The Death of William Posters (5 page)

‘The thing about this country,' he said to her, ‘is that there's nowhere to go. You just keep going round in circles. Have you read
Dr Zhivago
? No? It gives you a marvellous idea of what it's like living in a big country. Spaces thousands of miles wide and long. I'd like to be in a big country. He goes from Moscow to Siberia. When the train is held up by snow everybody gets out and digs. And when he wants to go back to Moscow, he walks. I don't know how many thousand miles it was, but he didn't say: “Oh, I can't go because the trains aren't running.” He just walks! He found out why he went on the run after he'd been on the run long enough. You know why it was? I'm just finding out myself as I talk about it: he went on the run because life was too much for him.'

‘Do you know then why you're on the run?' she smiled.

He thought, his face hard. ‘Ah! I do though, if you want to know. It's because life's too little for me.'

‘It's the same thing. He couldn't face life because it was too much. You can't face it because it's too little. Neither of you can face life.'

‘You put it neat,' he said, rueful over his shattered epigram.

‘I'm not a nurse for nothing. I've been in nursing for fifteen years, on and off. It makes you hard and wise, if you know how to take it.'

‘It'll be dark soon, so I must be on my way.'

‘I have some sherry, nothing harder, would you like a drop for the road?'

‘Yes. Are all those books yours?'

‘Mostly novels. Some I've never even glanced at. They're part of the furniture.' The cardigan sleeve was drawn up almost to the elbow, showing freckles on her fair skin. He looked directly at her eyes, and she smiled before turning. ‘What I've always wanted to do,' he said, ‘is do nothing for a year except read books, and learn something.'

‘I don't think you'd learn much, necessarily, but you might enjoy it.'

‘You're bound to learn something if you don't know anything.' He finished the sherry, sweet water, cold and griping after the tea. ‘There's a drop left,' she said, ‘so you might as well finish it. I can't see you getting drunk on it.' It was darkening outside, and she stood to switch on the light. ‘If you're not in a desperate hurry to get where you're going I have a spare room upstairs. It's only a camp bed, but you'll find it comfortable. Better than a hedgebottom, though it's up to you.'

He hesitated, as if unable to believe the offer. She laughed, open and frank about it. ‘I'm not trying to pick you up. You look as if I might be.'

‘I didn't think that. I'll stay then. When you're on the run you're always ready to stop running – like a rabbit.'

‘You seem well up on the philosophy of escape.'

‘I've never walked so long. Nor thought so much. Walking has turned out to be even more monotonous than standing at my machine at work. But the thoughts are better.' She asked why he had left his wife, but his fullblooded, earnest, airtight reasons had melted. He felt foolish trying to explain something that had taken a lifetime to overwhelm him.

She drew the curtains across: ‘I don't want your reasons if you can't give them. I've done so many things I still can't give reasons for. I had a fiancé once, when I was nineteen. He lived in Portsmouth and I lived in Guildford. I found out one day that I was pregnant, and on the same day I had a telegram from his mother to say he had been drowned.'

He was caught by the infectious remembering of her voice: ‘That was terrible. Where's the baby then?'

‘I took steps to remove it, but I got married very soon afterwards, and had a baby within a year. I could act on my decisions quickly in those days, and they always proved to be right. He's a boy of eleven now, very bright. He comes home for holidays, and to everyone here my husband is dead – though I left him in London two years ago. You'll sleep in Kevin's bed while you're here. My name's Pat Shipley, since we've been talking so long.'

He made the exchange. ‘Will you come out with me, and have a drink, or supper? We could go to Louth, or some place.'

‘Let's have no tit-for-tat, as they say around here. But I thought you were broke, walking to Sheffield?'

‘I wouldn't do this if I was – walking, and hitching lifts when I feel like it. If I'd got no money I'd stay put until I had.' She declined, and he would rather stay where he was as well, the oil stove warm and the room closed off in the vast country silence. He wondered what sort of woman she was, whether she would or wouldn't, wanted or didn't want, whether she was a posh tease taking a rest from it, or a sex-starved isolated nurse who worked so hard she'd had neither time nor opportunity in the last year and wouldn't squeal if he made a grab for her before she grabbed him. Not that she was all that much to look at. Nancy would make ten of her, but then, she was dead on him and this Pat wasn't. He looked at her through the clarity of silence: a rather round plainish face, if it weren't for her eyes and long ponytail of red hair. He'd never been with a gingernut before, but the hearsay on them was they were red hot. Not that I'll touch a hair of her red head, though I'd like to.

‘I'll fry some sausages soon. I have tomatoes and bread, eggs and bacon.'

‘It's too good of you.'

‘I feel like being good – now and again. It's my job. Haven't you seen the advertisements for nurses?'

‘Well, they are a bit daft,' he said, ‘that's true.'

‘They're more accurate than you think, though.'

‘Do you like your job?'

‘I'm too busy doing it to know.'

‘Don't you find it lonely?' He saw her as called out all hours of the day and night, coming back between long, lifesaving watches to an empty house – paraffin stove out, cupboard empty, even the cat gone from the back door, gloom and rain spattering the windows, looking around and wondering what to do now that she had a few hours off. Maybe she'd put the light on, hatch a fire in that parlour he'd glimpsed, find some tinned food and boil it, make tea, sit down to a book after letting in the cat that had found its way back to the door and mewed for her. He was right, she thought. That's my life: lonely, hardworking, yet happy if there is such a thing. ‘I'm not lonely,' she said. ‘I like being by myself. I see lots of people on my rounds.'

‘Sick people,' he said. ‘Is that enough?'

She spoke in a soft comforting way, yet he felt the edge of nervousness on it. It seemed strange to him that she was a midwife, yet it was possible to imagine her firm and soothing at critical moments of illness or childbirth. ‘Not only sick people. What I prize more than anything else in the world is independence. My father was a police inspector, and still is, I won't say where – and as a girl I was bullied and disciplined in the most awful stupid way. At school it was worse, and the first time I thought to get out of it I became a probationer nurse, out of the frying pan into the furnace. But it all led to this job, so I don't regret it now. I suppose when you know why you left your wife you'll go back to her?'

‘I'll never do that. I haven't only burned my boats and smashed my bridges, but I've burned my heart as well. There's no going back for me.'

‘You say it as calmly as if you meant it. It's frightening.'

‘Yet maybe I'm like a bloody moth near a flame, spinning around so close to Nottingham that I'll have to wrench myself further away to stop going back there to see how things are. I feel the kids pulling at me more than anything.'

‘Come on,' she said, ‘we'll see what there is to eat.' It was a spacious kitchen built onto the back of the house, and he leaned against the fridge while she cleared up. He hadn't expected to see such desolation. It wasn't as if she hadn't time to get things straight before a call came to say that Mrs Robinson's leg was bothering her again – but it was cluttered with the stains and refuse of weeks. The sink was heaped with pots – tea rims turned green on the inside of cups, porridge mouldy, knives black when she took them out of the water. It's a damp place, he thought. The smallest of the four stove burners glowed red. Hot water splashed over her words: ‘I always leave that one burning, day and night. It doesn't cost so much, and it keeps the kitchen warm. I can get coffee quickly without waiting for the stove to warm up.'

Foreseeing a long job he stored away yesterday's groceries in the larder. ‘The place is a mess,' she said. ‘But don't bother to help. This is woman's work.'

‘It's work,' he said The shelves had no room – about six boxes of various breakfast cereal took up space, some empty enough to discard. Jars of different jam, wrapped cut bread with a few stale slices left, sauces, mustards, various pastes. He'd never seen such a lavish and squalid larder, and threw half out. She didn't object: ‘You get careless, living alone. I've been meaning to clear it for days, but it's hard enough keeping my work up. Everybody seems to get ill in autumn and spring – when the seasons change.' She plugged in an electric kettle, turned on a burner of the large stove.

‘You fixed up a fine kitchen,' he said.

‘Now that it's clean. I'm still paying for it. It's not only the workers who get trapped by H.P.'

‘No.' he said, ‘but there are so many of them that it's them that keeps it going.' He made a fire in the parlour, looked around the small heavily carpeted room. Bookshelves padded every possible piece of wall, and he skimmed their titles – medical, history, books about Lincolnshire, poetry, and books on other books. How did I land in this smart educated place, he thought wryly, supping with the village midwife? He looked through a pile of records, kneeling on the floor to get at them. They were mostly chamber music, old seventy-eights, heaped around a small portable windup. ‘I like classical stuff,' he said, when she came in with the tray. ‘Beethoven, and – who was it wrote the Planets?'

‘Holst.'

‘Somebody got me Mars and Jupiter for my birthday once. I played them so loud that a bloke next door threatened to duff me if I didn't keep it quieter. I told him to try it, but he backed down and said he'd get the police. I lost interest in it though because Jupiter was what we used to sing at school and I didn't like it at all. Mars made me laugh, and I used to act the zombie to it for my kids. But it's a rotten piece because it reminded me of the Germans smashing everything at war. So one day I snapped the record and threw it out.'

She put sausages and tomatoes on his plate: ‘A pity they're only the sawdust type, but that's the worst of working in these outback villages.'

‘I don't think I know anyone,' he remarked, ‘who likes the work they do. There's always something wrong with it.' He was a quick, orderly eater, as if the food on his plate were a fortified area to be reduced by knife, fork, and mopping-up bread. His manner of speaking annoyed her, of connecting her spoken thoughts too outlandishly to some hook in his own mind. He was a passer-by she'd given shelter to, a footloose working-man from whom, at moments, she wanted the same tone of deference that she'd grown to expect from the grateful Lincolnshire villagers roundabout. ‘People who work at jobs they don't like are too stupid, unintelligent, and cowardly to break the rut they're in and get work that they would like.'

‘If everybody changed the job they didn't like I'd be at the pit face and you'd be roadsweeping.' She'd set the meal as if the idea of eating had no appeal for her, but now she ate as if hungry at the sight of someone else loading it back before her. ‘Everyone does the job they're fit for. The natural order of things works pretty well. Eat some bread and cheese.'

‘Thanks. We'll talk about that when there's a natural order of things. Most of my mates wanted an easier job, less hours, more pay, naturally. But it wasn't really work they hated, don't think that. They didn't all want to be doctors or clerks, either. Maybe they just didn't like working in oil and noise, and then going home at night to a plate of sawdust sausages and cardboard beans, and two hours at the flickerbox with advertisements telling them that those sausages and beans burning their guts are the best food in the country. I don't suppose they knew what they wanted in most cases – except maybe not to be treated like cretins.'

She went out, returned with a pot of coffee and a jug of hot milk: ‘Anything but work, that's what you mean. Strike, go slow, or work to rule, seems the order of the day. Why is it, I wonder?'

He cut bread and cheese. ‘Now you're being unjust. It was to vary the treadmill. But as well as that there was a collective wish to change the way things are run, so that they'll have the power of running things. If that happened it wouldn't be a treadmill any more. They wouldn't strike. They'd be too busy. And too interested in running it.'

‘That's being idealistic.'

‘I know it is, but not too much.'

‘I think you're speaking for yourself,' she said. ‘You're more knowing and intelligent than the rest. Not only that, but you speak of it in the past tense, I noticed.'

‘I haven't thought much about the factory since leaving it, that's true, because I suppose there's so much else to think about, soak in. But maybe what I soak in is still connected to the factory that I don't think about. It still separates me from the world in any case, the fact that I've been in one. Whether it's on my mind or not. How many of the others have you met besides me, come to think of it?'

Her face relaxed, and she laughed.

‘I thought so.'

‘What would you say if I went on strike, a nurse?'

‘I'd condemn you. You've no right to go on strike. You sell your knowledge and art, a workman sells his labour. That's the big difference. Oh, don't think I haven't thought about it. If I had a vocation I wouldn't have the right to strike, either. But you must concede it to the others. I didn't know I was so hungry – and talkative. Travelling makes me eat more, though I feel thinner than when I was at work. I don't eat as much as some people. I once knew a man who ate so much he had a blackout. Then he died. I think it was his liver. Some people never know when to stop.'