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By the time he left he had both children on his knees asking him to come again, and he saw how blind and irrevocable had been his own action in leaving his children.

Pam also asked him to call again, though gave a firm pressurized sort of handshake that could have meant good-bye for good.

They walked to a bus stop in Highgate. ‘I can’t go back on the underground,’ he said. ‘Let’s go overland to my place for a drink. The house looks squalid, but the room’s clean. Do you know Camden Town?’

‘I wandered around it in my student days.’

‘What were you studying?’

‘I read economics, and got a first.’

‘What are you doing then, being a wife? Maybe you get a kick out of wasting yourself.’

‘I’m not wasting anything. I’m living.’

‘It’s not enough. You’ve got to do something with it.’ His words disturbed her after the visit to Pam’s. He knew it, and she wondered why he kept on when a more sensitive and considerate person would have let her fall back into pleasant sloth.

They sat on the top deck, descending into the smoke and view, and she told him about her work in the village so that it sounded worthwhile and even important, until she caught a note of justification in her voice, and stopped. ‘I suppose London is full of women like Pam,’ he said. ‘Places like Hampstead and Highgate. I’ve seen ’em around, dragged down by snotty and petulant kids, and wasting their educated lives out of inertia. I guess it’s the fault of the country though, as much as them. They could do useful work, but there’s just no need of it. It’s a rare world.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked, and he had no answer. She took his arm when they left the bus. ‘If I hadn’t met Albert in Lincolnshire I wouldn’t have met you in London,’ he said.

‘Does it seem so important, to trace it back like that?’

‘It’s fate,’ he said. ‘By politics I’m a socialist, but I believe in fate.’

She laughed: ‘You want it both ways.’

‘At the moment it’s got me both ways. I was wondering what moves I went through to meet you.’ They came to a road of dilapidated early Victorian houses. One or two had been fixed up, cleaned and painted, adorned with shiny brass knockers and fancy numbers, cars outside like metal watchdogs. They walked to the far end, through a gang of playing children.

Stepping out of the sun Frank went up the stairs first, refusing to comment on how much of a dump it was because maybe she was thinking the same. Which was true. He certainly had no right to rail against Pam’s house. She wondered whether it would be possible to sit down when she reached his room — until the door opened. ‘I painted it out,’ he explained. ‘It was so bad even I couldn’t stand it. Take this chair. The others are clean, but only this one’s safe. I’ll sit on the bed.’ The walls were bare, like a top-floor cell, oblong and simple, a few books on a table, a suit behind the door, two pair of shoes showing under the made bed. How lucky he was to be so free, she thought, no more belongings — material or spiritual — than could fit in a suitcase. He looked at her: ‘If ever you want to make a decision, just say yes, whatever it is.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of anything.’

‘That’s impossible. You’ve always got something on your mind. I’m good at thinking on nothing, though it’s getting less easy. I’m thinking plenty at the moment.’

‘Such as what?’ It was a dangerous question, as if she had said yes to something by making it.

‘The same as before. I think we ought to go away.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

He lit a cigarette and passed it to her. ‘Do you think I’m blind and stupid? It’s got to be talked about. I’ve never seen a woman so much at the end of her tether. You’re like a sea being drained. The first time you meet somebody you get to know as much as you’re ever likely to, even if all the pennies don’t drop for a while. Something’s been eating you alive for a long time.’

‘Going away with you won’t stop it.’

‘If that won’t, nothing will.’

‘It sounds like boasting. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t know what you’d be doing.’

‘All you need do is say yes.’ She wanted to say it, to overwhelm him with it, but it just couldn’t be so easy for him, or her. The house and room and the street outside were silent except for their own voices. No traffic sounded and the children had run off to fresh pastures of brick and pavement. The afternoon had reached its deep middle, a silent and stale sheet on the bed of the day, a blue sky at the square window, an emptiness all around them and through it in which no feelings could be hidden. ‘Where do you think you’d go?’

‘Off this island, then I’d tell you where.’

‘I’m using the singular, not the plural. What would you do?’

‘Why do you make a question out of everything?’

‘Because I want to know.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘call it a holiday; call it the end of the world. What more do you want? I don’t care whether the sun’s shining or not. I don’t expect to sprout wings and be a bloody angel. I just want us to crash this rotten barrier. I want to look at my life from the outside. My life and this big island are meshed up and I’ve got to separate them. I’m caught in a press, and I want to struggle out of it. Maybe then I’ll fight my way back in, but then it’ll be different.’

She listened in amazement: ‘What does all this have to do with me?’

He sat, hands pressing against his head. ‘Nothing, if you feel nothing when I say it. I thought you might.’

‘Why did you choose me?’ she said in a low voice.

‘Who can say who chose who? I want you to come.’ She trembled, drawn easily to her feet.

‘No,’ she cried, pushing him away. ‘I want to come. I want to come more than you want me to, but the answer’s no. It’s got to be. I can’t do it.’

She was weeping with a bitterness he’d never heard before, but he held her loosely, though knowing that she needed no support with such salt tears. ‘Myra, don’t cry. We’re all right.’

‘I’m a happy woman,’ she wept. ‘Leave me alone.’ It would end well, he felt, so it would, but he could only hold her, his arms around and face close, eyes open blankly at the vacant window beyond her shoulders.

They stood, and he smiled at the window, the blank space. A pressure from her arms forced him away so that she could kiss him. Then she softened against him, limp and exhausted, her body shaking.

Her eyes were closed, and he lay by her side. The kisses she gave froze him. They felt so remote, so far away and detached that they came out of a dream he had nothing to do with, a form of revenge against what he hoped would not turn out to be himself. He stroked her hair and kissed her closed eyes. He wondered if she were asleep, as a lethargy matched to the blue window seemed to creep over her, attuned to the soft folds of her body, under the coat that she hadn’t thought to take off. A train rumbled, and behind the silence there was traffic along the main road.

19

He brought in food from a Greek shop down the road — fruit, olives, bread, sausage, wine and halva. They were like people mildly drunk, never mentioning plans or hopes, who understood each other perfectly. ‘Will it matter, me staying here?’ she asked the first night. They talked with the light off, but the curtains open, a faint moaning noise entering on sodium reflections and the softened beams of passing cars.