‘Fifteen kilometres,’ she told him.
‘We’ve done enough today.’
They went into the town, trees along the road, people walking the pavements. They lived here, worked here, were born and would die here, most of them. She envied them. Life seemed calm. Young girls strolled with their boy-friends. There was a public square, with a newspaper kiosk and garden seats. The streets were narrow, and shops open. It was like being back in the world when he parked and they stood upright on the gravel to stretch themselves. She belonged nowhere, only to herself. Yet she belonged everywhere she came to, and to nowhere in particular, the only certainty was that she was with Tom, covering the trail of a journey without end.
The hotel was modern, their room on the fourth floor. Out of the window she saw river and country beyond immediate roofs. ‘We must look like tramps coming out of the car.’
‘People are used to seeing such things.’
They washed and changed.
‘We’ll soon feel human again,’ he said.
He lay on the bed, and no sooner was his head on the pillow than he was asleep. It was still light outside, so she picked up the car keys and drew the curtains so that he wouldn’t wake till dinner.
She walked across the road to the parking space and unlocked the door, wanting the basket so as to buy food for tomorrow’s stint. To reach Dieppe by evening and get on the Channel ferry wouldn’t leave time for a sit-down meal. Broad daylight invited her to turn on the ignition. She backed out. A hundred miles would roll before he awoke. Traffic was leaving town, and she joined it, cars behind and in front, hers anonymous and unremarkable, one of the crowd.
Rolls of cloud lay on low hills ahead. If she met Judy by the kerb of the tree-lined road she would give her a lift, providing they were going to the same destination. It was laughable to be free. The ease of driving with no one else in the car was so much greater. She could go on for ever, until coming bang up against frontier or coastline, when it would be seen that the car wasn’t in her name. Even then, she might get through.
She would ride awhile and go back. She loved him too much to let him worry. He must be wakened for supper. She saw him sleeping, his exhaustion at last in repose. It was rare enough, these days. She wanted to be with him, and looked for a place to turn.
At a traffic island she went left instead of right. A car from the opposite direction smashed into her left side. Too late to avoid or beneficially stop. There was a rending of metal, a smash of windscreen and headlight, and a fearful jerk at the neck that spun her eyes into blackness.
14
By nine at night Hilary and Sam were so deadbeat that few squeaks or mumbles were still to come. They’d had their baths, been fed and sent to bed, and nothing could break the tranquillity of the hours that followed. Traffic noises diminished, and even the muted beat of the sea contributed to peace.
The security of living in Tom’s flat, minus the tension of wondering where the next tenpenny piece was coming from, made her feel more bodily worn out than she ever had. Having no worries, she decided, will be the death of me, unless I get used to it. The fight was worth making, considering, as she did, that her struggle had been sufficient to pay any debt towards sin and sloth that she might at some time have incurred.
She put her supper plate on the piano top, and set up the card-table by the fireplace. Her unease was caused by wondering when such good fortune – there was no other word for it – would end. She tried not to care. Her body and spirit wallowed in the succour that had dropped from heaven in the shape of this seaside flat and the money Tom allowed her.
The painting of the dead officer above the mantelpiece was taken down the day they came in, and stood in the hall where no one could see it. Sam had cracked the canvas by a nudge from his elbow, and a stab from the heel of his boot, on a race to the door with Hilary, injuries which distorted the pink-glo cheek and changed the angle of the gun barrel. But she joined the cracks with glue and coloured them with a child’s painting set, and hoped the wanderers wouldn’t notice on their return. She couldn’t remember when Sam had last shed tears, and his distress at the damage to what she considered to be the vilest bit of painting she’d ever seen almost brought tears to her own eyes.
She cooked at midday so as to have an easy time in the evening, when she fixed a cold supper of bread and cheese, and made a pot of black coffee in the fancy alchemical percolator of Tom’s old aunt. The kids had a dinner at school, and more or less looked after themselves, but she gave them breakfast and kept the flat in order, and spent any spare hours reading her way through shelves of novels by Trollope and George Eliot. Time passed, but the golden days would end, because Pam had phoned a few days ago to say they were on their way home. She expected them any moment, and then where would she be?
She sipped scalding coffee between bites of sandwich, trying to decide who she was in love with. The absence of Tom and Pam emphasized the isolated unreality of her feelings, which she hoped wouldn’t be altogether denied when they got back. She had been surprised by the realization that there had to be a man as well as a woman in her life. Perhaps such deficient people as myself, she thought, need both, but if so I don’t mind being in that category, especially if it leads me to become less deficient.
She was consoled by the fact that she could admit the truth at last. To indulge in dreams was a cure for exhaustion, a necessary exercise because at the moment there was neither man nor woman to comfort her. Perhaps there never would be again. They’d surely be too involved with each other to give any attention when they got back, especially now a baby was in the offing, but at least she would have passed time in that twilight aura of knowing there was one way which would allow her to live fully. And anything better than nothing was as good as having everything. If her hope to be with both of them turned out to be no more than her favourite fantasy, the knowledge of her possibilities would remain, and perhaps lead to a resolution of some kind.
After the children got into bed she changed to wearing one of the long skirts and high-necked blouses from the cupboard where Tom’s aunt had stored them. Slacks and sweater were slopped around in during the day, or put on to go out shopping. If it was chilly she donned Tom’s Merchant Navy overcoat, which seemed to be fashionable among the young these days. But for evenings she needed to feel different, hoping to reach part of herself long since forgotten.
She walked the room, and poured a glass of brandy. The telephone sounded, but she let it ring. Poured into coffee, the brandy warmed her. Most likely it was a wrong number, or a heavy-breather wanting his night’s sport. There had been such cases lately. She sat in the armchair with legs resting on a stool. If the noise went on for a long time she had enough will to last it into silence.
One had to know the basis of one’s relationship to love before connecting properly to life. Most people had the facility, she thought, because they reached the extent of their capacity early on, or imagined they did, which was the same thing. A proper existence must be founded on a correct appreciation of the half-hidden love that inevitably surfaced, and she knew that she had been in the presence of an enduring lustful affection which she called love ever since meeting Tom, and from the moment Pam had walked into her room one day out of the rain. It was an event of the lost meeting the lost, and feeling a sense of fulfilment as soon as they were in each other’s presence, or arms.
She remembered that they had needed cornflakes and butter for the larder, so went into the kitchen to scribble on the shopping-list before she forgot. The vital pushed out the banal. To bring food into the flat was at least as important as her thoughts, though she’d never known a time when space hadn’t been found for both.