She recalled their first meeting at a Youth Hostel in the Lakes, campers in the common room going over the day’s walk with maps and Wainwright. Afterwards they played guessing each other’s sign of the zodiac, and she tried eleven times with Stanley, till it was obvious he was her own.
‘Brilliant,’ he called. ‘Sally’s rumbled me at last.’
She was uneasy. ‘What date, though?’
‘The twentieth.’ His face had caught the sun and the wind.
‘You’re joking.’ He had to be. Or it was uncanny. But the chances weren’t that remote, unless he had seen her card on the warden’s desk, and was lying, or teasing. Sometimes on rush evenings a pile was left to be seen to later. She remembered the warden’s sharp and weatherworn face, neither young nor old, and she couldn’t imagine him in any other job, evil demon on the one hand, wonderful wizard on the far side of the face, she would never know which.
Stanley’s dark hair was combed straight back, so could she trust him? She had been blonde. His sly smile suggested that she might fancy him. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ he said, not entirely motiveless.
She had been reckless on the trek at times, going over the rocks and scree like a goat, so thought she must be careful in this. ‘What time of the day?’
‘A quarter to four. My mother swore she heard the tea bell as I popped out.’
Other hostellers listened as if to a tale of suspense, and she knew she turned pale, hands clasped, hoping she was too young for a heart attack.
‘Are you all right? Have I said something I shouldn’t?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said, ‘I suppose.’
‘Aren’t we all? What time were you born, then?’
Her father had noted in his diary, which he later showed with inane pride: ‘1545 hrs. Baby born. Seven and one half pounds. Call her Jane. No, Sally.’
‘Oh, I don’t really remember.’
From then on she tried to keep out of his way, but they were married in six months, drawn moth-like to the flame of zodiacal coincidence, which ever since had kept them in a firm matrimonial grip, or prevented them ever getting to know each other. Occasional quarrels were not enough, she thought, to justify his glib assertion that ‘We disagree so much that we get on like a house on fire.’ All the same, their meeting at the hostel seemed as fated as any arranged marriage, and they had either never been unhappy enough to separate, or at times too unhappy to separate, while the casualty rate among their friends had been so appalling that they knew no one who was married for the first time.
A black pantechnicon stalled in a bank of mist beyond some cottages, only one rear light visible and no blinkers going. She was so distracted by a man crossing the road that her car glanced the side of the stationary vehicle. To pull up would have left her half on the road, and being just over the summit of a slight rise there was the likelihood of cars overtaking at suicidal speed and crashing into hers. The only safety was in going on, wanting no argument with men who might be even more unpleasant because she was a woman. The barely audible glancing suggested that any damage was little more than superficial to both parties. She wondered in fact whether any contact had been made at all, and that she hadn’t imagined a touch of the car against the stalled and lurking monster.
Nevertheless, she was trembling, no lights anywhere but her own, snowed-up hedges like loaded camels by the roadside ready for the trip to some Samarra of the North Pole. The weather babble had not prepared her for a blizzard. Or maybe it had, for she had kept the radio on most of the day, but hadn’t taken in the vital words. The flash of a bare tree frightened her more than the thickening carpet in front, though from confidence that the car would get her anywhere, she was afraid of becoming entombed.
Stuff and nonsense, she laughed, going back to baby language in a crisis. Trundle trundle great big teddy bear car, are you going very far? Far enough, on such a night, the engine sturdy and the dashboard bright. There were no lights in houses passed, dead walls side on to the road, and any that could be seen were as dim as if those inside already sat around a candle.
Snow made the world raw, sent everybody back to the cave age, and though kids might think it fun, all in all she did not like to be out, which was hilarious when you mulled on how the country seized up in six inches of snow. Even Mrs Thatcher’s true-blue Britain hadn’t solved that one, though you’d think it wouldn’t be so difficult, with so many people on the dole.
Islands of snow, in which shores were indistinct and flattening at the glass, were pushed aside by wipers turning more and more sluggard. A corridor of winter trees dropped bomb pies from overweighted branches. Or the wind flicked them, hard to say what the hell in such an ambush, catapults at all angles turning the air to chaos.
Brakes on, the wheels locked, windscreen showing what she hardly dare drive into, feet controlled by the strutwires of instinct. A group of buildings dimly along the road, but could she slide the bumps that far? Lights called her on to keep going, play the feet and hands, piano and violin to win even a metre, a few rolls forward.
How safe the place was, good or bad, she couldn’t know. It wouldn’t have to matter, she had to weave along the snow, white woolly ruts building around the tyres The gates came close, she grazed the post and then after more manoeuvring was in, following the PARKING sign and across the courtyard between two other vehicles forming the dead end of a white glove thrown down from she didn’t know where.
FIVE
After setting out on the road Daniel never wanted to stop, though he hated driving at night, and therefore would like to do so as soon as practicable. The simplicities of life are all that matter, he mused, if only we can find them and keep them pure. The plan was to deliver the van in Coventry, and hope they would have a car to get him home by midnight. What, he smiled, could be purer than that?
The heater worked. He took off his cap and, bald head perspiring, managed a look at the mirror: pale thin face, bushy greying moustache. White-blue eyes blinked before returning to observe the road. As if there was a slow fire in the clouds, though he couldn’t smell the smoke, a flake of grey came down like burnt paper, the remains of God’s manifesto floating oddly into ashes. Too cold for snow, he had thought, but it wasn’t. A few more became moisture, their weight bursting bounds to make runnels, a system of watery freelanes till he turned on the wipers to a cleanliness that was almost next to a God he couldn’t afford to believe existed.
Leafless trees were tinselled with hoar frost. To look backwards and check that the cargo hadn’t shifted would be perilous, even more so if a shadowy ice patch caused him to skid and jolt. The prime-timing mechanisms were fail-safe, they had said, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they? ‘We’re professionals,’ they smiled, ‘none more so, by now.’ He knew those icy smiles that meant death if you didn’t take them seriously. ‘We get what we need and we know what to pay for. The Libyans and the Czechs are the technological tops in the business.’
Danger was one of the simplicities of life right enough, pure and unadulterated on this leg of delivery, fail-safe never sufficiently safe no matter what they said. But the amount of time between him and Coventry was not hard to live with, two hours of over seven thousand seconds, each a possible full stop on the future. Which particular white-scorched second would it be? The purity of that speculation was also hard to beat, good for a sweat and a fairly wry smile on any part of the trip.
He would be back at his teacher’s slog in the morning, you had better think so, someone else would drive the van to London or wherever, and he would be waiting to hear the radio squawk on about another pinprick of death and injury for the Cause in terms of terrorist atrocity, whereas he and all who so nobly fought knew that if there were enough of such attacks the elephant of oppression would eventually bleed to death and let them go their justified way to freedom and self-government.
Oil and grit coated the screen with a subtle paste, melted flakes not enough to take it off. Pressing the button to ease the squeaking wipers,
no liquid shot out, connections to the bottle blocked. He slowed, not wanting to stop and wipe with the rag but, his prayer answered, more snow came, melting till he saw clearly again.
The van ran easily, maintaining the ruts, soothing rhythmical bumps under the treads. He had an easy score to keep, not like those clear-eyed heroes who sniped from blocks of flats or drove a laden car of mercurial juice to outpost or point of ambush. Mayhem was their purpose, and bloodshed their policy. If he looked in the mirror again his eyes might encounter the tactical success of visionary technicolour.
More than the heater was making him sweat, more than the promise of a terrible explosion. Those who set bombs or fired Armalites had neither the imagination nor the intellect to appreciate the picture of reality they created. Reality for them was planning in cold blood and watching television, whereas for him the spectacle on the screen was no reality at all, his TV being reality itself.
He regretted that his courage wasn’t tested directly, but even so, the load was itching his feet, and he wanted to speed up time, and be floating homewards with mission accomplished. If the police stopped him he would be locked up for twenty years, an aspect of the struggle he didn’t care to think about, though how could anyone imagine that such material was carried in this ordinary van? Elation one minute, deadly fear the next, snow indicated a simplicity of life he felt little connection with, the van an impermeable boat taking him along a powder trail to destroy the villainous enemy. He would read about the attack in the common-room Guardian, salt tears smarting his cheeks, and the exciting thumps of a heart that would never kill him.
He enjoyed using his courage and faculties in a lost cause, if so it was, because you could not be a hero if you won. If you strove too keenly for victory, success would elude you. You would become careless, make mistakes that would destroy the precision of action. The only way to erode the enemy and finally defeat him was to live from day to day, as if there could never be an end to the fight.
At school he spoke to the children about patriotism, and the comfortable virtue of loving your country. The English could not conceive of anyone born there wanting to destroy its tolerant sanctity, so it was a perfect arena for the oppressed to do their work in. The children listened quietly to his sermons because it was the only time he went into a rage if they disturbed him.
While he spoke he believed ardently, otherwise how could they? But when he went into action for the Cause he was equally in thrall, and had neither tears nor audience for that. He became part of a plan on receipt of a coded message, kept to it no matter how circumstances might turn against him, decisions from Brigade HQ seeming to have been his own.
Fate got him moving, luck pushed him through. He drifted along so as not to interfere with the issues his subconscious laid out, his subconscious being more familiar with the unadulterated simplicities of life. Trusting his subconscious was a way of testing himself, controlling a mind that might otherwise be careless, the one-time sloppy faculties that had led him in a pub to mouth the sentimental fact that he was proud of having had an Irish grandmother.
His wife joked about it when he told her, but he always took seriously what others laughed at. Two years later she fled for ever from the tight-packed darkness of his aura, a flight he had known to be inevitable because with her, after the first few months of telling their dreams, it had become as if every day they met for the first time, unable to reach that second day of familiar relaxation, though he had never stopped hoping it would become possible.
If they had attained that phase, and then split, he might have been less tormented by her memory. Or maybe not. He knew nothing except that he had never been able to replace anguish by love and peace, survival in such a situation being the hardest of all to achieve. His senses became vague, he was unable to think clearly, and he only felt alive when motoring to a rendezvous in some lethal vehicle, thankful of his offhand remark in the pub when he wasn’t to know that McGuinness stood by his elbow and would later talk to him about it.
Momentous events happen whether you want them to or not, for why else would you get into something so thoughtlessly? You could betray your mother, but not the grandmother whom you had never known, and who propelled you towards your destiny. A wonderful concept – destiny. Who would be born without one? There was no other way to explain such action except to say that you must have been born with one, and given such thoughts by the purity of white fleeing towards his windscreen and obliterating names on the signposts.
Maybe they would give him a few words of thanks, as if to a soldier like the rest of them, after he had struggled through, though there was no danger as long as he followed the map photocopied into his brain. The aptitudes required for the Cause fell into place and never abandoned him, and he was a harder man than to need praise, which was for children, as well he knew, just as hurry was for idiots. Intelligence must keep the passionate conviction under control, and you altered the course of history by combining the patience of the snail with the cunning of the fox.
Two cars had collided, tank traps to his direction, half obscured by steam and smoke from metal entrails. One driver battled with the steering to disentangle. Spinning wheels dug into the ruts, and help was needed to push.
Hearing shouts above the noise of his engine, he eased through the gap. At top speed the wiper blades performed too slowly to beat the blizzard-and-a-half, if ever he saw one, but he spat a curse at the pinkboned menacing fist in his rear mirror, and saw his way onwards. They could not know their luck, because any fool rounding the bend at fifty into the back of his van could send all of them heavenwards.
The engine laboured at thirty miles an hour, lace-curtain flakes descending, the air so fudged he got a window down and a towel of cold air lapped his cheek. A long pull of breath cleaned his lungs, but the damp chill set him shutting it out. To jack up speed would be to show a panic which was not part of him. As long as the tyres bit and the wipers went he would soon make up time.
He remembered childhood pictures, they were printed on the myriad snowflakes before being swept off the windscreen. His father came home from clerk’s work at the bank and talked to his mother while six-year-old Daniel played on the floor with a long-armed crane, swinging the hook over redcoated soldiers on the crenellations of a wooden fort. His mother was crying, mutely so that he might not notice, and he didn’t see his father again because he was sent to prison for taking other people’s money. Then Daniel and his mother lived in rooms where there were no new toys because she worked in a shop and saved all the pennies so that he would stay at school and one day go to training college.
She stopped him playing with scabby street kids, and drummed him through one exam after another, treating him as harshly as if he were his father. Or she coddled him because he was part of herself and she wanted him to work where no temptation could ruin him, a pendulum which robbed him of knowing who he was till after she was dead from cancer at fifty.
Then came his marriage, at the beginning of which his wife told him that if you didn’t dream you had no spiritual life, implying that you were an inferior person, and he loved her so much that even though he hardly ever dreamed (except for one terrible recurring nightmare which he would never be able to describe to anyone) he decided to make up dreams rather than have her think so little of him, so that at breakfast he would say: ‘I dreamed I was smoking a big Havana cigar all night.’ Or: ‘I dreamed rain was pouring through the roof and saturating packets of banknotes.’ Or: ‘I went out to the car because I was being chased, and all the tyres were flat.’ Or: ‘I was walking through a forest on fire and didn’t get hurt.’
‘It’s good you’ve started dreaming,’ she said. ‘I’m getting to know you a bit more.’ Her dreams were no more or less vivid than the ones he fabricated, so that he wondered whether she wasn’t making them up as well: ‘I dreamed I met a tiger in a wheatfield and it chased me across a railway line where a train nearly ran over me.’ Or: ‘I was at a circus and an ape escaped from its cage an
d turned into a woman in tights, and then the tent fell in.’ Or: ‘I was in an aeroplane and the pilot said I am now going to peel off the roof so that you can see the stars.’ She had one every morning, and he felt it a matter of honour to match them. When he ran out of dreams and used some of the early ones again, with slight variations, she didn’t seem to notice. ‘You have a rich dream life,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
‘It’s only since I married you. You’ve done me a lot of good.’ He kept a notebook at school in which to put down any ideas for dreams which came to him, tried to concoct one a day, but on good days made up two or three. The ‘Dreambook’ stayed in his desk because it would never do for Evelyn to find it, though if she did he would explain that they were notes of dreams he’d already told her, and he had written about them because – ‘and forgive my vanity in saying this – I find them very interesting.’
But he still couldn’t remember the dreams she really wanted to hear about, because they were the totally uncontrollable sort that controlled him, which vanished back into the swamp of his subconscious on opening his eyes every morning.
After a few months the stream of his imagination ran dry, and Evelyn also lapsed in the telling of her dreams – for reasons unknown to either of them. With little else to talk about, the marriage deteriorated into a contest of mutual insult and spite, and when that phase burned itself out there was nothing to hold them together.
A damburst of light from what seemed like an enormous furniture van flooded his eyes, a burning of pupils and orbs that forced him to drop gear but, as if the juggernaut needed to see from one county to the next, its driver flicked on reinforcements, one high-intensity beam after the other sweeping the way clean.
King of the road, the black pantechnicon trundled on, a bandstand blast of its klaxon responding to the squeak of terror from Daniel’s horn as he expected the van to be struck along the edge like a box of matches. He swung clear in time, and the length of a lay-by sent him safe along a band of gravel.