Before the boat docked he found a steward to take tea and biscuits to Pam’s cabin. She had undressed, and was resting between the sheets. The rough bumping of the sea had made her drowsy, did not let her sleep but scraped continually at the cabin to the rise and fall under her bunk, more soporific than the train, keeping nerves on edge while relaxing her limbs. In her waking dreams she seemed deep under the sea. The capsule she lay in was at the whim of unseen currents. She couldn’t imagine being in a normally lighted room, with the floor unmoving and no other noise than laughing and talking, with Judy and the kids. If the sea came in she would be glad, yet use her last strength to stay alive.
She was surprised at being left alone for nearly three hours. He couldn’t desert her on board ship. Where would he go, even if he wanted to? They were in it together, and would stay that way. Her belly was taut, increasing in size. Was the baby swimming in its own inland sea? There was no future while it was, but she didn’t doubt that it would start one day. Would all hell be again let loose? She had no option but to wait and see, and endure, until the future, with a great cry, turned into the present, which would, she supposed, cry even louder.
The cabin was hot, and after her tea had been put down she got out of bed and stood up. He knocked and came in, wearing his heavy gaberdine raincoat, and cap which he took off. ‘We’ll be in in a few minutes. Newhaven’s ahead.’
‘I don’t feel the same person going back as I did when we left.’ She pulled on her dress. The only way he could respond was to go up for air and light, and watch the ship sliding into harbour while he laughed into the wind.
17
Judy didn’t like living off a man, and told the bastard so in no uncertain terms. Certainty of meaning in such cases was a letting go of the self, and she had, she decided in that floating ecstatic moment before speech, as much right to it as anyone else. But her voice was not too loud, nor her terms so brash as the throbbing in her veins had led even her to expect. ‘I shall be leaving as soon as I can get something fixed up that won’t let the kids down too badly.’
Tom was no fool. Nobody thought so, himself least of all. Let the sky come down, but he would not raise his voice beyond the normal pitch to meet any onrush. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but listen to me. I’ll talk to you as to a woman. Or a man, if that’s what you want. Or any other being you care to imagine yourself if you’ll just tell me what it is. Whoever and whatever you like.’
If a woman (or anyone) slammed into him he slammed straight back. No messing. It was the stiff-necked part of him you could always reckon on coming into operation when you least expected it. Judy had had enough, though, Judy had, she told herself, and Judy – thought Judy – would sling her bloody hook no matter how deep in anybody’s back it was buried. But there was no stopping him, until such time as she got up and walked. For some reason or other she couldn’t, and meanwhile he went on:
‘I’ll tell you, what’s more’ – he tapped a two-fingered rhythm on the piano top to mark off and emphasize each phrase – ‘that the money you’re too scared or too proud, or too mean (let’s face it) to share with us, isn’t mine, and never was. It came from my family – if you can call it one – by no other route except that of accident. That was the only way it got to me – and therefore to us.’
Fed up with such confrontations, Pam would have told her to go if she wanted, though knew she would be out-voted on the matter. But there was more to the clash than mere argument suggested. There always was. Whoever loved each other could do so from a distance, for all she cared. She wondered whether Judy hadn’t wanted Tom to respond in exactly the way he was doing. A person like Judy didn’t know anyone until she had made them angry, though it had to be admitted that she was sincere in all her principles, and fervent in any sacrifice she would make for them.
Judy needed an emotional base, however, and once it was found she considered it too good to relinquish easily, as Pam gathered from their conversations in the darkness of the bed they had twice shared since coming back. Judy had discovered ease not in material things, which to her were dispensable, but in the security of communal friendship not before experienced. The seeds of trust had slipped into her and taken root, but the rougher part of herself that sometimes demanded change threatened her with havoc.
While it was reassuring to know that everyone was a battleground, the consequence when those battlegrounds came into contact with each other could be anything but pleasant. Yet she saw the justice of Judy’s case. Judy wanted formal and open avowals that she and her children could stay, to be cemented by anger as much as with friendship and love, enabling her to agree before both Tom and Pam as witnesses, so that from then on she would not be tempted to thoughtlessly leave. Any arrangements half-defined, or allowances given on sufferance, or terms made plain yet not specifically numbered, were no good to her. It was too English a method – too, in a way, oriental. Only the rich could live by it, but in the present case an unspoken agreement to hang on as long as you liked suited no one, certainly not Judy, and Pam saw immediately that she was right. It must be roughed out (in anger if need be), drawn up, ratified, and thoroughly understood.
Pam loved him for falling for such tactics, or for falling in with them, which was more likely, as he continued: ‘And the money’s now in my name, but don’t let that gall you. We can do something about that – since the notion clearly does.’
Judy played the game her way, while he made the moves his, and Pam marvelled how neatly the methods dovetailed when they met. She coloured at his deviousness, and at Judy’s, and at her own when an occasional small contribution came into effect. Either that, or they all had a well-developed talent for self-preservation in the midst of an incipient chaos.
Then another truth came to her, the one that said he would promise anything to Judy because he knew, she thought, that as long as she stayed so would I. This made her feel trapped, and also angry, but it was a trap she herself had engineered, every twig, leaf and piece of bait. She had deliberately made it, walked into it willingly, and feathered it almost without knowing. Now she was to give birth in it. What had she left the old one for? The question was as unnecessary as it was for her to say that she liked it here.
‘As far as possible,’ Tom said, ‘I’m trying to make out that we own the wealth – if that’s what it is – in common. I don’t really know how far back it goes, and don’t much care, because I have no guilt feelings whatsover about using it to our advantage. My grandfather accumulated property. He bought stocks and shares. Maybe he owned half a coal-mine, and inherited a few miles of some branch-line railway. It could be that he even sweated the proletariat in sundry mills and slate quarries, as your former husband might have put it. But now the residue is ours. Ours, not mine, and if you don’t want any advantage from the money, that’s your decision. But if you take your children back to anything like the life you were living in West Eleven, then you’ll be far more immoral than staying here and living off money you think is tainted because it supposedly belongs to a man.’
His face had reddened. It was not in his nature to justify himself, neither to man nor woman, especially at such length. But it was part of him to be just, and he suppressed much of his anger lest it lead to a state where he could not be so.
Judy’s shrug was a milder reaction than Pam expected from someone of her views. But there was more to her response than the glimpse of a protected existence for her and the children. The picture of her leaving was desolation indeed to Pam, who knew it had always been possible to wake up one morning and find her packing before final quittance. Now it wouldn’t be, mainly because the reality of her departure with the children had also been unthinkable to Tom, who had handled its prevention in such a way that everyone had thought they alone were responsible for winning the skirmish.