He hesitated, as if unable to believe the offer. She laughed, open and frank about it. ‘I’m not trying to pick you up. You look as if I might be.’
‘I didn’t think that. I’ll stay then. When you’re on the run you’re always ready to stop running — like a rabbit.’
‘You seem well up on the philosophy of escape.’
‘I’ve never walked so long. Nor thought so much. Walking has turned out to be even more monotonous than standing at my machine at work. But the thoughts are better.’ She asked why he had left his wife, but his fullblooded, earnest, airtight reasons had melted. He felt foolish trying to explain something that had taken a lifetime to overwhelm him.
She drew the curtains across: ‘I don’t want your reasons if you can’t give them. I’ve done so many things I still can’t give reasons for. I had a fiancé once, when I was nineteen. He lived in Portsmouth and I lived in Guildford. I found out one day that I was pregnant, and on the same day I had a telegram from his mother to say he had been drowned.’
He was caught by the infectious remembering of her voice: ‘That was terrible. Where’s the baby then?’
‘I took steps to remove it, but I got married very soon afterwards, and had a baby within a year. I could act on my decisions quickly in those days, and they always proved to be right. He’s a boy of eleven now, very bright. He comes home for holidays, and to everyone here my husband is dead — though I left him in London two years ago. You’ll sleep in Kevin’s bed while you’re here. My name’s Pat Shipley, since we’ve been talking so long.’
He made the exchange. ‘Will you come out with me, and have a drink, or supper? We could go to Louth, or some place.’
‘Let’s have no tit-for-tat, as they say around here. But I thought you were broke, walking to Sheffield?’
‘I wouldn’t do this if I was — walking, and hitching lifts when I feel like it. If I’d got no money I’d stay put until I had.’ She declined, and he would rather stay where he was as well, the oil stove warm and the room closed off in the vast country silence. He wondered what sort of woman she was, whether she would or wouldn’t, wanted or didn’t want, whether she was a posh tease taking a rest from it, or a sex-starved isolated nurse who worked so hard she’d had neither time nor opportunity in the last year and wouldn’t squeal if he made a grab for her before she grabbed him. Not that she was all that much to look at. Nancy would make ten of her, but then, she was dead on him and this Pat wasn’t. He looked at her through the clarity of silence: a rather round plainish face, if it weren’t for her eyes and long ponytail of red hair. He’d never been with a gingernut before, but the hearsay on them was they were red hot. Not that I’ll touch a hair of her red head, though I’d like to.
‘I’ll fry some sausages soon. I have tomatoes and bread, eggs and bacon.’
‘It’s too good of you.’
‘I feel like being good — now and again. It’s my job. Haven’t you seen the advertisements for nurses?’
‘Well, they are a bit daft,’ he said, ‘that’s true.’
‘They’re more accurate than you think, though.’
‘Do you like your job?’
‘I’m too busy doing it to know.’
‘Don’t you find it lonely?’ He saw her as called out all hours of the day and night, coming back between long, lifesaving watches to an empty house — paraffin stove out, cupboard empty, even the cat gone from the back door, gloom and rain spattering the windows, looking around and wondering what to do now that she had a few hours off. Maybe she’d put the light on, hatch a fire in that parlour he’d glimpsed, find some tinned food and boil it, make tea, sit down to a book after letting in the cat that had found its way back to the door and mewed for her. He was right, she thought. That’s my life: lonely, hardworking, yet happy if there is such a thing. ‘I’m not lonely,’ she said. ‘I like being by myself. I see lots of people on my rounds.’
‘Sick people,’ he said. ‘Is that enough?’
She spoke in a soft comforting way, yet he felt the edge of nervousness on it. It seemed strange to him that she was a midwife, yet it was possible to imagine her firm and soothing at critical moments of illness or childbirth. ‘Not only sick people. What I prize more than anything else in the world is independence. My father was a police inspector, and still is, I won’t say where — and as a girl I was bullied and disciplined in the most awful stupid way. At school it was worse, and the first time I thought to get out of it I became a probationer nurse, out of the frying pan into the furnace. But it all led to this job, so I don’t regret it now. I suppose when you know why you left your wife you’ll go back to her?’
‘I’ll never do that. I haven’t only burned my boats and smashed my bridges, but I’ve burned my heart as well. There’s no going back for me.’
‘You say it as calmly as if you meant it. It’s frightening.’
‘Yet maybe I’m like a bloody moth near a flame, spinning around so close to Nottingham that I’ll have to wrench myself further away to stop going back there to see how things are. I feel the kids pulling at me more than anything.’
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’ll see what there is to eat.’ It was a spacious kitchen built onto the back of the house, and he leaned against the fridge while she cleared up. He hadn’t expected to see such desolation. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t time to get things straight before a call came to say that Mrs Robinson’s leg was bothering her again — but it was cluttered with the stains and refuse of weeks. The sink was heaped with pots — tea rims turned green on the inside of cups, porridge mouldy, knives black when she took them out of the water. It’s a damp place, he thought. The smallest of the four stove burners glowed red. Hot water splashed over her words: ‘I always leave that one burning, day and night. It doesn’t cost so much, and it keeps the kitchen warm. I can get coffee quickly without waiting for the stove to warm up.’
Foreseeing a long job he stored away yesterday’s groceries in the larder. ‘The place is a mess,’ she said. ‘But don’t bother to help. This is woman’s work.’
‘It’s work,’ he said The shelves had no room — about six boxes of various breakfast cereal took up space, some empty enough to discard. Jars of different jam, wrapped cut bread with a few stale slices left, sauces, mustards, various pastes. He’d never seen such a lavish and squalid larder, and threw half out. She didn’t object: ‘You get careless, living alone. I’ve been meaning to clear it for days, but it’s hard enough keeping my work up. Everybody seems to get ill in autumn and spring — when the seasons change.’ She plugged in an electric kettle, turned on a burner of the large stove.
‘You fixed up a fine kitchen,’ he said.
‘Now that it’s clean. I’m still paying for it. It’s not only the workers who get trapped by H.P.’
‘No.’ he said, ‘but there are so many of them that it’s them that keeps it going.’ He made a fire in the parlour, looked around the small heavily carpeted room. Bookshelves padded every possible piece of wall, and he skimmed their titles — medical, history, books about Lincolnshire, poetry, and books on other books. How did I land in this smart educated place, he thought wryly, supping with the village midwife? He looked through a pile of records, kneeling on the floor to get at them. They were mostly chamber music, old seventy-eights, heaped around a small portable windup. ‘I like classical stuff,’ he said, when she came in with the tray. ‘Beethoven, and — who was it wrote the Planets?’