‘Perhaps that’s why everybody goes on the run,’ she said. ‘I think you’re probably right.’ He was surprised and flattered that she took it seriously. She was fascinated at flashes of complexity in a mind she had imagined as too simple to take seriously. So far, he could only see the mechanics of how he’d gone on the run, rather than the cause. She had used the phrase, and he wondered if the time would come when it no longer applied, when he would be going to, and not away from, something. He’d got back to Nottingham, after so much driving around, and felt like using his feet. He parked his car up a side street off Alfreton Road, and the sky was less blue, white clouds hanging around the chimney stacks of Radford Baths. He yearned to let his legs walk, maybe carry him where a car could never go.
Narrow, winding and mildewed, he’d lived in these streets once upon a long time ago, and hovering odours made different air to that in the windswept well-spread estates. He’d hardly noticed such change in the oblivious one-track of getting married. It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen in, but years had gone by before clarifying his vision of it.
After the landmarks of birth, school, work you get more handy with the girls. Then at eighteen you’re called up, and so look forward to getting out. While you had something ahead of you it was fine. When you got out you Went after the women, earned your money and drank your fill. This went on for a couple of years, then there was nothing left, just a fifty mile wall dead in front, starting from your shining shoes and going, as far as you could see, right up to the sky. At the feel of it you stepped up the wild life, went mad for a month or two, spinning around like a bluebottle with a dose of Flit, and people thought you weren’t half a hell of a lad. Then you stopped, because even though the thick grey wall had gone and the sky was spring-blue again, you felt that the wall was still there, but inside you, which was worse because it really did mean that life was finished. You brooded for a month, and people thought you’d turned thoughtful and worried because you’d got some young woman into trouble, but you hadn’t. It was only your black ever-surviving heart getting you used to seeing a way out that you’d have whistled at in scorn only a few months before. Then your eyes opened, or you thought they did, and in this wall you saw a hole at the bottom, surrounded by rubble and dust as if you’d used the handgrenade of your life so far to blast that hole just big enough to crawl through. So you got married, and it all looked rosy on the other side. The fact that a penny bun didn’t cost tuppence any more, but four-and-eleven with threepence off was almost a pleasure to put up with. You loved in bed and comfort night after night and thought what have I been missing all these years?
The marriage was a light-hearted get-together at the Registry Office, standing to repeat after that sanctimonious corpse-head in glasses to honour and obey until the atom bomb parts us. And there was I larking around and pretending I had to be dragged in screaming by my mates because one of the other blokes had got her up the spout and not me, whereas nobody had at all and she was as pure as virgin snow I don’t think. Nancy smiled as if nothing was happening. Her mother tut-tutted and didn’t know where to put her face because she thought I meant it — and maybe half of me did, but things quietened down and ten minutes later I was under a snowstorm of paper wanting to get my hands on a St Bernard mongrel with a keg of well-bred brandy around its neck. To everybody’s disappointment I was icicle-sober that night.
Nancy must have come from a long line of bad cooks, because after a week at Cleethorpes she put a plate of tinned steak, tinned celery and baked beans before him, fortified by several slices of Miracle Bread, so named, he supposed, because it was a miracle it didn’t kill you. Ever the gentleman, he tackled it as best he could, able to joke about living off love until the month was out.
They lived with Nancy’s mother, and her cooking was worse. Even the meat tasted like cabbage, and there was nothing he could do but push it aside like a spoiled kid. Mrs Stathern thought her cooking the best for miles around and this made him hate her as well, because he couldn’t stand up and say he was going down the road for an egg and chips. If she’d known it wasn’t so good he might even have eaten some of it — in a joking light-hearted way while waiting for the stomach cramps. All he could do was thank God for a canteen dinner and get Nancy to fry some beans and bacon in the evening, a concoction that got monotonous day after day, but at least it was difficult to spoil, and such repetition eventually turned her into the best cowboy breakfast cooker in the whole of Aspley.
Those early months dreamed themselves by. Food wasn’t as important as his thoughts for some reason now made it, for there was house and home to buy and pay for week by week, and the first kid to wait for month by month and his machine to work at day by day. He couldn’t understand why it had gone on so long. Was it because of the violent blindoe times he’d made for himself before feeling that wall in front of him? In effect, he’d never left the wall, after having crawled through the shell hole with such relief. Instead of in front, the sheer face had stayed a few feet at his back, and now, lately, it had drawn a circle around him, stifling his life, so that he had to get out or choke to death.
‘The thing about this country,’ he said to her, ‘is that there’s nowhere to go. You just keep going round in circles. Have you read Dr Zhivago? No? It gives you a marvellous idea of what it’s like living in a big country. Spaces thousands of miles wide and long. I’d like to be in a big country. He goes from Moscow to Siberia. When the train is held up by snow everybody gets out and digs. And when he wants to go back to Moscow, he walks. I don’t know how many thousand miles it was, but he didn’t say: “Oh, I can’t go because the trains aren’t running.” He just walks! He found out why he went on the run after he’d been on the run long enough. You know why it was? I’m just finding out myself as I talk about it: he went on the run because life was too much for him.’
‘Do you know then why you’re on the run?’ she smiled.
He thought, his face hard. ‘Ah! I do though, if you want to know. It’s because life’s too little for me.’
‘It’s the same thing. He couldn’t face life because it was too much. You can’t face it because it’s too little. Neither of you can face life.’
‘You put it neat,’ he said, rueful over his shattered epigram.
‘I’m not a nurse for nothing. I’ve been in nursing for fifteen years, on and off. It makes you hard and wise, if you know how to take it.’
‘It’ll be dark soon, so I must be on my way.’
‘I have some sherry, nothing harder, would you like a drop for the road?’
‘Yes. Are all those books yours?’
‘Mostly novels. Some I’ve never even glanced at. They’re part of the furniture.’ The cardigan sleeve was drawn up almost to the elbow, showing freckles on her fair skin. He looked directly at her eyes, and she smiled before turning. ‘What I’ve always wanted to do,’ he said, ‘is do nothing for a year except read books, and learn something.’
‘I don’t think you’d learn much, necessarily, but you might enjoy it.’
‘You’re bound to learn something if you don’t know anything.’ He finished the sherry, sweet water, cold and griping after the tea. ‘There’s a drop left,’ she said, ‘so you might as well finish it. I can’t see you getting drunk on it.’ It was darkening outside, and she stood to switch on the light. ‘If you’re not in a desperate hurry to get where you’re going I have a spare room upstairs. It’s only a camp bed, but you’ll find it comfortable. Better than a hedgebottom, though it’s up to you.’