‘Let’s run!’ She took his hand and pulled him along.
A naval man never runs. Run, and you fall. You can’t see what you are doing. You injure yourself, or send others flying. Such accidents might prejudice the safety of the ship. So never run.
But he ran now, cutting through queues and dodging trolleys. The black man at the gate said: ‘You’ll be lucky, mate.’
The train was moving, and he helped her in.
Clouds flowed, and blue gaps appeared after Croydon. He had forgotten to buy a newspaper, he said. ‘Shouldn’t have run,’ she taunted him with a laugh.
‘Often I didn’t see one for months. Didn’t much hear the wireless, either, though the Sparks kept us informed. With a good wireless operator you never lacked news. Even in sleep they’re glued to the set searching the ether! When I came across a newspaper again it seemed as if nothing had happened.’
They wanted breakfast. ‘I’m ravenous,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Bring everything for both of us.’
There was countryside to look at beyond Gatwick. She remembered the waiter in the train from Nottingham, tall and handsome, long since gone.
He held his knife and fork almost at the top of the handles, which gave him a fastidiousness that hardly matched his face. Why had he asked her? Out of kindness, she supposed. It was good to be on a train while you looked at the fields floating by. The world was another place. The worst was outside, and changed with surprising ease. ‘Marvellous,’ she exclaimed, telegraph wires lifting and falling.
He felt like a youth of twenty because she had agreed to come with him, a competent person who, in spite of her gesture of despair, should have known better than to bother. She was abstracted, as if controlled by a mystery he would never be able to unravel. He was happy. Things rarely worked in conjunction, but today they had. His image in the window-glass was that of a worn and battered man of the world who had experienced too few of its many parts.
There was something untouchable about her spirit. He knew little except that she had been married, and had a son, and had broken the connection, an act which, judging by her sensitive but rawly outlined features, had needed much strength of purpose. She was emerging from the hardship, and he wondered how she had done it, but his need to know could not matter, because such a person never voluntarily explained herself. She seemed to live on an island, surrounded by reefs and sandbanks, that no one else would be allowed to explore. It wasn’t important now that she was with him, and he knew himself well enough to realize how inaccurate his impressions might be. He felt as if the weight of his own meaningless life was being taken off his back.
They walked from the station, streets freshened by cold wind. They told each other it was good to walk. Gulls squawked over the roofs, and he wondered how he had lived even for a few days without their sound. He had to get used to not hearing that mocking cry of freedom. In every place he had been the noise had an edge of malice, the over-zealous mimicking of the free calling to the unfree when in fact their sounds were signals to each other and had nothing to do with him. Yet he loved their cries, as if he’d once had the voice-mechanism for making them himself but had at some time been struck dumb.
The noise of the gulls over the seafront was less piercing, their calls were poignant, however, because he was with someone who made him feel unimportant but happy. He saw breakers rolling up the shingle and battering the walls, the tide rushing in like flocks of swans trying to escape destruction. Each wave seemed dead-set for himself, and he wanted a rest from such never-ending force. The sight of their unwearying remorselessness exhausted him.
It was hard to believe he had tolerated the sea-going life for so long – now that he had given it up. But everyone had to earn a living, and he had taken the way of least resistance after looking out of Clara’s window and deciding that on the sea he would find both vocation and a living. He was young and, much to Clara’s relief, who wouldn’t otherwise have known what to do with him, had asked no questions. From an orphanage on to a ship hadn’t been much of a big step, and once he had paraded his decision, youthful stubbornness turned it into an obsession.
Few choices had been possible, but when looked back on they formed obvious landmarks whose positions never varied from the place in which the years of life had set them. The big changes of choosing the sea, and leaving the sea, had left him feeling sufficiently elated to want as many more variations as there would be time for in his life, though to consider probabilities would ruin the clarity of the first choice that came along. Perhaps it had already been made, and only lacked recognition, and a gentle altering of course by a few points. At his age such changes could be made with less disturbance than before because they tended to stay more concealed.
‘This may be what is called bracing,’ she shouted, ‘but I’m frozen!’
He gripped her arm. ‘Let’s go this way. We’ll soon be out of it.’ The wind blew strong from the sea, and she tasted salt. They went back to the comfort of shops and people. ‘It’s better to see such water from the inside of my aunt’s flat.’
8
He held open the door, and she went in, to a smell of musty cushions. The clock striking twelve seemed that it would never stop. He pulled the curtains open on their rails, then took off his hat and overcoat. ‘Make yourself comfortable. There are about fifty bottles of sherry knocking around, if you want a glass. She liked her tipple of sack from sunny Spain.’
‘Nothing at the moment.’
They were silent. When she was with another person she felt even more like herself – vulnerable and defensive, isolated and unable to feel she belonged anywhere. She walked around the room. ‘What’s that picture?’
‘An uncle, killed in the Great War.’
She had not seen such a flat before. ‘It’s a nice place – grand.’
‘I’m glad you like it.’
She didn’t, particularly, but he followed her as if it was something special. She had meant that it was nice for him, though wasn’t sure he liked it either. The atmosphere weighed too much. When in a strange place her first impulse was to leave, but such hasty feelings were a screen behind which true impressions could form, if she had any, or if she gave them time. She opened one of the side windows, and fresh air pushed at the curtains. ‘Is it your home now?’
He nodded, and sat down. ‘Good job I kept the central heating on. Everything’s as my aunt left it. I’m torn between keeping it exactly like this, and altering it so that I can really call the place mine.’
‘I suppose you would enjoy that.’
He walked impatiently up and down the room, as if he were embarrassed, she thought, or felt trapped. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘I could sell it, and buy a house in the country.’
‘That sounds a nice idea.’
He stopped under the portrait of his dead uncle. ‘I like being close to the sea, on the other hand.’
‘There must be a cottage,’ she said, ‘near the coast.’
She followed him into the kitchen. ‘Was your aunt married?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Did she have any men?’
It was a stark, almost unthinkable question. He had never even wondered. Clara had seemed old and staid when they first met. Yet she had been younger then than he was now. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Funny if she didn’t.’
He poured sherry for himself. ‘I suppose so, but it needn’t be.’