Judy laughed, a more genuine resonance. ‘I hope so. We’ll all live happily together I expect.’
‘There should be space for all of us.’
‘We’ll talk about it when you get here,’ Judy said.
‘We don’t need to.’
‘All right, then. It’s settled.’ She sounded glad. There was some disturbance from the children, and Pam heard her shout: ‘Shut up, you pigs. Tom’s coming back. He’ll sort you out.’
There were cheers.
‘We’ll phone from the docks – maybe Newhaven, after Tom’s worked it out. He sends his love.’
‘Can’t wait to see you.’
‘Nor me you.’
‘You’d better hang up,’ Judy said, ‘or you’ll have no money to get back on. Love and kisses to you – both.’
She turned to Tom on putting the receiver down. ‘That’s that. All fixed.’
He clipped his case shut. ‘Will she be glad to see us?’
‘She will now. The children certainly will. She had imagined we’d be away for a couple of months, but it’ll be only a fortnight.’
‘That,’ he said, with more satisfaction than she liked to hear, ‘is fate. Everyone is at its mercy.’
‘It wasn’t fate that got me pregnant.’ She turned to her own clothes.
He ignored her remark, and said: ‘She’ll be all right. We’ll look after them. There’s enough room in the flat for everybody, as I heard you telling her.’
‘Or maybe it was fate,’ Pam smiled.
11
There was nothing in her mind except the force to get out into the open what little was in it, that much being all she had and therefore of the most vital importance to her. An east wind buffeted the car. He didn’t even see the low hills lifting to left and right. She said: ‘You are destroying me.’
His hands on the steering wheel gripped more than formerly. She had struck at the middle, and found a rock of truth that she had been feeling for since coming out of that miasma of gas when they first met. And he knew it, she thought, at which he could only keep quiet so as to be able to stay driving safely on the motorway. Their lives seemed more vital to him than anything she could say.
‘You’re trying to destroy me, that’s it.’ She was not willing to spare him. The pain was so unremitting that she could not even spare herself. Why did two people live together if they could not confess what pain they felt? Now that she had spoken she seemed more in danger than he could ever be. He knew that, as well, and if he didn’t respond, or reply, she would leap at his hands and bloody her teeth on them, tear at the dark hairs on those fingers confidently curled around the plastic-covered wheel so that he would run off the motorway or into some other vehicle. Death seemed easier than silence. She would reduce him, because the prospect of reducing herself was too final to be borne. The cost to her was infinite, but to him it would be little enough. All her life she had wanted to meet someone strong enough to sustain her central fire of attack, an attack into which was built the very substance of herself. The end had come, and she would fling herself into death; because anything less was worse than death which, though it meant life, she would not live with. She was his equal, and wanted him to know.
‘And I won’t be destroyed, not by you or anyone else, but above all not by you.’
He smiled, but was in agony. Unlike at first meeting, his face was no longer capable of concealing secrets. The ability to create mutual agony was at least a measure of their progress towards each other, as was the happiness they had known an indication of their intimacy. The driving of the car held his pain within bounds. Like the man used to obey, and to obedience, he kept a straight course, still conscious to the extent of moving from lane to lane while overtaking other vehicles. ‘You can’t destroy me,’ he said, ‘which is clearly what you want.’
He spoke as if out of despair, but she detected a note of triumph. The vivid light and stink of motor fumes made her feel near to death. Any split second, being at the outer limits of a life to which she had brought him, he might swing the car at the bank of a bridge support and end the misery he must feel but which she now told herself she did not. Death was better than no feeling. Without feeling you did nothing but that which brought death about. If she was dead she would wake him up, make his heart ring and vibrate to what was in her. He had come from the sea and usurped her place in the world, before bringing her back to it in his fashion. He was all compact and formed and finished beautifully by training and circumstance and heredity, while George had been a millpond of nothingness and she a mere appendage of that. She loved him and she didn’t, but her own terms were made as nothing by his monolithic self-assurance, against which she must prevail so as to save herself from destruction. He was the spirit to her flesh, and she would make them mix on her terms as much as on his. But all she could say was: ‘I won’t be destroyed, whatever you may want.’
She lacked words for the outside. They were there by the thousand but would not be spoken. She wanted them but couldn’t find any that would tell him what she meant. He loved her, so knew what she wanted to say, but it wasn’t enough unless and until she had been allowed to say everything.
‘I love you.’ Each word was as clear and as uncomfortable as grit in his throat. ‘Isn’t that sufficient?’
It no longer was. She had glimpsed something else. It had taken time, but another light was beginning to expand. She told him that no, it wasn’t enough, as a matter of fact.
He drove on. ‘It will have to be.’
She was sure he understood, but knew he might not be able to follow. He overtook an enormous lorry, hands relaxed at the wheel, and went on to put another juggernaut behind them. She struck, smashed, crunched her fist at his hands. ‘It won’t have to be. It won’t.’
He instantaneously gripped. His expression was unchanged, she struck again, the lorry wheels seeming higher than the car, a cliff-face sliding along with engine roaring and smothering theirs as if they were gliding in silence. He changed gear, flicked on blinkers to reach an inner lane, his lips making imprecations which might have been at the lorry as much as at her. For no reason he switched on the windscreen wipers, perhaps as if to wash her pestering spirit away. They were around the lorry obstacle, and for good measure he swung out again and left two cars behind. He thought he was safe, that he had survived a crisis as he’d triumphed in the fight when George and his brothers had attacked her.
She recalled the set-to, filled with shame and, forgetting the peril she’d been in, felt that her brothers-in-law had been hard done by. They’d stood little chance against his cock-of-the-walk sailor-bully who tricked them by bluff rather than fair fight.
The motorway curved, banks of rock and yellow soil close to the side. Heavy gunmetal clouds lay up the Rhône valley ahead. She struck again, fearing to vomit if she didn’t – blows more unexpected than the first and even more forceful, screaming at him to stop the car. He looked at the front, tightened his grip, and drove on. He thought she had finished, worked out her demons as if she were a mutinous deckhand whom he had to polish off by the old one-two. When she struck at him on a clear patch of the road his fist spun and knocked her head against the window.
‘Be quiet,’ he said loudly, ‘and pull yourself together.’
There was no other way. She was carrying his child. He would make sure no death occurred while he had control. And for the moment he had. But they were finished.
South of Lyon, a coppice of tall pipes speared into the air, blazing flames of gas burning at their tips against a dark underbelly of cloud. The tips of flame rippled like flags of victory against the world of darkness. She noticed him look at it yet watch every foot of the road. The zone the chimneys covered was immense. Her head turned to stay with them as he drove by. The rhythm of their waving flame-tips calmed her.