‘Can’t we go just a little further - to the railway station?’
‘I’d like to change,’ Louise said, ‘before dark. The rats begin to come in after dark.’
‘Going back will be downhill all the way.’
‘Let’s hurry then,’ Louise said. He followed her. Thin and ungainly, she seemed to him to possess a sort of Undine beauty. She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality. In his romantic, humble, ambitious mind he could conceive only a relationship with a waitress, a cinema usherette, a landlady’s daughter in Battersea or with a queen - this was a queen. He began to mutter again at her heels - ‘so good’ - between pants, his plump knees knocking together on the stony path. Quite suddenly the light changed: the laterite soil turned a translucent pink sloping down the hill to the wide flat water of the bay. There was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned.
‘This is it,’ Louise said, and they leant and got their breath again against the wooden wall of the small abandoned station, watching the light fade out as quickly as it came.
Through an open door - had it been the waiting room or the station master’s office? - the hens passed in and out. The dust on the windows was like the steam left only a moment ago by a passing train. On the forever-closed guichet somebody had chalked a crude phallic figure. Wilson could see it over her left shoulder as she leant back to get her breath. ‘I used to come here every day,’ Louise said, ‘until they spoilt it for me.’
‘They?’
She said, ‘Thank God, I shall be out of here soon.’
‘Why? You are not going away?’
‘Henry’s sending me to South Africa.’
‘Oh God,’ Wilson exclaimed. The news was so unexpected that it was like a twinge of pain. His face twisted with it.
He tried to cover up the absurd exposure. No one knew better than he did that his face was not made to express agony or passion. He said, ‘What will he do without you?’
‘He’ll manage.’
‘He’ll be terribly lonely,’ Wilson said - he, he, he chiming back in his inner ear like a misleading echo I, I, I.
‘He’ll be happier without me.’
‘He couldn’t be.’
‘Henry doesn’t love me,’ she said gently, as though she were teaching a child, using the simplest words to explain a difficult subject, simplifying ... She leant her head back against the guichet and smiled at him as much as to say, it’s quite easy really when you get the hang of it. ‘He’ll be happier without me,’ she repeated. An ant moved from the woodwork on to her neck and he leant close to flick it away. He had no other motive. When he took his mouth away from hers the ant was still there. He let it run on to his finger. The taste of the lipstick was like something he’d never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world.
‘I hate him,’ she said, carrying on the conversation exactly where it had been left.
‘You mustn’t go,’ he implored her. A bead of sweat ran down into his right eye and he brushed it away; on the guichet by her shoulder his eyes took in again the phallic scrawl.
‘I’d have gone before this if it hadn’t been for the money, poor dear. He has to find it.’
‘Where?’
‘That’s man’s business,’ she said like a provocation, and he kissed her again; their mouths clung like bivalves, and then she pulled away and he heard the sad - to and fro - of Father Rank’s laugh coming up along the path. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ Father Rank called. His stride lengthened and he caught a foot in his soutane and stumbled as he went by. ‘A storm’s coming up,’ he said. ‘Got to hurry,’ and his ‘ho, ho, ho’ diminished mournfully along the railway track, bringing no comfort to anyone.
‘He didn’t see who we were,’ Wilson said.
‘Of course he did. What does it matter?’
‘He’s the biggest gossip in the town.’
‘Only about things that matter,’ she said.
‘This doesn’t matter?’
‘Of course it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Why should it?’
‘I’m in love with you, Louise,’ Wilson said sadly.
‘This is the second time we’ve met.’
‘I don’t see that that makes any difference. Do you like me, Louise?’
‘Of course I like you, Wilson.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Wilson.’
‘Have you got another name?’
‘Edward.’
‘Do you want me to call you Teddy? Or Bear? These things creep on you before you know where you are. Suddenly you are calling someone Bear or Ticki, and the real names seems bald and formal, and the next you know they hate you for it. I’ll stick to Wilson.’
‘Why don’t you leave him?’
‘I am leaving him. I told you. I’m going to South Africa.’
‘I love you, Louise,’ he said again.
‘How old are you, Wilson?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘A very young thirty-two, and I am an old thirty-eight.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘The poetry you read, Wilson, is too romantic. It does matter. It matters much more than love. Love isn’t a fact like age and religion ...’
Across the bay the clouds came up: they massed blackly over Bullom and then tore up the sky, climbing vertically: the wind pressed the two of them back against the station. ‘Too late,’ Louise said, ‘we’re caught.’
‘How long will this last?’
‘Half an hour.’
A handful of rain was flung in their faces, and then the water came down. They stood inside the station and heard the water hurled upon the roof. They were in darkness, and the chickens moved at their feet
‘This is grim,’ Louise said.
He made a motion towards her hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilson,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s have a petting party.’ She had to speak loud for her voice to carry above the thunder on the iron roof.
‘I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean...’
He could hear her shifting further away, and he was glad of the darkness which hid his humiliation. ‘I like you, Wilson,’ she said, ‘but I’m not a nursing sister who expects to be taken whenever she finds herself in the dark with a man. You have no responsibilities towards me, Wilson. I don’t want you.’
‘I love you, Louise.’
‘Yes, yes, Wilson. You’ve told me. Do you think there are snakes in here -or rats?’
‘I’ve no idea. When are you going to South Africa, Louise?’
‘When Ticki can raise the money.’
‘It will cost a lot. Perhaps you won’t be able to go.’
‘He’ll manage somehow. He said he would.’
‘Life insurance?’
‘No, he’s tried that’
‘I wish I could tend it to you myself. But I’m poor as a church-mouse.’
‘Don’t talk about mice in here, Ticki will manage somehow.’
He began to see her face through the darkness, thin, grey, attenuated - it was like trying to remember the features of someone he had once known who had gone away. One would build them up in just this way - the nose and then if one concentrated enough the brow; the eyes would escape him.
‘He’ll do anything for me.’
He said bitterly, ‘A moment ago you said he didn’t love you.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he has a terrible sense of responsibility.’
He made a movement and she cried furiously out, ‘Keep still. I don’t love you. I love Ticki.’
‘I was only shifting my weight’ he said. She began to laugh. ‘How funny this is,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since anything funny happened to me. I’ll remember this for months, for months.’ But it seemed to Wilson that he would remember her laughter all his life. His shorts flapped in the draught of the storm and he thought, ‘In a body like a grave.’
When Louise and Wilson crossed the river and came into Burnside it was quite dark. The headlamps of a police van lit an open door, the figures moved to and fro carrying packages. ‘What’s up now?’ Louise exclaimed, and began to run down the road. Wilson panted after her. Ali came from the house carrying on his head a tin bath, a folding chair, and a bundle tied up in an old towel. ‘What on earth’s happened, Ali?’