The Death of William Posters (11 page)

‘No, I don't. But don't bring anything else that's stolen into this house. And don't tell Kevin where you got it. Not that he doesn't suspect already.'

The tree framed him, two trees, his own foliage gone deep within. She would certainly never see it, only the mirror of his grey eyes beating back her inquisition. It was the sort of strength she hated in a man, features as if they had been set for generations, fixed like stone that had somehow learned to move. ‘Kevin's got a head on his shoulders,' he said, amused that she should control her anger and not come right out with it.

‘It's a good job he has, otherwise he might mention the tree to someone who'll hear that one is missing from Panton Hall – to Waller, for example. You still have your city ways: they only have to miss a pound of apples around here and it's the talk for weeks. Next time, have a head on
your
shoulders and don't rely on Kevin having one. I want him to be honest, as well as intelligent.'

How could you argue with a woman who was worrying about her kid? Especially when he'd tried to do them a favour. There was no love for him that night.

But on other nights during the holiday their love was more silently rapturous. Her son was in the room across the landing, and this was all he could put it down to. She folded Frank with her warm arms and slender legs, slept naked with him, in spite of the winter, which she had not done before. Her face changed for love in the moments before the light went out, softened in the frame of her outspread reddening hair. He kissed her lips, and flower-blue eyes that wouldn't close until he touched the light switch. The strong love, the unique tenderness felt when looking at her, compounded itself when he thought back to her anger, seeing how his love had drawn her out of it, and even without him knowing had transformed them both. They had to be quieter with someone else in the house, and maybe this gave their love that slow-motion, secretive bitter-sweet ritual under quilt and blankets that sent through them such all-flooding passion. Unable to cry out with pleasure they bore it within themselves, touched by its sensual echoes long after the first violent spasms, until they were still and separated, pulled down by some irresistible force into an enclosed boat of sleep and left to drift in a black and dreamless sea.

Such intensities subdued them during the days that followed. Waking up, Frank felt he had been wrenched by a claw-hammer out of a week's sleep. But he was downstairs before Pat, often while it was still dark. A lorry had dropped off a load of trunks, and he'd set up the horse by the back door, got to work in the bleak air with jacket loose, drawing back the teeth that he'd filed one by one to sharpness so that his rhythm caused streaks of sawdust to mark the asphalt, and created a log-pile by the kitchen wall. At eight he filled the house with a smell of bacon, took breakfast up. They talked, and he watched her put on her clothes as if, he thought, they belonged to someone else, looking at each item as if she'd never seen it before, examining it for cleanliness rather than colour or style. ‘You were up early.'

‘I felt like it. I always do after the sort of love we did last night. It turns me into a new man.'

‘I'm glad of that,' she laughed. Sometimes when the phone snapped her out of bed she dressed in a few minutes, ruthlessly. He hated the noise of it, had used one rarely enough in his life to know he would never sound otherwise than a hung-over aborigine when forced to listen and make words at it. Her self-possession when called to it at certain moments never stopped surprising, and, in a way, pleasing him.

She pulled on her long woollen underwear, and fastened her brassiere – something which he considered her breasts could well live without. Occasionally she left it off, and he would kiss her from behind, his hands roaming the nakedness under her sweater. ‘I thought I'd get the bus today into Louth,' he said. ‘Buy some things we need.'

‘Take Kevin if you would.'

‘I was going to. You know, love, I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better for him to live here all the year round.'

‘I've thought about it, too. But I'm not sure he's not better off at school. He's settled there now, and likes it. Apart from that, his father wants him at school, and I'm afraid he has the final say. You see, I was the guilty woman who abandoned my husband and child.'

‘Well,' he said, with a hollow laugh, ‘you can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.' He thought she was making this up as an excuse, on the assumption that if they all settled happily together he'd go off one day and leave them high and dry, murder their bloody happiness. She must have had a few knocks in her life if she imagines that. He couldn't tell her all this, but he put his arms around her. ‘I'm with you for good, love, you know that, don't you?'

‘I know you are.'

‘Don't smile. It means you're not sure.'

‘If I didn't smile I'd be lying.' Her lips hardened, ends pointing downward, a sign of boiling sands beneath. ‘What do you want me to say?'

‘I want to believe that you feel sure about me,' he answered, standing by the window, his back to her.

‘That's up to you then, as well.'

‘I know.' He turned, and she was already dressed: a heavy brown sweater, skirt, thick stockings and shoes. ‘You think I don't know it? But it seems easier for me to feel sure.'

‘We'll have to wait and see whether it does.'

He felt as if an axe had chipped through to the ashes in his stomach. Her eyes rounded, but she wasn't smiling: ‘That shouldn't have sounded as hard as it did.'

‘I'm able to wait and see whether it does, whether you're sure of me.'

‘I love you,' she said. ‘Isn't that enough?'

He turned on her: ‘That's the trouble. We love each other. It's too easy to say. Maybe we only think we do, which would be better as far as I'm concerned, because there'd be some hope for us of a real love then. There's too much missing still. In the last few months I've had my guts ripped out and put back again. After last night I can't stand to look at anything. I can't think at all.'

Tears were falling: ‘What are you trying to do to me? To get from me?'

It was an effort to stay calm, and embrace her: ‘It's what I want to give you,' he whispered. ‘We're trying to make something here.'

She grew quiet and they went downstairs.

The days were short, occasional sun. Frost would have been better, for mostly it rained out of low cloud that swirled as mist along rolling tops of the hills. Bare hedges and trees were laden with it, and the garden was waterlogged, spreading a heavy permeating smell of rain and soil and soaked wood. It was an odour Frank liked: every sight and tang of the countryside emphasized his complete limb-rip from the past, stamped his isolation from it even more than living with Pat. He stood at the end of the garden; watching far-off house-roofs wilting under rain.

One morning they stayed late in bed, a rare happening, and Kevin tapped at the door with a tray of breakfast he'd made. ‘Just a moment,' Pat answered, reaching for a nightdress. Frank got into pyjamas, and all three ate a relaxed easy breakfast in the room.

After lunch, shadows drew in, leavened by silence. Frank kept lights burning all day, closed the blinds before night had time to thicken. Pat hated the winter. It made her work a double burden, depressed her with its dragging timelessness. Kevin was sent to bed at ten, so they sat in the lounge reading, a logfire scorching the small room, hissing and spitting as sap rolled into the flame.

One morning early they went for a walk. It was a winter's day, the blue dazzling snowless heart of winter in high Lincolnshire. Kevin had stayed at the cottage and tuned in to French lessons on a set of records his father had found one year at the Portobello market. It was winter only because it was cold, air chipping like invisible scraps of steel at the dead flesh of the face. They stepped quickly along the southward lane, through fields of frosty grass, as if they were going somewhere. ‘I hate to stay still,' Frank said. ‘There's no work on days like this so I feel good to be walking.'

She grasped his hand, as if they had much to say to each other, but which her vanity had decided was unnecessary: ‘It's a change to get away from the house and be alone like this.' They climbed the sloping hillside of loam, a hard hour's walk, edging slowly towards the top line that separated them from the touching sky.

The crest was gradual, shaved off, but suddenly there was nothing between them and the deep mist of the sky. The only sound that the world gave was that of their breathing. Up here, there was nothing else. They stood still: animals were underground, birds dead or far away, no roads, people, houses, nothing to make noise. Such uplands were a world on their own, not high, but isolated by the North Sea, the Fens and marshes, the Humber, and the subtle snakiness of the grey Trent that needed wide lowlands to breed and flood in to the west. Hamlets were half lost in frosty air. The rim of blue haze on the horizon was the pink of spring flowers, campion petals, premonitions of cuckoo spit and primroses, soft grass and tadpoles. The land was a whitened waste, copses and woods like dropped hoods set down to cover something special until spring, isolated farms and cottages hard to see but for minute darkenings of chimney-smoke. The hard breath of their climb subsided, until it could only be heard to each separated self; then they became aware of it, and it decreased again until they were as silent as the bitter unobtrusive air-touching hands and faces.

Unwanted words were spelt like a lit-up newsflash across the inside of his eyes: ‘Now what do we do?' The noise of his own life had been taken away, and the sound of all others, too. A pool in one of the fields had turned to ice, as if molten lead had been poured into a hollow and left to set, unbreakable, fixed forever even through summer. He was immobilized by lack of sound.

To break it he said, releasing her hand: ‘Let's go down,' and their feet moved with comforting heaviness over the frost as she took his hand and obeyed.

7

In four months he hadn't seen a film. At the pub, he drank in a private room to get out of the death-ray of television. Once a week he made tracks there, had a pint, watched by those who speculated on his long sojourn at Nurse Shipley's house.

He offered to take her to Louth or Lincoln for an evening, but she said: ‘When I want you to, I'll let you know. If you want to go, just do so. You know that I'm all right here.' He too liked the peace and isolation – while often wondering how someone like Pat could stand so much of it since she'd already done a couple of years.

He had cleaned out all he considered to be the good books of her library, and looked forward to the huge shiny-sided van drawing up outside the house to lend them more. ‘I'm happy here,' he said, ‘lapping up these books like a cat lapping up milk' – so that she wondered whether he were here for any other purpose than that. Still, in a discreet, offhand way, she advised him what to read, careful not to praise any book but merely putting it in his way by such phrases as: ‘This one isn't bad' or ‘You might like this one.' He had an irresistible yen to fill his shattered mind, to separate himself from the world, and yet have something to talk about with Pat. He secretly wanted to catch up with her in all she had read, felt that such continual reading was altering the basic mechanism of his senses in a way that reading had never done for Pat. For her, books were an accepted part of life, even to the reading of them, whereas they had been something rare and foreign to him, seen in other people's houses as part of the furniture – a showing-off part, at that. He had detested books at school as symbols of torment, employed only to prove in public what he had always known about himself in private – that he was dead ignorant. He assumed readily that Pat's books must be good because he didn't feel uneducated or foolish while reading them. Having tackled so few in the last ten years made them so much easier to absorb now.

They weren't the sort that taught electricity, plumbing, engineering or gardening, but they widened the world beyond the range of his eyes and softened the hitherto hard limits of his perceptions. Reading Homer or Sophocles, he couldn't scorn the idea of gods or God if he wanted to enjoy and get any good out of them. This wasn't easy. The many Greek names in a single book of the Odyssey bothered him, but Pat had a dictionary, so that he reduced his natural strong hankering to know what happened next, and actually enjoyed looking up every name until, towards the end, he had a rough idea who and what they meant, soon recognized them as clearly as he once had the names of players of his favourite rugby teams. He looked up words in the English dictionary, then lost his shyness at seeming half literate, and asked Pat what they meant to save himself the trouble of moving from the fire to the bookshelf. He'd previously bought or borrowed books to read about war or sex, but now he got pleasure from a story taking in neither. Or he found that if a book was well-written about love or war then it gave more satisfaction than a paperback half a notch above comic books. He'd liked
Tom Jones
, struggled through the peace parts of
War and Peace
, read
Tess
and
Fude
. One day he said: ‘I suppose a lot of those people gassed by the Germans had read good books like these.'

‘Of course. Many of them must have,' she answered.

‘Those German bastards,' he retorted, and went on reading in the savage light of illumination.

Kevin was seen off from the crowded platform at Lincoln. Frank had been indifferent to his visit at first, only wondering what effect it would have on him and Pat, realizing finally that in a curious way it had enriched them. Frank had grown used to him, and by the time he left they'd become so attached to each other that Kevin had promised to write. ‘I'm glad you got on so well,' Pat said on their way back from the station. ‘I was worried, naturally.'