can I?’
Frank sensed her tears, as close as when, weeks ago, they had quarrelled and he had struck her. The recall of it doubled his rage and bitterness. He felt as if standing on a shellbacked insect getting bigger under his feet, felt himself blacking out towards another strange light dominated by the smooth face, fish-eyes and polished shoes of the person whose opposing spirit wanted to crush and strangle his own: ‘Listen, you bastard, you’ve got no right to come up here and spoil what doesn’t belong to you, to wreck and ruin to your own sweet tune. Your cock crow’s hoarse and false, mate, full of maggots, you miseducated boatfaced bastard eating food and wearing clothes you never earned or advertised on the telly. You speak calm but you boil like an empty kettle, the moon in your mouth and the sun up your arse. You’re starry-eyed and cloudy at the brain except when it comes to doing the sort of job that will keep you like it forever. The world’s top heavy with you and your sort who wank people’s brains off every night with telly advertisements that make them happy at carrying slugs like you on their backs, but I’d like to see you do a real day’s work, if you could, if anybody’d be crazy enough to set you on.’
Keith pulled back his chair and stood up, a hand at his forehead as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer and was wondering where the blood poured from. ‘I had a commission in the army,’ he said, his voice dry and shocked, ‘and put people like you into detention.’
An almost soundless blow sent him against the wall, bent double as if to look at some intricate design on the carpet that he remembered seeing years ago in Heal’s. Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face, an engulfing polar cap. The chair cracked. Keith reacted, taller than Frank, heavily built, fist bursting, a whale-head driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness.
Pat cried out at the black sky: feeling the rotten, festering sores of the everyday world a thousand times enlarged bursting over her again, the love and peace, isolation and work made into a disease that she only wanted to shun. In a few hours it had happened, the impossible, unexpected, unwanted, all out of nothing, for no reason, taking away two years of dignity and usefulness. ‘Frank,’ she cried, ‘don’t.’
He was unconcerned whether it was the end or not, in some ways hoped it was, considered himself in the way of it since leaving home, wife, and factory, splitting his life’s tree with the axe of temperament and bloody-mindedness. The table roared, skidded before it could slice his spine, met the wall. He flung himself at the rushing figure, shoulder against chest and threw it stolidly back, drove his fist at an uprising forearm as if to break bone.
A voice telling him that this was no way to argue, a surrender to barbarity, was stifled as a stab in the back from a world he had recently met. He hated this world because it let him down at such a time, didn’t tell him how to avoid a punch-up nor how to survive it. With flooding eyes and face awash, a waterfall came crashing from the roof. His fist swung into a blind, wet, unkillable face that slid away, then wielded its own granite response.
There was no stopping or facing each other except by attack. Frank wasn’t conscious of thought, or even of seeing Keith’s upright body helpless against the wall before the violence of his opponent left him a shell unable to dwell on how he had come to begin this spiritual carnage. The room was a lighted cave, purple corners, greying walls, blue floor underfoot seen from scarlet eyes that alone had strength left to know what had been done.
Keith fell, groped and spread. The house was silent but for a clock ticking from the kitchen. Frank felt isolated, pinned into the darkening hemisphere of his pain, used, shamed, unnoticed, an animal at large in the frightening wilderness of himself. No one else was conscious in the house — he was the shell who conquers, winner of desperate wars in which despair is the only winner because it takes everything and loses you to yourself.