The built-up area fell like red flakes around them. The youth seemed happier. ‘Where’s your camp?’ Frank asked. ‘Is it easy to get into the armoury from outside?’
‘I suppose so,’ he stammered. ‘It’s right near a wood on the edge of Harby camp. The doors are locked in case anybody tries to get in without a pass.’
Frank laughed. ‘Wirecutters and a hairgrip. When you’re on guard next send me a telegram and we’ll clean it out together. Draw me a map of the camp, will you?’ — passed him pencil and paper.
The youth’s face became rounded, his eyes and mouth open. ‘Do you mean it?’ He was glum, set in a grim mould of discontent and fear, which made two of them.
‘Don’t worry,’ Frank said, ‘I’m not serious.’ Passing a disused railway station, he climbed the smooth tarmac up a hump bridge, and the speed of his fast-cruising car dropped them into an airpocket on the other side.
Ashamed to be begging lifts! I’m learning more in two weeks than twelve years in factories and living with Nancy. I couldn’t get this from a paperback. The blue wolds drew him in, treeless heights rolling and dominant. He struck off the main road after making his exit from the car, cut along a minor route marked red and thinly on his map as the veins in somebody’s bloodshot eye. No woods or villages, just onward rolling fields, the smell of dead rose bay and the lonely farm every mile or two. At the moment he felt more at home on this paved lane where no traffic passed than he had on the A road further back. Black and white cattle, huge and sleek, were dedicated to a slow contemplative chewing of grass, contrasted to his own troubled mind as he spared a glance for them and walked on.
Sunday and distant bells muffled the cold air. A mile ahead and dropping two hundred feet was a village still locked in afternoon sleep and stillness. Peace was rampant out of town and factory, obtruding, obvious and disturbing, and it wouldn’t let you be. The other day he was at Wainfleet — about five in the afternoon — and thought he’d nip along a lane and get to the sea, have a paddle before dark. He reached the sand but water was nowhere to be seen, then walked miles, it seemed, out over the hard sand, jumping ruts and channels in places. It was flat, dead flat, and no matter how far he walked and how much he looked across this sand he couldn’t see a ripple of the sea. It began to darken so that he couldn’t see the land either — and it was so flat — and somehow in the distance he could hear water shuffling around like an old man in carpet slippers, looking for the light switch in a dark room. But he couldn’t see anything so came back to the proper coast. Near it was an old pillbox, a machine-gun post he supposed from the war, so he went inside and slept the night. Waking up next morning the sea was almost lapping at the door. He stripped off and swam for half an hour, then got dressed and went back to the main road, where he ate some breakfast at a pub, food well-needed because he hadn’t slept well in that pillbox. It was cold, and he had rough dreams.
The first house set by itself on the far outskirts belonged to the district nurse, so the plaque said. A red Mini was posted outside, and the sight of it made him wonder for a moment, in his biased state against all four-wheeled friends, whether he should call there at all, or whether it wouldn’t be better to walk on to the next house. But he knocked at the door.
‘Yes?’
He felt he should say: ‘My wife’s labour’s started. Can you come and see her through? I’ve been expecting it for a week — she’s that much overdue’; but he said:
‘Would you give me a drink of water, please?’
2
There was nothing she liked better than, on a long, free, wild winter’s evening, to shut all doors and curtains in the living-room, heap up the fire with coal, and sit down with a book. It was the best distraction from her nurse’s life, a deep and final escape for a few hours from the insistent and necessary calling of the outside world. She was old enough to appreciate this solitude, after a child and twelve years of married life, yet young enough to let her book fall and reflect on what had brought her to it, and to realize faintly that this work and solitude was not to be the end of her life.
Vile weather was held at bay, its thumping sea-like roar muffled by walls and comfort. Outside it was wet and violent, the world a boxing-ring for ebony shapeless cloud. Inside there was warmth and clarity, light, good furniture and food. As a woman she respected it, knew its rarity and value. The hours had no end. The end of them was out of sight. They had no frontiers — until the phone pulled her back into the world again, sent her out to birth, death or pain, which was easy to handle since it was no longer her own. So there was always this possible disturbance to cut into thoughts or reading, and the elements growling beyond the walls were always audible enough to eat at the basis of her reasons for being there.
On this Sunday even fine weather, open curtains and in-streaming light from the blue sky didn’t save her from the encroaching habit of reflection. Since she had left her husband and gone back to nursing he had made good progress in the advertising firm he worked for. She still received an occasional letter from him, saying he wanted her back — an unfortunate phrase which implied that she had once belonged to him. When she left him he hadn’t run off to the woman he was having an affair with — which might have embellished their break-up with some slight yet elevating aura of tragedy; he had gone to his psychoanalyst and spent another year pouring out the soul he had never been able to pour out to her. He imagined, in his suffering, that she must be suffering too, but her pain had died before leaving him, so that when she went away there was never any possibility of her ‘going back’. It wasn’t possible to go back in life; it might often appear nice and cosy and comfortable, but it would mean a perilous defeat, an annihilation of her true growth, a rejection of the world that she had, after immense expenditure of spirit, come face to face with at last. Even in her lonely Lincolnshire cottage, with the spite-wind of the wolds sealing her in with apprehension and self-questioning, she knew this — that she was out on her own, independent, useful, set at last in the vanguard of her life.
Keith, now in middle age, had told how his mother gave him three choices for a career: either the Church, the army, or advertising — and he chose the latter because it was considered something new. Pat thought him dead, hollow, and self-centred, but couldn’t deny that he was good at his job. In that, he was forthright and decisive — so she gathered from parties given and gone to — but with her he was never able to make up his mind about anything, threw all decisions onto her. He wouldn’t say: ‘I’m taking you to the Mozart concert tonight,’ but: ‘Would you like to go to the concert?’ so that she had to wonder whether or not he’d like to go before answering (and deciding) whether or not she’d like to. It was the same in all things, even to the buying of cuff-links or a new tie. The only thing he could decide on without her was a new car. She put it down to a terror of life, and a form of togetherness that she was glad to be away from.
Keith had said in his last letter that he would come up to visit her one day, talk to her (plead, she noted), but she knew he would never have the courage to do so unless she sent a definite word of goodwill. This she could never do, because one’s life grew hard and settled after decisions had been acted on at a certain age. The anguished turbulent twenties had played themselves out to the bitter end, though she had at one time seen herself putting up with it for good, queening it forever over their small house near Notting Hill Gate that grew tinier with her discontent.