Valley of Decision (26 page)

‘Thank you.'

‘That's only your right. You let her go, and many husbands wouldn't, and then she acts as she has.' She stopped, staggered again into speech. ‘Anyhow that's all I know, David; I ought to have asked her more questions, but I was so taken by surprise. I mean, afterwards you think of all the things you should have said. But as soon as I know anything else, I'll be in touch. I'm that relieved to get you. I just think if she'd come back and somebody had seen her, and said something to you, and you didn't know a blind thing about it. What would you have thought of us?'

‘What does George say?'

‘He's like me. Only this morning, when I told him I was going to have another go to get hold of you, he said, “You never get shot of 'em, however old they are.”' She paused. ‘Will you pass the news on to your mother? I've been ringing her as well to try and find out where you were, but they were never in.'

‘They're away on holiday.'

‘That accounts for it.' Mrs Stiles hummed to herself, and David half-heartedly tried to make out her tune, failing. ‘If she does say anything about coming back to you . . .?'

‘I've already written that if she wanted it, I'd take her.'

‘That's good. O' course, that was when there didn't seem any chance of it happening, wasn't it?' The woman was either shrewd or malicious.

‘I meant it.' He sounded pompous, portentous even to himself.

‘I know you did. Well, I'll ring off now. Are you all right, David? I ought to have asked you before.'

‘Yes. Thank you.'

Mrs Stiles advised him to keep eating. ‘You've got to live, and it's no use doing other.' David prepared himself for a homily that did not materialize, for she breathed in, said, ‘Goodbye,' and put the phone down.

He sat in rumpled pyjamas trying to make sense of the room about him.

After breakfast, he decided against even a token cooking of lunch, and lounged about with the Sunday newspapers which interested him less than usual. They seemed fit only to litter the floor. He had no excitement, merely a sense of grievance that just as he was about to come to terms with trouble, the situation radically altered itself. He bought a loaf, tomatoes and a packet of biscuits from a Pakistani shopkeeper who politely informed him that though the weather was unseasonably cool, he could do nothing about it. The smiling teeth, the dusky, pale-palmed, illustratively waving hand matched his own mood. He had flung down, not half-read, an article about starving children in Somalia not because it added to his discomfort, but because he lacked the mental energy to complete it. The world was heavy with death, avoidable tragedy; his present state rejected the conclusion placed it on a par with reports of politicians' rant or literary chitchat. He opened a tin of chopped pork and was about to sit down to that, tomatoes and pickles, when his mother rang from St Austell to find out about the Lincolnshire venture.

His brief résumé was interrupted by a gabble about a morning service the older Blackwalls had attended. The singing had been poor, the organ playing dull, the parson's sermon almost a caricature and yet Joan had been moved.

‘Not until we came out,' she said. ‘Then I realized that the place had been holy for generations. Don't you think there's something in that?'

‘Yes. Larkin said as much.'

‘You sound grumpy. Well, never mind.'

‘There's been news of Mary.'

That put religion out of her mind.

He told her what he knew, parried her excitable questions from his lack of knowledge. At the end of ten minutes, she asked, ‘What have you decided to do, then?'

‘Nothing.'

‘I can see I shall get no sense out of you.' She might have been laughing. ‘Will you go to see her?'

‘I expect so. When she arrives and I know a bit more.'

His mother was volatile with advice; his father was due, he guessed, for a lively afternoon.

When he rang off he wished he had been more cooperative with his mother. She meant well. She had vigorously promised to get in touch tomorrow and had ordered him to think positively.

‘You sound like a politician.'

‘You mustn't lose her for want of trying.'

‘Are you sure I want her back?'

She didn't easily give up. He left the phone with his eardrums ringing, and ate with distaste. He could not think what he should do, but cautioned himself not to be surprised by this. He was emotionally bruised; pain, grief, uncertainty racked him. Mary had thrown him down. With some shame he remembered how one night soon after he was convinced she would not return, he had taken his car and driven out to Trent Bridge to stand on the embankment in the windy darkness at quarter to eleven. All the way there a voiceless fiat had scored itself on his body, not only in the aching head but in shoulders, chest, belly, backbone: Drown yourself, drown yourself. The diktat seemed forcibly sensible, but impersonal and in no way connected with black water, cold mud, a sodden corpse. At the same time he knew he would not do it.

He had stepped from his car.

The river flowed high, greasy with the reflected distant streetlights. Above, ripped clouds raced across the luminous patch round the moon. He could hear wind and water; his hair joined the disturbance; chill nibbled at his face.

All he had to do was walk forward from the road once he had stepped over the low fence, cross the grass and the pedestrian way, negotiate the steps, and head into the river. His distress urged him forward, fuelling mad resolve, but he knew he could not. In spite of loss, the total wreck of happiness, there seemed inbuilt inside him a common sense, an everyday rationality, a kind of formidable schoolmastery which had refused permission. When he had considered this later he had decided that his affliction, desperate as it seemed, earth-shattering, must have been weak, small, compared with that of men who hacked their throats open with cut-throat razors or drove headlong into brick walls. Perhaps he was pathologically incapable of such intensity of feeling. But if one way, why not at the other end of the scale? Was he capable of love? It felt so, but he would not die for its non-requital.

He had stood that night, injured on the road, flattening his jigging hair with a gloved limb, keeping it parted. With a shudder, he dared himself to lift his feet over the railings, to march the few paces across wet, wintry grass, smack down on the flat, tread the broad concrete steps where holidaying children sat in summer, to take a position at the bottom, on the concrete, within inches of the fast lapping of revelling flood-water. He did so and once there did not move, held himself still, testing himself.

Then he had nodded at the river, in formal acknowledgement, and made a firm way back to the car, jinking his keys. For the moment he had assuaged his grief, if not for good. Broken pride, longing, embarrassment, frustrated desire would rack him again, but inside, it seemed, a limit had been imposed on himself by himself. Next time he was in trouble, he would put it into words, he could ‘do a Trent Bridge'. He remembered his father's mock use of an expression of surprise from his childhood, ‘Well, I'll go to Trent Bridge.' He had been and standing there, had achieved something, a lowly place in the second division of love.

Baffled now, he decided he'd take himself out.

He drove once again through the city, past fading warehouses, duller clutters of modern housing complexes, but parked this side of the Trent. Though it was Sunday, a heavy drizzle kept people indoors. David, pulling up the hood of his anorak, walked down to the river again in the grey light. This wet spring the waters were high, threatening. He repeated some lines he had learned for A-level:

picked with his toe end at the pattern scored on the concrete under his feet. The rain seemed both fine and heavy as he lifted his face. Keats's words meant nothing to him, mumbo-jumbo round one shell on the human shore, nor had this place any significance. Back to the road he walked hard under dripping trees; a pair of lovers kissed but they were in his eyes damp and disheartened. A woman clung on to the leash of a bull terrier; a smart, elderly man with a flat golfing cap and walking stick told him it wasn't pleasant.

‘No,' David answered, half stopping.

‘But my garden can do with any amount of this.'

He was away, the ferule of his stick tapping militarily.

David took a rapid tour of the memorial gardens where pruned rose bushes dripped, flowerless as yet. He tried a second circuit, equally unsatisfactory, before he stopped to read the names of the war dead. They meant nothing; his aesthetic judgement of the shape of the arches or the lettering meant more than the deaths these ordinary ranks, names, initials represented. What had happened to him in the last few months was as nothing compared with the grief splitting these hundreds of families caused by faceless governments and their decisions. Unenfranchised women mourned. The men who returned remembered bloody mud, stench, dirty fingernails on a headless corpse, trees and brickwork ripped to shreds. There were no Blackwalls commemorated. This piece of minor civic architecture pointed its lesson, they shall not grow old, in vain. ‘They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man.' It was as nothing, but it was all that a silly city could do, and he, wifeless with wife returning, stared miserably at the polluted, wet marble or limestone, he did not know which. It represented the uselessness of the world, and his ignorance, gold letters and black on white, discolouring stone spelt out the message, ‘We had back luck,' like a casual postcard from some foreign part.

It was raining more heavily; one could hear the rattle fall on the leaves of evergreens. His sinuses pained; his trousers below the anorak were damp. Dragging his mind together, he ran back to his car, arriving breathless. He had passed no one; the few pedestrians had disappeared from the face of the unsympathetic earth. He peeled off his anorak, thrust it to the floor, drove home.

He fell asleep in front of the gas fire, was woken by the telephone. Fred Payne.

‘I'm glad I've caught you. Is June 18th free? A Saturday? We've been offered a double concert in Hull. Saturday and Sunday. They want the first Rasoumovsky.'

David dolefully filled in his diary.

‘What if I hadn't been at liberty?' He felt awkward.

‘We couldn't have done it.'

‘The others are all right?'

‘Yes. We haven't long, have we?'

‘Do we play the same programme twice?'

‘We'll need to think about it. Not very enterprising, is it, though?'

David stood condemned.

‘I'll look the Beethoven over,' he said.

‘Thanks.'

The word displeased him, and disgruntled he asked himself why he should exert himself to support the Trent, when they'd drop him in August on Robert Knight's advent without a qualm. He fell asleep unanswered.

Preparation for examinations, the school summer concert, a proposed trip to London occupied him in the next few days. On Thursday morning Mrs Stiles rang him at work to say her husband had driven down to Heathrow to collect Mary.

‘What time are they due home?'

‘About four o'clock.'

‘Do you want me to do anything?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Shall I come over?'

‘No. We'll see how she is. I'll ask her what she thinks. That'll be the best. I've no idea what she'll be like. She just gave us the time of her plane. She sounded whacked.' The short sentences dropped like dominoes, spelling his defeat. ‘You never know in any case, with these flights. They're often delayed. I'll ring you as soon as I know anything definite.'

‘It's not very satisfactory.'

He took the call in the office of the head of the music department, surrounded by boxfiles and scores, records, cassettes, the classical repertoire meticulously neat. There was nobody about, but he expected any minute some lout would burst in for a book or an instrument.

‘I think that's best, David. We none of us knows where we are.'

‘Who's helping you in the shop today?'

‘Mrs Thomas. You haven't met her.'

‘Is this your half-day?'

‘No.' He heard a second voice raised in query. ‘I shall have to go.' Relief with exasperation. ‘I'll ring you as soon as I can.'

She put down the phone; he went back, to ear tests for O-level.

Surprisingly his spirit lifted, so that he took rehearsals, practised that evening with élan as if on the edge of renewal. He refused a theatre ticket for Thursday evening, sat at home with his cello waiting for a telephone which stayed mute. Mrs Stiles did not get in touch with him until Saturday morning when she asked him over for a meal at eight that night.

‘How does she seem?' he asked.

‘Not too bad.'

‘Has she said anything about returning?'

‘I can't . . . Over the phone, y'know.'

Mary, presumably, had come into the room. Less than twenty miles away, with two nights in an English bed behind her, in the smell of the shop and kitchen she made an entrance at an awkward moment. He hurried out of the place with his Saturday lists to preclude thought. The rest of the morning was wasted on household chores, on list-making and marking; he took lunch deliberately late, practised desultorily, weeded in the borders, gave up, watched television grudgingly, went back to Beethoven. Time would not move for him. He needed every few minutes to shift his haunches from one seat to another.

By six, he had bathed, dressed himself in slacks, an open-necked cream shirt, a new dark brown pullover. With shoes polished, hair schoolboyishly tidy he sat about his house shivering. He tried to imagine the Stileses' living room. By now the shop would have just closed, though George would probably be below there still, with his pocket calculator or his checklists keeping out of the way of the women upstairs. Eva would be sitting down to a cup of tea, shoes off, vigorously grousing about the stupidity of customers, travellers, the young men in to help, her husband. Before long she would make precise inquiries about the meal, soup, a salad with ham and tongue, a sherry trifle she had left to Mary to supervise. Once she was convinced that the preparations did her credit, she would shyly ask Mary what she intended towards David, Only the tone of voice would be diffident, not the form of questions. She feared her daughter, knew she had grown beyond her; it was highly probable that they barely shared a single, moral, social, political view, and yet she believed that the girl could be caught napping as earlier she had been certain that a crafty examiner could seize on the scale Mary played or sang most weakly, and damn her with it. She had worked in ignorance then, melodic or harmonic minor were merely names, but she knew once she had established a reasonable doubt Mary's own intelligence would do the rest.