He pushed the papers aside, and returned the pen to his pocket. ‘You’re part of these letters because you persuaded me to search that roomful of stuff, when I really was about to throw it out. You began the process that can’t be reversed, so I never want to be away from you.’
She kissed his hands. ‘They write such beautiful letters!’
‘I saw a page of manuscript on parchment that shines and dazzles,’ he told her, ‘which must have taken weeks to copy. When I was in the orphanage we had to read the Bible every day. For years I didn’t like the sections dealing with a man who was said to have died on a cross for my sins. I couldn’t believe that such an event could have anything to do with me. Somebody had got it all wrong, I thought. My sins are my own, such as they might be, and God will either forgive them or he won’t. But it’s up to God, not the man who was killed by the Romans on a cross – a piece of barbarism of which the twentieth century has more examples than any other. I could believe in God, and those parts of the Bible which weren’t about Jesus. It seemed that God had already had a lot to do with my life, if things had any explanation at all. The so-called Old Testament stories made sense. I had a good memory and learned whole chapters, though I later forgot them. In the navy I hardly opened the Bible, except in some hotel when I might – if I was sober – read a few verses before going to sleep. Later I carried one with me from ship to ship, until somebody walked off with it. It’s strange to realize that much of it was written in the script I’m learning to write, and that one of the books which came from my mother is the first five books of the Bible in Hebrew.’
‘They’re part of you,’ she said.
She sat opposite, did not care to say anything without thinking first. It was no use blurting the words so as to save the anguish of a decision. Those days must surely be over. She must trust herself to say whatever came to her, otherwise there was no way of knowing whether the thought was false or not. She had surfaced after a life under water, and felt the miasma of self-deception clearing. If what she said meant nothing to him, then her words were at least justified by what was in her heart.
They had seemed more united in his aunt’s flat, together but without that seriousness which, in the cold rooms of this half-way house, pushed them apart. She no longer pertained to herself. Nor did he belong to himself. Neither were they primarily attached to each other. Yet even to think so implied a more than possible unity. They belonged to this world but were detached from it, though only by such feelings of separation could the real connection ultimately be made. It had to start somewhere. ‘I’m in love with you,’ she said simply.
He couldn’t tell her that he had never heard a woman say so before, but was silent with a silence that was also part of her, just as she thought that her silence must by now belong to him. He shook himself, as if he had been asleep. His eyes showed an exhausted spirit, that seemed to have received an unendurable shock. She had said that she loved him, and he tried to smile, wondering when she would say it again.
8
She was in a wood but sunlight flowed between black-and-yellow trunks, smooth and tall with no leaves or branches visible. Her head wouldn’t turn upwards to look. There were bushes and flowers, and gnarled roots half covered with soil that hindered her walk. Sleep showed as if through a window. Her dream, packed on to the head of a pin before it pricked and woke her, kept out the cold. The sunlight was still hot between the trees, and something was about to happen. She stroked one of the trunks, and caressed the mark of its Hebrew letter. Her tongue went forward, and a root at her foot became a cat which nudged her ankle and leapt up the tree before she could touch. She walked a straight line between trees till sunlight drew off, and darkness came. A muffled bang sounded far away as she was climbing, an easy ascent to follow the light, going towards the inside of an umbrella that had a hole where the centre should have been, floating weightlessly up the inner funnel of a parachute without any thought for the earth, arms and fingers straight above her head so that she could steer through and into a light that would last for ever.
A noise deepened into thunder and tore her eyes open. A mass from the outside world threw itself at her. She sat up. Light came through curtain slits.
‘Open the fucking door.’
She hurriedly put on shirt and slacks, buttoning and zipping. Her fingers wouldn’t work. She felt sick, and choked back her dread. ‘Go away.’
A piece of paper had been pushed in as if it might save her life. She snatched at it. ‘Gone out for a while.’ George must have watched him leave.
‘Let me in, you whore.’
‘I’ll see you downstairs, at Judy’s.’ I won’t see you. Keep out of my life. I’m finished with you. She shouted, but he banged at the panels, then ran at the door with his broad shoulders, shot latch, lock and bolt apart, and was in the room.
She would not let him see her terror. ‘I told you: I’d meet you downstairs.’
He had grown stouter, as if in the habit of boozing heavily. He trembled as he leaned against the doorway. ‘Pack your things. I’ve got the car outside.’
Say something, but don’t argue. And say it quietly. He was strong and agile, but his skin was blotched. He was grieved, and full of violence. ‘I’ve only just got out of bed. You woke me up. If you’d let me know you were coming we could have met somewhere and talked things over properly.’
The clock said nine. He had set out in darkness, full of energy and purpose, see-sawed with love and loathing, till loathing got the upper hand, as it always did. His eyes had hardened during the long stare of a hundred and forty miles of road, impacted by tar and dazzling light thrown back.
‘Pack your stuff. We’ll talk in the car.’ He looked around the room. ‘It wain’t take long.’
She stood with hands together to stop them shaking. The only way to evade him was to die, or pray for his instant obliteration. She remembered that for the first time in her life there was something to live for.
He moved closer. ‘I ain’t got much time. The lads came down with me. We’re to be back at work today. There’s no time to waste.’ His fist banged down and tipped her clock, as if angry that she looked at it and not him. His previously contained insanity was erupting. There was no one else in the world but himself, and the person that he wanted to control – which is me, she thought. No will or object could stand in his way, certainly not an instrument for the marking of time.
In such a way he had been insane since she first met him, and she must have known it, and been ensnared because his maniacal sense of possession had left her with no possibility of refusing whatever he wanted. Her presence during their marriage had kept him on the proper side of normal life. And if much of the time she had seemed out of her mind herself, it was only because she was taking the madness from him so that he could function properly. She would have no more of that.
He pulled at her. ‘You will get in the car, if I have to kick you in.’
She looked around.
‘He won’t help you.’
He had been drinking, kept a bottle in the glove-box. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Alf, Harry and Bert are waiting downstairs for that git. Our family stands together, you should know that. Twenty quid each, and extra for petrol. A good day’s pay, but they stick by me, all the same.’