The Death of William Posters (28 page)

‘My plan for today,' she said, to prove that thoughts of George did not worry her, ‘is to visit my sister-in-law, then go to the gallery and see Albert's pictures. It closes soon, doesn't it?'

‘You ought to go today. It's worth seeing. I hope his next show is as well.'

‘What makes you unsure about it? You don't envy him, do you?'

He put down his cup. ‘I used to, when I first met him in Lincolnshire and saw his paintings. I envied him then, if that's the right word. But now I don't. He gets into blind rages, attacking the art dealers, critics, and other painters' work. That's the sort of thing that'll ruin him unless he goes back to Lincolnshire for ten years and sees nobody, like before. I'm not saying all those people aren't worth attacking, but the best way you can do it is by ignoring their existence – I should think. Teddy doesn't really want him to go back to Lincolnshire, keeps trying to get him to go to Italy or Greece for a year or two. There's nothing wrong with that, but Albert has to make his own way there, not go under Teddy's auspices. The less people he has looking after him, the more he'll be able to look after himself again. Then he'll be all right.'

‘What about you, though?'

He laughed, cigarette smoke rolling across at her. ‘Me? Whatever happens I'll be all right – as long as something happens.' She'd never thought of it that way. ‘That's the only way I
can
look at it,' he said.

‘You're lucky, then.'

‘I know. Every time I take a breath, or eat some bread and cheese I say to myself: “You lucky bastard!” I was born lucky in that way.' He told her the skeletal facts about himself. ‘Up to last autumn I was buried in three feet of cold soil, unable to move except for my arms and breath. Now my feet are free, at least.'

He belonged nowhere, she reflected, but he had belonged somewhere so solidly once that it would take him years to find some natural way of life again. He was the sort of man who could not turn back. His face was a mask of animation and strength, grey piercing eyes, highish cheeks, firm jaw and the sort of mouth that bends easily into anger – a man of character shifting between two coastlines of existence. His senses seemed out of tune with the rowdy and continuous traffic-flow along Euston Road where they now walked, and his face had a natural serenity whose only violence might be to protect that serenity from the forces of history. She found it impossible to guess where it would lead him; and difficult to imagine from where he had set out. To try and deflect him from his wilful half-conscious drifting would be an underhand way of helping herself, for his limbo was only noticeable in that it seemed to give more purpose to her own life, while she didn't yet know what that purpose might serve.

They took a bus to the Embankment, walked up the steps and on to Hungerford Bridge. ‘This is my favourite view,' he said, leaning on the parapet. ‘I often come here, look at the river for hours, watch it change colour as the sky alters. I kid myself I'm looking at London because I can see up the river to St Paul's.' He reached down, closing a hand over her fingers so that she had no thought of drawing away. ‘The river's moving, going somewhere.'

‘Which is more than we are,' she said, seeing it swirling along, dark and grey.

‘I want to stay here a while,' he teased, pressing her hand, feeling like one of those young lovers often walking this way. A train moved slowly out of Charing Cross, shook the bridge under their feet, a noise of steel and thunder that stopped her replying. ‘If I travel,' he said, ‘it's got to be out of England. There's no place for me on this right little tight little island.'

‘Where, though?'

‘I'd go to the moon if I could. I want to go over the water, onto a continent. The sky eats into my brain here.'

‘You're running away from yourself.'

‘I know. If that's the only way to find yourself, then you'll sooner or later run into what you're running away from, even if you don't know what it is. You'll recognize it when you hit it – or it hits you.' She smiled: he talked as if he'd just discovered the abstract and, like Columbus blundering into America, wanted to pull the whole world over into it. ‘Maybe you won't like it when you meet it,' she said.

‘It's a case of surviving, not liking.' They walked off the bridge, through the tube station hall and up Villiers Street. ‘If I decide to take off,' he said, ‘why don't you come with me?'

His question flew into her heart like a piece of sharpened stone. She stopped walking, as if it would compromise her to answer while her feet still moved: ‘Are you afraid of doing things on your own?'

He laughed. ‘Maybe two can be saved for the price of one! I just think it's better with somebody else, and I thought you might have an idea of lighting off as well.'

‘I hadn't,' she lied, which she knew came too quickly for him to believe it. They had a shepherd's-pie meal in a pub off Leicester Square, sitting away from the businessmen's crush at the counter. ‘If you'd like to go to the gallery,' he said, ‘I'll meet you somewhere later.'

She wanted to stay with him. ‘I don't think so. I'll go another time perhaps.'

‘When I've gone away?'

‘I didn't mean that. Why do I have to explain myself step by step?'

‘Because you want to. Have another glass of red plonk. I'll get more beer for myself' – the waitress saw him wave.

‘Beer and wine don't mix,' she smiled.

‘Anything mixes. Get me a quart of each in the same bowl and I'll drink 'em. In fact I'm almost beginning to feel like it.'

‘The very idea makes me sick.'

‘Add a cup of whisky if you like. Let's drink to a long life – wherever it is.'

‘That's innocent enough,' she said. ‘Perhaps I should go to the Arlington after all.'

‘What about your sister-in-law?'

‘Yes, I must go there.'

‘I'll wait for you. Meet you later.'

‘Come up with me. She lives in Hampstead.'

‘Isn't it risky? They'll twig something. It'll get back to your husband.'

‘It might, but I don't mind.'

‘Are you sure?' he asked, wondering whether she liked him more than she hated her husband. ‘Let's go then.'

The underground shuffled them north. She sat by his side, unspeaking, as if she had made a decision and to open her mouth might turn her from it. Leaving home this morning was an event beyond the far rim of the earth, and as usual in London she felt, with handbag and shopping basket, without a bed to go back to that night. It was alarming and exhilarating, a sort of soul-drift in a desert of streets where she felt no responsibility for the nomad state of her psychic life. At the moment only Frank was real, and the rattle of the carriage going under Belsize Park.

It was a two-floored house in a row of forty-year-olds, comfortable red-brick set on a slope with superb views towards Highgate. The front door was painted yellow, with a mosaic of different coloured heavily-leaded glass – pulling away when Myra tipped the bell.

Frank was introduced to Pamela, a tall buxom young woman wearing corduroy slacks and a green jumper. She looked at him with a half smile, as if surprised that Myra could ever have met a man apart from her husband.

With so much house he was surprised they sat in the kitchen, big as it was. Two small children played at a box of toys, a boy and girl who seemed rather subdued. He winked and tried to catch their eyes, but it was some time before they smiled.

‘Are you going to see mother?' Pam asked. Myra said she wouldn't have time today, but might well call on them next time. ‘They won't like it,' Pam told her, ‘when they know you haven't been to see them.'

‘I have a show to see at the Arlington,' Myra said, ‘a new painter from Lincolnshire.'

‘I read about him,' Pam said, filling the kettle to make them some tea. ‘His work sounds marvellous, and I'd love to see it too, but I always have too much on with the sprogs' – meaning the children, Frank gathered. She must have been cleaning up when they came, because a heap of
Observers
and
Woman's Owns
still lay by the draining board. Or maybe she'd been reading, because he noticed some sort of manual called:
How to Deal with the Outstanding Child
lying near the sugar dish.

They drank tea, and talked, and he was happy to see Myra so animated over news of family and old friends, and the chitchat of what was on in town. He put in his comments now and again, but couldn't feel himself part of the main thread because he was so much a stranger. He couldn't tell whether Pam looked at him so openly out of curiosity, or whether she was giving him the eye. He smiled, to find out, and got a smile back, none the wiser. When Myra went to the bathroom she asked if he'd known her long.

‘A couple of years,' he lied, and when she asked him what he did for a living he said he was a writer, though it didn't pay enough to keep an illiterate in postage stamps.

‘Oh, and what do you write?'

‘Stories,' he said. ‘No luck yet though. I'm off to France in a couple of weeks. Bum around a bit. I can't stand England.'

‘I've always wanted to leave it,' she said, ‘teach in some exotic place like Persia or India. But there's no hope of that, I'm afraid.'

‘You could teach in England,' he said.

‘Perhaps I will when the sprogs are older.'

He felt sorry for her. ‘Don't you think there's something wrong with the sort of world we live in?'

‘I'd never thought of it,' she answered. ‘It is difficult, that's true. But I suppose it's up to us as individuals, really.'

‘No,' he said, ‘not really. It's about time we got past all that, grew up, you might say.' Myra came back, only catching the last sentence. It was a rich house, as far as Frank could see, must be run on about forty pounds a week from Pam's photographer husband. Yet there was a squalor about it that he had always imagined such money could eliminate, an educated squalor, admitted, a stench of untidy intellect that didn't appeal to him. Myra had told him that Pam had a degree from Cambridge, in English, and he had been naïve enough to expect an impeccable house. Even the tea was weak.

By the time he left he had both children on his knees asking him to come again, and he saw how blind and irrevocable had been his own action in leaving his children.

Pam also asked him to call again, though gave a firm pressurized sort of handshake that could have meant good-bye for good.

They walked to a bus stop in Highgate. ‘I can't go back on the underground,' he said. ‘Let's go overland to my place for a drink. The house looks squalid, but the room's clean. Do you know Camden Town?'

‘I wandered around it in my student days.'

‘What were you studying?'

‘I read economics, and got a first.'

‘What are you doing then, being a wife? Maybe you get a kick out of wasting yourself.'

‘I'm not wasting anything. I'm living.'

‘It's not enough. You've got to do something with it.' His words disturbed her after the visit to Pam's. He knew it, and she wondered why he kept on when a more sensitive and considerate person would have let her fall back into pleasant sloth.

They sat on the top deck, descending into the smoke and view, and she told him about her work in the village so that it sounded worthwhile and even important, until she caught a note of justification in her voice, and stopped. ‘I suppose London is full of women like Pam,' he said. ‘Places like Hampstead and Highgate. I've seen 'em around, dragged down by snotty and petulant kids, and wasting their educated lives out of inertia. I guess it's the fault of the country though, as much as them. They could do useful work, but there's just no need of it. It's a rare world.'

‘What are you going to do about it?' she asked, and he had no answer. She took his arm when they left the bus. ‘If I hadn't met Albert in Lincolnshire I wouldn't have met you in London,' he said.

‘Does it seem so important, to trace it back like that?'

‘It's fate,' he said. ‘By politics I'm a socialist, but I believe in fate.'

She laughed: ‘You want it both ways.'

‘At the moment it's got me both ways. I was wondering what moves I went through to meet you.' They came to a road of dilapidated early Victorian houses. One or two had been fixed up, cleaned and painted, adorned with shiny brass knockers and fancy numbers, cars outside like metal watchdogs. They walked to the far end, through a gang of playing children.

Stepping out of the sun Frank went up the stairs first, refusing to comment on how much of a dump it was because maybe she was thinking the same. Which was true. He certainly had no right to rail against Pam's house. She wondered whether it would be possible to sit down when she reached his room – until the door opened. ‘I painted it out,' he explained. ‘It was so bad even I couldn't stand it. Take this chair. The others are clean, but only this one's safe. I'll sit on the bed.' The walls were bare, like a top-floor cell, oblong and simple, a few books on a table, a suit behind the door, two pair of shoes showing under the made bed. How lucky he was to be so free, she thought, no more belongings – material or spiritual – than could fit in a suitcase. He looked at her: ‘If ever you want to make a decision, just say yes, whatever it is.'

‘I wasn't thinking of anything.'

‘That's impossible. You've always got something on your mind. I'm good at thinking on nothing, though it's getting less easy. I'm thinking plenty at the moment.'

‘Such as what?' It was a dangerous question, as if she had said yes to something by making it.

‘The same as before. I think we ought to go away.'

‘Don't let's talk about it.'