Titus stopped running for a moment, to see where their guide-man was and found that he was standing still, almost a fly in amber, dried white in the darkness, trapped. The man stood motionless, as Titus returned to him. He lifted the sleeve of his robe, and once more showed the numbers cut into his arm. He drew an imaginary knife across his throat, he spread his arms in what might have been hope or hopelessness and he turned back and ran as fleetingly as a leveret, back into the darkness from which the three of them had just emerged.
It was a moment of truth. Should Titus follow? What conscience he had told him it was what he should do; what reason he had told him of the pointlessness of such an action. Reason prevailed and, with Dog and an absence of guilt, he ran until he was out of the wood and sitting panting on the sunlit verge, where he fell into a deep sleep of nothingness. He only awoke on hearing in the distance what sounded like the baying of hounds, a pistol shot and a cry of pain.
20
An Unexpected Meeting
TITUS AND DOG found themselves on a narrow road in open countryside: downland, with clumps of bushes and neat fields; a huge expanse of sky, not blue, but grey-white, and convoluted clouds that changed their shapes at each blink.
Hunger, never at bay for long, began again to remind Titus that he was at the mercy of his own being. His ingenuity was once more called upon.
‘Come on, Dog, let’s see what we can find along the hedgerows – not that you will care for what nature provides there. Why don’t you burrow and chase, and kill and eat? I have a knife and you have your whole elemental being.’
As they walked down the narrow road, towards what seemed to be a meeting of four roads, the man and his dog for all their hunger were breathing the air of freedom.
At the crossroads Titus stood and looked in all directions. He saw space and time, but he did not see which way he should take. In the middle of the cross was a heart-shaped island of grassy stubble, and for some reason of symmetry he sat in the middle of it, to empty his mind and to make a decision, with no recourse to logic, on which way he should go.
They must have sat on the heart-shaped mound for twenty minutes when Dog pricked up his ears before Titus could find the reason why. In the distance there was if not a sound of human life, at least a sound that was controlled by human life; a slow advent on to the scene of an alien-to-nature sound; an internal combustion engine that seemed to be contending with age, so much did it hesitate, blow and bang, stop and start again, long before it could be seen.
Surprise was no longer part of Titus’s life. He had lived on the edge of it for so long. Curiosity he still possessed in abundance. Nothing was ever as it might be envisaged. Things were invariably more strange than the wildest imaginings.
‘Do I always let things happen to me, then, Dog? Am I an onlooker or am I a catalyst? Am I a man whose childhood is incomprehensible to all but those who turn their back on this world because they cannot bear what it offers? Who am I, and what, or who is about to enter our lives? Can it be someone that will pass us by? Can it be someone who will change the course of our lives? Shall I be master of my own fate, or should I leave it to fortune?’
This was not to be so easy: the spluttering car was upon him and almost annihilated him as it came to a stop in the middle of the heart-shaped island. He had just enough time to jump out of its way and as he landed face down on the road, he heard a sound of wheezing, together with a jumble of dry coughing and laughter. His first instinct was of anger, and his natural quick temper hastened his speed to turn, sit and stand up to whoever was the cause of his undignified collapse.
He had no idea what he might expect, but it was certainly not what he now saw. It was a woman of around thirty or thirty-five, small and thin, with short, dark hair so jagged it was seemingly cut with a razor. She had a little bony face, with smudged hazel eyes, a narrow, aquiline nose, and a small mouth with a half-smoked cigarette, which clung to her bottom lip like a limpet. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, hacking and chuckling. ‘I think I dropped off to sleep – I’ve been driving all night, and only woke when the car stopped on the heart. A heartbeat, a car beat, be dat what it may, be-ware, be-troot, be good, be gone, bee-hive, b-awful . . . At least you’re not hurt.’
‘And I can see that you are not hurt either,’ said Titus. He felt unable to compete with the verbal play of the strange woman. But the very thought of a woman, after so long a time of thinking of nothing but survival, made him look at her less as a person than as a symbol, of something which he had so often sought, so often treated roughly, but felt an unholy need of.
He began ‘I’m not a wit . . .’
‘Not a wit too soon . . .’ and then followed another paroxysm of coughing and laughter, with cigarette smoke exhaling a delicate pale-grey blind between them.
‘Oh, to hell with you – I’m in no mood for wordplay – hardly in any mood at all – who in hell are you? I’m Titus Groan – that’s simple enough. I’ve had my fill of clever women. All I want, now that you’ve appeared from out of the blue, is to know where you are going, not where you have come from. I’m not interested. Can you help me, have you any food, have you a home, a house, a room, a bed, a floor? Just answer me quite simply, and if it’s at all possible without the frills of smokes and coughs and laughter . . .’
It was so long since Titus had given outward expression to any thought that he was insensitive to the brusqueness and the roughness of his voice, and what it said, and when he at last looked at the small woman to whom he was speaking, he was surprised to see her lower lip, to which the cigarette still clung, trembling, and all the vividness of her personality extinguished.
‘Now it is for me to say sorry. My harshness was not deliberate and I have no excuse. I am sorry. To blow out a candle that is shedding light in a dark room is thoughtless, unkind and stupid, and what’s more makes life a good deal less interesting. Now I’ve talked too much. You say something.’
‘Oh, that is the one thing that would really silence me, cough and all.’
‘Well, at least I have told you my name. Cannot you tell me yours?’
‘It’s Ruth Saxon – quite straightforward, really – and if you get to know me better, you’ll probably think it strange that there should be anything straightforward about me. Not that I’m crooked, but that I never seem to think or do things as other people do, or at least so my family tell me.’
‘Then we should get on rather well,’ said Titus in a conciliatory tone. ‘Perhaps the same could be said about me.’
As they talked, probing circuitously each other’s personalities, Titus had time to look at and into the car, which had so suddenly broken his solitude. It had a character to fit its owner. It was full of personality. Canvases lay in the back, piled one upon the other, stones and shells of all sizes were scattered on the seat behind the driver’s, and sitting regally disdainful of outside events was a clowder of cats of varying colours, peering from behind a large bunch of wayside flowers.
‘Yes, I’m a painter, and I love cats and I carry my heart on my sleeve. I love painting more than anything in the world. I love everything to do with it. The smell of turps, the materials I use, the brushes, the canvas, the silence, the solitude. When I’m painting I’m consciously serene. Perhaps it’s the only time when I’m not asking myself insoluble questions. The sole truth when I’m painting is the truth of paint. It doesn’t matter how old I become, it’ll always be there, and some of the world’s greatest painters reached their old age passionately living, their hearts, their eyes, their souls, their hands plying their trade. One old painter had an inscription on his grave: ‘‘Here lies an old man mad about painting.’’ There, that tells you about me. What about you, Titus?’