‘You said we should go away together.’
‘Is that all? Well that’s not much. Why are we fighting over that?’
‘I suppose it’s because I want to go too. But I can’t.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go, either.’
‘You said you were fed-up with the village.’
‘Let it drop.’
‘That’s what you said.’
‘Forget it, love.’
‘You say something, and then you say forget it, because the damage’s already done. If you’re really tired of living here, you must go. But don’t destroy everything bit by bit before you do. I won’t allow it. I have to stay, so leave something intact.’
His hand touched her shoulder, feeling its shape under the jacket and nightdress, a reminder of better hours than this. ‘You’re making a wrong sort of picture. It’s not true to our life here.’
‘It is. You want it to be.’
‘Make up your mind. I’ve already made more out of my life in the last three months, than in ten years before that. You know why? Because I met you. Since then everything’s changed, my whole mind. I feel as if my eyes are a different colour.’
This did the opposite of calm her: she couldn’t bear the responsibility for it: ‘It’s impossible to know what you want. You talk about going, then you try to tell me you’re in heaven.’
‘I only want what I’m getting,’ he said morosely, ‘what I’m able to get. If there’s anything bigger, it’ll come along without me wanting it.’
‘I suppose you want me to throw my life out of true before it comes to you? A little human sacrifice never goes amiss, especially when it’s someone who’s just taken ages to win a great personal battle. It makes it so much more satisfying.’
‘I hate sarcasm. It’s the worst disease I know.’ The stare in his grey eyes had emptied them. He seemed far away from her, beyond the house, in a seclusion private to himself, a step back and above any patch or person of the world.
‘Explain something to me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Anything. Whatever you like. Just explain something.’
He thought her mood had marvellously changed. ‘What, though?’
‘Whatever you like. Think something up, and explain it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m not being subtle or sarcastic. Just explain something about yourself.’
‘You’re trying to get it out of me with a knife, so I can’t.’
‘I didn’t think you could. Can’t you explain anything?’
‘No, not yet. I don’t see why I should, even if I could. Explanations don’t automatically solve things. They don’t always make life better, either.’
‘Ah, now we’re getting at the truth,’ she said. ‘You don’t talk at all. All you can do is deny, deny, deny.’
‘All you can do is destroy.’
‘But you know, you’re such a bloody letdown.’ The hackles of destruction were out, all the goodness he had brought between them gone bitter in her in an inspired unguarded unjustifiable moment. ‘You act as if you died at the age of five,’ she said, ‘and have been living ever since on what’s left. You’re soft. You can’t take it. You can start it, but you can’t take it. All you can do is mystify and bluster.’
He sprang to the bed and crashed his hand against her pale strained face: ‘What are you going on and on for?’ he exclaimed. ‘Let it drop, can’t you? All I asked was if ever you got fed-up with this one-eyed village.’
She fell sideways from the pillows, the bedside telephone spilling onto the floor. ‘You stupid fool’ – wrenched out by sobs of rage, words spinning at him like wheels of fire: ‘If you want to do that you can get back to your housing estate or slum. I suppose they love it there.’ This final end to a quarrel had never been imposed on her before. She felt a shame that stunned her, a rage spilling against him and herself. How Keith would laugh if he knew of this – but wasn’t that why she had left a man with such a mind? But her face burned more from the blows, and tears forced themselves through, until the effort of fighting them turned shame to anger.
He stood at the window: black frost glazed the snow-covered ground; he hated it. Before, it had been comforting, an ally to his love, a balm to life. It now held the world’s evil under whitened hoods and claws and clamped all things down that he wanted to spin out slowly from himself by way of explanation to Pat. By which time the snow and frost would have melted away.
She set the telephone back on its stand. It rang at the same instant, incising the four walls with urgent noise, and she spoke into it as if no quarrel had happened, perfectly ready for her work. He walked down the stairs.
8
Work served the same purpose as snow and frost – to cover up scabs and interior minefields, muffle the galleries of his mind leading to caved-in girders and smashed hydraulic props. The air was keen, snow heavy on the spade, granite and marble at deeper layers that he didn’t work at, but attacked. Frozen seams from previous hard weathers called on the dynamite of his total swinging strength to prise them free from the flagstoned path by the side of the house. He went deep into his mind, but syphoned-off energy prevented him getting anywhere near the end or bottom of it.
She’d put on her overcoat, gloves, hat, picked up her bag and gone out, climbing across snow towards the village, passing the school where, already and in such weather, children were gathering. Phrases came to him, but the sounds contradicted each other and kept his lips firm together, and she’d gone off without a word, face set hard, like his own heart and face, like the ice-snow he was trying to crack on either side of the drainpipe. He didn’t know what had sparked all of it off. It seemed as if her sort of love was meant to eat each other up, exactly the sort he was trying to escape. People should adjust themselves to the external world, not to each other, a diffuse connection with the whole world rather than the icy inbite of destruction. There is a natural tenderness in everybody which should make it possible for man and wife – or woman and man – to take care of each other, and ignore the fastenings of over-strung emotion which strangle at both of them.
Till midday he cleared snow from around the house, scraped walls and steps, shook it from fences. Standing on the floor of the shallow loft, he opened a skylight and freed a good part of the sloping roof, right down to its blue slates, by wielding a long brush and shovel. He hauled up an aluminium ladder and fixed it from the skylight. Within the radius of his burning mind and arms he worked to push snow-ridges down towards the eaves, over and off, a spluttering impact as it hit the ground.
A whole flank cleared, he straddled the roof to begin the other. The low sky, absolutely without feeling or sense, a forlorn William Posters at his wits’ end and taking a breather, stood by his elbow and above his head, dumb, omnipresent, and never-pouncing.
Arms and chest sweated under his jacket, but he pushed strenuously at the snow. The thaw might not come for weeks, and his irritation at this was expressed by a slow, patient thoroughness in his task of uncovering the house. He swung the ladder over and fixed it to the ridge, made his way down almost to the eaves, scooping snow even out of the drainpipe tops.
A few beams of midday sun came through. On earth again, he shovelled snow from the lane, until the house and its outskirts was an island of brick, slate, paths and fences in an ocean of snow-covered wolds, an isolated clear speck of winter-liberated country. He inspected his work, walked around the cottage on solid ground, stamping his boots as if still necessary to knock snow off them. Cold air penetrated now that he was still, stood smoking a cigarette, wondering when Pat would be back. Possibly there was no point in waiting, but it wasn’t in him any more to run away. The fighting had only just begun and he hoped that both of them would be worthy of what they could end up becoming to each other. Two more calls had come in before she left, so a whole day would pass in helping some bawling pink blob of a kid into this arctic-orientated world.
 
; He put on his coat and ploughed a way through to the village pub. Five lanes met at Carnford, sloped in at various points along the sinewy mile-long street. Much of the road had been cleared, though no bread would come from Louth that day.
He shook his way into the saloon bar, and the landlord was talking about it to the only other customer. ‘They’ll have to manage on biscuits and cakes then,’ he laughed. ‘I saw a fine stock of them in the shop just now.’
Frank reached for his pint and the cold tusk of it going down was something he’d craved during the snow-heaving. He sat by the electric fire, more for company than warmth, a solitary two-bar heater glowing from the depths of an ancient fireplace. The other drinker caught his eye: ‘I expect it’ll last a while.’
Frank didn’t mind talking: ‘I’ve cleared my lot. Been on it all morning.’
‘I’d never shift mine,’ the man said. ‘My kids are too idle. Strong, but bone idle. They wouldn’t lift a spade, not them. I’ve got seven of ’em, all grown up. If I said: “What about taking a spade to it?” as I did this morning, they’d say, as they did this morning: “If we want to do that sort of thing we can go to work. I suppose you’ll be sending us to work soon? Nothing would surprise me.” So we have to keep ourselves as best we can. It’s not easy, it ain’t. It’s not, either. My name’s Handley, Albert Handley. I live at the Burrow. Turn left by the next pub and it’s up the hill a bit. You’re living at Nurse Shipley’s, aren’t you?’
Frank couldn’t be sure till he saw her again. He took the measure of Albert Handley during a few gulps and commonplaces. He was a tall, spruce-looking man with short dark greying hair, the sort you could comb without a mirror. He seemed about forty, had brown eyes, a reddish face, and a small dark moustache. There was something intelligent, considerate and ruthless about his face, as if he’d left the army as an N C O not long enough ago to have regained the easygoing appearance of a working man of the world who hadn’t done much work because he thought himself a bit above it. He didn’t seem like a farm-labourer, nor a farmer, nor even one of those men from the council houses who took the bus for Scunthorpe steelworks every morning. It was hard to say what he did, though from what he said, he did nothing – hard to get to know such a man until you got to know him.
‘How did you land up in this place, then?’
‘Came to see Nurse Shipley, and stayed,’ Frank told him. ‘Have a pint on me.’
‘I’ll do that. Like the old village?’
Frank stood at the bar with him, pushed two empty jars towards the beer pumps. The landlord filled them. ‘I’m fond of a bit of isolation. Lived in a city all my life.’
He chuckled. ‘You’ll get it here. Health to you.’
‘Cheerio.’
‘I’m a Leicester man. Was on the coast in the war, artillery. Met a girl from this village. Married her. Worse move I ever made. Still, mustn’t grumble, as the parson says. Ever since then I’ve never had the bus fare to get back to Leicester. With a wife and seven kids every shilling gets snatched away. Perhaps I like it though, I don’t know. What’s your trade?’
‘Machine operator, when I do it. I gave it up a few months ago and came here to think things over. I read a lot, which stops me from thinking, so maybe I don’t want to think after all – yet.’ Half the pint slid into his throat.
Handley was also a fair drinker: ‘You read a lot, do you? You don’t look that sort.’
‘Thanks,’ Frank said. ‘I wish I could meet somebody subtle for a change’ – though aware of him being someone with whom small talk couldn’t get you hung, drawn and quartered. Handley laughed: ‘I used to read a good bit in the old days: Marx, Conan Doyle, Michael Arlen, Lenin. Not that I get much time for it now, old chuff, what with writing my letters, and painting.’
‘Painter and decorator, are you? Have another?’
Handley’s brown eyes looked steadily: ‘Are you rich?’
‘No,’ Frank told him.
‘I didn’t think so. Honour among thieves. Have one on me. It’s my turn. I don’t paint houses, I paint pictures.’
‘Pictures?’ Frank snapped into his new pint.
‘I have to live. You’ve never heard of Albert Handley’s Lincolnshire primitives? Neither has anybody else, above twenty miles away. But stay around a bit, and I’ll show you something before the day’s out. Get that drink finished, and we can walk up to the Burrow for a bit of exercise.’
‘I’d like to,’ Frank said. ‘I haven’t met anybody before who does paintings. Not that I need exercise after the clearing out I did this morning.’ He bought two quarts of brown, and they were ready to go.
The sky was darkening, as if evening couldn’t wait before closing in. An icy wind licked over the wolds, fit to prise open the village street, all doors clamped against it, smoke caught by it, scooped up slowly from every chimney. ‘I’ve spent many an hour analysing winds according to what part of the body they seem most hell-bent on,’ Handley said as they walked along. ‘Up here they’ve all got characters, the winds – which is more than I can say for the people. Sometimes there’s a leg wind that paralyses the kneecaps, pulls you over by the ankles like a starvo-loony mixing you up with the NAB bloke. Now and again a wind will get at your breath – a chest wind, the most dangerous of all. Or there’ll be a head wind, which makes the temples ache and the eyes smart. They just concentrate on one place, even in a gale. I’ve known a wind just go for the shoulders or the small of the back – leaves you groaning for three days with rheumatism or lumbago as if you’ve been conned into a job on the new motorway. A wind can give you a stomach ache as well, or it can get at the heart or liver. One consolation is that it never goes for two things at one time, but one is enough to floor you in most cases.’
The top of the snow had turned crisp, and boots cracked into it as they made their way through the shallower drifts. The sunken lane leading up to the Burrow had a three-foot depth to plough through, the only marks on it made by Handley on his way down. Even wild life shunned it on such a day.
‘The worst of living in the country,’ he said, ‘is that it’s not fit to live in.’
Frank was breathless. ‘I still like it.’
‘You’re not used to it, that’s why. Now and again I have a dull ache all over the left side of my chest, as if my heart is going to seize-up, and stop all life in me. I lie down and try to sleep, but it’s worse. I can’t paint when it’s on. If I dig in the garden I sweat. It lasts days, and when I wake up without it one morning I feel as if a fifty ton stone’s been lifted from my head. The pain’s terrible. It eats me up while it lasts but the local quack doesn’t know what it is. Nobody does. I always say it’s the wind – a special sort that just goes for that side of me. Why try to explain everything?’
The lane turned sharply, snow not too deep, so that a foot of it seemed like normal walking. ‘If you want your bus fare,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll lend it you. It can’t be much to Leicester.’
‘What the hell would I do in Leicester? Shoot roof rabbits?’
Back from the next bend stood a large three-storeyed plain-fronted brick cottage. ‘There’s the happy homestead,’ Albert said. ‘Fifteen shillings a week is what I shell out for it, and that’s all it’s worth, believe me. There are four buckets under the attic roof for when it rains, so thank God it’s snowing. We’re dreading the thaw. In winter it’s an igloo; in summer a cullender upside down.’
Within fences was a large garden: coal sheds and chicken coops next to the house: bike shelter, rabbit-hutches and wooden porch. It seemed a bargain to him. Two sacks served as doormats, iced waterbutts on either side. Some kids had scrawled in chalk: ‘Sticky bombs for sale.’ They kicked snow off before getting out of the deadly wind that Albert had been too busy talking about to notice what part of him it was getting at.
The hallway was bare except for a framed portrait of the Queen on one wall, and one of Albert’s larger pictures on the other. There were no mats or carpets on the wooden stairway, and it wasn’t much w
armer in than out. A sea-like clatter of spoons and pots sounded from somewhere.
‘The family’s having something to eat. Let me show you this painting.’ Frank stood too close, stepped a few paces back, until he bumped into the Queen’s head on the wall facing. ‘Turn it round if it bothers you,’ Albert said. ‘I just keep her there because it looks good if somebody comes to see my paintings. They never used to buy any before I put that up. Then they thought I was a fine chap who should be helped. One of my best brainwaves.’
Frank got a good view, and nothing else bothered him. It was an epic combination of browns, greens, mauves and purple-blues, a massive background landscape as if meaning to depict the whole breadth of Lincolnshire. Against this was the vague grain of a brown cross, almost merging into it, and on the cross was the shadow of a man, his head not, as usual, hung in the hello death position, but somehow upheld and looking inland, over a violent shift of darkly coloured and merging symbols in the foreground. His outspread arms were drawn back over the wood and tied there. Hanging beneath the crosstrees was a row of small dead animals that looked in no way out of place. ‘They’re rabbits,’ Albert explained. ‘I call this picture “Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher”.’
Frank was transfixed. The totality of it reached a long way into his heart, touched a dark and not disagreeable world familiar to his senses and memory. It wasn’t so much the dramatic content, startling and effective though it was, as the colours and juxtapositions of shapes that weren’t relevant to the main theme, showing with terrible perfection a clash of personality punished by crucifixion. They were the colours he felt hidden between his everworking heart and disjointed soul, a coagulate of visual mechanism located somewhere behind the eyes. He had studied Gray’s Anatomy in Pat’s library over many weeks, but his idea of the body and its components retained the primitive impressionism of childhood. The plates, as clear and marvellous as coloured diagrams of the four-stroke engine, stood no chance against the eternal fixtures of his earthed imagination.