She could not listen for ever, because he did not speak forever. She went out. She could only walk. She walked the three miles home, elated from the words poured like wine into her, and repeated with every step. Her legs ached and her feet were sore, but being worn out enabled her to look at the reality of the streets and people again, so that by the time she reached home the preacher’s words had faded to a place in her mind where they would not dominate her spirit beyond endurance, but which helped her to remember them.
George asked where she got to every week. She said she went walking. She called on Eunice Dobson who lived in the Park. They had coffee and talked for an hour about old times at the ticket office. Then she walked back. He thought it a good idea, said it was healthy to use her feet now and again. He was sorry he couldn’t go, but was too busy with paperwork.
She stepped into fresh air on her way into town. Better to walk than go in the car, as George had suggested. She only drove often enough not to forget how to do it, otherwise he took the wheel, nervous that she might scratch the precious paintwork or scrape the bumper. The protection which the enclosing car-frame gave against the outside world had the disadvantage that it cut her off so decisively from other people.
The fact that she had thoughtlessly told a lie gnawed at her. She felt defiled and threatened on realizing that no one had as much power over you as those who made you lie. Though there was only herself to blame, she knew that George had meant to attack her by asking so pointedly where she went. It was impossible to walk out freely in a world where every experience had to be shared as one might have to divide a bone with another dog.
The Sunday morning street was empty, breakfast-smelling houses standing back from the pavement. Their bricks were dark and comfortable from having been lived behind for more than one generation, compared to the ten-year pebble-dash boxes on her street. They were permanent and untouchable, and inside she imagined a richer atmosphere than that which nurtured her, who felt she was dying under the weight of a single lie. When she ran screaming across the street a paperboy came around the corner on his bike, and cursed as he swerved, calling out: ‘Fucking old bitch!’ while pedalling away.
Her father’s Bible was in her bag. She had read it in her schooldays and now, frightened, took it out to hold. Her father’s and her mother’s names were written inside the cover. She had inscribed hers on the opposite page when she was seven. She stood by a lamp-post and looked at the signatures of joint ownership, until she was calm. Then she walked over a railway bridge and to the main road.
The cemetery was to her right as she went up the hill, a sky of grey cloud with no space between, a mild wind blowing into her face. A bus went along the wide road, a car overtaking, and she felt sweat under her arms from the heat of walking. She stopped by the railings because a blister was beginning at her heel, though the lie she had told burned even more.
A man at the wheel of a shining station-wagon turned down his window. ‘Are you lost, duck?’
He stopped by the kerb. ‘Do you want a lift somewhere?’
He looked at her through wire-framed glasses, seeming about fifty, with fair hair swept back over his broad head, wearing a sports jacket, cardigan and tie tucked brashly in. She liked his easy smile, and the hand that rested on the window. The click of indicators sounded, and he had left the engine running. ‘I’ll take you wherever you want. My wife’s away for a week, and I’m footloose and fancy free!’
‘I’m going to chapel,’ she said.
‘I’ll give you a lift, then.’
‘No thanks. It’s only just over the hill.’
‘What do you want to go to chapel for, anyway? You’ll do a lot better coming with me.’
She fastened her coat, ready to walk. ‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t? Can’t? Do you hear that? She can’t!’ He appealed as if he had someone else in the car, which he hadn’t. ‘What reason is that?’
She took two steps forward, tempted by a madness that felt wonderfully sane, to get in and put herself beyond the deadly woodenness of life that weighed her down. There would be no crawling back to the self she would leave behind. He opened the door: ‘Come on, then, why don’t you? We’ll be in Matlock in forty minutes, or Skeggy in a couple of hours. It’s still early, so the roads’ll be clear.’
For such people everything worked. The devil’s arrangements were always to be relied on. There was a glint of something worse than victory in his eyes, which she could hardly blame him for, considering her hesitation. The car radio caterwauled brainless music to help in his enticement. ‘You aren’t coming then?’
If ever she was to leave she would choose her own time. ‘No.’
His tone was half between a wheedle and a demand: ‘Go on. Come on. Why not?’ – she’d heard it all before. ‘My wife won’t mind. We do a bit o’ swapping now and again. I swap her, she swaps me. It don’t mean much, as long as we’re happy. In fact it keeps us together, doing a bit of swapping now and again. We’re in the Aspley Swap Club.’
She wouldn’t be surprised. ‘There isn’t an Aspley Swap Club.’
‘I know,’ he admitted, ‘but there ought to be.’
She laughed, then was horrified at talking to him at all. If he came out of the car she would swing her handbag with the Bible inside. ‘I’ve said no, so get going.’
He was disappointed, but his smile was fixed. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
She waved as he drove away. He waved back. No harm in trying, he must have thought. When the moment came it would not be with another man. That sort of escapade would mean even less freedom. She couldn’t understand the disturbance of a trivial lie to George, and forgot her sore heel as she went over the hill towards the city centre, reflecting that some day she might indeed go away to live on her own in a place too far off for him to come and find her.
The preacher she had hoped to hear was gone. The circuit might not bring him back for another year, in which time who knew where she would be? Perhaps it was for the best. Every month a different speaker came with text and message. ‘Grief,’ she heard, ‘is heavier than the sands of the sea, therefore my words are swallowed up. The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.’
Her thoughts became settled, in that she seemed for a time to have fewer of them, but she was comforted, and grateful to live secure in her own mind. The weekly hour of peace strengthened her, verse and exhortation soothing the turbulence of her false life.
She walked through the pedestrian area on her way to the bus stop.
‘I didn’t think it could be you, coming out of that place,’ Bert said, ‘but by God it was! How are you getting on then, duck?’
He used to be good-looking, but his close and interesting features had developed into the face of a ferocious but all-knowing bird about to peck anyone into the ground who got in its way. ‘You like going to chapel, eh?’
She could sense his silent laughter in the space behind his face. ‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t think you was like that.’
‘I am, when I want to be.’
He glanced at the upper windows of surrounding shops, as if someone might be observing him, or perhaps as if reconnoitring for a way inside, like the old days when he hadn’t been averse to doing a discreet job or two. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain.’