Her Victory (32 page)

The struggle to stay alive generated the energy to keep going. Fighting against all hostilities created a pressure that did not allow her to contemplate such a way out. She reasoned, and became less despondent. With her free hand she wiped an eye that had become momentarily wet, and happiness at being alive caused her to squeeze the hand she was holding.

Pam woke.

‘Feeling better?'

She closed her eyes and lay back. Nothing to get up for.

‘You had a good sleep.' Judy's hand was held firm when she tried to draw it away. Her fingers opened in her anguish on seeing the mark of the wedding ring.

The room was as if shielded by grey blankets. ‘I can't see anything. Put the light on.'

Judy smiled. ‘I will if you let go of my hand.' There was an aroma of sweat and fear. He had bundled her into bed with her clothes on, but couldn't have done otherwise, being the gentleman he was. ‘You should get undressed if you're going to stay in bed. Be more comfortable.'

The light made the room dull orange rather than grey. ‘If I do I'll never get up. I've got to phone my husband.'

She'd sent a letter saying what she intended to do, so he'd hot-foot it down and drag her back to the bijou den for a kitchen leucotomy. She looked for an unposted envelope, or screw of paper. ‘Why do that?'

‘I don't know.' Nothing to hold. ‘What else is there?'

‘Did you tell anybody beforehand?'

She sat up, and turned her head slowly. ‘I must stand.'

Judy held her. ‘All right?'

The world was empty. ‘I did it without thinking. I can't trust myself.'

Judy laughed. ‘Who of us can?' She came from the window. ‘If you get some work, and mix with people, you won't do it again. There's no point running back to hubby now that the worst is over.'

‘Perhaps she does want to go back to him.' The door had opened too quietly to be heard through her talk. She was meddling dangerously, Tom thought, though considered it best not to say anything further on the matter. He expected a raging come-back, but Judy was like the weather, in that what you anticipated didn't always manifest.

‘It's up to her,' was all she said.

He was wet from the rain. ‘How are you?' he asked Pam.

‘All right.' She was morose – or she couldn't recognize him. He had seen people close to death, and she didn't look far off. But he felt an interest in her, though could ask no questions while she was still in the storm. He was repelled by what she had tried to do, and kept his thoughts clear in order not to condemn. Yet he had entered into her offence by doing what he could to save her. She had been caught by a death-dealing wave, and he had interfered with her fate by stopping it in mid-twist. On your own head be it, he told himself, but he didn't want to let her out of his sight in case another stray wave took her under.

‘I bought food,' he said. ‘After I get rid of these wet clothes why don't you both come next door and have some lunch?'

Pam felt she never wanted to eat again; and Judy said: ‘I must go out and do my own shopping.'

He stood, tense and uncertain. ‘I have a screwdriver next door, and some bigger screws. I'll fix the latch back on, that I snapped in my hurry to get in.' There was no answer. He stayed a little longer so as not to leave too abruptly. ‘Anyway, the food will be next door, if you care for it.' He expected no response, but heard Pam say, as he turned to go, that she would wash and change first.

She remembered a struggle, but couldn't recall what had happened beyond his cruelty at pulling her out of a warm sleep that ought to have lasted for ever. She had seen his face at a time too far off to remember who he was. She had been drawn from that dream by a long scalding ache. This same man had stopped her going even further back into her childhood dream. In bringing her cold skin into more contact with daylight he had crushed the dream for ever, yet wakened her at the same time.

Some force to touch was missing at the end of her fingers, and her mind raced through thoughts like a millwheel in space. Memories created even thinner air. Nothing inside or out had substance. She looked around the room in the hope of seeing some solid attachment that would tell her where she was.

She shook her head angrily, crushing back fraudulent tears till they seemed to burn her brain. The day was unlike any other, an island unto itself.

She took off her blouse and threw cold water on her face, over and over again, like an unstoppable machine. Judy was frightened that she would never stop unless her arms were pinned back, and pushed a towel roughly towards her: ‘Use this.'

Pam rubbed her face too hard for her skin to stay pale. She would erase all features. Nobody would recognize her, not even herself, no matter how clear the mirror. Having woken out of life's worst dream she did not know what part of her existence to get back to.

Judy held her till she became still, and hardly breathing, as if she had gone to sleep while on her feet. There was a tinderish heat about her, not humid and animal, but a temperature the body provided to keep her inner warmth unsullied by cold from outside.

Judy touched the back of her icy hands. The palms were hot. She stirred, but did not move, her face pressed into a compatible darkness at Judy's shoulder. She would willingly stay, but it was an impossible hiding place. To rest in it for more than a few minutes might tempt her to lie in similar places of refuge. Nothing mattered. Her arms relaxed, but hung around the large comforting shoulders and felt the strong beating of another heart, suggesting a world that would have no interest in wrecking her peace. All she hoped for was to arrange a demarcation within which she could live, surrounding a place where she could flourish and work without pain. If it wasn't possible she would be nothing more than a grain of purposeless dust in the universe.

Different feelings were taking hold of Judy at this long embrace, making her afraid of doing something which would involve them too closely with each other. Impatience and embarrassment urged her to ease Pam away, to say it was time she pulled herself together and got back to normal life. She didn't want to play mummy to a person who would become dependent and give nothing in return. She had often helped, and would do so again, but not by starting a relationship which couldn't but end in a very ragged way indeed.

Pam put on a clean blouse. ‘I must go downstairs, before I burst!'

‘You poor kid!' said Judy.

She didn't like her tone. ‘Thanks very much. I'll be all right now.'

4

He could imagine Judy saying that like every man he was only waiting for a woman to come and look after him. She was right. He was. Yet she was also wrong, because he wasn't. All his life without a woman's company for more than a few days at a time, someone to wash his shirts wasn't essential for him. And for sex, the odd affair would see him right.

He'd been to Salik's Polish delicatessen and bought cheeses, smoked fish, loaves and pastries, and picked up two bottles of Mount Carmel wine at an off-licence. There weren't enough plates, so some of the food would stay on paper. It was easy to live in London, with so many shops, pubs, launderettes and eating places, a cosy and civilized north European refuge in which you wanted for nothing provided you had paper money for it.

He tasted the wine. The fish looked good. He sat in the armchair and read his newspaper. She may not come. It was impossible to read. He stood at the window. He needed a housekeeper for Clara's flat if he was to stay there, someone to caretake the six rooms and other nooks branching therefrom. He would use it as a base to go back to, no matter where he wandered. Advertise for a competent middle-aged woman who wanted a haven and a job.

He wondered whether his soul would always be that of a sailor. With no family life during more than thirty years on board, and none before that, the sea had been his mother and the sky his father, two elements not known for their especial concern for anyone sandwiched between. To consider a room or flat as his settled home made him want to run back to the roughest elements, which would soothe him in a way nothing could on land where whoever he might live among could give that sensation of danger which he needed in order to feel alive. He watched. He walked in limbo, thinking while on the street that everyone he saw was dead. The occasional exception was a shock to the heart, and so rare that it was hard for him to believe that he would live for long in this country no matter how comfortable it might seem.

He thought of George Town harbour, and the cable railway going up the green-backed hillside of Penang Island, that dazzling and incomparable paradise on earth. From the hotel terrace at the top he saw the mainland of Malaya with its grand escarpments and jungle-covered mountains falling back layer by layer into the distance of dusk, or growing more distinct at the onset of a storm, enormous sweeps of monsoon rain darkening the livid foliage. There was a place for any man to languish in!

But there were still wilder and more remote localities, far from everywhere even in this day and age: dense forest on a mountain close by, or the bare slopes of a distant volcano, and the roar of heavy breakers beyond his window, places where typhoons, eruptions and storms were so loud and violent that he couldn't believe they weren't intending to engulf the world. There was meaning in life. But he had to taste it by the mouth and feel in every part of the skin that first plate-glass metallic fall of conjoined waterdrops when the monsoon burst over palm trees and fell in such a way that it seemed as if God had singled him out for a spectacular drowning. The weight of the sky wouldn't let him breathe. Everything smelled of water. He was cold yet not cold. He should have hated it but didn't because it was something to
feel
, an intense wash coming down with a noise that wouldn't allow a normal voice to be heard, and he felt in some perverse way that it was a protective umbrella put over him to stop worse befalling. He was awed, and that too was beneficial. Such flashes of lightning came that, though enjoying it, he didn't feel safe. He could die any moment, though the chances were remote. But he knew only too well that he was alive.

When the ship far from land tipped and tilted its way through a monsoon he also lived. But here he was, and such a life was finished. The floor didn't drop away, or even rock gently, and he stood with dry skin looking out of a window at a street under a plastic-seeming sheet of benign drizzle, wondering why the fierce bite of life had gone out of him.

Clara had died, and done no favour by leaving her money into his keeping, though he had no intention of grumbling at that. At least she had hung on till he was fifty, at which she may well have smiled to herself and known that such an inheritance could hardly ruin him.

His chronometer on the sideboard, attended to at twelve each day by Greenwich Mean Time whether at sea or ashore, had been neglected. He had let go of time by one hour. The ticking, lost in another compartment of his mind, stayed quiet, till something in his consciousness pulled it back again. Not to notice its measured marking of his and everybody else's life suggested that something vital was worrying him. It was, and through his acute irritation he wondered why he had been foolish enough to believe that she would ever care to face him again.

The universal clock could not be forced. Alterations brought by the passing of time stopped or furthered all maturing hopes. A chronometer with accurate pacing was part of a scheme devised by God, but needed the hand of a person to build and keep it going. Even in the stormiest seas, when every next moment could tip you to disaster, he had been on hand to wind the chronometer at its set hour. The regularity had been too long part of his life for him not to be annoyed at his lapse.

On his penultimate run from Central America he reflected, while winding the chronometer one day, that whenever he was back on land this was something he would always do, to remind himself of what he thought he could never bear to leave but was forced to because he'd had no say in the matter. All changes had happened whether or not he wanted them. An alteration in the weather had nothing to do with him, but he often felt himself geared to the elements in too helpless a way to bear contemplation.

He did not like what had caused this condition, though knew that no master even of the biggest ship was ever captain of his fate. A lifetime at the mercy of uncertain sea and malign sky had emphasized his addiction to order and precision, and reinforced his scepticism that his own intrinsic self had ever been responsible for changes in his life.

For the sake of well-being he should put his chronometer and sextant out of sight, throw away log books and mementoes now irrelevant. To be tidy in the past had protected himself and others but, in having forgotten to carry out his daily winding of the chronometer, even if only for an hour, he needed such qualities no more.

He had wound it, nevertheless. Face down in its gimbal ring, he turned the tipsy key gently four and three-quarter turns, and the sound of the ratchet calmed him. The odour and movement of the sea was not to be thrown off so easily. Habits die hard – if ever – in a man of fifty, but in the process of change he felt more adrift than ever, and it was with relief that he heard a faint knock at the door.

5

She sat by the table, and he poured wine. ‘I don't suppose a drop of this will hurt.'

She wore lipstick, eye shadow, face cream. That stuff on women does more harm than good, Judy had said before going out to the shops. I know, she answered, maybe it does. I feel better, though. I haven't used it for a month. She wore no bra – don't need one – a white blouse with an open beige cardigan, and a skirt. A change of clothes might give a new start in life. Anything was worth trying.

She looked at his pale face, freckles, tonsure of red hair, uneven teeth when he smiled, broad nose, well-shaped but pronounced lower lip, firm chin slightly squared: an attractive ugliness, a determined intelligence. Why him, and not somebody else?