‘What did I say?’
‘Couldn’t make it out.’
She ate a biscuit. ‘I haven’t slept at this time of day before.’
‘Sometimes at sea you catnap at all hours. Never in a bed like this, though.’
‘Did you have hammocks?’
He wore trousers and shirt, but had no shoes on. ‘Once or twice. I slept in one four weeks on my first trip to Singapore, and then four weeks back. They were comfortable.’
She brushed crumbs from the sheets. He kissed her breasts. In friendship she felt accessible, and liked it. ‘I must get dressed.’
‘I’m getting used to you with no clothes on.’
She was not embarrassed, and wondered why. Such freedom had been impossible with George. She felt a remote but friendly pity for him. They had existed, but had not been made for each other. Familiarity and time had failed to bring it about. Yet with someone so new she didn’t mind how he saw her, or what they did. She kissed his hand, and placed it between her legs.
He stroked her hair.
No words could explain her feeling of ease and helplessness. Did you have to go through the stage of being with no clothes on before getting to know someone, and was making love also part of it? She knew him, yet did not, but felt there was no need to consider it. She wanted to slide back into bed and dream, but drew the eiderdown around her and stood up.
‘We’ll go out for a meal,’ he said. ‘I know a place where they serve food upstairs. It’s nice and casual.’
In the street a wind blew the umbrella inside out, and he fought in a doorway to right it, while she stood in the rain and laughed. He held part with his foot and worked systematically to get the circle of spokes into place, but by the time he had gone fully around, the ribs shook themselves out again. He tried to do it more quickly, but the spokes still would not jump back into a firm circumference, so she held half the circle with both hands spread wide, using all her force, and they passed it round and round to each other till the umbrella was usable again. People looked at them as if they were mad. Swinging the umbrella high, rain clattered against the cloth, then he held her arm as they walked.
The room was smoky and warm, with a piercing smell of cooking that either made your mouth water, she thought, or drove you back into the street. She noticed him hesitate at the threshold, as if unsure who should go in first. Perhaps the only places where he had ever felt secure were the orphanage, a ship at sea, and his aunt’s flat.
The prolonged love-making in strange surroundings had sharpened her perceptions as if she were at the beginning of a cold or the flu. She was glad to sit down. The candle flame shook whenever the door opened. She took a napkin from the wine glass. ‘I feel as if I’ve been rolled down an endless slope in a barrel. My thighs ache, among other things.’
He touched her wrist. ‘I’m not surprised. We must have been three of four times around the world!’
The waitress gave them a folded card to look at. Pam didn’t know him. He didn’t own the flat at all, but had obtained the key while whoever it belonged to was on holiday. And was he really a retired naval man? Judy Ellerker had confirmed it, though perhaps he had deceived her as well, and the story from his day-long sorting out of the lumber room had also been fabricated. The documents matched his tale, though they could have been assimilated from somebody else’s. Maybe he was a man out of prison or back from abroad who had perfected his tricks for living off the land. He brought people into life again, and went on his way. His brown eyes looked dully at some far-off scene, until he sensed her attention. Then he came back with such immediacy she felt nothing but tenderness. She knew so little of the world that anything could be true, though in this case it wasn’t, and she decided not to retail such thoughts but say what she would like to eat.
He asked the waitress what champagne they had, and Pam let them sort the matter out. ‘It gets around the clubs of Nottingham,’ she said, noting what he chose.
‘I once took a case of it on board, to bring back for my aunt, but the captain sniffed ’em out, so Clara only saw one bottle. She opened it the first night, took a sip, gave me a swallow, then poured the whole lot down the sink. It was counterfeit, Clara said. She was right. It was worse than vinegar. God knows what it was. But the captain quaffed off eleven bottles without even a murmur. Perhaps it just didn’t travel.’
The door opened, and he looked towards the sound. He flinched before turning back to his soup, having seen that raven-dark hair, parted at the middle and smoothed tightly back, in some other place. The skin of her cheeks was fresh, like that of a doll still in bloom, and he remembered her from the time of his aunt’s death, and the hour they had made love in the bed-and-breakfast place near the station. He hoped she hadn’t seen him, but cursed a large mirror along the wall which made the room seem endless and damned all privacy. He lifted his glass to Pam’s. ‘Here’s to us.’
Beryl came close, and he felt a tap at the shoulder.
‘Hello, sailor! A different one every night, is it?’
He stood up. Pam noticed his eyes harden. The woman was good-looking, but brazen. Tom indicated whom he supposed to be her boy-friend standing some yards away: ‘Would you both like to join us?’
‘No fear,’ she laughed.
‘Boy-friend?’
‘Who else?’
He touched Pam’s elbow. ‘Let me introduce you.’
Pam said: ‘Hello!’
‘He’s good,’ Beryl said. ‘Aren’t you, sailor?’
Maybe she’s drunk, he thought. ‘Am I?’
‘But I must go.’ She nodded. Her boy-friend looked left out of things. ‘He’s not so bad, either, sailor. So long!’
Tom sat down.
He must know scores of girls. ‘Someone you met?’
‘She was the nurse on duty at the hospital when Clara died. Is the fish all right?’
She felt stupid at having her mood spoiled so easily. He sensed the weather-change, but there was nothing to do except regret the barometric pressure and curse his luck. ‘The sky’s turned foul for no good reason.’
She nodded, then drank. ‘The sun’s still out as far as I’m concerned.’
He called himself a fool. He had swaggered off such a close call more than once, but now felt clumsy and vulnerable, unable to speak for a while – till he noticed a newspaper on an empty seat saying there would be a rail strike as from midnight. ‘We won’t get back to town tomorrow unless we take a bus, and I don’t feel like fighting for a seat. It’s inconvenient.’
‘Strikes usually are,’ she said.
‘My pay for the first ten years was enough to bring anybody out on strike, yet it wasn’t even thought of. I’d have felt ashamed creeping off a ship and saying I’ll do no work till I get more money. But times have changed. Your work is your weapon. Everyone can go on strike now. It’s bad for the country, of course, but who cares about that? It’s like chipping bits of wood from a raft in the middle of the sea. Sooner or later you sink and become food for the fishes. It’s a pity there’s nothing anyone can do, because it’s rather a good raft, and I’ve grown to like it, having done some of the work to keep it afloat.’
She thought of George’s brothers, and surprised herself by saying: ‘I’ve known people who found it hard enough to live on their money. But even if they have enough not to go short of anything, they want more – on the principle that they can never have enough. If others have it, they must have it. They see the easier lives of others on the telly, so you can hardly blame them.’
He dissected his fish. ‘It’s more than envy. It’s restlessness, and a craving for change without any spiritual values. People who could set an example don’t care to any more. They’ve lost their nerve, perhaps.’