In rectifying errors you created others, and therein lay the peril that could arise from insufficient attention to detail. On the other hand a number of errors might more or less cancel each other out, though accuracy was sacrificed if too much reliance was placed on such a system. But he wasn’t navigating through half-charted waters any more. His latitude was benign, his longitude comfortable, and he was in a country where quakes were unknown, tremors infrequent, fires rare, and floods didn’t reach this far from the river.
What would Aunt Clara have done in the present fix? He had never asked such questions, though thought of a few cases when it might have been wise to do so. He had stubbornly relied on training, tradition, his orphanage upbringing, and fragments of congenital sense coexisting so well with that triple grafting on to himself – which by now could not be spliced into distinctions.
To ask Clara, while she was alive, what he should do in such a situation would have opened him to an influence too powerful to be good. She might have told him to do the wrong thing as punishment for having had the weakness to need advice. He only knew that you managed better on your own, and therefore were never likely to be embarrassed by sharing mistakes with anyone else.
Clara considered that, no matter what purpose other people served, they were there to help her, and if she was in need she would respect their existence by giving them the privilege of doing so. Lacking even so lowly an item as sugar for her tea, she would ask for it with that presence which only those could object to who did not possess what she wanted. The notion that not to ask was mean-spirited would hardly occur to her, for she would do so without the thought going through her mind.
He ran the electric shaver over his chin, washed his face, and reached for a tie. To act as Clara would have done was a form of homage – for which she would no doubt call him a bigger fool than he had ever thought himself.
He unscrewed the fuel tap so that he could light the stove when he came back, then took up his sugar-tin and went out. He’d often wondered whether Clara’s gruffness hadn’t hidden a subtlety too deep for him to fathom, until he came to feel that much of the deviousness lay in himself. Acquaintances over the years had hinted at such qualities on seeing his obtuse and effective methods in dealing with difficulties among the men, but he had felt straightforward in what he was doing, and thought they were exaggerating his skill out of a wish to become friendly – a gesture which he hardly ever returned, on the assumption that people should mind their own business.
Finally, he decided, as he knocked on the door, you do as you damn-well like. Smells of breakfast came up the stairs. A crying child seemed unwilling to go to school. The place was a bit of a slum, and now that he had money he would get somewhere better. A smell of gas overpowered all others. Must have gone to work and left it on. He leaned close to make sure. People were careless, and he thought so would I be if I lit a cigarette while standing here.
There had been movement earlier, but if someone went out the slamming of the door was followed by a thunderous hoofing down the stairs. So much for his scruples about borrowing sugar. He would light the stove, and fetch his own, and might even get fresh bread instead of chewing damp biscuits.
A sensation of horror and alarm, against which he swore obscenely, caused him to propel himself from the wall in a heavyweight rush at the door, and he had knocked over a table and all that was on it in the darkened room before he stopped.
He ripped at the curtains. Strips of tape snapped at his wrists as he slammed the window up, the cut of icy air as welcome as a dash of cold water in the Red Sea.
She lay by the fire, like someone pulled out of a lifeboat after a shipwreck and left to take a chance on recovery while less serious cases that might survive were seen to first. He turned off the tap, but thought she was dead, and that if she wasn’t she ought to be, should be thrown out of the window, and then see what troubles she’d have – provided she landed in one piece.
She weighed enough to be in the next world already. Such a signing-off and homecoming was more than he could be bothered with. Leave her. Seal up the window. Turn the gas back on. Go out and lock the door. She’ll never forgive you if you don’t.
She was damp under the armpits. He hauled her along the floor. A shoe came off, and he stopped to put it back on. Her foot was warm. The fumes and effort gave him a headache. Your trouble wasn’t bad enough, or you wouldn’t have tried such a stunt. He worked ill before breakfast and, still holding her, rested to get breath, not wanting to fail with a heart attack and have two suicides found instead of one which, in view of the apparent methods of having brought it about, might at least get them a posthumous commendation for ingenuity.
Laughing at the notion, he closed the door and pulled her to his own room. Too cold to open the window, but she needed oxygen – if she was sufficiently in the world to profit from anything. He took off his jacket and put it on a hangar behind the door. Her face continually changed expression, as if she were having painful and vital conversations with herself.
She lay on the floor. He undid the top buttons of her shirt, then stretched her arms up and began to man the pumps, his head and face sweating after the first half dozen of north-south, north-south and north-south. She’s dead, but keep on, he said, keep on, and felt light in the head at having to work again, though it was such hard galley-slavery that if it took five more minutes he would stop whether she came to life or didn’t. If breath had been available he might have sung a ditty. The impulse to guffaw was hard to fight, as if it had been laughing gas instead of plain old coal. Pity the new North Sea stuff isn’t in yet. Must have known it was coming soon, so couldn’t wait.
She’ll need a bath after this. For a change we’ll have east-west, east-west and east-west, but if anybody asks what I’m up to I’ll say I might be performing an act of mercy or doing physical jerks as I do every morning like this on whoever’s willing, but thank God you’ve come to take over the pumps because I’m flagging at north-by-east, north-by-east and north-by-east.
He prayed, and bullied, and laughed at her, and swore at himself, and cursed his bad luck, berating his lack of endurance when the pump wouldn’t draw, and rocks were about to rip away the bottom of the ship on which she lay. He had made the effort with men about to peg out from drowning, and to the absolutely drowned – with undisciplined hope but diminishing strength.
In freezing air he steamed from the effort and called on God, and Clara, his father and mother, and anyone else who might listen, but most of all himself and the gassed woman under him till he heard her choke and gag and fart and bite more of the bitter cold welling in through the window. Disinclined to gentleness, he spun her halfway round the compass and hauled her with his last strength to the sill, pushing her over as if he’d had enough and would send her three decks below like a bag of dirty linen at the end of a voyage.
‘Breathe!’ he shouted.
Shirt sleeves flying, he took in air for himself and held her at the window, looked out from the dead centre on a hundred and fourteen degrees of great circle bearing pointing somewhere or other but right now too much was happening to bother where such a beam might go. A man got out of a car across the street and looked up at their lovers’ tiff, then shook his head and walked down the nearest basement steps as if on his way to collect a poor soul’s rent.
She gasped, and retched when he forced her to the sink. ‘Fetch it up!’ Only rough stuff could help in a matter of such life and death. ‘Or I’ll put my hand down your throat and pull it out myself.’