She followed up with a rather feeble attempt at rubbing her cheek against his, but he had already withdrawn and she was rubbing instead against a salt wind off the North Sea.
She had not been wrong in thinking the landscape was moaning at her as the train jolted her dispassionately towards her destination. From the direction of the sea came a steady moan insinuating itself between a low sky and a flat landscape. The expectations of those walking through a pale light were duly flattened.
Gravenor was holding her hand, chafing her rings with bony fingers. ‘I’m so glad, Eadith, you could give me some time before I go away.’
‘But where are you going?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
It increased the anonymity she had coveted intermittently. Yet Gravenor’s refusal added another ominous note to a life which was becoming an orchestration of foreboding. Seated beside him in the car she visualised letters some of her girls had shown her from those they imagined to be real lovers, the dates, place names, sometimes whole lines, even paragraphs excised. Eadith was reminded of games Eddie had played under Nanny’s supervision, snipping patterns out of folded paper, in a nursery sealed against draughts and asthma.
Turning to Gravenor she said, ‘Anyway, Rod, I’m glad I came — that we’ll have this time together.’
‘If we do have it.’
They were driving through the East Anglian flatlands, which rose very slightly to seaward, protecting them from the forces beyond. As additional protection a straggling crown of black thorns. In one place she noticed an armoured car, dun figures of the military, concrete dragon’s teeth and pillboxes, to remind that this low-keyed war was not entirely fantasy.
A flat landscape and preoccupation with war would not allow her to defer answering him for ever.
‘Well, I’m here,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t we enjoy being together?’
‘That’s for you to decide. You always close down on me.’
‘I like to think we have something better than sexuality,’ she half-lied. ‘Isn’t a relationship richer for leaving its possibilities open?’
She turned to see whether she was beating the English at their own game.
He said, ‘Much as I enjoy your company, Eadith, I’d like to know you as a woman — because I love you — even if my temperament doesn’t help me convey it.’
It was as difficult for him, she could see, as for herself. She would have liked to leave it at that, but couldn’t; she must take more of the blame on herself.
‘Day and night I’m surrounded by whores,’ she offered as part excuse. ‘Girls I’m exploiting, I should make clear. Even they like to think they have what they see as true lovers, sometimes only fellow prostitutes they can depend on for comfort and affection — above sexuality.’
Because she sensed she was causing him pain she was racked by her personal dishonesty. If she had been true to her deepest feelings she would have stopped the car, dragged him behind a hedge — and demolished their relationship.
At least what must be the house was beginning to take shape ahead.
‘That’s it,’ he nodded. ‘The camel couchant.’
The folly forming in the bleached landscape was every bit of that: its tower-neck in nobler stone patched with mortar, the body of humbler grey flint. Bits added on contributed a ribbed effect, the buckling timber only waiting for time, weather, or invasion to send it flying apart.
‘I love it,’ Mrs Trist announced with the glib spontaneity of a guest at an Untermeyer party.
No, she wasn’t quite so dishonest; she didn’t ‘adore’ it.
What appealed to her were aspects of its homely ugliness, the local flints, like the knobs of Gravenor’s finger joints. She resisted taking up the hand nearest her, which might have led to more and worse.
After the two of them had struggled inside with her bag, he resumed his apologies in an automatic silence-filling way, ‘… primitive as I warned you, darling.’
There was a fire burning in one room, then in a second. There was more than a touch of luxury, but of a subdued kind, such as the crypto-rich and the aristocratic hope will put them right with democracy.
In the same way the slaves who keep luxury in order may be discounted if they remain invisible.
Rod said, ‘There’s an old body comes over from the village and cleans up. Leaves a stew — a rice pudding. Otherwise, I do for myself while I’m here.’
‘I look forward to seeing that.’ She meant it tenderly, but he might have taken it as censure.
He left her after showing her her room, which looked out over the dyke, the crown of thorns, and the uncharitable light off a sea which, although invisible from where she was standing, must be lashing itself into frenzied action.
After living through the approach of one, and the early stages of a second and more equivocal war, she was sensitive to hysteria in the elements as well, yet probably, however many wars she experienced, she would not believe in their reality. Any more than she could believe in her own by now middle-aged face, in which every wrinkle was quivering as she repaired her lips in a fogged glass, driving the lipstick in as though committing a rape.
She glanced at her wrist, not so smooth as it should have been because Fatma had let her down that week. She found herself looking, she realised, for Eddie Twyborn’s wristwatch: checking the time when we go over the top. The stench of sweat-rotted leather, mud, blood, and was it semen? rose disconcertingly through the concentrated perfume of French Fern.
She touched her hair and went down to find Gravenor, who called to her from the kitchen.
It was a small, improvised, littered room. She saw at first glance that the expensive utensils were dented or chipped — genuinely used, unless he threw them at himself when alone. Or at someone else if he weren’t.
‘I don’t eat lunch,’ he apologised, ‘but we’ll have something.’
They sat at a scarred table putting away lashings of indifferent cheese perilously perched on hunks of bread. She could see her violent lipstick coming off on the crust of a cottage loaf. They were both cramming in too hard the food which was, for Rod at least, another apology to common man; while Eadith’s apology was for herself and that phoenix inside her which in the nature of things would never experience re-birth.
She put out a hand, and they were holding each other’s, in her case holding off, fingers buttery, smelling of chain-store Cheddar.
He made coffee and they began listening — oh, no, she might have protested — to the Grosse Fuge on the gramophone. When they had descended — and it was no escalator, no apparition on the way up, only the dentist drilling at the ultimate in nerves — she got up out of the low-slung sofa, hoping he was not aware of what she heard as a strangulated fart.
She said, ‘Rod, darling — I think I’ll go for a walk — by myself. It’s what I need.’
She stood above him, like a soubrette swinging the organdy hat, about to launch into a number, whereas in her self of selves she might have been preparing to drown in Wagnerian waves of love and redemption.
‘You know what to avoid,’ he told her. ‘On the sea side, the Army. If they’re not on hand to prevent you clambering through the barbed wire, there are mines along the beach.’
He had a coldsore breaking out. She could have fallen on it and sucked it dry. But contented herself with a few little half-coughs, half-sobs, which he probably interpreted as dispassion.
All through the grey-green landscape, the colour of succulents, samphire, dirty sand, lichened stone, blown cloud, war was gathering, she could feel. She could smell blanco, Brasso, male armpits, sergeant-majors’ crotches, the phlegm in their screamed orders from away down beyond the uvula, as a prelude to the scream of shells.