Rather mannish and thin-faced, there was something good-looking about her, except that her eyes were bloodshot and her face whitewashed. ‘Sorry there aren’t any flowers. No funeral today. Let’s go once more to the fresh-air box.’
She stood. ‘I don’t want to.’
But he led her. ‘After six good breaths, we’ll risk shutting it.’
He closed the door, slammed down the window. ‘Do you think you can sit at the table?’
She tried to speak while he lit the paraffin stove, but her chin rested on her chest, mouth open. ‘You’re not very good-looking like that, though.’
He gripped her arms and shook, held her up. She sat like a sack of onions, he said. ‘If you don’t feel well, let me know. Be a pity if you fell and broke an arm after all this – or chucked up over my best bed.’
She longed to sleep in her own room until death came, or the headache stopped. A fire rampaged behind her eyes. She sat upright, facing him. He fed her pieces of bread and butter. ‘Welcome aboard! The ship’s all yours – while we’re floating along.’
Coffee tasted like boiled straw. One minute she knew how she had got here, and the next she didn’t. She wanted to go to sleep and find out, and then to forget why she had. He’d prevent her because he liked tormenting people, as if she had done him harm (though if she had, she’d forgotten about any incident she’d been through with him in times gone past) and he wanted to make her pay. Like any man, he was unrelenting and unforgiving, and she resented him eating as if the effort of stopping her going to sleep when she wasn’t strong enough to fight back gave him an appetite. Then she remembered having lain down by the gas. Couldn’t say why. She bit into some bread. Wanted to go to sleep and find the answer, but would she get it?
He talked, seeing that she could not, and believing that silence would be the death of her. He told her who he was, and what he knew of his life. She wouldn’t remember. But he talked his snotty drivel, as if she were fully alert, to make her grey unseeing eyes stay open, to stop her head dropping into the borrowed sugar, and to help more food and coffee – however little – into her mouth.
When he handed her a corner of biscuit with cheese, she took it like someone with neither sense nor feeling, and ate as if she were made of glass and he could see the crumbs and flakes going down through her body, the ultimate state of shame and embarrassment like one of those dreams in which you were caught walking naked in the street. She wanted to hide from him who thought he could stare at her: just because she wasn’t able to respond for the moment. Didn’t like him. She floated as if she were drunk. She felt like a baby which, though hungry, wanted most of all to sleep.
Her nose ran. She couldn’t feel it. Her lips threatened to stop moving. He trembled for himself. How could a strong enough woman like this try to get off the world before it shot her loose in its own good time? There was no saying. Maybe only the strong ones did it. He wanted her to fasten her shirt but was too shy to do so or ask. There was gooseflesh on her white chest, and an odour of skin from the faintest swell which was visible. The only procedure he knew was to keep her going till she dropped. He felt he’d need more sleep himself after this, though supposed an hour’s dose of air in Holland Park would get him lively. The coffee and food fuelled his talk.
When her eyes flickered in acknowledgement of some half-lost phrase he wondered what was in her mind. ‘Are you feeling better now?’
‘Help me.’
He caught her before she fell. ‘You’ll be all right after a day or two.’
‘I shan’t.’
He wiped her face. ‘What’s your name?’
She leaned against him.
He was afraid. If she slept she would die. He’d been a fool in keeping her from a hospital. His instinct had guided him and had never let him down. But he wondered, and worried.
‘I want to sleep.’
‘I know you do.’
Her eyes flickered. For a moment she was awake. ‘What’s your name, though?’ he asked.
Her smile turned bitter by the downcurving of her lips. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Better and better.’ Perhaps knowledge goeth before a fall, but he wanted to hear her say it. That and everything else. ‘My name’s Tom, if it’ll make it easier for you. Everybody uses first names these days, no matter what the circumstances. I suppose we can do the same.’
He spoke now so as not to frighten her. She pushed him away. He threw coffee dregs in the sink. She watched him wash and dry the mugs. He’d forgotten her. He poured fresh coffee. If an unexpected wave hit the ship out of an apparently calm sea, the fact would register yet give no shock, but his hand twitched at the surprising clarity of her voice: ‘What’s in that box?’
He went to the table. ‘Drink some more. You must be bone-dry inside. I certainly am, and I only got a few whiffs.’
‘Beautiful box.’
He opened it and tilted it to show her. ‘A sextant.’
‘And the other?’
‘Drink something, and I’ll tell you.’
‘I’m not a baby.’
‘It’s a chronometer.’
She drank.
‘On a better sort of ship there’s what you call a Decca navigator. If you want to know where you are in the middle of the ocean you push a few pearly buttons, and get three lemons. Spot on, every time, though there’s no way to prove it. You take it on trust, like so much else. It’s like having God on tap. But I was lumbered with these magic boxes to work out my daily destiny. Six months more, and I’ll forget how I did it. You get your position by sun-stars-and-stripes across the firmament, up to your knees in books of tables and bits of paper. Sometimes there’s neither stars nor sun to be seen, and you can’t even get a position-line on Old Nick himself. You ask the radio operator what he can do, though every bearing costs the company a pound or two, so you can’t ask for too many. But he has a try, and you end up in a worse fix – unless like one of our blokes you believe in the God of Israel! We go by dead-reckoning, when we’re not dead drunk. O yes, it was a sailor’s life for me all right, but not any more. I’m fifty, fit, and out of it for good, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but enjoy every minute, if and when I can.’
She drank the mug dry. He passed a clean handkerchief. She could wipe her own mouth this time. His intention had been to walk the four parks to Trafalgar Square, then stroll along Piccadilly to look in the shops. But he couldn’t leave. He might tuck her cosily in bed, and no sooner was he out of the door than she would try the same stunt again. And he was in no mood to leave. He filled his pipe and lit it. ‘Feeling better?’
She wondered whether the door was locked. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘I don’t see how I can. We only met a couple of hours ago.’
The room was warm, and he opened the window an inch. He sat away from her. Life had been divided between a stifling cabin and the grinding wind. Oven or gale was the order of life. One without the other was impossible. Tears pumped from her eyes, another method of getting the poison out. ‘You should have left me,’ she said.
‘I had no say in the matter. I heard a distress signal, or sniffed it, rather, so answered it with my own feet and shoulder, instead of all nine articles of Rule 31!’
The world had no limits. If she stretched her arms she wouldn’t reach the outside of herself. She wanted to run. ‘Did George send you?’
His face was honest. If anything, he was amused at her fear and torment. He looked like a monk in a film. ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard him called that, though I must admit I’ve referred to him myself in some pretty wicked terms in my time. Who the hell is George?’
‘My husband. I walked out on him a couple of months ago.’
She was improving. ‘I’m sure you had to. But don’t cry. You’ll be all right. Every move is for the best. Always keep moving. Any sailor will tell you – that while you’re on the move, you’re alive!’
She knew. But she had no will, no strength. There was nothin
g left. She wanted to get out of his sight, but was terrified of dropping into sleep, then of waking up and never knowing again who she was. She clutched at the speeding circular wall when the pinpoint of the sky got smaller.
‘It’s hard till you get used to it,’ he said kindly, as if he knew all about whatever it was.
‘Don’t belong anywhere.’
He held her hand. She tried to draw it back. ‘I’m a doctor of the soul,’ he said. ‘I shan’t hurt you. None of us belong anywhere till we die. Most people don’t know it, but I always have. Moving across the oceans all my life and never being in one place for more than a few days was what I chose from early on. It was my work. Now that I’ve left the service I belong on this island, but where I’ll be tomorrow God alone knows.’
She thought he talked to himself. Her eyes were half closed. When she swayed he steadied her, keeping her from sleep as she became more of a weight.
‘There’ll be enough of that belonging when you’re dead,’ he told her. ‘That’s what I feel, so why peg yourself down and anticipate that zone of oblivion? Not to belong anywhere special while you’re alive is a blessed state. Well, maybe not for everyone, but I was set for it as soon as I was born, conceived on the sea by a sea-cook, no less, so it’s in my blood and maybe my ancestry on more sides than one for all I know, though that’s a tale I may never get to the bottom of.’
The morning light was fading, its promise gone. She fell. Cloud hovered low. He switched the light on. Bed was the best place for her, a horizontal state that even a spirit-level couldn’t quibble with. ‘You’ll be all right as long as somebody’s close to make sure you start eating when you wake up.’
What did she care?
He walked her next door, and pulled open her neatly made bed. He gently lowered her, and took off her shoes. Her feet were cold now.
She surrendered to a kind of peace. A hand lay against the side of her face. He wondered what the hell he had done. She certainly wouldn’t thank him. He covered her, and went back to his room for a roll of bedclothes, which he laid over her own.
A faint snore sounded as he shut the door. It had been as close a run thing as any storm he had been in. He had risked having a dead woman on his hands, and the police asking questions, and charging him with some arcane misdemeanour. The world of law and regularity would rush on to him and he would be no longer someone set apart from the rest of the people because he’d inhabited a closed order for so long. A juicy scandal for the papers! He’d left the sea, and Aunt Clara was dead, but there was still a polished procedure to follow in such emergencies. He was forgetting his training and habits. Or they were already abandoning him. Even now it wasn’t too late to get her tucked up in a nice clean cot with trained nurses to hover around.
Another few minutes, and who is to say whether she’d have come through undamaged? Or even pulled out of the black pit she’d dug pretty well for herself? He put a coffee-flask and some biscuits by her bed, with the thought that she would be normal in a day or two and that what happened then would be up to her. If she really had a mind to kill herself – no use denying the proper words – no one would be able to stop her. He respected her free will, providing it didn’t threaten the liberty of others – his especially.
A frown rippled over her forehead. He had an impulse to kiss her on the cheek before leaving, by way of wishing her a quick recovery, not to mention the luck she would need. He resisted, and fought off the sudden wrack of pure sadness, as if they had met at some forlorn beach after their separate shipwrecks, and might never see each other again. He went out quickly, imagining that on waking she wouldn’t even remember him.
2
At the bottom of the stairs he knocked twice on Judy Ellerker’s door. ‘I heard the first time,’ she said, ‘but like to make sure I’m wanted!’
He went into the room.
She told him to sit down. ‘I thought I heard you huffing and puffing up the stairs last night.’
The place was tidy, except for a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on the floor. ‘I do a bit every day, and break it up before the kids come home. But every day I get more of it done. I threw the box away, in case the picture made things too easy. Not that I have much time, but I manage the odd half hour.’
‘What do you know about my new neighbour?’ he asked.
‘Can I get you anything to drink, captain?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘She left her husband, or whatever it was called, a month or so back. Leads a quiet life, poor kid. Still got her brain-damage from an overdose of matrimony, which makes it hard to tell what she’s like. I suppose you fancy her, but if I were you I’d leave her alone. Give her a chance to pull round.’
He’d heard her distastes concerning men before, but felt they could have nothing to do with him. ‘She’s not well this morning.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. We all recover in the end, though.’
‘She had an accident.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, let’s say she left the gas on by mistake, unlit.’
‘And you didn’t get an ambulance?’ She reached some coins from the shelf.
‘There was no need.’
Her face reddened. There was an expression in her eyes for which he knew no other name but panic. She pushed by, and took her coat from a cupboard, then swung to face him. ‘No need? Have you been playing mummy and daddy up there? What have you got against her? Why do you want to kill her? Never heard of the social services, you blind prick?’
He was going around Cape Horn with a vengeance, and would have felt more comfortable if mere cliff-like waves were crumbling against him instead of this swell of blind loathing, before which he found it hard to stay calm. Yet in the face of her determination to do something ridiculous he felt he had better explain. ‘She’ll be all right. Call an ambulance, and they’ll think it’s a hoax. And if you do get one I might be entitled to ask what you have against her. Go up and see for yourself.’
She hesitated. ‘You think you handled it, do you?’
‘I did what I could. My first thought was for her, not the authorities or whoever you want to run for.’
She took off her coat, sipped her tea, decided it was too cold, and slopped it down the sink. ‘Even so.’
‘Take a look at her in half an hour, to make sure she’s still sleeping. I’m going out for a while.’
‘You’re used to giving orders, aren’t you?’
‘Not to people like you, thank God.’ He had few charts for this kind of ocean, and what he did have were recklessly out of date.
‘I’ll see to her,’ she said.
That’s what he called for, he told her. ‘The door’s unlocked. I won’t be gone long.’
‘If I think she’s not well, I’ll call a doctor.’
‘I’d expect you to.’
He was past caring, and glad to get into the outside air, as if he too had caught more than a good dose of poison gas.
3
It was chilly on the landing but icy when she closed the door. Pam’s head was below the line of blankets, and there was no sign of breathing.
Judy lit the fire. She put her hand into the warm damp bed. She might wake up with pneumonia. On the other hand she would be all right, though so ashamed at what she had failed to do that she’d try again. They all did. But she would talk the message into the darkness of her pathetic brain that no man is worth extinguishing yourself for.
She sat by the bed, knowing that in herself there was a light that couldn’t be got at any more. It had almost gone out once or twice, but she’d never tried any such suicidal move as this poor thing, having always said she would rather cut a man up than do herself in, or that if she did think to end her misery it would be a better policy to take one with you, so that one of them at least wouldn’t get away with it any more. It was as good a reason as any for killing a male of the species, Phyllida had pointed out, for once unable to resist saying what was on her mind.
&nb
sp; She lit a cigarette, and poured coffee from the flask. He had been playing house as well as nurse, and seemed quite good at it. He had never confided in her, nor tried to impress her as a man. Didn’t need to, she supposed. In answer to the question as to whether or not he was married he told her in a tone that didn’t want the matter to turn into a conversation that he was not, and as far as he knew, never would be.
They had remained friendly because he only came to the house every month or two, and regarded her more as a neighbour than a woman which, while proving that he could keep his distance, disappointed her because he was in no way influenced by her as a person. He prized neighbourliness more than he liked women, since he had spent most of his life out of their company. Because he was naturally reticent, it was not difficult for him to treat everyone as his inferiors, though she couldn’t fault his politeness, which was always well developed in those who really knew how to treat inferiors. She could read his bloody mind all right.
His speech and manners, and an ability to say little and still have a will of his own, reminded her of Phyllida. She knew nothing of his background, but assumed he had been to some minor public school and, not being bright enough for university, had been put into the navy by his parents so that at least he would be able to earn a living.
She was sorry for shouting at him, because he had, after all, tried to save someone’s life, in no matter how risky and left-handed a manner. She hated her own big mouth when it gave her no choice in what she really wanted to say. On the other hand such words as came out often had the right effect, and were what she’d hoped to say anyway, though to think so could only be decided by hindsight when she’d seen the effect on whoever was listening.