‘Shut your mouth, or I’ll take my boot to you.’ The same voice, an island unto itself, seemed to come out of the roof, with a stridency that had little to lose and nothing on earth at least to be afraid of. The dominating ugliness struck even her in the face, a voice accustomed to making itself heard, understood and obeyed against the noise of engines or the elements, or both – not, perhaps, the voice to command from the throne of absolute authority, but that of someone expounding the law of good behaviour which had been passed on to him. He was finding it no easy task, but in a crisis there was nothing else to rely on, and because the odds were so much against him the transference had to succeed. ‘What are you doing here? There’s eighteen months inside waiting for the lot of you.’
‘It’s none of your business,’ Alf shouted. ‘She’s our brother’s wife, and she’s coming back to Nottingham with us, where she belongs.’
George threw her coat on the floor. ‘It’s no bleddy use. Let’s clear off.’
She looked, and listened, and waited for the ability to get on her feet. He was holding her suitcase as if it were weighted with iron, and he would swing it against them. His reddening face seemed about to burst with a rage she could never have mustered in herself no matter what they did, and that she thought was containable in no human being. She had not known him before. His head was held back, as if to see above any level they would reach.
‘Let them go away,’ she said.
‘Not likely.’ He put her suitcase by the wall, seeing Bert making signs to push against him. ‘Keep back, sailor!’ he shouted in the voice she hoped never to hear again.
‘Fuck off!’
His knees lifted, and the sharp smack of bone against Bert’s face was followed by a colder thump. Bert was taller, and Tom fell grunting with two dull blows at the cheek, but he recovered, and boxed, and edged himself around, and suddenly Bert was heeling down the stairs. George sidled by, and was out of sight. She couldn’t tell how it happened, pressed herself in a corner to stay clear.
He maintained his attitude of defence, knowing that Alf would try to avenge his brother. Because there was something funny and pathetic about his two fists, which seemed childishly deployed, she wanted to laugh – despite her tears and the sharp aches. His fists would shield him, and her, from the world threatening to burst through their puny guard. She couldn’t laugh. But there was something comical in being defended.
Alf made one last savage attack, but it ended in a circular kind of scuffling around the landing, occasional jabs going out from both. The skirmish seemed to go on for ever. When she looked it was to see Alf go sideways across Tom and follow a pathway down the stairs.
Tom pursued them below the first landing. ‘If you come here again, I’ll break you in pieces!’
He breathed as if an engine were locked inside, a weird and distressing effect when he tried to smile. He seemed far away from himself, and separated from her by the agony of breathlessness and pain. The front door slammed, and he walked cautiously down to make sure they were on the right side of it, pressing himself close to the wall on one flight, and against the banister on the next. She supposed he had done such manoeuvres often to be so adept in them.
They had swung at his shopping bag on the way by, all of it spilled and scattered. He thought it cheap at the price. Half a dozen cardboard boxes telescoped into one, which he had brought from the supermarket to serve as containers for their belongings, stood by the door, hardly damaged by their boots in the hurry to get out.
10
She stood in her room, unable to move. Her will had gone. If she sat or lay down she would never get up. She would die, because this was no kind of life. Neither her imagination nor her pessimism had envisaged direct assault. A person could not be secure with such people loose, who felt she belonged to them like a slave to be taken back into bondage.
She didn’t, and never had. Never would. She was not connected to them in any way, but they would have killed her rather than let her stay free. He spoke, in his familiar and soothing voice. ‘Come into my room, and let’s have a look at you.’
‘Leave me alone. I feel wrecked.’
He put his arm around her. ‘You’ll be all right.’
What did he know about it? Her stomach was made of iron when she pressed her fist there. But she went with him. He brought a bowl of water, and washed her face while she sat in the armchair. The rancorous note of his authority was still apparent. ‘If I telephone the police they’ll catch them going up the motorway.’
‘Leave them.’ She was unable to stop her hands shaking. ‘I’m not really hurt.’
His face was also bruised, the lower lip cut. ‘They’re a rough lot. But you’re a bit of a fighter yourself, to hold them off so well. You just left me with the mopping-up!’
‘I didn’t think I could do anything.’
He took two pieces of cotton wool soaked in cool liquid, and held them to her bruises. ‘You never know what you’re like till you get pushed against a wall. But I’m sorry I took so long over my business. When I came back and saw this type coming out of the house with your suitcase I thought he’d rifled our belongings. He gave me some talk, so I put in two quick ones and got him to tell me what was going on. For all I knew, your life was at stake. It certainly sounded like it as I came up the stairs. You get rough lots at sea, even these days, so it wasn’t a new situation for me. There’s often no hard feelings afterwards, though I didn’t like the look of that gang.’
‘It had to happen, but that part of my life is finished. If I was in any doubt about it I couldn’t go on living.’
The pain of her weeping doubled itself in him. Such an incident could brush anyone. He had known rather more of the world in that respect than she had, but decided that, since it was now up to him, she really had seen the last of them. ‘We’ll be away by this evening. I went to the estate agent’s and settled everything. We’re to leave the keys with Judy.’
‘I could have paid my own account.’
‘I did it to save time. All that’s left is to hump our belongings on to the pavement and load the car. It’ll be like quitting a wharf we’ve been tied up to for too long.’
She couldn’t stay, yet didn’t want to go. Every move was a bad dream. She had agreed, and the idea thrilled her, but her one-time family had spoiled her with dread where before she had been optimistic. She felt unable to eliminate such gall from her soul. It was impossible to imagine the kind of freedom from them that she craved. But the gorge rose as if to vomit them out even against her will. It was a matter of time. She would not let them blight her spirit.
She padded the corners of the case with underwear and socks, and folded his uniform while he emptied the cupboards. ‘We must leave things ship-shape, though Judy said she would give a final sweep in exchange for whatever goods we won’t be taking.’
He put half a dozen out-of-date Pilot Books in a box, and protected his deckwatch and sextant with newspapers. His short-wave radio was placed by the door. There was a record-player, suitcase, roll of charts, and a kitbag of oddments – the tools and toys that had gone all over the world, moved by ship, rickshaw, taxi and human back, belongings as much part of him as his own fingertips.
There was no hurry, he said. It was best that way. She still wasn’t fit. He topped whisky with water and gave it her to drink. He sipped from the flask. They smoked and talked. He took off his jacket and unloaded the shopping, cutting away damp bread where the eggs had broken. He set things on the table and they sat down to eat. She felt better. The stove kept them warm. ‘I’ll leave it for Judy,’ he said, ‘and five gallons of paraffin in the cupboard.’
She was in pain on trying to smile. ‘With so many things she’ll open a junk stall on the Portobello Road. It’ll make her a pound or two.’
They cleared away the meal and finished at the sink. All his life he had moved. He still hadn’t stopped. But she was about to begin. After such a send-off by George and his brothers it was impossible to imagine the
future. She was exultant from the whisky, but fought to stay calm and not show tears. Men hated to see women in tears, she thought, though not more than she hated them in herself. She had struggled for her life, and won. Even without Tom they wouldn’t have taken her. Because it was her victory she could go with him and feel safe, as much out of her own will as because she was in love. Funny sort of love. But it was all she was left with.
Neither knew where it would end, and that also made the prospect acceptable when all through her life there had either been nowhere to think of going, or a straight road on which it would be intolerable to travel. She did not feel that he would be hard to know, or that to fathom him would lead her to a lake of pitch from which there would be no escape. It did not matter whether or not she got to know him. He was not difficult to be with, so it didn’t seem important. The fever of wanting to know a man in order to find out whether he loved you or not, or whether you loved him, was a sure way of destroying any love that existed, or cauterizing any regard out of which love could grow. She had learned her lesson, reflecting that it had taken her long enough – if it actually turned out that she had.
In some ways he was foreign to her, though she couldn’t say exactly how or why. Didn’t want to. She was also a foreigner to him, she didn’t wonder, and a foreigner even to herself much of the time, which was maybe why she had been able to stay alive through much of her past existence. She hoped she would continue to, no matter what happened between them. She flattered herself, she said, in imagining that she could be a foreigner to anybody apart from herself, but no doubt she might be, at her time of life and with the foibles that had surfaced after abandoning her funny marriage. That she felt like a foreigner to all and sundry seemed the first good fact about herself and their relationship. It thinned the emotions, gave them less importance when in operation. Not being ‘made for each other’ meant there were sufficient novelties of behaviour for affection to fasten on without generating painful antagonisms. Because they were not familiar by temperament and background everything had to be said before the meaning was clear, and so only those meanings were made plain that clarity considered absolutely necessary. So they could be almost uncaring, a mood in which all revelations would come, if they must, in their allotted time.
Because they felt foreign to each other she sensed that it still might be possible to love and yet keep their separate identities. Many couples who lived together for a long time took on the worst traits of the other (and in her case she blamed herself as much as George) and so could not help but enter a battlefield from which neither could get free, an inbred fight in which, the longer it went on, the more impossible it was to call a truce or separate. Two people with common frontiers should cross them with circumspection, or by invitation only.
They talked well into the afternoon, as if unwilling to leave such a haven before emptying their minds of what thoughts it had bred in them. A conversation with long silences went on till she could no longer sit up, and the walls swayed towards her.
She lay on his bed, and was immediately asleep. He pulled up a chair and sat as if to guard her, knowing that they would need the whole world’s space before their spirits could be contained. He looked at her relaxed face, which seemed younger than before her experience of the morning. He would provide space, but the word, as he observed while putting her hands under the blanket so that they would not get cold, had no precise meaning except in the picture of a blue ocean and a white sky that were empty for as far as the eye could see, but about to be filled by the first star of the morning.
11
A warm spring wind from the sea ruffled the curtains. He had drawn a six-pointed star on a sheet of cartridge paper, using a red biro and a long ruler, one triangle superimposed on the other so that all six points became small triangles of equal area.
From each point he ran a green line to the centre, and pondered on the diagram. Counting the indentations between the points, twelve directions could be marked off. Aristotle was said to have suggested a circle of twelve winds. The six-pointed star was the Star of David, the Magen David of the Hebrews, the Jewish Star, the sign on the flag of Israel. He wore one around his neck, under his shirt, two triangles of gold within a circle. It had belonged to his mother.
A box of instruments was open on the table. The drawing fascinated him, as a Euclidean object, a geometrical conundrum, and as a religious symbol with secular properties. He wondered if it had been used in ancient times as a surveying device, a mathematical instrument and angle-measurer for designing temples or building pyramids. The six points coming out of the centre and reckoned as parts of a circle could be used in finding latitude at sea, the sixty-degree divisions conforming to the sixty-degree angle of a sextant.
Each point could be part of a timing system to mark off the segments of the day. If a cord was suspended from the middle, as a gunners’ device with a protractor, and a weight attached, it could have calculated calendars. In a land survey, a complete triangulation could have been based upon it. Science as well as art was cultivated before the Flood. He had read that Josephus ascribed surveying to the Hebrews, who were said to have derived it from the Patriarch Abraham, who brought it to Egypt from Ur of the Chaldees. The Star of David was mystical, yet scientific and rational.
She only half understood what he told her. He didn’t seem altogether sure himself, except for the mathematical intricacies. On a desert island, armed with the double triangle of six points, he could within a week, he said, produce an accurate map of his territory. A Magen David was a star, a symbol for the spirit to dwell on, a design to exercise the brain in all kinds of technical beginnings. A spaced-out baseline would begin his survey, angles subtended by a fabricated tape to get the perfect equilateral. He rolled the words over and over, wrote them and crossed them out as if he had been born recalling them, from the moment the umbilical string snapped, or on first seeing the golden Magen David between his mother’s breasts.
With such an inheritance, who needs anything else that the world has to give? A Star of David as the basis for a navigation kit could steer you a course through the heavens or over the surface of the world, keeping clear of hell and high water. You could periodically sell your expertise to the highest and most tolerant bidder for laying out irrigation ditches or building trireme canals on which boats with burnished thrones that queens sat on floated at dawn or dusk. Or you could check the sun’s zenith, calculate heights and distances, make contour maps never found four thousand years later when the first marauding Europeans opened the pyramids. Or you made Portolan charts of the oceans for mariners to steer by in their ships towards empires only now crumbling away.
Jafuda Cresques of the school of Majorcan map-makers had his observatory in Portugal for Henry the Navigator, and made the first charts of the oceans, as is common knowledge among seafarers ancient and modern. Joseph of Spain brought the Arabic numerals from India. On his Great Voyage of discovery Columbus took with him Luìs de Torres and four more bearing the Star of David in their hearts. They had prepared astronomical works and made scientific instruments for navigation, and were otherwise intimately concerned with and connected to the guiding star seen also by Columbus, who knew that without such people the Great Voyage would never have started.
Covilhão went to the land of Prester John; Abraham de Beja to India; Wolf to Bokhara; Isaacs to Zululand; Palgrave to Arabia; Vambéry to Turkestan. The race of travellers and star-followers spread far and scattered wide, others ever in their wake. Tom knew that he too had been one of them all his working life, though too ordinary to be noticed, because every ship in the middle of the ocean needing to ascertain its position to within a few hundred yards was in effect (and as far as the navigating officer was concerned) there for the first time, since in the nature of things there could not be the marks on the water of who might have been there before.
With no country of their own, the Sons of Aleph (and of every other letter of their Divine Alphabet) looked at the stars for guidanc
e, and the stars answered with their trust. Astronomical tables of practical utility were drawn up by those without country but to whom Jerusalem was the centre of the world. Prophiat Tibbon produced the quadrant to replace the astrolabe, and Bonet de Lattes invented an astronomical ring. Herschel surveyed the heavens. Beer drew his map of the moon, and Loewy invented his elbow telescope.
The world was a pitfall but the heavens were benign and gave their knowledge to whoever observed their mystery with penetrating reason. In the beginning were the stars, and among that unaccountable number were six which, when the points were drawn together in the mind’s eye, became two triangles of guided light superimposed, making the Star of David. But those six stars were never mentioned by name nor delineated as such, though they were known and indicated by some sequential cabbalistic sign in the Book of Tables. They are known yet unnamed, and no one will claim to know them, but they exist and are eternally in their places.
She caught one word in ten as he laboured among his heaps of books and charts: reading, drawing, writing, staring out of the window and pondering on some problem which, he said, seemed useless but which delighted the mind and could not therefore be futile. He constructed a frame of two triangles and covered it with letters and figures to test his ideas, fixing sights and strings, and aiming it at the moon, the sun or the first star of the evening, covering sheets of paper with calculations, or pecking at the keys of an electronic calculator till he obtained answers that either satisfied or sent him back into more hours of frenzied reckoning.
She looked up from her reading, and realized that as far as he was concerned she did not exist. Yet he was happy because no obligatory companionship was necessary, no sense of either of them feeling deprived because the other wasn’t ready to vibrate with good or bad emotions at a mere glance. They were cut off from each other, and she was glad, able to sit undisturbed and be herself.