‘You seem well up on the philosophy of escape.’
‘I’ve never walked so long. Nor thought so much. Walking has turned out to be even more monotonous than standing at my machine at work. But the thoughts are better.’ She asked why he had left his wife, but his fullblooded, earnest, airtight reasons had melted. He felt foolish trying to explain something that had taken a lifetime to overwhelm him.
She drew the curtains across: ‘I don’t want your reasons if you can’t give them. I’ve done so many things I still can’t give reasons for. I had a fiancé once, when I was nineteen. He lived in Portsmouth and I lived in Guildford. I found out one day that I was pregnant, and on the same day I had a telegram from his mother to say he had been drowned.’
He was caught by the infectious remembering of her voice: ‘That was terrible. Where’s the baby then?’
‘I took steps to remove it, but I got married very soon afterwards, and had a baby within a year. I could act on my decisions quickly in those days, and they always proved to be right. He’s a boy of eleven now, very bright. He comes home for holidays, and to everyone here my husband is dead – though I left him in London two years ago. You’ll sleep in Kevin’s bed while you’re here. My name’s Pat Shipley, since we’ve been talking so long.’
He made the exchange. ‘Will you come out with me, and have a drink, or supper? We could go to Louth, or some place.’
‘Let’s have no tit-for-tat, as they say around here. But I thought you were broke, walking to Sheffield?’
‘I wouldn’t do this if I was – walking, and hitching lifts when I feel like it. If I’d got no money I’d stay put until I had.’ She declined, and he would rather stay where he was as well, the oil stove warm and the room closed off in the vast country silence. He wondered what sort of woman she was, whether she would or wouldn’t, wanted or didn’t want, whether she was a posh tease taking a rest from it, or a sex-starved isolated nurse who worked so hard she’d had neither time nor opportunity in the last year and wouldn’t squeal if he made a grab for her before she grabbed him. Not that she was all that much to look at. Nancy would make ten of her, but then, she was dead on him and this Pat wasn’t. He looked at her through the clarity of silence: a rather round plainish face, if it weren’t for her eyes and long ponytail of red hair. He’d never been with a gingernut before, but the hearsay on them was they were red hot. Not that I’ll touch a hair of her red head, though I’d like to.
‘I’ll fry some sausages soon. I have tomatoes and bread, eggs and bacon.’
‘It’s too good of you.’
‘I feel like being good – now and again. It’s my job. Haven’t you seen the advertisements for nurses?’
‘Well, they are a bit daft,’ he said, ‘that’s true.’
‘They’re more accurate than you think, though.’
‘Do you like your job?’
‘I’m too busy doing it to know.’
‘Don’t you find it lonely?’ He saw her as called out all hours of the day and night, coming back between long, lifesaving watches to an empty house – paraffin stove out, cupboard empty, even the cat gone from the back door, gloom and rain spattering the windows, looking around and wondering what to do now that she had a few hours off. Maybe she’d put the light on, hatch a fire in that parlour he’d glimpsed, find some tinned food and boil it, make tea, sit down to a book after letting in the cat that had found its way back to the door and mewed for her. He was right, she thought. That’s my life: lonely, hardworking, yet happy if there is such a thing. ‘I’m not lonely,’ she said. ‘I like being by myself. I see lots of people on my rounds.’
‘Sick people,’ he said. ‘Is that enough?’
She spoke in a soft comforting way, yet he felt the edge of nervousness on it. It seemed strange to him that she was a midwife, yet it was possible to imagine her firm and soothing at critical moments of illness or childbirth. ‘Not only sick people. What I prize more than anything else in the world is independence. My father was a police inspector, and still is, I won’t say where – and as a girl I was bullied and disciplined in the most awful stupid way. At school it was worse, and the first time I thought to get out of it I became a probationer nurse, out of the frying pan into the furnace. But it all led to this job, so I don’t regret it now. I suppose when you know why you left your wife you’ll go back to her?’
‘I’ll never do that. I haven’t only burned my boats and smashed my bridges, but I’ve burned my heart as well. There’s no going back for me.’
‘You say it as calmly as if you meant it. It’s frightening.’
‘Yet maybe I’m like a bloody moth near a flame, spinning around so close to Nottingham that I’ll have to wrench myself further away to stop going back there to see how things are. I feel the kids pulling at me more than anything.’
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’ll see what there is to eat.’ It was a spacious kitchen built onto the back of the house, and he leaned against the fridge while she cleared up. He hadn’t expected to see such desolation. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t time to get things straight before a call came to say that Mrs Robinson’s leg was bothering her again – but it was cluttered with the stains and refuse of weeks. The sink was heaped with pots – tea rims turned green on the inside of cups, porridge mouldy, knives black when she took them out of the water. It’s a damp place, he thought. The smallest of the four stove burners glowed red. Hot water splashed over her words: ‘I always leave that one burning, day and night. It doesn’t cost so much, and it keeps the kitchen warm. I can get coffee quickly without waiting for the stove to warm up.’
Foreseeing a long job he stored away yesterday’s groceries in the larder. ‘The place is a mess,’ she said. ‘But don’t bother to help. This is woman’s work.’
‘It’s work,’ he said The shelves had no room – about six boxes of various breakfast cereal took up space, some empty enough to discard. Jars of different jam, wrapped cut bread with a few stale slices left, sauces, mustards, various pastes. He’d never seen such a lavish and squalid larder, and threw half out. She didn’t object: ‘You get careless, living alone. I’ve been meaning to clear it for days, but it’s hard enough keeping my work up. Everybody seems to get ill in autumn and spring – when the seasons change.’ She plugged in an electric kettle, turned on a burner of the large stove.
‘You fixed up a fine kitchen,’ he said.
‘Now that it’s clean. I’m still paying for it. It’s not only the workers who get trapped by H.P.’
‘No.’ he said, ‘but there are so many of them that it’s them that keeps it going.’ He made a fire in the parlour, looked around the small heavily carpeted room. Bookshelves padded every possible piece of wall, and he skimmed their titles – medical, history, books about Lincolnshire, poetry, and books on other books. How did I land in this smart educated place, he thought wryly, supping with the village midwife? He looked through a pile of records, kneeling on the floor to get at them. They were mostly chamber music, old seventy-eights, heaped around a small portable windup. ‘I like classical stuff,’ he said, when she came in with the tray. ‘Beethoven, and – who was it wrote the Planets?’
‘Holst.’
‘Somebody got me Mars and Jupiter for my birthday once. I played them so loud that a bloke next door threatened to duff me if I didn’t keep it quieter. I told him to try it, but he backed down and said he’d get the police. I lost interest in it though because Jupiter was what we used to sing at school and I didn’t like it at all. Mars made me laugh, and I used to act the zombie to it for my kids. But it’s a rotten piece because it reminded me of the Germans smashing everything at war. So one day I snapped the record and threw it out.’
She put sausages and tomatoes on his plate: ‘A pity they’re only the sawdust type, but that’s the worst of working in these outback villages.’
‘I don’t think I know anyone,’ he remarked, ‘who likes the work they do. There’s always something wrong with it.’ He was a quick, order
ly eater, as if the food on his plate were a fortified area to be reduced by knife, fork, and mopping-up bread. His manner of speaking annoyed her, of connecting her spoken thoughts too outlandishly to some hook in his own mind. He was a passer-by she’d given shelter to, a footloose working-man from whom, at moments, she wanted the same tone of deference that she’d grown to expect from the grateful Lincolnshire villagers roundabout. ‘People who work at jobs they don’t like are too stupid, unintelligent, and cowardly to break the rut they’re in and get work that they would like.’
‘If everybody changed the job they didn’t like I’d be at the pit face and you’d be roadsweeping.’ She’d set the meal as if the idea of eating had no appeal for her, but now she ate as if hungry at the sight of someone else loading it back before her. ‘Everyone does the job they’re fit for. The natural order of things works pretty well. Eat some bread and cheese.’
‘Thanks. We’ll talk about that when there’s a natural order of things. Most of my mates wanted an easier job, less hours, more pay, naturally. But it wasn’t really work they hated, don’t think that. They didn’t all want to be doctors or clerks, either. Maybe they just didn’t like working in oil and noise, and then going home at night to a plate of sawdust sausages and cardboard beans, and two hours at the flickerbox with advertisements telling them that those sausages and beans burning their guts are the best food in the country. I don’t suppose they knew what they wanted in most cases – except maybe not to be treated like cretins.’
She went out, returned with a pot of coffee and a jug of hot milk: ‘Anything but work, that’s what you mean. Strike, go slow, or work to rule, seems the order of the day. Why is it, I wonder?’
He cut bread and cheese. ‘Now you’re being unjust. It was to vary the treadmill. But as well as that there was a collective wish to change the way things are run, so that they’ll have the power of running things. If that happened it wouldn’t be a treadmill any more. They wouldn’t strike. They’d be too busy. And too interested in running it.’
‘That’s being idealistic.’
‘I know it is, but not too much.’
‘I think you’re speaking for yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re more knowing and intelligent than the rest. Not only that, but you speak of it in the past tense, I noticed.’
‘I haven’t thought much about the factory since leaving it, that’s true, because I suppose there’s so much else to think about, soak in. But maybe what I soak in is still connected to the factory that I don’t think about. It still separates me from the world in any case, the fact that I’ve been in one. Whether it’s on my mind or not. How many of the others have you met besides me, come to think of it?’
Her face relaxed, and she laughed.
‘I thought so.’
‘What would you say if I went on strike, a nurse?’
‘I’d condemn you. You’ve no right to go on strike. You sell your knowledge and art, a workman sells his labour. That’s the big difference. Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. If I had a vocation I wouldn’t have the right to strike, either. But you must concede it to the others. I didn’t know I was so hungry – and talkative. Travelling makes me eat more, though I feel thinner than when I was at work. I don’t eat as much as some people. I once knew a man who ate so much he had a blackout. Then he died. I think it was his liver. Some people never know when to stop.’
‘That’s a story you made up,’ she said, pouring his coffee.
‘I know. They’re all true enough. I think them up when I’m walking.’ They sat by the fire. She suspected he was trying to charm her, but was disturbed more by her suspicion than by the fact that it might be justified. He obviously didn’t think about what he said, she decided. ‘This is a comfortable house,’ he remarked, ‘I’m enjoying tonight.’
‘So am I,’ she admitted, ‘in a strange way.’
‘That countryside was getting me down. It’s too green. The road’s hard and the sky’s too grey. I favour a warm room and the supper I’ve just had.’ To spoil it, his feet ached for the walking they’d do tomorrow. He couldn’t thumb any more lifts, as if the man’s accusation of begging free transport had broken one part of his spirit, only to have strengthened another that had just become visible to him. ‘It’s hard to imagine you not getting lonely though, on these nights.’
She was glad of his curiosity. It comforted her, since it was too rare these days. Yet it was also too brusque and offhand, not only that he might not be sincere in it, but that he might be forgetting that they had only just met, and that such curiosity was premature. Still, she had asked him in – for a cup of tea – and in spite of its short time ago she felt no shyness in talking, mainly because she was only talking out of herself, on the understanding that he would be gone in the morning. In any case, he seemed amiable, almost interesting, though somewhat more remote than a person often is when you stop them in the street to ask a direction.
Relaxed and comfortable by the fire, another part of him was out on the wide spaces of the road, blinded by sky and distance. ‘I haven’t always lived alone,’ she said. ‘I was married twelve years, until I split up a while ago, to a typical middle-class Englishman, an advertising copywriter – someone who sat in an office all day in Holborn thinking up slogans that would sell soap powders or a correspondence course in bricklaying.’
Her phrases gave way to a ticking clock, a noise which made the silence deeper than itself. ‘You chose him,’ Frank said.
‘I made a mistake.’
‘So did he. So did I. It’s a marvel to me how many people make mistakes.’
‘You have a sense of humour. But I was tired of the useless life I was leading. It got so that I didn’t need him and he didn’t need me. He was a sort of father to Kevin, but even that didn’t weigh when I decided to leave. Being a housewife in London with a charwoman and an au pair wasn’t enough. I was a trained nurse, and was needed in a village like this, by ordinary people who want some sort of looking after. I think everybody should do useful work. I hate idleness or pretence.’
‘So do I.’
‘Tell me about your work. I’ve never met anyone who worked in a factory, not to talk to.’
‘In what way? I’m what they used to call a mechanic, but I was beginning to see further than the end of my nose. I was also what the gaffers called “a bit of a troublemaker”, but for years they were baffled by me because I was also a good worker. I could set anybody’s tools and take their machine apart as well as the chargehand, and I had many hints that if I stopped being such a keen member of the union, life would be easier for me as far as getting on went. But I saw too much injustice to accept that. I knew which side of the fence I stood on, and still do. I made many others see it as well. They had a favourite trick at our firm of starting on the coloured blokes when they wanted to reduce work rates, but I got the whole shop out once over this, a stoppage they didn’t forget because they had to give in over it. People think factory life is a bed of roses, but it needn’t be as bad as the gaffers make it. I loved the work – though I didn’t realize how much till now. But I can’t go back to it, not for a good while.’
‘You’ll go back to it,’ she said, ‘like I had to come back to this work after so long away.’ She liked people of integrity, but wasn’t sure that she liked his brand of it, so foreign to all the things she had been brought up to believe.
‘What do you do on these long nights?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t see any dance halls on my way into the village.’
‘I keep a journal when I can. I read, listen to music, make dresses sometimes, knit. I’ll show you where you’re to sleep.’
The stairs were steep, straight up, and narrow, and he followed a few steps behind. The long cardigan gave her figure a squarish, rather old-fashioned look, though the shape of her legs and the unmistakable sway above them redeemed her femininity. When she stopped on the tiny landing, there was some hesitation in her face. He was tempted to put out his arms, kiss her if she responded. But
they had been talking too long which, for the moment, killed him with hesitation.
She pointed to the bedroom opening to the, right: ‘Go in, and I’ll get you some blankets. There’s only one sheet, so you’ll have to double it.’
A camp bed lay under the window, and in one corner a tank of four goldfish on a table. It had been the kid’s room; shelf of books, a football, boxing gloves, crayons and paint tin, whistles and Dinky toys jumbled into a tea chest. The walls were whitewashed – the first time he’d seen it used for other than ceilings – and it made the small cottage bedroom look bigger than it was. ‘A nurse in the next village is standing in for me,’ she said, dropping his blankets, ‘so I’m off for the next three days. Which means that I’m not getting up till nine in the morning, so you can just let yourself out early. Slam the door behind you to make sure it locks.’
‘I can’t thank you enough. I was done-for when I knocked at your door.’
‘You looked it,’ she smiled. ‘I must say. I expect you’re tired now, as well.’ They shook hands. ‘If I don’t see you, good luck.’ Then she went out, closing the door.
That was quick, he thought. She couldn’t get out fast enough. As if I might jump her here by the fish tank, and me on my last legs at that, though I’ve knee-trembled on no legs at all before now. It was hard to tell whether she wanted me to or not. It was hard to tell whether I wanted to as well. And on that, he was sleeping.
4
It was half past six and still dark, and a driving, wind-crazed rain rattled the windows. Gutters and drainpipes shuttled it musically across the garden path and Frank listened to its stream of consciousness from the warmth of his camp bed, hoping it might stop before he set out towards Lincoln. His first thought on waking was always, nowadays: ‘Where am I?’ The less comfortable his night’s lodging, the quicker came the answer. The space between oblivion and full consciousness was always disturbing, a basalt twilit vacuity, such a depth of neutrality that it was alien and torment to him. In factory days there was no space between deep sleep and dressing, and this new zone had crept into his experience since leaving them.