‘I don’t expect to be back from Manchester until Wednesday,’ announced Marcia. She was a visual display director for an advertising agency, which involved a lot of travelling, particularly to exhibitions.
‘I’ve no idea what this new course is about,’ he said in return. ‘I’ll probably be busy: certainly until it settles down.’ Closer to London the motorway was becoming more congested and Gower wished he had given himself more time to get ahead of the rush hour: he hated being late for appointments, especially first-time encounters.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, slowly. ‘Don’t you think it’s stupid, us living like we do…’ She squeezed his hand again, in further reassurance, and said quickly: ‘OK! I’m not getting heavy. I am not sure I want the absolute commitment of marriage, either. I’m talking simple practicality. Keeping two separate flats is bloody mad: if I’m not out of town, like I’m going to be the next few days, we’re with each other all the time. There’s no point in living apart, is there?’
The traffic was getting heavier: Gower could see it at a standstill, far ahead. ‘I suppose not,’ he agreed, reluctantly, suspecting she had steered their conversation. Gower was frightened of their being permanently, more constantly together, although for none of the normal reasons that might make a person apprehensive of a stable relationship. His statutory inability to discuss his job with her would inevitably create a gap between them. And he didn’t want anything between them. The paradox was that he wanted to be with her all the time, probably surer of their relationship than she was.
‘That was begrudging,’ she said, disappointed.
‘Look at the bloody traffic!’
‘We’ve got all the time in the world,’ she said, truthfully. ‘And we’re not discussing the traffic. We’re discussing living together because it might be nice. At least I am. If you don’t want to, why not say so?’
‘You know I want to.’
‘Fine!’ she said, a person of quick decisions. ‘So let’s do it! Whose place? Mine or yours? I think yours is more convenient but my flat is in a better area. My lease has some time to run…’
‘Wait a moment!’ halted Gower. ‘Where’s the panic?’
‘Where’s the reason for delaying?’
‘I’m still going through courses: you know I’m starting one today.’
‘You’re already in the Foreign Office. There’s job security, carved in stone, for the rest of your life. Why should a course affect our living together?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, unhappy at not finding more convincing avoidance.
‘I think I know what you’re not sure about.’
He finally had to stop. Ahead the road was clogged as far as he could see. They had only just passed the airport turn-off, so he estimated he had at least another eight miles of jammed motorway. ‘That’s not so.’
‘Let’s forget it.’ She was staring straight ahead again.
‘Why have we got to make a decision now, in the middle of a bloody traffic jam? Let’s talk about it when you get back from Manchester.’
‘What’s there to talk about, apart from whose flat it’s going to be?’
‘You trying to make a row?’ They rarely argued: he couldn’t remember the last time.
‘No.’
‘We’ll sort it out when you get back,’ he insisted. He was glad the traffic began to move. He could at last see the reason for the blockage, a single-line crawl past three cars in a nose-to-tail accident, each driver blaming the other in a hard-shoulder shouting match: beyond the cars were moving fast again.
‘Is this the last course there’ll be?’ asked Marcia, trying for neutral ground.
‘I think so,’ said Gower, uncomfortably. He’d been schooled for conversations like this, actually lectured on the responses and convenient answers.
‘Then something permanent?’
‘That’s the procedure.’
‘I would have thought by now you’d have been given some indication of what it will be.’
‘Probably something in administration.’ Always dismissive, he remembered, from the how-to-reply lecture. ‘It’ll give me time to look around and make my mind up about a definite division.’
They left the motorway and Gower turned through the Chiswick back streets to avoid any more main road crawclass="underline" he was taking her directly to the station for the Manchester train.
‘I’m ambitious for you,’ she declared.
‘I’m ambitious for myself And nervous, he privately admitted. Despite all the exhausive training and tuition and one-to-one lectures, just as it had been with his tutor at Oxford, Gower couldn’t visualize what it was really going to be like. He’d actually mentioned it to his last instructor, seeking some guidance. Instead the man had nodded in quick agreement and said it wasn’t a profession for which there was any sensible, practical apprenticeship.
‘I’ll phone tonight,’ promised Marcia, as they stopped at the station. She leaned back in through the door, intending to collect her cases from the rear seat. ‘Best of luck with the course.’
Gower kissed her and said: ‘You’re wrong: you know you’re wrong, don’t you?’
‘About what?’ She knew, but wanted him openly to commit himself, to make her the clear winner of the dispute.
‘Me not being sure. About us. I’ve never been more sure of anything. I love you.’
It only took him half an hour to reach the headquarters building in Westminster Bridge Road and the boxlike fifth-floor office. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said, politely, as he entered. ‘Gower. John Gower.’
Charlie Muffin wondered if being called ‘sir’ would be the only tangible benefit of his new job. ‘Your first mistake,’ he said.
It was so unusual for a foreigner to travel hard-seat – the lowest, cheapest class on Chinese trains, on wooden benches without upholstery and which did not convert into sleeping bunks – that Snow attracted even more attention than he might normally have done, simply by being a waiguoren, a foreigner. Snow attracted attention not merely by being a foreigner. He was an unnaturally tall 6? 5†, a spindly-limbed man whose long-ago purchased chain-store clothes never seemed to fit but to hang upon him, too short at the legs and arms.
From experience he didn’t try to force any conversation, waiting for the other travellers to practise their English upon him, which several did, from the moment he left Beijing. Again from experience, he let the talk range at the whim of those who approached him, never asking a direct question. Always, however, he quickly disclosed his ability to speak Mandarin, to avoid offending anyone into thinking he was trying to be superior or eavesdrop on the birdlike chatter fluttering around him. Before the first overnight disembarkation he thought two passengers – a young girl student from Shanghai and a middle-aged man who said he was a doctor – were going openly to criticize the government, but although he encouraged further conversation neither, ultimately, did so.
On that third day he saw on its way northwards a long convoy of army trucks carrying soldiers along a road parallel to the railway track. The trucks looked new and not of Chinese manufacture. In such crowded, unknown surroundings – unsure of informers among his fellow passengers – Snow held back from taking photographs. He counted a total of forty-seven lorries.
Later that same day the train stopped for water almost directly opposite a series of camouflaged but obviously newly erected factory buildings. On that occasion, pretending to photograph the steam-skirted railway engine in the foreground, Snow managed three exposures.