After Julius (28 page)

PART THREE

SUNDAYS

CHAPTER 13

DANIEL

H
E
walked fast down the drive because he was angry and wanted to get well out of that set-up. Then, in the lane, he slowed
down a bit, till his eyes could get accustomed to the dark. It was cold: his feet were quiet on the road since he wore rubber soles, and there was nothing to smell – the temperature had
dropped so even a fox would have had trouble winding a hen coop. The banks of the lane were high each side of him; he could see now where the sky began above them. In the house, he had been
shivering in the hot, rotten atmosphere: now it was clean and quiet – he could get on with his life. What he didn’t like about it all was these people turning out to lead lives like
that. All that room and money and three hot meals a day and what did it amount to? The older girl was a tart, and the pair who came to dinner had no manners or consideration for anyone else at all.
And that doctor. Everybody tied up with everybody else – like people in decadent books they were. None of those women knew their place and you could see that they weren’t happy out of
it. A shocking waste. A shocking waste, he repeated miserably to himself. When he thought of
her
– not only putting up with it, but actually standing up for her sister, he wanted to
hit her until she promised never to be like it again. How did she manage to seem like a child then, with all this going on? She must be sly about it: well, when she’d come mincing into the
room in her long skirt, he’d wondered. Her not seeming to be like the rest of them seemed now to be mere treachery. Perhaps she had only pretended to enjoy the fireworks. Why had she asked
him? To get him in some sort of trap – she probably collected men like her sister. Women were notorious for looking one thing and being another. Vampires, witches, ghosts, mermaids, the more
wicked they were the more beautiful they had to be to get the chances. But
she
wasn’t beautiful: she had a funny face when you came to think of it; standing on her dignity so you had
to smile.

It wasn’t her fault that she’d been brought up with that rotten lot. What he couldn’t stand was all his notions of splendour being smashed up. If she’d been sixteen, he
would have taken her in a little boat, just the two of them, with cold chicken and chocolate swiss roll and anything nice she fancied and he would have put a ruby ring on her finger and bought her
a brand new hat with a bunch of cherries and of course they would have got married; she wouldn’t need white gloves and all her accessories to match like Dot had. She wasn’t sixteen,
though. Far from it. She was too old to know better by now. And if he’d known her when she was sixteen it would have been no good – it was even before he was ill – although that
seemed to have gone on for such a long time that he felt he could hardly remember before it. And here he was still with all this time in his life to be filled in: she’d been a false start,
that was all. Maybe if he’d gone straight for her from the start, he wouldn’t be feeling so filled with anger now. Probably that was what she’d expected. To be thrown on a bed and
have her clothes ripped off her: sex and excitement and then one of those elaborate drinks and on to the next one . . .

A car was coming down the lane, which was so narrow that instinctively he stood still, pressing himself against the bank. It stopped beside him. It was her.

‘Dan?’

He couldn’t see her face properly: but she sounded dead anxious.

‘I’m not coming back,’ he said.

‘I’m not asking you to. Let’s go and look at the sea.’

She was trying to sound as though nothing was the matter. Or perhaps she was trying to sound as though something
was
the matter when really she didn’t think there was. She
won’t trap me, he thought, and got into the car without a word. At the bottom of the lane she turned left. It was a much wider road with cats’ eyes in the middle, but they were going
too fast to count them. He shut his eyes and thought about Violet so that he didn’t have to
think
not to think about
her.

Violet had been at the sanatorium with him. She’d had the same things done to her, three months before they did them to him. When he began to get better, they used to sit in deck chairs in
a huge dull garden and talk. She looked frail – thin and weak like a small plucked bird, but she never stopped talking. She’d had a packed and mysterious life and she kept telling him
things but he never got them in the right order. She’d been to prison – twice, and in countless hospitals, an approved school, a hostess in a night club, to the Isle of Man, a
chambermaid in a big hotel, she’d had a baby but it died; when she was young an old man had given her ten bob a week to go to the pictures with him without any knickers; she’d been in a
train accident; to Ostend for a naughty week-end; all her hair had been burnt off by an electric fire. She had told him everything in exactly the same way; nothing was different from anything
really, she said: it was all all right, only she’d hated being at home: her father had – you know – when she was fourteen and he’d always been hard on her after that. There
were too many of them, and Mum used to get so depressed for months on end she didn’t count for much. He never discovered a single thing which he considered to be nice that had happened to
her, her life seemed to be simply a series of wicked shocks. She had a seedy little face with beautiful eyes, hair like dry hay, and her small sharp bones stuck out everywhere although she ate
everything she could lay hands on. She liked the sanatorium – didn’t want to leave it – she’d seen enough of life to last her, she had said. It was weeks before he
discovered that she was twenty. She liked someone to chat with and everything nice and regular meals. He slowly fell in love with her because she had made him want to be angry on her behalf: she
was bright without being above herself; she didn’t blame anyone or make excuses; she was wonderful, extraordinary company, and he could not help imagining how charmed she would be by a life
jam-packed with good events. He felt that he would be able to transform
things
for her – it wasn’t a matter of wanting her to change in the least. She was entirely friendly and
he began to want her badly. There was a lot of chat in the sanatorium about people getting randy – convalescent energy the prissier nurses called it – and it was all quite true, he
found. He wanted someone, and more particularly, he wanted her. She wasn’t a flirt; she never edged up to sex and backed off giggling like some he could mention – it just didn’t
seem to cross her ways at all. Then one day, they’d gone for a little walk in the grounds and sat on a piece of rough grass out past the borders, and she’d said: ‘You want me,
don’t you?’ And such was the ease between them that he’d simply nodded. ‘Well, go on, then,’ she said: ‘
I
don’t mind,’ and she’d lain
down with her hands behind her head, until he’d taken off his jacket and made her a pillow. He’d had her, and it had been like all the feeling in the world
without pain
to his
body, and after the weeks of feeling pain this was like water on a scorching desert. Afterwards, she said: ‘Did you like it?’ And he said: ‘Yes, I liked it all right,’ and
then, looking at her face, friendly still but unmoved, he said: ‘Thank you,’ and then her face did move, and she said: ‘Nobody’s ever thanked me before,’ and he
thought she was going to cry. So he’d told her that he was going to make life so she’d never have to thank him, never be grateful, and she wouldn’t go on doing kindnesses and not
know what they were. He told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her and they’d have a wonderful life, and she lay there listening – smiled all the time but she never said a word
. . .

‘. . . thinking about.’

‘You shouldn’t ask that question: it’s dull – and rude.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said humbly.

He looked at her straight little nose as she drove without looking at him: she wasn’t pretending to be anxious, but that wasn’t the end of it.

‘You can catch an early train from Hastings if you want,’ she said. ‘You could have the key of my flat and sleep there tomorrow – in the daytime, I mean.’

‘I don’t know. I may go abroad.’

‘But you
can’t
. . .’ she began.

‘What can’t I do?’ He was instantly on his guard.

‘I mean – you’d have to go to London first.’

‘Why? If I get to the sea, it seems a bit silly to go the journey back to London. The sea’s where you go abroad from, surely. I take no interest in air travel,’ he added, in
case she thought he didn’t know about that.

‘Well, you have to have a passport for one thing.’

He ground his teeth. He’d honestly forgotten that: it seemed to him that life was fixed so that you couldn’t have one: you had to think ahead about every single thing you did –
surprise was knocked out, and you ended up doing things long after you’d stopped wanting to.

‘It wouldn’t take you long to get one, though.’

He looked at her suspiciously. Was she trying to get rid of him now? He wasn’t going to be fobbed off unless he felt like it.

‘Once you’ve got a passport, you can go to a lot of places without making plans,’ she said.

‘Have you got one?’

‘Mmm.’

She’d got everything – of course. She was probably
born
with one.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she said.

There was the feeling of the land stopping: ‘I know,’ he said. He tried to open the window to smell if the air had changed: he wasn’t used to cars and it seemed stuck. She
reached across him and undid some catch and the window slid back. It was foreign air: you couldn’t say it was salt, like they did in books, but it had an oceanic flavour.

‘Will it be too dark for me to see properly?’

‘I do hope not. Anyway, you’ll get some sort of feel out of it. The sea is never the same whenever you look at it,’ she added.

‘Never?’

‘Honestly not. It’s about as much the same on the same sort of days as people who are supposed to be like each other look like each other. That’s not the same, is
it?’

‘I’m not sure that I’ve seen enough people to know that,’ he said cautiously: he was liking her again against his judgement: she’s
deep
, he told himself
furiously: you can’t judge her by the things she says; she just
wants
you to, of course. Why?

She was driving more slowly – down a steep hill: he expected the sea to be at the bottom, but it wasn’t.

‘About half a mile,’ she said. Sometimes he wondered if she couldn’t hear what he was thinking: a dangerous notion and not one he took kindly to.

They seemed to be driving through a small desert – sandy banks with rough grass and little windswept trees. ‘What’s this then?’ he asked after a bit.

‘A golf course. Here’s the beach.’

She turned sharply to the right and stopped the car in front of a field gate. ‘You pull the string on the door to get out.’

She’d turned out the lights of the car, and for a moment they both stood in the dark. There was just enough moon for them to see where it was, bedded in yeasty-looking clouds. He waited
till he could see better, and then turned to the sea. It lay neatly all along in front of him – very dark with oily glints. He liked the sound of it reaching the shore.

‘Let’s go down to it.’

She led the way round the gate and he realized that she’d still got her long skirt on under her coat.

‘Watch out for sea holly,’ she said: ‘or perhaps it won’t hurt you.’

He stumbled a bit, because all his attention was on the sea. They walked down the sandy scrub to the shingle. There was a strong sea smell now. A row of huts, for bathing, she told him when he
asked, but she wasn’t chattering. He could see the whites of the waves a few yards from the edge, but he couldn’t see the horizon, the sky just seemed to come down into the sea. The
noise was continuous and irregular – there was a strong air rather than wind. He went right down to meet the water, stooped and put his hand to it: it felt cold and thick, and tasted very
nice. A wave came over his shoes – nearly – he jumped back and turned to see if she had seen, but she was sitting on the stones looking up at the sky: the moon was doing better or else
his eyes were getting used to everything. He walked along a bit, and found a bit of sand covered and recovered by water: there were big sunken pebbles in it, with the sea swooning out round them
and the sand glistening new each time. He stood for a bit, trying to imagine the country beyond. It ought to be very different – black cliffs with neat green on top, or sugar-coloured sand
and great forests. It was different this way round, here it was just the end of England, you couldn’t expect any excitement. He thought of going there – France that would be. He had a
moment’s panic about all Frenchmen being like sheep – looking exactly the same because you weren’t used to them: then he remembered Charles Boyer and thought it would be all
right. Except he
wanted
them to look different really – but different from each other as well – to
him.
He enjoyed the animal air in his face and wished it was light. The
sun coming up at sea would be good. He went slowly back to where she was sitting, and sat beside her. She sat quite quietly not saying anything.

‘I’d like to be out in a boat on it. That where your father went?’

‘Yes. Not there, exactly, but somewhere out there.’

‘Does that make you sad?’

‘I can’t really remember him. Only a kind of regret. Have you known anyone well who’s died?’

‘I may have.’ That snubbed her, and he stared resolutely out to try and find the edges of sea and sky.

Violet had died. She’d left the sanatorium very soon after that afternoon: she was cured, they said; she must get back into life. She didn’t want to leave. Leaving meant going back
to her family, and she didn’t know how she was going to stand that. She wasn’t strong enough to do a full-time job yet, and she needed a home life, they said. He told her that
he’d be out in a matter of months – she’d only got to hang on until he was out and he’d see to her. ‘You’re an invalid yourself,’ she said, ‘you
can’t look after no one.’ He asked her to write to him and she said she might. He begged her to write to him and she said she’d think of it. He said he’d write to her: she
looked as though he’d changed the subject away from the practical problems of living in four rooms with Mum and Dad and three brothers and sisters. It won’t be for long, he’d
said. ‘It won’t be,’ she said with a return of her usual energy, she’d go clean out of her mind if it was for long. Mostly she seemed stunned at having to go; it left her
with nothing but a kind of lifeless despair. She’d gone, on a wet morning in the station taxi – she hadn’t even looked back to wave at him, but he knew she’d been trying not
to cry.