He could, of course, go to London and look for her. But where? The only lead was the photo, flashed outside the Arlington Gallery. He could call on her parents, or a few friends, but sensed these to be useless. If Myra had gone to such places she would have phoned him already out of boredom. He didn’t want to move outside the axis of work and home.
On the fourth day he went up to Town, a desultory visit, calling at Stanford’s to buy survey plans, then looking through the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He reconnoitred the Arlington Gallery, but saw nothing of Myra. He was back in the village by six, vanguard of the rush hour spreading north out of London. The air smelled of evening when he came out of the garage, sun glowing lampwise down the green slightly inclining land of the valley. It would linger there, slipping gently from heavy cloud to dun-coloured fields and silver trees. He’d take a walk later, after tea, along one of the quiet lanes towards the woods that would darken first. He felt more tired than after a normal day — irritable, ragged, fundamentally disturbed — hoped a stroll would clear his body of lung-destroying air. Walking to the door, he caught the pungent sweetness of fresh-scythed grass — coming to him as if pulled out of the hard grip of winter’s teeth, though spring was far enough on into the year.
This switched him into the gear of a good mood, and he looked forward to the long solitary evening to follow his walk. Where Myra was he did not know, and he was beginning not to care.
The door gave even before he turned the key. Taking off his coat in the hall he heard talking from upstairs, and the sound of music playing softly on the bedroom transistor.
‘Myra!’ he called, in the same voice he would use after a satisfying day at work. It was the only way he could tolerate the giant spider latched with all claws inside his chest.
The music stopped. He went into the lounge, sat with legs stretched out, trying to read a newspaper as if she still had not returned. He was too sick to move, at the thought of her bringing back the man she had presumably stayed with.
‘I’ve come to say good-bye,’ she said, ‘and get my things.’
He didn’t look at her: ‘Sit down.’
‘I’d better not. We want to catch the last bus back to the station.’
‘You can phone for a taxi.’ He was robbing her of a deadline, a time she clung to as the unalterable mark of departure. ‘Sit down,’ he repeated.
‘I’ve told you, I’m in a hurry.’ He stood quickly, took her by the shoulders and pushed her into a chair. It was an unknown violence and she smiled slightly, a sardonic expression to conceal her first and sudden hatred of him. ‘I’ve something to tell you before you finally make up your mind:’
‘Everything’s set. It’s no use, George.’
‘Perhaps not, but while your boy friend is getting your things downstairs I want to say that I’m giving up the house. A while ago I applied for a job as surveyor with a company that’s looking for oil in Tripolitania. I’ve known for a long time that you weren’t happy with the humdrum life here, and I’ve been wanting a change, as well as to do something useful in a country that needs help and patience and knowledge. I thought all this would appeal to you, and as far as I’m concerned, if you want to change your mind, then I’ll be glad. In six weeks we’ll have sold this place and be out there. I got confirmation of the appointment this morning.’
To the one left behind the world becomes unreal, timeless, dead. The air itself alters, an alien covering of roof and sky that only action can throw off. He held himself tight at the centre, showing a calm almost lethargic exterior — that sharpened to hopelessness and a damaging inability to say anything else.
She stood up. ‘I can’t stay with you. I wish you luck in your new job.’ Frank waited in the hall, trunk and suitcase by the stair rail. Myra was surprised that what she wanted to take fitted into so little, which gave her the feeling of really leaving.
There was no shaking of hands when she introduced them. George could not force his eyes onto Frank, and this, more than Myra’s going away, caused a painful rage to burn in him. Frank found it a strange and sterile experience, enmeshed in such a polite but deadly ritual. ‘Let’s sit down and have a drink,’ George said.
In the living-room he poured generous portions of whisky, emptying the last of the bottle into his own glass. Equal to his rage was the desire to know something about Frank, which also made him ashamed because the only way of finding out was to talk, to be calm and amiable at a time when it was not possible.
Frank accepted the drink, knowing that if he made any remark at all on the present situation, a man with a face as bunched and putty-coloured as George’s would go berserk, smash the house from top to bottom — which would be a shame since he had to go on living in it after they had gone. He would also maybe smash anyone who got in his way, so Frank was ready, watching for any move that might lead to this. ‘It’s good whisky,’ he said. ‘I needed that’ — and even this was too near the mark, as George’s face took on a subtle but new shade of choler.
‘I’m glad you did,’ George said. ‘It’s not easy for any of us.’
‘It isn’t,’ Frank said.
George could not talk. Why do people go away? he wondered. Because they are going to die and so hope to escape their fate; because out of impatience they can’t wait to know their fate and future. Even the gypsy in them can’t tell them that, unless they move. Movement is like gunpowder — needs a flame to set it off. People move because they haven’t started to live to the fullest extent of their basic personality. Those who are always on the move have no personality.
‘The trunk’s labelled,’ Myra said. ‘I’d like the railway to pick it up tomorrow.’ She sat down again, unable to stand, and dreading every second. George wished she had come alone. Not that he would have stopped her, but he would have spoken more freely. It was a vile blow to deal, to stand this other person in front of him when there was so much to say that he had never been able to say before.
‘We must make that bus,’ Frank said.
George had an idea, to do something that would open them all to the sky, and end everything in the only way possible. ‘I’ll drive you to the station. You can take your trunk then, at the same time.’
‘Don’t trouble,’ Myra said.
‘I can be back in forty minutes.’
‘No,’ she said. Frank had his coat on, the case by him. ‘You’ve been at work all day.’
He couldn’t insist. ‘I was in Town, looking for you.’
‘I’m sorry, George.’
His grey eyes smouldered lifelessly: ‘Go on, then. Get out.’
They left him standing, looking into the tall drawn curtains that opened onto the back garden where she had worked so often, and with the mindless pleasure one often finds in a false role. Fresh cool air snapped at them. It was dark, with only a solitary lamp lit along the deserted street.
George was unable to believe that nothing else could be done. Clarity of mind existed, it seemed, but only at the restricted middle of the most complex labyrinth. He felt it, but had no way of reaching it. Life had always seemed a straight road, and he hadn’t even been foxed by a simple dead-end or caught in a false cul-de-sac. Instead, he was now trapped in an unsurveyable maze of footpaths darkened by tall hedges. Such a labyrinth was extreme torment for a mind that could exist only on order and calm, which wanted everything measured and shaped, reduced to a beautiful design and set down on paper. The last few days had drawn him into the labyrinth, like a doomed fly fixed in helplessness until the spider-god came out for him. Or maybe he had been going towards it all his life, slowly and more deliberately than he’d known. Tonight there were a thousand routes open all around him, but none indicating with more certainty than any other either a track to the middle, or an exit to the outside world.