10
She stood in her room, unable to move. Her will had gone. If she sat or lay down she would never get up. She would die, because this was no kind of life. Neither her imagination nor her pessimism had envisaged direct assault. A person could not be secure with such people loose, who felt she belonged to them like a slave to be taken back into bondage.
She didn’t, and never had. Never would. She was not connected to them in any way, but they would have killed her rather than let her stay free. He spoke, in his familiar and soothing voice. ‘Come into my room, and let’s have a look at you.’
‘Leave me alone. I feel wrecked.’
He put his arm around her. ‘You’ll be all right.’
What did he know about it? Her stomach was made of iron when she pressed her fist there. But she went with him. He brought a bowl of water, and washed her face while she sat in the armchair. The rancorous note of his authority was still apparent. ‘If I telephone the police they’ll catch them going up the motorway.’
‘Leave them.’ She was unable to stop her hands shaking. ‘I’m not really hurt.’
His face was also bruised, the lower lip cut. ‘They’re a rough lot. But you’re a bit of a fighter yourself, to hold them off so well. You just left me with the mopping-up!’
‘I didn’t think I could do anything.’
He took two pieces of cotton wool soaked in cool liquid, and held them to her bruises. ‘You never know what you’re like till you get pushed against a wall. But I’m sorry I took so long over my business. When I came back and saw this type coming out of the house with your suitcase I thought he’d rifled our belongings. He gave me some talk, so I put in two quick ones and got him to tell me what was going on. For all I knew, your life was at stake. It certainly sounded like it as I came up the stairs. You get rough lots at sea, even these days, so it wasn’t a new situation for me. There’s often no hard feelings afterwards, though I didn’t like the look of that gang.’
‘It had to happen, but that part of my life is finished. If I was in any doubt about it I couldn’t go on living.’
The pain of her weeping doubled itself in him. Such an incident could brush anyone. He had known rather more of the world in that respect than she had, but decided that, since it was now up to him, she really had seen the last of them. ‘We’ll be away by this evening. I went to the estate agent’s and settled everything. We’re to leave the keys with Judy.’
‘I could have paid my own account.’
‘I did it to save time. All that’s left is to hump our belongings on to the pavement and load the car. It’ll be like quitting a wharf we’ve been tied up to for too long.’
She couldn’t stay, yet didn’t want to go. Every move was a bad dream. She had agreed, and the idea thrilled her, but her one-time family had spoiled her with dread where before she had been optimistic. She felt unable to eliminate such gall from her soul. It was impossible to imagine the kind of freedom from them that she craved. But the gorge rose as if to vomit them out even against her will. It was a matter of time. She would not let them blight her spirit.
She padded the corners of the case with underwear and socks, and folded his uniform while he emptied the cupboards. ‘We must leave things ship-shape, though Judy said she would give a final sweep in exchange for whatever goods we won’t be taking.’
He put half a dozen out-of-date Pilot Books in a box, and protected his deckwatch and sextant with newspapers. His short-wave radio was placed by the door. There was a record-player, suitcase, roll of charts, and a kitbag of oddments – the tools and toys that had gone all over the world, moved by ship, rickshaw, taxi and human back, belongings as much part of him as his own fingertips.
There was no hurry, he said. It was best that way. She still wasn’t fit. He topped whisky with water and gave it her to drink. He sipped from the flask. They smoked and talked. He took off his jacket and unloaded the shopping, cutting away damp bread where the eggs had broken. He set things on the table and they sat down to eat. She felt better. The stove kept them warm. ‘I’ll leave it for Judy,’ he said, ‘and five gallons of paraffin in the cupboard.’
She was in pain on trying to smile. ‘With so many things she’ll open a junk stall on the Portobello Road. It’ll make her a pound or two.’
They cleared away the meal and finished at the sink. All his life he had moved. He still hadn’t stopped. But she was about to begin. After such a send-off by George and his brothers it was impossible to imagine the future. She was exultant from the whisky, but fought to stay calm and not show tears. Men hated to see women in tears, she thought, though not more than she hated them in herself. She had struggled for her life, and won. Even without Tom they wouldn’t have taken her. Because it was her victory she could go with him and feel safe, as much out of her own will as because she was in love. Funny sort of love. But it was all she was left with.
Neither knew where it would end, and that also made the prospect acceptable when all through her life there had either been nowhere to think of going, or a straight road on which it would be intolerable to travel. She did not feel that he would be hard to know, or that to fathom him would lead her to a lake of pitch from which there would be no escape. It did not matter whether or not she got to know him. He was not difficult to be with, so it didn’t seem important. The fever of wanting to know a man in order to find out whether he loved you or not, or whether you loved him, was a sure way of destroying any love that existed, or cauterizing any regard out of which love could grow. She had learned her lesson, reflecting that it had taken her long enough – if it actually turned out that she had.
In some ways he was foreign to her, though she couldn’t say exactly how or why. Didn’t want to. She was also a foreigner to him, she didn’t wonder, and a foreigner even to herself much of the time, which was maybe why she had been able to stay alive through much of her past existence. She hoped she would continue to, no matter what happened between them. She flattered herself, she said, in imagining that she could be a foreigner to anybody apart from herself, but no doubt she might be, at her time of life and with the foibles that had surfaced after abandoning her funny marriage. That she felt like a foreigner to all and sundry seemed the first good fact about herself and their relationship. It thinned the emotions, gave them less importance when in operation. Not being ‘made for each other’ meant there were sufficient novelties of behaviour for affection to fasten on without generating painful antagonisms. Because they were not familiar by temperament and background everything had to be said before the meaning was clear, and so only those meanings were made plain that clarity considered absolutely necessary. So they could be almost uncaring, a mood in which all revelations would come, if they must, in their allotted time.
Because they felt foreign to each other she sensed that it still might be possible to love and yet keep their separate identities. Many couples who lived together for a long time took on the worst traits of the other (and in her case she blamed herself as much as George) and so could not help but enter a battlefield from which neither could get free, an inbred fight in which, the longer it went on, the more impossible it was to call a truce or separate. Two people with common frontiers should cross them with circumspection, or by invitation only.
They talked well into the afternoon, as if unwilling to leave such a haven before emptying their minds of what thoughts it had bred in them. A conversation with long silences went on till she could no longer sit up, and the walls swayed towards her.