But he also wondered about Maricarmen’s motive for coming to this island and latching on to the Handley roundabout. Some solid plan existed beneath the pronounced swell of her breasts — more visible now that her coat was open. The idea of bringing the notebooks hadn’t been made till she accepted their invitation and had applied for a passport. The High Command of Dawley, Albert, Richard and Adam had made a chart of STEPS TOWARDS INVEIGLING MARICARMEN INTO ENGLAND and pinned it on the wall, filling in a coloured square every time a certain move had been accomplished. Well, not quite, but he was sure it would have been if they’d thought of it. He would struggle single-handed to protect this strange and unique woman beside him.
She was tired, but wondered what it would be like fulfilling her expected role — until she showed her true purpose for going there. Shelley’s last letter had been posted from Tangier, and she knew one paragraph by heart: ‘There’s this Englishman coming south for a little tourism (gun-running) beyond the mountains. He’s hard, and as solid as a rock — especially in the head, I reckon. But he’s the right meat, because this kind of travelling can be tough. We’ll be back in ten days, and if he turns out well, we could do more sight-seeing later. He seems ideal for the job, a Limey worker who claims he’s not long out of a factory. Providing he can read and write (and I think he can) we should make a good team. There is something about his eyes, a sort of abstract grey, but I can’t decide whether such empty hardness will be better or worse for us. But since we don’t intend shacking up, but only making this one trial run together, it doesn’t much matter.’
Being an atheist she could not speak to the dead. So they were separated forever. Death proved and finalised her atheism. They had once lived in Malaga for three months, shared a cold and barrenly furnished flat on a cobbled street that led to a bald piece of rising ground behind the city called El Egido, into which were built many gypsy caves. The flat was so cold that some nights they would take food and wine and eat with the gypsies, the poorest of the poor who had been hounded and murdered by fascists during the Civil War.
Or they would go to Vicente’s bar in town and drink Amontillado at one of the wooden tables, talking for hours, playing Ludo and Checkers. The walls of the cafe were decorated with pictures of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, showing his pathetic visage as he sat undiscouraged under the broken windmill sail. They grew warm with vino y tapas, and the flat seemed no longer desolate when they went back to it.
Walking through the square before the illuminated cathedral at midnight they saw a tree with tiny green leaves just breaking out of bud, points so livid and infinitesimal that it looked as if a cloud of green fireflies resting on all the tips of the branches before taking off into the dark blue sky towards Africa.
The curtain of death came over her memories, and a row of faces made up the safety-curtain of her mind. She didn’t know where she was. A young man gazed out of the window with such a forlorn expression that she wondered if he too were thinking about death. A tight-lipped, severe, thin-faced woman looked into a book, while the man beside her was asleep. Another man tried to get a glimpse of her, but turned away when she met the gaze. They seemed a very far-sighted nation with such empty eyes.
Cuthbert took her to the dining carriage for tea, and they faced each other. Away from home he made it a rule to eat whenever food was available. You never knew where your next meal was coming from in this shifting world of frivolous uncertainties. If he were on his own he would eat and drink as if some invisible person were threatening to snatch the cup and plate away, but with Maricarmen so close the second and civilised Cuthbert took control.
She wondered why he put on such a smile as soon as they sat down, but he wasn’t aware of having altered his lips. She seemed to be in a land where people did not speak. Being exhausted after a journey was no excuse. Perhaps they simply had nothing to say.
Cuthbert had always seen silence as slightly ridiculous, unless it was used as a weapon — when you had to make sure it didn’t look like a fit of sulking. Pouring tea for them both, he used it as a way of getting her to talk about herself. Some people thought it bad manners to be silent with another face near by, and you rarely had long to wait before they spoke.
But now, such ploys were blown away like dry leaves in a gale. He was aching to talk to her but wasn’t able to. The irrational was taking its revenge on the rational. He thought of pouring tea over his hand in order to force something out, but the spout veered towards a cup.
She pulled the soggy cake from its cellophane wrapper and broke it in two. The attractive sight of her appetite cured him of a temptation to reach out and take her hand, though he tried hard not to stare at her. If they were destined to live the first hours of their meeting without much conversation, so be it. He respected himself, and also her. It occurred to him that they were weighing each other up.
‘I don’t smoke much,’ she said, but taking one. Warmth and food had softened that haughty and beautiful façade. She took off her coat. He looked at her as he lit the cigarette. Her eyes, engrossed in the flame, were almond-shaped and turned down slightly towards high cheekbones. When she sat back he wondered what she saw, what her eyes showed, what range, ocean, road, cell. He frightened himself by speaking when he had no intention of it. He couldn’t afford such gestures if he wasn’t to lose faith in his own shaky strength. Yet one could not go on believing for ever in the power-politics of the unspoken word.
In the taxi crossing London she said: ‘Mr Handley didn’t mention that his son was a priest.’
‘I’m not. I almost was one, but I didn’t finish the course.’
‘Why do you wear that collar?’
‘As a disguise, when I go out and face the world.’
She laughed, in a throaty uninhibited way and he did not know whether to be glad at amusing her, or resentful at being mocked. Maybe she often showed off a ready sense of humour at another’s expense, with an attractive, almost sexual laugh which he began to see as the only vulnerable part of her that was likely to be revealed till you knew her better. To her, the fact that he wore a priest’s collar when he had no right to showed that she’d have no difficulty luring him into her cause against Dawley when the time came.
She dipped her head to glimpse the Houses of Parliament. ‘Is that what you call the “cradle of democracy”?’
‘The cradle of democracy is the coffin of religion,’ he said. ‘Though I suppose it’s not a bad idea at have one.’
‘Most countries do,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Heaps of stone to keep people in their places.’
He wanted to laugh at such socialist rubbish, having had too much of a bellyful from birth. ‘There’s a certain sort of beauty,’ he said, ‘in such vast spaces being covered and enclosed by so much stone. You have to think about the shape of the inside, and the roof over it showing the limits of men’s ideas and ideals. Space wrenched from the elements to prove that you can’t have civilisation without religion.’
‘Landscape,’ she said, as the taxi swung into Trafalgar Square, ‘that’s my idea of beauty. Earth, space. I suppose that’s what drew me to Shelley. He liked it as well. Not cities and buildings. Cities eat up beauty, buildings digest it. After being in prison I never want to enter any again. I like Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona because workmen are still there, cursing and shouting. When they’ve gone and it has doors and windows I won’t go near it. A finished church imprisons the soul as well as the body. But I went to Gaudi’s temple with Shelley. He was interested in unusual buildings.’
‘Didn’t he want to blow them up?’
‘Only the ugly ones.’