The Death of William Posters (7 page)

A sip of tea set him talking, relieved that his mouth liked the heat of the liquid. Maybe I'm coming back to life. A pan on the fire was frying bacon for a row of breadslices, and after a day's gardening the smell of it was pleasant to Harry: ‘Of course I do think about the future. Even at my age. I suppose you're too young to bother with it,' he grinned.

‘You're wrong. I'm full of it, the future, it's on my mind all the time. Maybe it's because I don't know that there's going to be any future. You remember that last crisis? Planes were going over day and night and I used to watch their vapour trails from the factory roof – all loaded to the gills with hydrogen bombs ready to go off any minute towards Russia. I felt my nerve going as I saw what might come – a complete deathfire burning everybody. But I'm strong, too bloody strong, and I just went back to my machine. “What's the use?” I thought to myself. But I wondered why everybody was dead at a time when they should be alive. And I thought: maybe it's because everybody's talking about it on the telly and reading all about it in the papers, and while this goes on they think it's a game and can't happen. You don't have a bleeding future while you've got the telly on, and that's a fact. I feel I'll go looney though if I don't get on the move. I'd like to walk ten miles every day for ten years. I feel as if I'm being strangled. This country's too little for me – you can walk to any coast in a week – a bit of eagle-crap dropped out of the sky. I look at all the people round me who have boxed their future up in the telly, and it makes me sicker than that whisky I slung down. The wide open spaces would frighten any dead bastard who didn't like other people. That's what the telly does anyway, teaches you to despise your fellow man. There's nothing left to believe in in this country, nothing left, not a thing.'

‘Careful,' Harry said. ‘That's because you've got nothing to believe in yourself.'

‘You may be right. I'll have to find it then. There's nothing in this country that can help me do it and that's a fact. There's a spirit of rottenness and tightness in it.'

‘You can't condemn a whole country.'

‘I don't. I never wanted a country to believe in, either. I'm out of a factory. A machine will do me. I was just talking about the feeling. I feel like an ant on a gramophone record that can't get off.' He was sitting up, legs spread along the floor, having eaten his way through a bacon sandwich and drunk the mug of tea. Harry had said little, let him rave on, let the fire in his eyes burn undiminished, glowing as if he'd put back a bottle of paraffin instead of whisky. A hard wind kept up a continual bumping against the hut, as if a huge dog running blind across the gardens stumbled at the hut it could never learn to see: ‘You can talk, but the world will go its own way.'

‘As long as I go mine. That's all I feel fit for now.' He felt good for even less, but couldn't admit it to Harry: head full of stones, legs dead, body paralysed and yet to be woken up from, as if the whisky had killed him, stopped his heart so that he had actually wandered around in the black limitless emptiness of unearthly death in the hour before Harry found him; travelled among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks, hands and shoulders that, thanks to the bacon and blind talk, and after so long, were getting blood through them again.

Harry spread more slices in the pan. ‘It's all right you blabbing about England being rotten, but it's better than some places I could name, for all its faults.'

‘That don't say it can't be better though. It won't last much longer.'

He laughed, and turned the bacon over. ‘It'll last me out.'

‘Enjoy it then, while you can.'

‘I'm not enjoying it. I'm too bloody busy living to let things get my goat the way you do.'

‘There's some as can do both,' Frank reminded him.

‘And there's some as can't help but do both,' Harry said, ‘and delight in it' – turning the rashers over for a final crispness. The hut air was close and heavy with breathsteam, fagsmoke and the top-heavy odour of burning fat, a total blend suggesting warmth and protection from the outside world. It was comfortable, even though Frank's enduring prostration on the hard boards wore his bones away and ached into his muscles. It was inside, away from the vile attack of problems, and here the only problem Was in talk, and to catch into talk the numerous problematic thoughts that came into his head – before they spun away and lost themselves maybe in the sort of protected atmosphere he'd stumbled into, where no real problem could get at any other problem. His head dizzied at such spinning arrows. He wanted to get up and go outside, lean against the hut, push and strain until the whole ricketty fabric, Harry included, fell into a heap. But he wasn't even strong enough for that after so much drink. I'm waking up in a way I've never wakened up before; or maybe the whisky's scorched the jungle from my brain and left only a few steel bolts and rods that I can find my way through at last. Unless it'll only feel like that until the last drop of whisky's all pissed out and I get into my old leaf-bag skin again.

He reached for another sandwich, while Harry set the kettle on the primus in a self-indulgent excuse to keep the blue flame comforting the vitals of the hut. ‘Death means nothing to me,' Frank said to him, ‘because my future has been taken away. Yet I can't live without a future, Harry. There's got to be something, but when the whole world can go up in five minutes, what is there? There's not even a chance of crawling back into the swamps and living off fish and snakes. There's nothing at all, because the future doesn't mean anything. But to me it's got to. I've got to rip something out of it. So am I supposed to make a future out of this world that's already taken it away? People are, better off without a future, tamer, docile. No, I've got to figure one out for myself, which means I'm on my own, even when I don't want to be.'

He ate, and relaxed. It felt like a truce in life – a white handkerchief slowly ripping in the outside wind. Harry often came here and had this truce with himself, yet he was the one who at work said life was a long continuous battle from cunt to coffin. The wind jumped, caught the hut beam end on, shook but didn't budge it. I don't want to go out into that wind. It's dark outside, and cold. I want to stay where the bacon's frying and the lamp's lit. That wind can never bash the hut flat, but it might crash me down if I go out into it. But what's the use of talking? My mind's made up to go out into it whether I go out into it or not.

He shut the back door quietly so as not to wake Pat, felt like an island, drifting away from the continent of his life, almost as if he'd been pushed off by it like some lifeboat no longer needed. The twenty-seven years of it, three times nine, seemed to be receding from the isolated point at which he found himself. He felt more cut-off from life than even when walking the lonely hedgebound roads an hour before dusk. It was a weird feeling, limboed in some Lincolnshire cottage, feet on the table and drinking tea, radio piping softly.

He had to leave, yet without knowing why, as if there were slow-moving springs in his legs over which he had relinquished control, months ago, before he had even thought about blowing up the bridges of his life. He stood to re-set his pack, wrote on a note-pad: ‘Dear Pat, thanks for everything, Frank.' She'd had quite a life compared to his: fiancé drowned, married life to an advertising nob, nursing on and off, and God knows what else. Mine's been tame, stuck in one place, factory, house, pub, same pals, brands of ale, glorying in a pushbike and then a car, dull when you think of some people. With all her books and records she's a better educated person, and they're the people who move and live exciting lives. Things happen to you, the more you know, the more you think.

Rain had stopped brewing itself into the derelict garden. The brimming waterbutt became still, reflecting the sky growing lighter above the hillock, and clouds as if ready to get a move on at last. He walked along the path, smelling the fresh damp air, soddened grass and the distant whiff of rotting tree bark; sedge underfoot was clean and heavy after the night of saturation. Wind jumped the trees, flicked the outer edge of emptying twigs left and right. In Nottingham the streets would be on the move, main roads flooding well, yet there was a sense of movement around this silent garden which he was beginning to understand.

He stepped back into the kitchen, meaning to get his pack and go. Pat stood by the table, having glanced at his scrawled note. She wore a long dark-blue dressing-gown, her face pale from sleep, hair falling loose. His entrance made her jump: ‘I thought you were already off' – not meaning to sound so brusque.

She was more relaxed, lines on her face, a smile less bright, less stern and sure of herself than she seemed last night. Straight out of sleep, a recent battleground of dreams, she wasn't yet accustomed to daytime and the presence of this man she had given shelter to. He made her feel as if she was in a strange place, a home not her own that she had woken up in out of a dream. Her senses were overdrawn, exposed, isolated from what surrounded her. She wanted him to vanish, then to stay. There was something pleasurable in the power facing her, so that she distrusted it but could not retreat. Some people, he thought, get up after a night's sleep; other people recover from it, and you can see it on their faces – as it was on hers. He stood close: ‘Not yet. I made myself comfortable for breakfast.'

His hands were on her elbows, moved up her back. ‘Stop it,' she said. ‘What are you doing?'

The answer was a massive rockface, a cauterization of all social feeling, a force that no will or protest could stop. He pulled her to him, face against the side of her neck. ‘This' – kissing her warm smooth skin, feeling her body slowly pressing. Her head drew back, eyes closed. ‘No, leave me, for God's sake.'

Her lips were hard, opening so that her teeth were against his, and neither could speak. She forced herself away, saying anything that would preserve her from him until the right moment; whenever that would be. ‘Not now. Stay though, if you like. I have to dress and go to the stores in the village.'

He sat in the parlour reading a book to the background of the Clarinet Concerto and a coal fire scorching his ankles, finding it pleasant the way she took the fact of their morning kisses so coolly, being accustomed to this as a time of snap and quarrel, a canyon separating you from the woman you'd just been funny with. But she acted as if they'd done nothing, or as if they'd been courting a year already. Nevertheless Pat found it strange the way he seemed at home so soon, took to a book and Mozart as if he'd been familiar with both all his life. Maybe this was what he'd craved since leaving his wife: a new home, though he'd never admit it. ‘I don't know what I'll do with myself while you're shopping,' he joked. ‘I can't wait till you get back.'

‘Read a book,' she said, busy with a shopping list. ‘Put a record on.'

And he hardly noticed her return: ‘What are you reading?'

He looked at the cover:
‘The Naked Lunch
. I thought it was a dirty book, with the word naked in the title.'

‘I can't tell when you're being serious,' she said.

‘What do you mean?' Indignant tone confusing her even more, though she didn't show it. He was many moves ahead in being familiar with her, and she envied his uncomplicated social ease when she didn't resent it. ‘Where did you get this sort of book?'

‘In Paris, last year.'

‘You've been to Paris?'

‘You sound impressed. Only on holiday.'

‘I'd like to travel one day. I can tell it's a good book though from the writing. I hope they banned it. It'll make the bloke who wrote it a lot of money. I reckon they should ban every book that comes out so that more people would read.'

She laughed, taking off her coat. ‘Would you like coffee?'

‘Aye, one for the road,' standing up to kiss her.

‘Careful,' she said. ‘You'll get me drummed out of the village. I'm supposed to be a pillar of the community: irreproachable, but invisible as long as I'm alone.'

‘Let's go upstairs then,' he said, ‘so that we won't be seen. It's lucky there is an upstairs. If there's two things in the world I can't stand it's twin beds and bungalows. If somebody left me a bungalow in their will I'd put a double bed on the roof and saw a hole in the ceiling, so that we could go upstairs when we wanted it.' His hands roamed at her waist and hips, and any moment he expected a swingback from her – as he might have got from Nancy even after years of marriage. But she turned by the top step, forced his arms around her; ‘I love it when you do that.'

‘I'm not shy,' he said, unable to recognize her unassailable self-possession of last night.

Neither was she; undressing, she asked if he had anything: ‘You know, precautions and all that.' He'd never seen a woman get stripped so quickly, yet without hurrying, in a casual and graceful way. It was all off before he could get a good look in and enjoy it – no fumbling with hooks and buttons that crazed him well before glimpsing the real thing. Having regarded it as inevitable, and lacking the patience not to make it so, it was partly shyness that made her undress so quickly. Now that she mentioned it, he hadn't got any: ‘I started out with a gross, but somebody picked my pocket in a pub the other night. Everywhere was shut yesterday.'

‘I'll cope then,' she said. What's the use being a nurse, he thought, if she can't? The room was white-washed, brilliant, bare pictureless walls showing the flesh dazzle of her body plain before him. The curtains were closed and electric light on, so that it might have been two in the morning, and this seemed like the limit of sloth to him, real sin compared to the fact that he was about to make love to someone a complete stranger now that she was naked. She seemed taller, with long legs and well-shaped thighs, a tapering waist not noticed when clothed. There were faint stretch marks on her stomach from having the baby all those years ago, but her muscles were flat and the navel distinct, while her breasts were small and round, purple-ringed at the nipples. His hands went over them, shaking at the soft velvet touch as if he'd never made love before. Her arms pressed around his neck. I'll shoot my bolt before I get there if I go on like this, so out of practice, and nervous as if I was fourteen.