The Death of William Posters (36 page)

Frank liked the tale, wondered why he'd had to come as far as Tangier for the accident of reading it. Going south, he'd see the desert, but not roam far into it. The slow days were beating down his spirit, and he wanted to set off, though at the same time aching at the thought of having to leave Myra at such a point in their lives.

He woke at four o'clock, more disturbed than he'd imagined, birds of prey and an insomniac beast worrying him all night. He had coffee and bread in the kitchen to a low murmur of sleepless people out of the Emsallah district on one side, and a roistering noise from a couple of cabaret places on the other. A boat-hooter sounded in the port, a low, dreadful gut-mover indicating a funnel and row of lights about to set off for another land, which caught at his stomach like an ancestral voice, tugged at his journeyman legs. But it's not so bad, he thought, because I'm moving as well, in another direction, but moving just the same. It's harder for those said good-bye to, for Myra who's got to stay among all the indications of what our life's been like. I only want to live properly with her; to work hard by the day, until life is so absorbing that it jets by. Yet his return was only ten days away, and there was no use trying to wring three months of sentiment out of it.

He did not know how to say good-bye. He stood in the dark bedroom. He had never said good-bye to anyone he was in love with. The thought of leaving her turned him to salt, to ice. He stood there, her face hardly visible, trying to tell himself he wasn't in love with her, that to be so would mean a defeat for all he had lately surmised and stood for. But he was leaving too much, felt as if about to drop from the last grip of the lifesaving rope end. He blamed such thoughts on the morning, when the brain was clear and ruthless, showing in true light one's bravery and apprehension.

She felt his presence by the bed. ‘Are you going?'

He waited a moment: ‘I don't have to. Nobody's dragging me. If only they were.'

‘You're saying this for my sake,' she said, opening her eyes. ‘I'll see you quite soon.'

‘I'm a fool,' he said. ‘I don't want to leave you both.'

She sat up. ‘I know. But don't make it too difficult. I know how much you want to go.'

‘I love you,' he said. ‘My roots are in you.' You did love me, she thought. You're incapable of love. You've wanted to be free of it for so long that now you've made it, you've won. ‘Just take care,' she said, ‘that's all.'

‘I'm running guns to the Algerians,' he said.

‘I know. I'm glad. But Miriam already told me.' She hoped that Shelley knew there was no danger in taking him from her at such a time.

‘If we can burst that frontier we'll be O.K. I'll be careful. I'm cool enough' – feeling at last that there was no limit to what he could do. ‘I've come full circle, going off on a thing like this. I feel as if I left the factory only yesterday, got paid up, clocked-out, and took a plane down. There's a natural connection between that work and what I'm going to do. My muscles feel it, and my head as well. It's not much perhaps, but it means everything to me. I used to dream of being able to
do something
, but I'm not doing anything. I see that now. I'm just being myself. I've learned to be myself. I want to prove it finally though. Then I'll come back. You'll be all right. I know you'll look after yourself.'

‘I've got Miriam and a few friends. You make it sound more final now. Do you think you won't come back?'

‘No. I'll come back. This is just dawn talk.' But the tears bled out of her. Desolation would rend her bones and close her eyes, but there was no one to tell, Frank least of all. He roared her name, unfragmented syllables thrown out by his exploding heart. He felt it emptying, knelt by the bed, his hand under the clothes, smoothing her breasts, her enlarging belly. ‘He'll be there when you come back,' she said, her throat hardening into firmness, ‘but not if you come back too late.'

‘I've got so much to look forward to. That sort of thing used to frighten me, but not now. It'll be an easy trip. Shelley's been there before, and swears it's a piece of cake. It's just the fact of leaving you for any time at all that creases me.'

It was cruel and weird, this voluntary wilful parting. He kissed her and left, casually, as if coming back in ten minutes with fresh bread for their breakfast.

She lay still, the door slamming through her, feeling that he'd never open it again. If he weren't back in two weeks she would take a plane to London, go to the house in Buckinghamshire and wait for her baby which, by time scheme but not physical possibility of touch, could have been George's. After that, she would carve out her own life as Frank was carving out his, in action and not love. If he survived his crossing of the desert he would know where to find her. In that sense they belonged to each other and she would always wait for him.

The blue light of dawn clawed at her belly. She had a baby, and love must die. The universe was taking it back. Where the claws of love had rested the flesh was rotten. Frank knows this, and is acting it out in the only way possible, by leaving me. Will God allow the world to be proletarianized in this way? He's emptied me of love, but I feel better than I've ever felt in my life. To live out a great emptiness is to fulfil yourself completely. I can't put into words what has happened.

23

A wet Atlantic wind lurched in from the chopping sea, and all the clouds, ragged and green, looked as if they'd decided to come south and make a party of it. ‘One big downpour,' Shelley said, ‘and every dip of the road between here and the desert will be a lake. In which case we won't get through this side of a month.' He decided on the coast road, rather than risk the mountains beyond Tetuan. Egrets stared into pools by the open roadside, their reflections like question marks upside down. ‘If you hadn't looked so much like a working man, our friend at the bookshop wouldn't have smelled two rats. Especially when you wouldn't take his gelt,' he went on, continuing an earlier argument.

An anaemic forest spread out from the road. ‘He can stuff his gelt where it belongs,' Frank said. ‘What do I want money for? I don't care if my job isn't pensionable.'

The word
H I E L O
was written plain and big along the side of their covered lorry. Ice it is, Frank thought, but bugger-all whisky to go with it. He'd brought nothing except two cartons of cigarettes and some money, and couldn't imagine a more perfect way to depart. Shelley was at the wheel, and Frank took the spare seat, a closed map on his knee. Four Moslems lay on bales and boxes behind, smoked and talked, well-built, thuggish men of about forty wearing khaki trousers and battledress under blanket-like burnouses. Another six would flag them at a crossroads beyond Fez.

A squad of police manned a roadblock at the next junction, a zone of short steel spikes laid out like a carpet. ‘You'd better make with the Arabic, or we'll have to use those guns on these bastards.'

Shelley pulled in: ‘Keep quiet.'

Frank saw himself back in Tangier by midday, either laughing about their misadventure in Myra's arms, or cursing his luck behind bars, with Myra trudging up to the Kasbah jail with a billy-tin of rice and mutton, kif-fags and tea.

The Moroccans in the back were motioned outside, not a word said, rifle spouts and law-faces moving around the lorry. Shelley's hand stretched from the cab. The officer looked at his papers, saluted as if a bee had flown out from them and stung him, and waved them on. The Moroccans climbed back, and Shelley manoeuvred the lorry through a gap in the spikes.

‘What was on those papers?' Frank asked as they turned up into the olive-grown hills. ‘Khrushchev's signature?'

‘The Prophet himself signed it,' Shelley laughed, ‘then Mao Tse Tung. Don't think we're the only lorry on Route Twenty-One. Not that there are many. As always, the north fares better, because you can always find ships to put stuff down along that coast. You'd be shocked if you knew how many Englishmen were making a fortune on that run, with their little ships from Gibraltar. Trust the Limeys with their little ships.'

In the afternoon, under a lead-coloured sky, the lorry roared its guts beyond Meknès and up into the Middle Atlas. Snow soon piled on either side of the road, curving and twisting to seven thousand feet. ‘This is nothing,' Shelley said – though no one complained, ‘you'll be crying out for water in a few days and having your nuts scorched off.'

‘I'd have brought a keg of brandy if I'd known,' Frank said. ‘You mean to say they're fighting a desperate civil war over there for country like this? Don't blow your top, commissar. I'm making a joke. I know it's rich country for all that. The Yorkshire Moors are rich, as well, snowed-up or not. Still, the desert is healthy, for hermits and scorpions. At least I could have brought my skis though, if I'd known about this.'

Peaks and rolling flanks were bolsters of snow, a vast rumpled skybed that someone had left in a hurry. The sight and smell of snow when they pulled-up for a legstretch made him almost lightheaded. Moroccan shepherds huddled their flocks into rough shelters. Frank was salaamed when he gave one a cigarette. A knife wind scraped along the drifts, dusted the road that had been cleared by ploughs a few days before. A bus, its top piled with bales and suitcases, passed at a speed even Shelley shook his head at. Veiled women and Old Testament faces of impassive men gazed from inside.

The snow made Frank feel spiritually clean. He'd never seen so much of it, nor been so high among mountains, nor so many miles from any churning sea. This last fact impressed him most, and he wondered whether the moon got this far inland. Certainly the sun did. A bleak thumbprint showed for a minute from a mountain shoulder. A Peugeot cruised by, a French family up from some holiday oasis, woman driving, crewcut head of a man leaning out with a ciné camera aimed at the sheepfold and forest of high cedars humped and laden with snow. Snow took the sense of density out of a forest, made it seem more accessible in that it widened the space between trunks. Larch trees and ilex patched the cedars, hard to pick out unless one had the trained eyes of Shelley. ‘I expected a desert and I got Siberia,' Frank said, glad of his cap, overcoat and heavy boots.

By nightfall they were over the Middle Atlas, and ready to bed down near Midelt. In spite of bitter cold the Moroccans slept in the lorry, guarding in turn the stuff they were moving south. A fire in the hotel yard huddled them in talk except for the blackest hour of the night. Frank and Shelley drank Pernod at the kerosene-lit bar inside. Frank asked why there was so much unemployment in Tangier and Morocco. It didn't puzzle him, yet he wanted to know.

‘Since the French pulled out of Morocco the industry has collapsed. Also, a developing country needs a statistical system to measure its progress and potential, otherwise, it doesn't move. You can't do anything until you get one. When Tangier became part of Morocco, forty banks closed in one day. And when money stops circulating, the economy stops running – what little there was.'

‘People can work, even without money,' Frank said, ‘until things get properly organized. It's better than no working at all.'

Shelley smoked a pipe on long hours of driving, and lit up now. ‘They'd work for food, if there was any to hand out. They're primitive enough for that. And they're good workers, in spite of what a Frenchman might tell you. But there's no surplus flour to pay them with – unless it's a handout from Uncle Sam.'

‘Maybe it's a case of them having the wrong sort of government.'

‘Some people in the big cities are trying to alter it, but it's hard. Most Moroccans are tribal and primitive – let's face it – and they don't want things to change.'

‘It's the towns that matter,' Frank said. ‘Sling me some more of that water. This stuff's punching holes in my stomach.'

‘The Chinese Revolution began with the peasants. Same in Cuba and Vietnam. Algeria as well. You're old-fashioned, still harping on 1917. I don't have much faith, Frank, in the modern masses, as too many individuals are called. The only magnanimous action of modern times was a passive and unconscious one – that they allowed the hydrogen bomb to get cooked up. Which is where we come in. Guerilla wars are the only possible ones from now on.'

‘You talk as if capitalism is finished,' Frank said. ‘It's not that easy. I wish it was.'

Shelley laughed: the idealist with practical solutions. ‘Capitalism is a luxury liner washed up on an island: the people already there swarm down to the shore and loot it, to rebuild their own boats with its help – almost from nothing.'

‘Have you ever tried to make a nut and bolt?' Frank asked, fed-up with his flippant images.

‘No, but I've known many people who
can
make them. They're a dime a dozen. I'm getting stoned. I've got to sleep. Allow me to flip off to my pad like a cross-eyed penguin.'

Through the rock-rock-rocky mountains and the pure-and-driven snow, balancing on bootlace roads with the smell of pine cones and nostril-burning frost to clear the head, Frank became as adept at such turnings as Shelley, as if they'd been on the trek for weeks. Stapled by front bend and backmirror hairpin, the new land blinded him to past or future. Trees hammered the sky over them like a circus tent in which only thoughts and sensations of the present could perform. In spite of plenty to eat and smoke and a shower last night at Midelt, he already felt as if he were living rough, a tramp with a purpose, sharpened by driving and fatigued by lack of past or future.

The country was cold (even at midday), stony, laced with iron trees, vast. The world is small until you come to the wilderness, he thought, then you see how big it is. Beyond the desert there was jungle, land still unexplored, unsurveyed, unconquered.