He opened it.
‘You look as if you’ve just done the nightshift in a soot factory,’ she said.
He washed, then sat diagonally from her. With rolled-up sleeves, and a shirt open at the neck, it seemed as if he had lived in the flat all his bachelor days. Even his subdued and worried state emphasized the fact. ‘You must have had an interesting hour or two.’
He paused in his eating. ‘I’ll tell you about it.’
‘Take your time.’
‘I still don’t know who I am, but I’m getting a rough idea as to who I might have been, and that’s a beginning.’
She put more of the fish on his plate. ‘Have you found anything startling?’
‘Not yet. I’m not even born.’
‘Keep trying,’ she said. ‘Knowledge is sacred.’
His eyes were troubled. ‘This sort is.’
She was glad he had changed his mind about it, though he was further away than she liked. She served hot food, then set cakes and cheeses close so as not to get up till after the meal. ‘You can make the coffee.’
He poured more wine. ‘I’ll wash up, too.’
‘No. Get on with your sorting.’ If she wasn’t useful she wouldn’t be here. The day out had turned into something else. London seemed a thousand miles off. Her past had vanished. No alteration of surroundings had ever lifted her so much out of herself. Even to wonder what was missing from her consciousness did not put her back in touch. The man whose flat she was in was a stranger, as she no doubt was a stranger to him, so they were at ease with each other. At least she hoped she was. She felt almost married, but without the tangled obsessions that came from having slept in the same bed. She liked being here because she could leave whenever she wanted to.
He told her what he had found, describing how each piece of information was laid aside until something turned up from a box to confirm or complement it. He assembled truths and situations into sequences, like doing a jigsaw puzzle or putting a pack of cards in order during a game of patience. He did not go rigidly from A to B, and hurriedly to Z as if afraid to lose his way should he not finish the story quickly, or as if he couldn’t be bothered to make the tale good for her since it only concerned him, or good for himself since it couldn’t concern anyone else; but he went on calmly with his circumlocutionary report, taking a fact here, a lead there, describing a book, or a photograph, and quoting from a letter or journal, or an unlabelled sheet of paper on which someone had scribbled thoughts seemingly unrelated or information presumably unsought, and circling the loose pieces until a more or less whole picture formed, the assembling of a mosaic rather than an ordinary account which would have been finished too quickly and thereby diminished in the telling for him, and been less absorbing in the hearing of it for her.
‘I have to be careful not to allow the stuff to explain more about myself than it deserves,’ he said, having spoken in his precise way to the end of the meal. ‘I’m still me, after all, and my fifty years of unknowing haven’t been exactly meaningless.’
He was fighting his definitions to the last. She wanted to pity him because, though he might not know it, his face reflected a painful ordeal. He would never admit it, she felt sure, yet she did not envy him the ability to hold it in check, or his fate that had decided he must.
They went into the kitchen, and when the noise of the coffee grinder stopped, he said: ‘The same things happen to everyone. It’s only when you find out about such events that they seem more fascinating than they should. I read somewhere that everyone’s more like their grandparents than their parents, and now I’m not sure whether to believe it. You just have to live with what you know, I suppose, or let all revelations slip into the bloodstream, and then more or less forget them.’
She was no longer sleepy. ‘You’re only half-way through the story.’
Unopened boxes lay over the living-room floor like the jellyfish surrounding the ship off Sabang on that tropical morning when he had almost fainted and dropped overboard. Would they sting if he stepped on them? There was no option but to descend. The box nearest his chair released a smell of stale lavender, a vanishing sweetness that he recognized but could not fix in his memory.
There was the usual jumble of liner and railway tickets, whist-drive score cards, sweepstake certificates, death notices, address books, pocket diaries and dance programmes. He filled plastic bags for the dustbin men, not being a detective on the lookout for information who needed evidence to condemn or acquit. The past now seemed relevant enough to tie himself firmly to it. He had been an orphan, but it hadn’t mattered. Aunt Clara had told sufficient for him to think it unimportant to know more. If he had persisted, he was given to understand he would lose even her. She would tell him not to come back. ‘That’s all I know,’ she had snapped at him, ‘so ask me nothing else.’
‘Damn it,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll scratch among the rubbish till my fingernails bleed.’
5
‘What memories I shall be left with when all this is over!’ Clara wrote in her large script. It was open, and naïve, and the rounded generosity of individual letters stared at him like faces that pleaded to be believed. But he shook off all impressions, imagining that to attempt to read the character of writing in this way would argue even more naïvety in him.
‘I knew the cruise would not end well as soon as I saw the name of the ship. But to think I didn’t really know what was going on. How could I have been so BLOODY stupid? Yet even so I couldn’t have stopped it. Nobody could. We were together every minute. No one came into our cabin. When she was there, I was with her. But of course I couldn’t have been. At night she was on her own. Mother blamed me. Father blamed Emma. Emma blamed herself. And we all blamed THE MAN. But Emma was twenty-eight, and in control of her own decisions. Or was she? Whoever is? She saw him for the first time on the third day out, when we’d recovered from our mal de mer, and there was nothing anybody could do from that moment on. But why didn’t she make him take care? Elementary precautions had always been rule number one, the first thought before enjoyment, such as it was or could ever be.’
Emma’s carefree ways did not prevent her from understanding the world well enough to try and snap its bonds, but she did more damage to herself than break free of the values which she looked on with contempt. But she was in love with Alec, a sort of scullion or undercook who should not have been within a mile of the first-class part of the ship, but who was the kind of beetle it was impossible to prevent encroaching.
Clara saw them standing on the lifeboat deck one night after dinner, and almost pulled her from the rail. ‘We must have coffee, dear.’
He looked at Clara. ‘She’ll be all right with me.’
‘Perhaps so. But she’s coming into the saloon now.’
He was even cheeky about it. ‘I was showing her the stars. There’s a few around tonight.’
‘I dare say there are.’
‘What a fuss you’re making,’ Emma said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’m not a young girl.’
‘I know, dear, but it’s father’s birthday tomorrow, and we have to write that telegram between us so that we can send it off.’
‘Goodbye, miss.’ The man walked away.
Emma said to Clara in the saloon: ‘Don’t do that again, do you hear? I talk to whoever I like. He’s a pleasant person, and we were just talking.’
‘With his arm around you?’