The Death of William Posters (32 page)

‘You're a different sort of person,' Larry said. ‘I need a god to believe in, even if it's only a composite of these hills, trees, Joanna, this house. I write my stories and live my life in that, framework. It's narrowing at times, but enriching as well. I envy the way you feel. You're the Uncomplicated Person.'

Frank took this as a compliment: ‘I'm the empty man, the man without religion. All I believe in is houses and factories, food and power-stations, bridges and coalmines and death, turning millions of things out on a machine that people can use, people who also turn out millions of things that other people can use. It's no use harping back to poaching rights and cottage industries. We've got to forget all that and come to terms with cities and machines and moon landings. We're going to become new men, whether we like it or not, and I know I'm not going to like it.'

‘You mean mankind has to lose its soul?' Larry suggested.

‘What soul? Still, if you want to put it like that, you can. All the space that's left by kicking out the soul is taken by a railway, a hammer, a whole landscape of industrial and material necessity. The soul is so big that you can get all these things in, and more. The bum-bailiffs march up to the soul and sling God out kicking and screaming. Then the real things of life move in, and that space that God inhabited (all his bloody mansions) is enormous. We can get so much in there.'

‘Who's “we”?' Larry asked.

‘People who think like me, and those who have it in their blood but don't yet know how to think. I had to step out of factories to realize this, though I've always felt it, and that's a fact.'

Larry's sallow face had turned pale. ‘How can you live like that?'

‘I've been living like it all my life,' Frank told him, lighting a brown-papered Spanish cigarette. He tapped his heart: ‘It's rich enough inside, in here. It's getting richer, the more I live and know.'

It was a long, convivial day. They drank a bottle of Cinzano before lunch. Frank hauled up buckets of icy water from the well to go with it. Even in the sun cold air lingered from the dawn and they sat with jerseys on, talking right up to the confines of an exhausted midnight – when he followed Myra up to bed.

In spite of the cold she was drifting into sleep, too tired to wait for Frank and a possible exchange of views on the day. Sleep was revolving far away, between two flying storms of snow and sand. Her heavy weight drifted her down, away from the sway of trains, the purring of last night's boat, the incessant talk and the smell of cold oranges. She was beyond the clash of tree branches outside the window, her body sinking and settling, eyes forced shut into a dark world that was empty except for a spark of light that never went out, an illuminated distant life-dot recognized as the stirring inside her.

They could either rent a furnished house in Majorca, and arrange for Myra to have the baby here, or go somewhere else and not bother too much about where the baby was born. They sat in a café, looking out at the muddy square while they discussed it. Rain had been falling ten days without stop. In such a monsoon the house was small for the four of them. The continual thumping of Larry's typewriter made it seem as if they were still on a ship. The noise penetrated Frank's reading and drove him to walk along lanes and mule-tracks whether it rained or not. The mountains were swathed in cloths of rain, cloud-shirts, mist boiling up the valleys, clinging by grey fingernails to escarpments and treetops. Larry said it was usual weather for the time of the year. ‘December and January are better,' he said, ‘but February and March get lousy again.'

Frank was in favour of moving. So was Myra. They set out on a boat to the mainland, wet decks and cold ironwork steaming through drizzle. Blue domes of Valencia did not shine in the distance. Harbour lights and quays stretched before the boat which edged towards tie-up, still a thrilling part of any journey for Frank. Beyond the customs sheds an orange tram passed on its way into the city.

They stood on the open deck rather than queue to get off, Myra in no condition to be pitched among bundles and boxes on a swaying gangway. Once on the quayside Frank walked into the hold of the ship and pulled out his trunk.

The road was straight and flat through dingy suburbs, their taxi dodging trams, swinging around cars and bicycles. Larry had given them addresses of cheap pensions in all the southern towns. Rain clouds hung over the city. Having once started on a journey Frank wanted to get it over as soon as possible. If Frank had been George, thought Myra, they would have stayed a few days in Valencia at such a time instead of rushing on without any thought. In fact George wouldn't even have started the journey, and she couldn't finally decide what she wanted most. Maybe they'd miss the train, then they'd have to stay for a while. Frank didn't even know where the journey would end, but wherever it was, he felt a need to reach it.

With ten minutes to go he booked the trunk and bought tickets. The only place for Myra to sit was a small emergency seat near the door. The train moved almost as soon as their luggage was in, pulling away between tall buildings and wide boulevards out of the middle city. The first night they met he had seen her off on a train from Paddington – into blackness and never to be met again, lights, noise and smells different from this lit-up uneasy move together into the Spanish south. ‘Another four hundred miles, and we'll be in Granada,' he said.

‘I'd like to know where we're really going,' she said. ‘I like travelling at the moment, and wouldn't mind if we never stopped, but where are we going right now?'

‘We'll go to Tangier,' he said, eyes fixed on row after row of orange trees flickering by, content again at the feel of a train under him. ‘I've always wanted to go to Africa!'

‘Don't think I'm worrying,' she said, ‘but where am I going to have the baby?' The train ran into sun, clear sky over flat fertile land spreading to mountain peaks. He took the brandy from the travelling basket: ‘Tangier's a big town. Have it there.'

‘But no further,' she said. ‘I don't want to have him in a tent in the desert.' They laughed. She leaned against the window and managed to sleep. He stood guard so that ticket collectors or people opening and closing the nearby door shouldn't disturb her. He wondered, now that it was too late, whether they shouldn't have stayed in Valencia.

Myra had bought a guidebook, and he read it in calmer moments, opened the map and followed station names, mountain ranges, rivers. The train slowed between weedgrown walls in a suburb of flat-roofed houses: Alicante, stayed half an hour by the large harbour. That called for another swig of brandy. He found comfortable seats for them. For some reason he had picked up Spanish quicker than Myra, wielded it fluently at stations and cafés.

The train passed along the sea edge, a blue gradient of mountains lifting from each cape on either side of the city. There were many ships in the harbour, and bathing huts along grey beach like sentry boxes put there to keep back encroaching surf. They turned inland, date palms and orange trees almost brushing the windows. Train wheels were thumping south-east – another eight hours for Granada – taking them over arid plains and within clear sight of grandiose mountains to the north, and villages propped on isolated hills, a huddle of poor houses baked in summer and frozen in winter, desolate and destitute. It was hot in the carriage, sun shining strongly through windowglass. Myra sat in her blouse, head now and again resting on her bare arms. Frank took off his jacket, walked through the carriage to bring water for Myra, and beer for himself.

Hardly anyone was speaking, and the whine of the diesel engine drowned the voices of those who were. The carriage was wrapped in the afternoon silence of the outside landscape. It was perfectly still and not a word could come from it. It lacked meaning, took on a death-like quality. The wheels were circular hammers beating on the tracks. Such a time brought momentary boredom with life, and memories came in speed and secrecy to dam up and strengthen the crumbling walls of courage. Frank stared at the beige land, not seeing it, but seeing himself.

The journey was enlivened when the train came to a bridge over a ravine. The driver stopped before it, uncertain whether it was possible to get his loaded train across. Frank looked along the track. Workmen on the upper banks of the ravine stood aside, waiting for the train to make up its mind.

‘We'll be here all day,' he said to Myra. ‘You should see that bridge.' Planks formed a parapet only along part of its length, while tree-poles buttressed and reinforced its shaky girders. Frank thought he saw it sway, but knew that this was imagination, mirage, fatigue. The train inched forward, lurched, a hundred heads poking out to gauge its progress. Frank felt scared. The train stood full on the bridge, not a word spoken, only a grinding of wheels, a creak of structure.

They were over. ‘I hope there aren't any more like that.'

Myra laughed. ‘I knew it would be all right.' She had had this feeling, that all things would be all right, ever since leaving George, but as the afternoon spun itself slowly out it seemed that the magic weave was falling away, that the train was taking her to a stage beyond both George and Frank, not out of Frank's love so much as into her own self where life would be lonelier and yet more solid, frightening, exhilarating and independent. The baby lulled her, and the journey went on and on.

Plains on either side seemed without limit, as if they were going into the hinterland of a newly born and endless continent. Sunlight spread yellow wings through sparse cloud, turning the arid countryside into a blood-irrigated desert. Mile after mile without house or horse. They cat-napped through the dusk, Frank wondering whether he hadn't, at last, encountered those vast and endless spaces dreamed about with such love and longing. He'd given up everything to find this, to find Myra, to find a new brain and absence of mind by drifting anchorless or, rather, attached to the built-in anchor of himself. But these weren't the spaces, nor these the feelings. Wherever he was going, he was some way from it yet.

When he opened his eyes and looked through the window the sun was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, but always lower down towards the horizon, until nothing could be seen and the world was confined to a train whose wheels were spinning towards Granada.

21

They walked the streets of Granada under a clear, cold, sun-blue sky, spiritually unable to leave. ‘I feel I've been here before,' she said. ‘But I never have. Not in this life, anyway. George didn't approve of the régime to let us come this far south. These smells of oranges and flowers, and snow in the air. It's strange.'

He didn't know what she meant; it was new to him, but rich in its newness. ‘The Jews and Moors lived here at one time.'

‘Maybe it was that,' she said. ‘It's such a strong feeling. It exists right inside me.'

‘It could be that,' he said. ‘I couldn't believe in that.' Such new impressions overwhelmed him still, but he was strengthened by them, no longer disorientated. Having no time to think of himself, resolution grew firmer because decisions that moved him from one place to another were less hard to make. They walked in the garden of the Generalife, between the shadows of gigantic cypresses. ‘I was with George so long,' she said, talking through the sound of spraying water, ‘that I forgot I was Jewish. But it's been coming back to me since I met you, for some reason. And this place has given it to me strongest of all.'

‘Where did your grandparents come from, then?'

‘From Bessarabia. I think that's in Russia now.'

‘Arabia,' he smiled, ‘it doesn't seem much different, does it? We're in a bit of Arabia now. When the Jews left here they went to North Africa and Turkey. Maybe some ended up in Bessarabia.'

‘Why not?' she said.

‘Myra of Bessarabia,' he said, taking her hand. ‘I never thought we'd be in Granada.'

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘What is it, love? Tell me what it is?' A group of Germans armed with guidebooks, plans, cameras and measuring tapes trod gutterally past, pinkfaced and coatless, stepping over hosepipes with exaggerated care. ‘I'm afraid,' she said, ‘and I don't know why.'

He embraced her by a tall tailored hedge: ‘I'm full of love for you. Everything will be all right. The baby will come, and we'll be happy with it.'

‘It's not even that,' she said. ‘It's not that at all. It's more than that.'

‘You'll be all right. Don't cry.'

But Myra felt a desolation of the soul, was a young girl again thinking of beautiful things, locked in an ancient world passed on to her from an exclusive state that only women can inhabit, and that men catch (if ever) in rare moments when they are happy. It was a sensation carried from one woman to another by some dying goddess who never quite died. To Myra it became a self-induced ivy-dream of queens and princesses in whom the beauty of physical mating was admitted to become the finality and further beginning of childbirth. It was a world they kept unjealously because of a divine right that seemed to flower in the alleyways and upper streets of the Albaicin. A parapet had guided her eyes directly across at the blood-coloured towers of the Alhambra buttressed by great snowbanks of the Sierra Nevada – where it also flowered. This desolation went through a procession of images towards something it could never quite reach, a dream containing all the animal realities of the earth. She saw in other women her perfect counterparts infused with the orgiastic motions of which childbirth was the last great cry and connected to the delicate inborn tendernesses in herself. She felt the force of living and was glad to be alive, a positive sensation for the first time which had nothing to do with Frank. The time was close when she could live in as complete a way as she would ever know, for this was the end of her life so far, the phosphorescent deadness that would give place to a new and unique person. It pointed the rebirth towards a life that would be hers only.