The rats, of course, became invisible: there weren’t any to be seen. But they were continually breeding, ardently proliferating their rodent species in the various underworlds of oblivion. They dwelt far below the surface even of a child’s dilatory mind, quick, cruel, whiskered and ordured noses exploring dark caverns and nibbling the energized vapours of cloaca that kept them alive. They lived in the rat-filled banks and hollows of ashtips and streams, feet planted, heads turned in momentary awareness against the outside world, on the forced refuse, the hopes, the gangrenous wrecks of people’s lives, a thousand seams below. It was an evil impossible to fathom, excavate, analyse: the depths were too packed, putrescent, liquid, unrecognizable, a mud-death of suffocation, cone-roads descending. Such depths were wardened by rats, the only true history impossible to classify by seam or layer. One fell into it by turning on the gas-tap. One walked away from it — by walking away, or by the body taking you off if the spirit wanted you to stay by the world-wide rat-pit of rat-darkness which is body-death and soul-death.
Frank desired neither, fought both, wanted body-life and soul-life, to steer a narrow course on the narrowing tightrope across the top of the world’s circus tent, balanced safe above the rat pits spreading below, the world-width of black mud surrounded on every far distance by dim faces of spectators in thrall to the rats laughing and waiting for his fall.
He hoped there was no question of falling. He would not fall, hoped his limbs, blood and bones would hold him back. But it was necessary to fight in order to keep the same dignity and independence he had known in his more stable, traditional, less knowing existence where the rats had been less likely to get at him.
He forgot about the future. Living alone, it didn’t exist. He hadn’t talked to anyone for days, and thought he never wanted to again.
Wearing jacket, trousers and jersey shirt, and a pair of boots he’d splashed ten guineas on, he went to meet Myra at Paddington, her letter still in his pocket. He picked her out from the barrier as she stepped off the train dressed in a light brown coat and carrying a shopping basket. He had forgotten what she looked like and was afraid of not recognizing her. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ she said, handing in her ticket.
‘It’s a good beginning,’ he joked, remembering his impression of her as someone cold and half awake, while thinking that you don’t know what a house is like to live in until you’ve made a fire in it. They walked to the cafeteria. He was surprised that they didn’t feel like strangers to each other as he stood in line for coffee and buns. She recalled writing her letter out in the garden one sunny day, sitting on the steps and trying to stop the wind flicking her pages. She’d wanted to be among streets and traffic, away from the so-called peace which was noisy enough to drown the real feelings in her. But silence wasn’t finding it so easy to hold them down any more, and in becoming real again she hoped she wasn’t making Frank too responsible for something that couldn’t yet be seen as either good or bad. The few paintings glimpsed at Albert’s party, the crush of people, the meal and walk with Frank, were important because she was inclined to overrate them. She shouldn’t have written the letter, but had no power to resist it.
She asked how Albert was. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him for a while. Nor have I been to the gallery. I packed all that in.’
‘You did seem a bit out of place there. What happened?’
‘We were having some dinner, the day Teddy handed me your letter, and the talk went on and on, so vicious and useless that I couldn’t stand it. It was starting to pull me in. When you feel that something’s played itself out, you’ve just got to go.’
He seemed more real now that he was free from a world that had no genuine use for him. Some re-humanizing process had occurred in the time elapsed. The other night had been an artifact in which they were not quite being themselves. It seemed clearer now, with the reality of traffic roaring outside and a train journey behind her. There was so little emotion between them that it couldn’t possibly be false. Sun softened into the room and she felt drawn to his rather large hands resting by the cup, eating, pushing the plate away. ‘I suppose you saw our photo in the newspaper?’
They talked in a clatter of metal trays. ‘I did. But I hoped you hadn’t, by some miracle. What did your husband say?’
‘Not much, though he didn’t like it. I said it was all chance and coincidence, that I happened to be there when the painter needed help.’ It hadn’t been easy, for George must have brooded on it all day, pacing it out in the fields, encasing it from hedge to fence to looping footpath. His high standards would tell him to ignore it, but they let him down as the endless belt of daytime wore on. By evening he was incensed, and only her calm talking smoothed things out for the hours that followed. It was a unique experience at her age, and in this so far quiet marriage. Why had such an innocent photo pitched him from accepted order and unthinking peace to a life of suspicion — that he hid very well but that she now felt in him all the time? It was mysterious to her. Could a man hold that stupid photograph responsible for portents which must always have been with him? The answer came now that she was sitting with Frank.
‘My plan for today,’ she said, to prove that thoughts of George did not worry her, ‘is to visit my sister-in-law, then go to the gallery and see Albert’s pictures. It closes soon, doesn’t it?’
‘You ought to go today. It’s worth seeing. I hope his next show is as well.’
‘What makes you unsure about it? You don’t envy him, do you?’
He put down his cup. ‘I used to, when I first met him in Lincolnshire and saw his paintings. I envied him then, if that’s the right word. But now I don’t. He gets into blind rages, attacking the art dealers, critics, and other painters’ work. That’s the sort of thing that’ll ruin him unless he goes back to Lincolnshire for ten years and sees nobody, like before. I’m not saying all those people aren’t worth attacking, but the best way you can do it is by ignoring their existence — I should think. Teddy doesn’t really want him to go back to Lincolnshire, keeps trying to get him to go to Italy or Greece for a year or two. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Albert has to make his own way there, not go under Teddy’s auspices. The less people he has looking after him, the more he’ll be able to look after himself again. Then he’ll be all right.’
‘What about you, though?’
He laughed, cigarette smoke rolling across at her. ‘Me? Whatever happens I’ll be all right — as long as something happens.’ She’d never thought of it that way. ‘That’s the only way I can look at it,’ he said.
‘You’re lucky, then.’
‘I know. Every time I take a breath, or eat some bread and cheese I say to myself: “You lucky bastard!” I was born lucky in that way.’ He told her the skeletal facts about himself. ‘Up to last autumn I was buried in three feet of cold soil, unable to move except for my arms and breath. Now my feet are free, at least.’
He belonged nowhere, she reflected, but he had belonged somewhere so solidly once that it would take him years to find some natural way of life again. He was the sort of man who could not turn back. His face was a mask of animation and strength, grey piercing eyes, highish cheeks, firm jaw and the sort of mouth that bends easily into anger — a man of character shifting between two coastlines of existence. His senses seemed out of tune with the rowdy and continuous traffic-flow along Euston Road where they now walked, and his face had a natural serenity whose only violence might be to protect that serenity from the forces of history. She found it impossible to guess where it would lead him; and difficult to imagine from where he had set out. To try and deflect him from his wilful half-conscious drifting would be an underhand way of helping herself, for his limbo was only noticeable in that it seemed to give more purpose to her own life, while she didn’t yet know what that purpose might serve.