"I'm thinking about my holidays."
She gave me a fresh cup of tea. "Everything fixed?"
"Yes," I said. "It's odd, but whenever you want something you get it."
A change came over the happy composure of her face. I'd seen something like it before: Aunt Emily had looked like that at my parents' inquest. It was an old face looking at me, knowing too much about love, proper human love as prosaic as wet Mondays and as necessary as wages, knowing too much about the pain which announces itself in accents as matter-of-fact as the policeman giving evidence; Mrs. Thompson at that moment knew all about me, saw through the flesh of my words and into the skull beneath.
"You always get what you want when you're young," she said. "The whole world's in a conspiracy to give you things ..."
Then she was herself again, and I was out of that courtroom in 1943 with its smell of damp wool and dried ink, and stone floors and the coroner, listening to Aunt Emily with a bored look on his fat face, and back in the front room with the sun sparkling on the polished oak table and Eagle Road outside as bright and bouncing as a newly bathed baby.
When I reached the office, it was full of people shaking Tom Harrod's hand. Tom was the Chief Audit Clerk, spectacled and bald and in his early thirties, with the typical sedentary worker's stoop and pasty face; I suppose that he had all the normal human attributes, but to me it always seemed that he'd been included with a new consignment of office equipment or given at Christmas instead of a desk diary or inkstand.
I joined the crowd. "Congratulations. You'll make a good Deputy Treasurer. When are you leaving for the South?"
"Steady on," he said. "I haven't resigned yet." He put his hand on Teddy's shoulder. "I expect you'll be able to carry on without me."
Teddy looked smug. It didn't suit him. When Tom had gone and we were left alone together, he said: "Are you applying, Joe?"
"You don't get Grade Four until you're too old to enjoy it," I said. "Besides, it's not worth the extra responsibility."
"I think I'll have a bash just the same," he said.
"You stand a better chance than I anyway. You've been here longer." He had been there longer than I; but he wasn't as good as I and he knew it. "They'll put you on Grade Three at first," I said. "There's something about Four which terrifies them."
"Every little helps," Teddy said. "You know I'm going steady with June?"
"You couldn't do better." I had a sudden sense of loss, and then a feeling of barriers being raised between me and the rest of the world. "I wish you luck, Teddy. With both her and the job."
"You're sure that you don't mind about me applying?"
"Why the hell should I?"
"I'd be your senior."
"Tom never bothered me much."
"I had the buzz that Hoylake's reorganising."
"I knew that a long time ago," I said. I looked at the rows of files, the red and black inkwells that the office boy should have cleaned out yesterday, the tin lid used as an ash tray in which my cigarette was smouldering, the calculating machine and the typewriter, the calendar with the picture of the girl like Susan, the basket full of accounts at my desk, and each became part of a dreadfully cosy desert - though at least, I thought as I turned away from the calendar, I was no longer deceived by the mirage.
"I knew a long time ago," I repeated. I dropped my hand heavily on Teddy's shoulder and squeezed it in mock friendliness until he winced with pain. "You go right ahead, Teddy."
24
When we reached Wool, Alice was asleep on my shoulder. It was almost too hot; we'd had the window open all the way but it only had the effect of stirring the air like porridge without bringing any fresh oxygen in. I shook Alice gently and she came to wakefulness slowly, smiling happily at me as her eyes opened. She was wearing a blue dirndl skirt and a white blouse; I helped her to her feet, my hand touching with gratitude the good heaviness of her breast.
"Four days," she said, when we were at last in the taxi. "Four whole days. I don't know how I managed to wait for so long - " She kissed me, regardless of the crowd of holiday-makers around the station. "Look," she said as the car snaked through the lushly green lanes, "there's Tess of the D'Urbervilles's mansion. I once was cast as Tess in an awful rep production and I swotted up everything about her. This is the country for passion, darling."
I bit her ear gently. "Is that a promise?"
"Anything you want," she said in a whisper. "You can beat me if you like."
"That depends upon your cooking."
"There's a caseful of food. Our larder's bare now."
I whispered something mildly improper into her ear and to my surprise she blushed, then giggled like a schoolgirl.
"Oh, you are a one, Mr. L, reely there's no 'olding you once your passions are aflame. Don't never leave a gal alone for one minute, you don't."
"Aye, lass," I said. "T'truth is, Ah'm insattible . Tha's let thisen in for a rough time, Ah'm telling tha straight."
She put her finger on her lips, looking in the direction of the driver. "Hasn't it been hellish waiting, though?"
"God, yes. Until I saw you at Waterloo I didn't believe we'd ever manage it. It doesn't seem quite real even now."
"We'll make it real." We sat in silence then, holding hands until the taxi pulled up at the cottage.
It was limewashed and thatch-roofed, with two front doors next to each other; it had originally been two cottages and its owners had converted it. Standing at the bottom of a steep lane off the main road among a wilderness of elders and blackberry bushes it had a strange atmosphere of self-willed solation. From beyond the little rise in front I could hear the faint muttering of the sea.
When I'd paid the taxi driver, he drove up the lane at breakneck pace; the taxi was an old high-built Minerva and lurched all over the place, its springs squealing. "You'd think the place was haunted," I said.
"It probably is. We'll haunt it after we're gone, shall we?"
"We're not going to die yet," I said, scooping her off her feet and carrying her over the threshold. I dropped her on the sofa in the living room and stood over her, feeling a little dizzy.
"You've done it now," she said. "You're compromised."
"I don't care," I said. "Have you realised, darling, we're alone? We needn't worry about Elspeth coming in unexpectedly, or Eva spying on us. I don't have to leave you at ten o'clock, and I can give you some fine china anytime I like."
"What's wrong with right now?" She pulled me down beside her. I accompanied her almost immediately into an agony of pleasure; we sank into a different dimension from which we emerged shaking and frightened - it was as if we'd been fused together, melting into each other like amoebae but violently, like cars crashing head on.
"Christ," she said. "that was almost too wonderful." The word didn't sound like a blasphemy, any more than it had done when we were making love. She had said it again and again then, in a breathless amazement: it was the first time I'd heard her use the word.
Before tea, we washed in the kitchen. It was small and stone-flagged and cool; the sink was shallow and the water splashed up from the stone. The water was icy cold; Alice, stripped to the waist, shivered as drops ran down her back. The window was small and covered with dust; in the half-light her skin seemed almost luminous. Free, at that moment, from the desire to enter her body, I saw its beauty impersonally, as an arrangement of colour and light, a satisfying theorem of lines which curved generously, which gave, gave, gave to the air, to the cold stinging water, to me: a woman's body always wants to live, all of it, and a man's is always deathward inclined - as long as Alice was there I wouldn't die, it was like having my father and mother alive again, it was the end of being afraid and alone.