Devices and Desires (6 page)

“He hasn’t got a father. He did have a father—I mean, he isn’t Jesus Christ. But he hasn’t got one now.”

“Do you mean that he’s dead or that he’s gone away?”

“Could be either, couldn’t it? Look, if I knew who he was I might know where he was, OK?”

Then there had been another silence, during which she took periodical gulps of her tea and the sleeping baby stirred and gave small pig-like grunts. After a few minutes he had spoken again.

“Look, if you can’t find anywhere else in Cromer you can share the caravan for a time.” He had added hastily: “I mean, there is a second bedroom. It’s very small, only just room for the bunk, but it would do for a time. I know it’s isolated here, but it’s close to the beach, which would be nice for the baby.”

She had turned on him again that remarkable glance, in which for the first time he had detected to his discomfiture a brief flash of intelligence and of calculation.

“All right,” she said. “If I can’t find anywhere else I’ll come back tomorrow.”

And he had lain awake late that night, half-hoping, half-dreading that she would return. And she had returned the following afternoon, carrying Timmy on her hip and the rest of her possessions in a backpack. She had taken over the caravan and his life. He didn’t know whether what he felt for her was love, affection or pity, or a mixture of all three. He only knew that in his anxious and overconcerned life his second-greatest fear was that she might leave.

He had lived in the caravan now for just over two years, supported by a research grant from his northern university, to study the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the rural industries of East Anglia. His dissertation was nearly finished but for the last six months he had almost stopped work on it and had devoted himself entirely to his passion, a crusade against nuclear power. From the caravan on the very edge of the sea he could see Larksoken Power Station stark against the skyline, as uncompromising as his own will to oppose it, a symbol and a threat. It was from the caravan that he ran People Against Nuclear Power, with its acronym PANUP, the small organization of which he was both founder and president. The caravan had been a stroke of luck. The owner of Cliff Cottage was a Canadian who, returning to his roots and seduced by nostalgia, had bought it on impulse as a possible holiday home. About fifty years earlier there had been a murder at Cliff Cottage. It had been a fairly commonplace murder, a henpecked husband at the end of his tether who had taken a hatchet to his virago of a wife. But if it had been neither particularly interesting nor mysterious, it had certainly been bloody. After the cottage had been bought, the Canadian’s wife had heard graphic accounts of spilt brains and blood-spattered walls and had declared that she had no intention of living there in summer or at any other time. Its very isolation, once
attractive, now appeared both sinister and repellent. And to compound the problem, the local planning authority had shown itself unsympathetic to the owner’s overambitious plans for rebuilding. Disillusioned with the cottage and its problems, he had boarded up the windows and returned to Toronto, meaning eventually to come back and make a final decision about his ill-advised purchase. The previous owner had parked a large old-fashioned caravan at the back, and the Canadian had made no difficulty about renting this to Neil for two pounds a week, seeing it as a useful way of having someone to keep an eye on the property. And it was the caravan, at once his home and his office, from which Neil conducted his campaign. He tried not to think about the time, six months ahead, when his grant would finish and he would need to find work. He knew that he had somehow to stay here on the headland, to keep always in view that monstrous building which dominated his imagination as it did his view.

But now to the uncertainty about his future funding was added a new and more terrifying threat. About five months earlier he had attended an open day at the power station during which the Acting Administrative Officer, Hilary Robarts, had given a short preliminary talk. He had challenged almost everything she had said, and what was meant as an informative introduction to a public-relations exercise had developed into something close to a public brawl. In the next edition of his news-sheet he had reported on the incident in terms which he now realized had been unwise. She had sued him for libel. The action was due to be heard in four weeks’ time and he knew that, successful or not, he was faced with ruin. Unless she died in the next few weeks—and why should she die?—it could be the end of his life on the headland, the end of his organization, the end of all he had planned and hoped to do.

Amy was typing envelopes, sending out the final copies of the newsletter. A pile was already to hand, and he began folding the pamphlets and inserting them into the envelopes. The job wasn’t easy. He had tried to economize with the size and quality, and the envelopes were in danger of splitting. He now had a mailing list of 250, only a small minority of whom were active supporters of PANUP. Most never paid any dues towards the organization, and the majority of the pamphlets went unsolicited to public authorities, local firms and industry in the vicinity of Larksoken and Sizewell. He wondered how many of the 250 were read and thought with a sudden spasm of anxiety and depression of the total cost of even this small enterprise. And this month’s newsletter wasn’t his best. Rereading one before he put it in the envelope, it seemed to him to be ill organized, to have no coherent theme. The principal aim now was to refute the growing argument that nuclear power could avoid the damage to the environment through the greenhouse effect, but the mixture of suggestions ranging from solar power to replacing light bulbs with those which consumed seventy-five per cent less energy seemed naïve and hardly convincing. His article argued that nuclear-generated electricity couldn’t realistically replace oil and fossil fuels unless all nations built sixteen new reactors a week in the five years from 1995, a programme impossible to achieve and one which, if practicable, would add intolerably to the nuclear threat. But the statistics, like all his figures, were culled from a variety of sources and lacked authority. Nothing he produced seemed to him genuinely his own work. And the rest of the newsletter was a jumble of the usual scare stories, most of which he had used before: allegations of safety breaches which had been covered up, doubts about the safety of the ageing Magnox stations, the unsolved problem of storing and transporting nuclear waste.
And for this issue he had been hard put to find a couple of intelligent letters for the correspondence page; sometimes it seemed that every crackbrain in north-east Norfolk read the PANUP newsletter but that no one else did.

Amy was picking at the letters of the typewriter, which had a persistent tendency to stick. She said: “Neil, this is a bloody awful machine. It would be quicker to write the addresses by hand.”

“It’s better since you cleaned it, and the new ribbon looks fine.”

“It’s still diabolical. Why don’t you buy a new one? It would save time in the end.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“You can’t afford a new typewriter and you think you’re going to save the world.”

“You don’t need possessions to save the world, Amy. Jesus Christ had nothing: no home, no money, no property.”

“I thought you said when I came here that you weren’t religious.”

It always surprised him that, apparently taking no account of him, she could yet recall comments he had made months earlier. He said: “I don’t believe Christ was God. I don’t believe there is a God. But I believe in what He taught.”

“If He wasn’t a God, I don’t see that it matters much what He taught. Anyway, all I can remember is something about turning the other cheek, which I don’t believe in. I mean, that’s daft. If someone slaps your left cheek, then you slap his right, only harder. Anyway, I do know they hung Him up on the cross, so it didn’t do Him a lot of good. That’s what turning the other cheek does for you.”

He said: “I’ve got a Bible here somewhere. You could read about Him if you wanted to. Make a start with St. Mark’s Gospel.”

“No thanks. I had enough of that in the home.”

“What home?”

“Just a home, before the baby was born.”

“How long were you there?”

“Two weeks. Two weeks too bloody many. Then I ran away and found a squat.”

“Where was that, the squat?”

“Islington, Camden, King’s Cross, Stoke Newington. Does it matter? I’m here now, OK?”

“It’s OK by me, Amy.”

Lost in his thoughts, he hardly realized that he had given up folding the pamphlets.

Amy said: “Look, if you’re not going to help with these envelopes you might as well go and put a new washer on that tap. It’s been dripping for weeks and Timmy’s always falling about in the mud.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll do it now.”

He took down his tool kit from the high cupboard where it was kept well out of Timmy’s reach. He was glad to be out of the caravan. It had become increasingly claustrophobic in the last few weeks. Outside, he bent to talk to Timmy, caged in his playpen. He and Amy had collected large stones from the beach, looking for those with holes in them—and he had strung them onto strong cord and tied them along one side of the playpen. Timmy would spend hours happily banging them together or against the bars or, as now, slobbering against one of the stones in an attempt to get it into his mouth. Sometimes he would communicate with individual flints, a continuous admonitory prattle broken by sudden triumphant squeals. Kneeling down, Neil clutched the bars, rubbed his nose against Timmy’s and was rewarded by his huge, heart-tugging smile. He looked very like his mother, with the same round
head on a fragile neck, the same beautifully shaped mouth. Only his eyes, widely spaced, were differently shaped, large blue spheres with, above them, straight bushy eyebrows which reminded Neil of pale and delicate caterpillars. The tenderness he felt for the child was equal to, if different from, the tenderness he felt for his mother. He could not now imagine life on the headland without either of them.

But the tap defeated him. Despite his tuggings with the wrench he couldn’t get the screw to shift. Even this minor domestic task was apparently beyond his powers. He could hear Amy’s derisive voice. You want to change the world and you can’t change a washer. After a couple of minutes he gave up the attempt, left the tool box by the cottage wall and walked to the edge of the cliff, then slithered down to the beach. Crunching over the ridges of stones, he went down to the edge of the sea and almost violently wrenched off his shoes. It was thus, when the weight of anxiety about his failed ambitions, his uncertain future became too heavy, that he would find his peace, standing motionless to watch the veined curve of the poised wave, the tumult of crashing foam breaking over his feet, the wide intersecting arches washing over the smooth sand as the wave retreated to leave its tenuous lip of foam. But today even this wonder, continually repeated, failed to comfort his spirit. He gazed out to the horizon with unseeing eyes and thought about his present life, the hopelessness of the future, about Amy, about his family. Thrusting his hand in his pocket, he felt the crumpled envelope of his mother’s last letter.

He knew that his parents were disappointed in him although they never said so openly, since oblique hints were just as effective: “Mrs. Reilly keeps on asking me, What is Neil doing? I don’t like to say that you’re living in a caravan with no proper job.” She certainly didn’t like to say that he was living
there with a girl. He had written to tell them about Amy since his parents constantly threatened to visit and, unlikely as this was actually to happen, the prospect had added an intolerable anxiety to his already anxiety-ridden life.

“I’m giving a temporary home to an unmarried mother in return for typing help. Don’t worry, I shan’t suddenly present you with a bastard grandchild.”

After the letter had been posted he had felt ashamed. The cheap attempt at humour had been too like a treacherous repudiation of Timmy, whom he loved. And his mother hadn’t found it either funny or reassuring. His letter had produced an almost incoherent farrago of warnings, pained reproaches and veiled references to the possible reaction of Mrs. Reilly if she ever got to know. Only his two brothers surreptitiously welcomed his way of life. They hadn’t made university and the difference between their comfortable lifestyle—houses on an executive estate,
en suite
bathrooms, artificial coal fires in what they called the lounge, working wives, a new car every two years and time-shares in Majorca—provided both with agreeable hours of self-satisfied comparisons which he knew would always end with the same conclusion, that he ought to pull himself together, that it wasn’t right, not after all the sacrifices Mum and Dad had made to send him to college, and a fine waste of money that had proved.

He had told Amy none of this but would have happily confided had she shown the least interest. But she asked no questions about his past life and told him nothing about hers. Her voice, her body, her smell were as familiar to him as his own, but essentially he knew no more about her now than when she had arrived. She refused to collect any welfare benefits, saying that she wasn’t going to have DHSS snoopers visiting the caravan to see if she and Neil were sleeping together.
He sympathized. He didn’t want them either, but he felt that for Timmy’s sake she should take what was on offer. He had given her no money but he did feed both of them, and this was difficult enough on his grant. No one visited her and no one telephoned. Occasionally she would receive a postcard, coloured views usually of London with non-descript, meaningless messages, but as far as he knew she never replied.

They had so little in common. She helped spasmodically with PANUP but he was never sure how far she was actually committed. And he knew that she found his pacifism stupid. He could recall a conversation only this morning.

“Look, if I live next door to an enemy and he has a knife, a gun and a machine gun and I’ve got the same, I’m not going to chuck mine before he chucks his. I’ll say, OK, let the knife go, then the gun maybe, then the machine gun. Him and me at the same time. Why should I throw mine away and leave him with his?”