He walked into the customs sheds. ‘I’m to meet one of my domestic staff from Spain,’ he said briskly to a slate-eyed passport official of his own age. ‘Mind if I wander along? Might spot her coming down the gangway. Be no end of a help. Wouldn’t like her to take the wrong turning at an awkward moment!’
The man smiled. ‘That’s all right.’ He was going to add ‘sir’, but decided not to, a slightly disrespectful omission that made him feel better, and added pleasantly: ‘Go and wait on the left.’
Cuthbert set off beyond the specified point, on to the actual quay, where the ship was bumping into its berth. Seagulls peeled off strips of sky as they slid over the sheds and water. Uncle John’s last sight of earth must have been this, before the addle-brained fool went to heaven. He’d opened his suitcase, wind scattering papers up among the seagulls, took out a monstrous revolver, and put it into his mouth. The last hunger of life. The real bite of a starving man. A final look showed gulls flying over Dover Beach, before the armies of the night rushed in.
What else can you do when you’ve sensed too much, and can’t take any more? Maybe it wasn’t such a lot he’d seen. One man’s much may be another man’s little, but it makes no difference in the end.
Suicide is the final act of infantilism, he thought, by those who are still so close to the womb they think they can double back into it when they can’t go on. Such a memory spoiled the solid view he’d always had of himself, wondering why Maricarmen had been booked via the fraught place of Dover. Maybe Handley had machined it, to put him at the mercy of a dark omen which would rattle him if he tried to win her on the way home. Yet he sensed that his weak point was the belief that everything Handley did was conscious and calculated. It needn’t be so at all, and he would rather have had anyone for a father than an artist, though there was nothing to do but learn how to live with it.
He took a pipe out, and a rubber tobacco pouch, part of his parson’s kit that he loathed but had trained himself to work convincingly. He rattled around his pockets for the stubby box of matches, and the policeman walked by without returning his friendly nod. He lit up, but let it fade as the first passengers trod curiously down the gangplank.
He watched Maricarmen carry two suitcases along the quay without struggling, thinking it just as well that she was strong. He caught her up at the passport counter, heard her explaining with an American accent that someone was coming to meet her, and so introduced himself.
Letters were shown, and they allowed her through. One bridge crossed, he thought, silent as they walked to the custom sheds, even false words blocked for the first time in his life. She opened her cases, and the trunk that the porter set down. The customs man slid his hands between the books and papers as if, to warm his frozen self, he was putting them up the skirt of a beautiful woman — a look of distaste at being landed with such a job.
‘A lot of papers.’
‘I may study while I’m here.’
He opened a book called Warfare in the Enemy’s Rear.
‘Politics and history,’ she said.
He flipped through it, as if the title suggested an esoteric treatise on sodomy. ‘All these notebooks yours?’ he asked, disappointed that it wasn’t.
‘Yes.’
Cuthbert stepped in, but he made a chalkmark on the lid and walked away, leaving them to close it. The bland official atmosphere of England’s well-guarded gates had no effect on her, as it had on a few of the English returning from their holidays who could not yet show the confidence that having had it so good for so long should have given them.
She was far from revealing whatever there was to hide, carrying herself with an air of Iberian dignity that made everyone around her seem physically warped. She had high cheekbones, and long black hair smoothed back from her forehead, but there the resemblance to a typical flamenco dancer ended. Her face was pale and thin, her nose small. There wasn’t much beauty, he decided, but her pride shook his heart. She was tall, and her eyes had that look of sensibility that does not draw pity from anyone, though they are able instantly to see the marks of suffering in others. She wore a light grey overcoat none too heavy for the gusty day.
He was wary of getting too close for fear he wouldn’t see her properly, yet wanted to be nearer so that people would know they were together. He enjoyed them looking, and wondering what a young parson had to do with such a woman. He wished he hadn’t donned his dog-collar before leaving home — touching the small of her back to point their direction along the platform.
A porter had gone on with her luggage. ‘It’s not far to London,’ Cuthbert said. ‘A couple of hours. We’ll get a taxi across town, and another train from St Pancras.’
‘I seem to have been travelling for ever,’ she said. ‘It’s a good feeling, though.’
He opened the carriage door. ‘You’ll get there soon. England lies before you like a land of dreams!’
He paid her porter five shillings — rather less than he should have done — and got a dark look at his white collar before the man pocketed the coins and walked away. He regretted his meanness, which gave the wrong impression before this new and striking acquisition to the community. His hands were trembling as he pulled out his pipe and tobacco.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The carriage was full and stuffy — a light rain gusting along the foot of the cliffs, grey window-flashes of the sea as they threaded several tunnels.
He wondered what she was thinking, knowing that if he couldn’t guess with the sharpened intuition of fresh acquaintance it would be far more difficult in the future. His priestly bent of mind could only get at somebody’s thoughts by hearing them speak: having nothing on which to frame questions did not inspire him to use his imagination and make up something which, though colourful, might not be accurate. He thought too much of himself to want anything but the truth.
They sat quiet. At the dimness of each tunnel, glad to be leaving the locality of Uncle John’s death, he looked at the illuminated vision of her face in the window, while she sat by his side with unfeeling blankness after a twenty-four-hour spirit-shaking journey from Barcelona. He was nagged by the feeling that he’d seen her before, and he couldn’t fathom where.
The precious trunk was in the van, that heavy and sole reason why she had been sent for. As soon as Dawley and his father had their hands on the notebooks they’d kick her out — providing such humanitarian revolutionaries could contrive to get her pregnant and arrange for six-foot snow drifts to surround the house. He saw through their game all right. To fill up John’s museum and shrine they wanted the word-picture of Shelley Jones’ revolutionary soul fixed into a glass case.
But first they would put every last phrase and statement under the glare of their gritty logic, work on it like medieval alchemists to transmute the raw wires of ordinary metal into the purest gold of future example. Handley was running a country, not a community, and needed an historical museum to justify it. His first martyr was Uncle John, and a second had come along like a windfall in Shelley Jones. He wondered who was lined up for the third.
They wouldn’t admit this, would swear to inviting Maricarmen for reasons of international solidarity, and affection for poor Shelley who had died fighting for the downtrodden inhabitants of the Third World. She would need a place to rest in and recover from her ordeal. If the first reason for enticing her to England was icy and heartless, the second was poisonous with sentimentality.