“And live with that for the rest of your life? Thanks. Ο thanks.”
“You asked,” the tension gnawed and went on gnawing.
“I asked? I asked for a lot of things.”
It was as if silence was turned like a lock and the key forgotten about. We sat in that silence for what seemed like hours. Once I got up and went to the Mens and got two more gins at the counter on my way back, but that didn’t disturb the silence. Sometimes the tension wandered off into a sensuous mindlessness but then would startlingly snap back.
“I suppose we’d be better back in the room,” she said as if it was now her room too.
“I suppose we couldn’t be any worse off there.”
We walked in the warm spring evening. Three hours had passed since we had met. That the curtains in the room were drawn as always seemed to mock us, the light lit above the Chianti bottle on the marble.
“It’s the same as ever,” she said looking round.
“It’s always the same,” I said.
“Somehow it shouldn’t be the same,” she said.
“Would you like a drink?” and when she shook her head I asked, “Do you mind if I have one?” and when she didn’t answer I poured myself a large whiskey and started to drink it quickly.
It was then that she came into my arms. “Kiss me. Comfort me. I’m going to need a lot of comforting.”
As I rocked her I said, “We’ll find some decent way out. You can depend on that. It’ll not be as bad as it seems now.”
“Why don’t we go to bed,” she said. “We’ve certainly earned it. We have nothing to lose now. Nothing.”
When I turned out the light we both seemed to undress with abstracted slowness. There was no feverish slipping of knots and buttons and buckle and hooks but rather a sad fumbling with them before reluctantly letting them fall loose.
I felt her sobbing before I touched her shoulders, and when she came into my arms she shook there in an uncontrolled fit of sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t help it.”
“It’s all right. No one will bother us here. Don’t worry about it,” and when she quietened we began to kiss, laughing nervously when I dried the tears with the corner of the sheet.
“That is what I need,” she breathed. “That is what I need. It is not talk I need but loving.” I was silent. “I don’t know why this happened to us. We’re both good people,” she took up.
“It happened too soon, before we knew one another. We were unlucky.”
“I’ll have to resign,” she said. “It’s going to be a hard road. I hate to think of them getting away with all that money after all these years.”
“Where do you think you’ll want to go?”
“To London. I always wanted to go to London. Two years ago a man called Jonathan wanted me to go. He owns magazines. I nearly resigned and went to work for him on a Water¬ ways magazine there. I little thought then that this’d be the way I’d be going,” she began to cry.
“I can go with you,” I said. “I could get some job there, or even keep writing the old stuff. I could stay with you till the child was born.”
“What would we do then?”
“We’d get the child adopted.”
“As simple as that. To go through all that and then just turn round and give the child away?”
“That way the child would have a secure home.”
“Listen,” she said. “There’s going to be enough hard times in the days ahead. What I need now is loving not talking or thinking. I’m going to need a great deal of loving to face into the days ahead. And you have no idea how much you’re loved. And I know how hard these days have been for you as well,” she said as she drew me back into her arms.
My aunt came for a checkup at this time. She came on the train. I met her on the platform but when I took her bag at the carriage door she was impatient. “They wanted to drive me up, when it’s just for a few old tests. If you heeded them, they’d have you in a wheelchair before long. You’d never be able to start making your own way again.”
“There’s no use pushing it though,” I was dismayed at how ill she looked, yet as she walked she seemed to walk ahead of me. She had on the lovely old brown tweed with fur at the throat that I remembered in happier days.
“You’re just as bad as your uncle and Cyril,” she scolded.
“I’m not that bad,” I said. “How do you feel? You look great anyhow.”
“All I feel is that it’s very cold, as if this year may never take up,” and it made me even more careful. It was a warm day for early summer.
“What would you like to do — go out to the hospital now or wait for a bit?”
“We’ll be out in the hospital soon enough. It’s long since we had a chat,” and I took her across the road to the solid comfort of the North Star Hotel. She wanted brandy.
“Are you sure it won’t interfere with the tests?” my voice had no authority in its policeman’s role.
“Bad luck to the tests,” she said. “They’re only a matter of going through the rigmarole.”
“And there’s no chance they’ll try to keep you in?”
“No. They said I’d be able to go home the day after tomorrow. I have to be home because of the garden.” She began to tell about her garden. She’d got James Prior to rotavate it. It had been a wilderness of weeds, not having been broken for the two previous years. She’d sown beans and peas, lettuce, carrots, parsnips, Early York cabbages, parsley, shallots, beet, even marrows. The netting wire had to be fixed because of the rabbits. The garden had been part of the old railway. Every fine afternoon she walked the half-mile down the disused line. Cyril collected her with the car on his way home from work.
“I feel I get well there, just rooting about among the plants. You never feel the time pass. And every day there’s something new. Around dinner-time you find yourself getting anxious about the rain. And you forget about the pain, unless it’s playing you up horrible bad. I hadn’t my foot in the train this morning when it started.”
“I was thinking that something good must have happened when I saw you get off the train, you looked so much better.”
She wanted another brandy and she joked about the black-haired girl, asking if I had anybody now.
“Not really anybody,” I said.
“I know what that means,” she laughed.
“I may have to go to London,” I said.
“What would you want to go to that old place for?”
“The crowd I work for want me to go.”
“You don’t have to go?”
“It’d be hard not to. They want me to go for a year or so.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to. Isn’t it almost time you came home? Your own place is lying there. And whose for the old mill — bad luck to it — except yourself?”
“I couldn’t afford to go home, unless you give me some of those houses you have,” I changed to tease. Over the years she’d acquired seven or eight houses in the town, and as she didn’t believe in cash was always on the lookout for more. They were let out as flats and a few shops and were jealously guarded for her beloved Cyril. She coloured like a young girl.
“Bad luck to you, but haven’t you more than enough — without thinking of my poor shacks.”
“They’d come in very handy,” I laughed. “Will you tell me this now, am I right or wrong, is there anybody who has enough?” I mimicked my uncle, “There’s only the one class of people that has enough, and there’s no prizes for telling where they are — they’re all in the graveyard.”
“Bad luck to both of you,” she laughed into the last of her brandy. “Ye might look different but the pair of yous are the same thick old blocks.”