New and Collected Stories (82 page)

The sun was in her eyes so she turned her back to it. When Mario walked on to the bridge she gave him the banknotes: ‘Sorry.'

‘No
affari
?'

‘The bleeders wouldn't do it.'

He scowled. ‘Bleeders?'

She explained.

‘Never mind.'

Neither spoke for half an hour. They walked by rowing boats tied to wooden landing stages, and she wondered when and at what place they would reach the sea if she and Mario got into one of them. Maybe they'd land on a beach in Italy, and have no more trouble from anybody.

He held her hand tightly, so she knew he was brooding about something which it was no use asking him to explain. But he didn't seem angry. He was miles away, living in sounds and colours she had no hope of understanding, though she liked the warm and dreamy feeling when she tried to picture them. With an English bloke she wouldn't have had such dreams. They'd have joshed and teased like kids – whereas with Mario she saw mountains and yellow trees, and a sky so blue it would blind you if you looked straight at it. But she didn't want to because her dream was too far beyond her normal mind. You had to be grateful for small mercies, and this was bigger than most.

Grey water slopped at the concrete steps. There was a noise of children playing from the other side of the river. She felt easy with him because, though he had suffered and was far from home, he had a light heart and could make her laugh. But she took his larger hand in order to share his bitterness, and let whatever he felt was too much to bear pass into her. She had always known that there were some things you could only keep quiet about, though realized now that the one way of filling such silence was by touch.

The streak of green and blue turned into the last flush of the day. Children stopped playing suddenly. They were alone on the embankment with no one to see them. Not that she cared. She'd hold his hand whoever was looking on. They could take a running jump at themselves for all she'd bother. Once upon a time she had clutched her father's hand, but she hadn't spoken to that bully for days.

‘Never mind,' she said to Mario. ‘They're dirty robbers, that's what they are.'

Her whole body shook when he kissed her, and she could never remember feeling so protected.

‘I love you,' he said.

She didn't know how to say anything. To speak like that seemed a funny way of putting it, though. They walked on, and she couldn't find words to answer, even when he said it again. It was time to say goodnight, and promise to meet another day, but she couldn't stop walking and say anything while still so close to that total change already made between leaving home and meeting him. To walk away from the comfort of holding hands seemed neither right nor possible.

She still felt stupid at not having got some English money for his foreign banknotes, but it was a failure that brought them closer, and made her want to stay longer with him, so that she was almost glad they'd been so rotten to her at the travel agent's.

A policeman stood talking to the woman tollkeeper who leaned by a tiny brick house to collect money from any carts or motors that went over Ha'penny Bridge.

‘Not go there,' Mario said.

There was plenty of dusk to hide in, so she wondered what he meant. They were on the lowest step by the water which, had it come up another inch, would have flowed over her shoes. ‘It don't matter, does it?'

‘In camp at ten. No Italian out after ten o'clock.'

It was too late, anyway. The world was full of trouble when you did things that caused no harm. She wondered who started it, but didn't know. If Mario walked about after ten at night it wouldn't stop the day beginning tomorrow. ‘Will you get shouted at?'

He smiled. ‘I have given sergeant money. But the police don't know, and they ask for papers, maybe, then send me back, and tell Captain. Then Mario will not walk with Edie for three weeks.'

If they crossed Ha'penny Bridge to the fields they'd be safe from prying eyes – and from having to make up their minds to go anywhere. He pressed his face to her hair and said things she didn't understand but that she was happy to hear. She was also glad she had washed her hair last night.

He led her up the steps and back to the roadway. ‘Police gone now,' he whispered.

She took two ha'pennies from her pocket. The old woman at the gate wore a thick coat and scarf to keep out the damp. The river pushed itself forcefully along, and the other side seemed far off from where they stood. The noise of a cow sounded from the fields.

The tollkeeper took her ha'pennies. ‘You'd better be back before twelve.'

‘Are you going to wind up the bridge, then?' Edie asked, thinking that coming back was too far in the future to worry about.

‘Cheeky young devil!' the old woman called.

A sliver of sharp moon showed as if about to come down and cut the river to ribbons. But there were streaks of night mist towards Beeston, and white stars glittered above. Halfway over, Mario said: ‘You give her money?'

‘Only a penny. It's a
toll
bridge.'

‘Toll?'

‘Money to pay,' she said. ‘Somebody private owns it.'

He walked more quickly. ‘Not good.'

‘It's always been like that.'

Her arm was folded with his so she had to keep pace. A plane flew over. ‘One crashed last year. An American plane. The pilot knew a woman in a house at Wilford. He went over ever so low to wave at her. But he crashed, and everybody in the plane was killed.'

She didn't know whether he understood. It didn't seem to matter, but she went on: ‘Five men died, and all for nothing. The pilot had wanted to say hello to his girl. And now she will wear black for evermore because he is dead. And she had a baby afterwards and they couldn't get married. She saw his plane blow up when it hit a tree with no leaves on in the middle of a field.

‘Bad story,' he said.

At the end of the bridge they walked down the lane, no lights showing from any house. They were used to the dark. She didn't know on which field the plane had crashed, but perhaps it was near Fairham Brook where she used to play with Henry when they went on picnics from Albion Yard. At work they'd said what a shame it was, and wondered whether the poor girl would ever get over it, and what would happen to her baby if she didn't, because she was packed off to live with her grandmother in Huntingdonshire. Others heard she'd killed herself, but all sorts of rumours flew about, and you couldn't believe anything, though she wouldn't be surprised.

When he stopped singing it was only to kiss her hand. She heard the grating cry of a crow from the river that looped on three sides of them. She liked his tune, and would have sung a bit herself if she had known it, though she was happy enough to listen as they went through the village that seemed dead to the world and into a field where they would stay till the bombers came home.

Confrontation

‘When I last saw you – a year ago,' Mavis said resentfully, and with more disappointment than he cared to notice, ‘you told me you had only three months left to live.'

He remembered it vividly, while reflecting that mendacity was an illness for which there was no proper cure. It was possible to recover from it, however, when you had no more need of such unsubtle ruses. In other words you might grow out of lying by the simple process of growing up. He hoped it was only a matter of time, that though old habits never die they might simply fade away.

It happened at June and Adrian's party, a disaster that was indeed difficult to forget. What's more, his ploy hadn't worked, so he might just as well have saved himself the trouble of lying. Yet it
was
undeniable that he had lied, and enjoyed it. He could only apologize to her – first, because he was still here on earth to make her remind him of it; and second, that he was still alive and might yet lie again.

His apology didn't seem to make much difference. Her disapproval was so profound that he saw some chance of them getting to know each other better. She watched him take a cigarette out of his packet, then put it back. He wasn't going to lie again, after all. Or perhaps it only meant he wasn't going to smoke much today. He was showing her that he was cutting down his smoke production, so that at least he couldn't convincingly repeat his lie of a year ago.

‘I've only got three months to live,' he had said.

She laughed, loud. ‘You're joking.'

The folds of her red-and-white African safari-wrap shifted under her laughter. She was big and fair and, talking to someone a few minutes ago, he'd heard that she had just left her husband. He thought he couldn't go wrong, until he told his silly lie.

‘Well, no, I'm not lying, or joking, though it sounds stupid, I admit. I wish to God I was. It was only this afternoon that I was told.' He looked straight into her face, and watched the expression change. If you weren't merciless to people who made fools of themselves they would never believe in you again.

Her features showed an inner horror, as if she had touched previously unfathomed depths of callousness in herself – which frightened her far more than any predicament he might be in at having only three months left to live.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘really I am. I shouldn't have told you. You're the first one. Why should I burden you with it? Even my wife doesn't know yet. I only heard today, in any case, and I haven't been home. I went to see a blue movie in Soho, then came straight on to June and Adrian's shindig.'

They stood in the small garden in which only a few others had sought refuge from the crushing noise because most people thought it was still too damp outside. ‘Are you here because you know June – or are you a friend of Adrian's?' he asked, in what he hoped would be construed as a valiant attempt to change the subject.

It was his faint northern accent that brought back the feeling that he might still be lying. The only thing that stopped her disbelief was the fact that no one in the world would lie about such a matter. ‘Both,' she told him.

‘I don't even believe it myself,' he said, ‘so if you think I'm lying I can easily understand.'

Maybe so few people came into the garden, he thought, because it was close to the main road, and a huge bar of orange sodium light glowing above the hedge had the ability to plunge its searching fire into any heart, and detect those untruths which everyone used at times like these. But against a
monstrous
lie it would have no power.

She felt herself unfairly singled out to receive this terrible information. It was as if someone had come up and married her without her permission. Her soul had been sold in some under-the-counter slave-market. At the same time she felt privileged to be the first one told – though a gnawing uncertainty remained.

‘Forget it,' he said. ‘I shouldn't have spoken. I feel slightly ridiculous.'

Her husband had never told her anything. If he'd heard from his doctor that he was going to die he'd have kept the information to himself and slipped out of the world without a murmur, so that she'd be left with the plague of having nagged him to death. Her frequent and fervent cry had been: ‘Why don't you
say
something? Speak, for God's sake!' Once when they got into bed, after a day of few words passing between them, she said in a friendly tone: ‘Tell me a story, Ben!' He didn't even say goodnight by way of reply. Thank heavens all
that
was finished.

She touched his wrist. ‘It's all right. It's better to speak.' The glass she held was empty. In the glow of the sodium light it was difficult to tell whether he was pale or not. Everyone looked ghastly under it, and she understood why most of the others stayed inside. Adrian and June must have bought the house in summer, when the days were long.

‘It's not,' he said, ‘but I'm one of those people who can't really help myself. If I'm not talking I'm not alive. I often wonder if I talk in my sleep.'

Illness that is fatal, she had read, was nearly always brought on because the inner spirit of the afflicted person was being prevented from opening and flowering – or simply from a lack of the ability to talk about yourself and your problems. He didn't seem to be stricken in that way at all, though every rule had its exceptions – so they say.

‘I've often thought of buying one of those ultra-sensitive modern Japanese tape-recorders which are switched on by the sound of your own voice,' he said, ‘then playing it back in the morning to see if I've uttered any profundities, banalities, obscenities, or just plain baby-talk during the night.'

Her husband, who had been in advertising, had believed so much in the power of the spoken word that he would say very little, except perhaps at work, where it could be taken down and transcribed by his secretary, and used to make money. She dredged around at the back of her mind for something to say. Maybe her husband had been right when, in reply to one of her stinging accusations that he never said anything, rapped back: ‘It takes two to make a silence.'

‘But I never did,' he laughed. ‘They're too expensive. Anyway, I might have said something that would have frightened me to death! You never know. And in any case, when I say something I like to make up my mind about what I'm going to say a second or two beforehand.'

‘Is that what you're doing now?'

People were coming out through the open french windows with plates of food. Neither the sodium lights nor the damp would bother them if they had something to do, such as eat.

‘Absolutely,' he told her, ‘but because I'm talking to
you
I don't let it stop me.'

The northern accent, slight as it was, far from making him seem untrustworthy, now had something comforting about it. If he'd had the accent, and spoken very little, it would have been merely comic. But he had something to say, and that was different. He was also using it to good effect, she suspected.