Her Victory (50 page)

He stroked her hair.

No words could explain her feeling of ease and helplessness. Did you have to go through the stage of being with no clothes on before getting to know someone, and was making love also part of it? She knew him, yet did not, but felt there was no need to consider it. She wanted to slide back into bed and dream, but drew the eiderdown around her and stood up.

‘We'll go out for a meal,' he said. ‘I know a place where they serve food upstairs. It's nice and casual.'

In the street a wind blew the umbrella inside out, and he fought in a doorway to right it, while she stood in the rain and laughed. He held part with his foot and worked systematically to get the circle of spokes into place, but by the time he had gone fully around, the ribs shook themselves out again. He tried to do it more quickly, but the spokes still would not jump back into a firm circumference, so she held half the circle with both hands spread wide, using all her force, and they passed it round and round to each other till the umbrella was usable again. People looked at them as if they were mad. Swinging the umbrella high, rain clattered against the cloth, then he held her arm as they walked.

The room was smoky and warm, with a piercing smell of cooking that either made your mouth water, she thought, or drove you back into the street. She noticed him hesitate at the threshold, as if unsure who should go in first. Perhaps the only places where he had ever felt secure were the orphanage, a ship at sea, and his aunt's flat.

The prolonged love-making in strange surroundings had sharpened her perceptions as if she were at the beginning of a cold or the flu. She was glad to sit down. The candle flame shook whenever the door opened. She took a napkin from the wine glass. ‘I feel as if I've been rolled down an endless slope in a barrel. My thighs ache, among other things.'

He touched her wrist. ‘I'm not surprised. We must have been three of four times around the world!'

The waitress gave them a folded card to look at. Pam didn't know him. He didn't own the flat at all, but had obtained the key while whoever it belonged to was on holiday. And was he really a retired naval man? Judy Ellerker had confirmed it, though perhaps he had deceived her as well, and the story from his day-long sorting out of the lumber room had also been fabricated. The documents matched his tale, though they could have been assimilated from somebody else's. Maybe he was a man out of prison or back from abroad who had perfected his tricks for living off the land. He brought people into life again, and went on his way. His brown eyes looked dully at some far-off scene, until he sensed her attention. Then he came back with such immediacy she felt nothing but tenderness. She knew so little of the world that anything could be true, though in this case it wasn't, and she decided not to retail such thoughts but say what she would like to eat.

He asked the waitress what champagne they had, and Pam let them sort the matter out. ‘It gets around the clubs of Nottingham,' she said, noting what he chose.

‘I once took a case of it on board, to bring back for my aunt, but the captain sniffed 'em out, so Clara only saw one bottle. She opened it the first night, took a sip, gave me a swallow, then poured the whole lot down the sink. It was counterfeit, Clara said. She was right. It was worse than vinegar. God knows what it was. But the captain quaffed off eleven bottles without even a murmur. Perhaps it just didn't travel.'

The door opened, and he looked towards the sound. He flinched before turning back to his soup, having seen that raven-dark hair, parted at the middle and smoothed tightly back, in some other place. The skin of her cheeks was fresh, like that of a doll still in bloom, and he remembered her from the time of his aunt's death, and the hour they had made love in the bed-and-breakfast place near the station. He hoped she hadn't seen him, but cursed a large mirror along the wall which made the room seem endless and damned all privacy. He lifted his glass to Pam's. ‘Here's to us.'

Beryl came close, and he felt a tap at the shoulder.

‘Hello, sailor! A different one every night, is it?'

He stood up. Pam noticed his eyes harden. The woman was good-looking, but brazen. Tom indicated whom he supposed to be her boy-friend standing some yards away: ‘Would you both like to join us?'

‘No fear,' she laughed.

‘Boy-friend?'

‘Who else?'

He touched Pam's elbow. ‘Let me introduce you.'

Pam said: ‘Hello!'

‘He's good,' Beryl said. ‘Aren't you, sailor?'

Maybe she's drunk, he thought. ‘Am I?'

‘But I must go.' She nodded. Her boy-friend looked left out of things. ‘He's not so bad, either, sailor. So long!'

Tom sat down.

He must know scores of girls. ‘Someone you met?'

‘She was the nurse on duty at the hospital when Clara died. Is the fish all right?'

She felt stupid at having her mood spoiled so easily. He sensed the weather-change, but there was nothing to do except regret the barometric pressure and curse his luck. ‘The sky's turned foul for no good reason.'

She nodded, then drank. ‘The sun's still out as far as I'm concerned.'

He called himself a fool. He had swaggered off such a close call more than once, but now felt clumsy and vulnerable, unable to speak for a while – till he noticed a newspaper on an empty seat saying there would be a rail strike as from midnight. ‘We won't get back to town tomorrow unless we take a bus, and I don't feel like fighting for a seat. It's inconvenient.'

‘Strikes usually are,' she said.

‘My pay for the first ten years was enough to bring anybody out on strike, yet it wasn't even thought of. I'd have felt ashamed creeping off a ship and saying I'll do no work till I get more money. But times have changed. Your work is your weapon. Everyone can go on strike now. It's bad for the country, of course, but who cares about that? It's like chipping bits of wood from a raft in the middle of the sea. Sooner or later you sink and become food for the fishes. It's a pity there's nothing anyone can do, because it's rather a good raft, and I've grown to like it, having done some of the work to keep it afloat.'

She thought of George's brothers, and surprised herself by saying: ‘I've known people who found it hard enough to live on their money. But even if they have enough not to go short of anything, they want more – on the principle that they can never have enough. If others have it, they must have it. They see the easier lives of others on the telly, so you can hardly blame them.'

He dissected his fish. ‘It's more than envy. It's restlessness, and a craving for change without any spiritual values. People who could set an example don't care to any more. They've lost their nerve, perhaps.'

‘People want to be happy,' she said, ‘and they're persuaded it costs money.'

He was as close to bitterness as she had so far seen him. ‘But happiness never comes. They're poor, duped fools. When you have it, you don't want it. Often you don't even notice if you do have it. That's probably the best sort. But as soon as you think to want it, it goes out of the window if you already have it, and becomes unattainable if you don't. It's a tricky kind of balance, all in all.'

‘I'm happy now,' she said.

He held her hand. ‘So am I. But it doesn't come by pursuing it. Nor by going on strike for more money.'

She had to agree, though after a while asked: ‘Do you want to go back to the world of your grandfather?'

‘Not really. It only led to the one we've got now. But I do feel there are values one ought to hold on to. When I wake in the morning I thank God I'm alive. Every birthday I'm grateful for another year of life. I was brought up to believe that if you didn't work you didn't deserve to eat. When the sea was calm and empty there was time to mull on things. You were blessed with two minds, one concerned for the safety and progress of the ship, and the other taken over by thoughts of what was going on in the world, but rarely with what turmoil might lie within yourself. It's very effective to contemplate the state of the world from the bridge of a well-run ship. But things can happen at sea, all the same, and you live with the thought that your life is not your own, being divided between the company you work for and the sea itself. Your life only belongs to you when you set foot ashore. Not even then, for if there's one thing certain it is that our life doesn't belong to us alone. Get to thinking that it does, and someone else then assumes he has a right to take it over. Self-assertion comes before slavery. If every man believes in God, or at least has infinite respect for a humane and unassailable system of ethics, then no other man has the moral power to subjugate him.'

It was more agreeable when he talked than to be caught in the singular deadness that dominated his silence. The evening was pleasant now that the aura of the nurse's disturbance had gone. But she wondered what was the beginning and end of all he was saying, for didn't he belong to himself, rather than to something like God? She certainly did, and especially so in the last couple of months when she had moved from a lifetime of torment after having been attached body and much of her soul to somebody else. Even in the most enduring union you had to be your own property first, before any satisfaction was to be got out of allowing part of you to belong to someone else, she told him during dessert.

‘Without wanting to seem unduly religious,' he said, ‘we all belong to the unknown, which I call God. By believing in God we are given the authority for our equality with regard to each other. That's all I mean.'

She didn't like the word ‘equality'. ‘Everyone is different, not equal. If they were equal you wouldn't have been an officer.'

He smiled. ‘They may not be equal in everyday life, but they are in the sight of God. It's vital for everyone to think so, for the proper running of society. Under God and under the law we are equal, and that's as it should be, otherwise you get the barbarism of dictatorship, as in Russia, where people can't even leave the damned place until their spirit's broken, and mostly not even then. Law on its own can be tyrannical, but if you have God then His law, which we must assume to be good and beneficial for humanity, helps to keep human laws civilized. It hasn't always worked out, but it's still the only hope we have. And in the best countries it has more or less done so.'

He was embarrassed. ‘I'm talking too much. Sailors are known for it, once they get ashore, though Jonah talked on board ship till he got himself thrown into the sea, and then talked in the whale's belly till God got him spouted out again. Not that he was a sailor.' He tapped the empty bottle. ‘There's time for another drop.'

She put her hand on his arm. ‘I'll get tight if I have any more. Let's go.'

He signalled for the bill.

‘I'll pay half,' she said.

‘You bought the food yesterday.'

She looked astonished. ‘Yesterday?'

He laughed. ‘Yes – yesterday.'

He was right.

‘We ought not to get too particular about such things.' He picked up the chit. ‘I shan't go broke over a few quid.'

At the seafront he looked up the Pointers to Polaris. There was no more rain. The wind was backing north-easterly. ‘We're in for a change to dry and cold, so the train drivers will stay snug in their beds with toast and tea, and who can blame them, unless it's those poor chaps waiting on platforms for non-existent transport?'

They walked a mile towards Shoreham, then turned back. Lights twinkled in the Channel. ‘Do you wish you were on one?'

He held her hand. Why did everyone assume so? ‘I see no point in thinking about the past. Life on shore makes my existence out there seem emptiness itself. After what I learned about my family I suppose I'm still the same person who worked his whole life at sea, but the connection feels slender at the moment, walking along the front with you. I expect the two lives will merge sooner or later, but it's amazing to think I lived so long as someone I wasn't.'

‘Maybe you didn't,' she said.

‘I agree. It's hard to be final about it. But if I'd been brought up in that kind of family I imagine I'd have gone to a prep school as a boarder, and then to a public school as a boarder. Being passably bright, and with a bit of luck, I'd have made some sort of university, and become an engineer like Uncle John. By the time I was fifty my mother and Clara would have died, and I'd be where I am now, living in the flat with the money they'd left. On the other hand I might have been an idler, and broken my mother's heart – or some such thing.'

‘I don't think you would,' she said. ‘And yet – you might have done!'

He stood by the rail. Light reflected from behind, as breakers thumped and grated at the shingle. ‘I still think it's all a dream.'

She wanted to hold him and kiss him. ‘Is it a bad one, though?'

Where was the calm impassive sailor she had thought him to be? He looked at her in the half light. ‘While I was in the kitchen this afternoon I remembered an incident from just after the war that I'd not thought of until today. It was the sort of thing that might happen to any sailor in a foreign port. My ship had docked in the East River in New York, and I had a day to spare so walked into town. I got something to eat in a Chinese place, then went up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. I'd been there before, so knew my way. Passing a Moorish-looking synagogue near 43rd Street I saw a tall old man with a long beard, wearing a black broad-brimmed hat. He was shouting a greeting to somebody behind, as I thought, but he came up to me, and babbled in a language I didn't know from Adam. He held my hand and called me by a name, and seemed to be asking questions, his eyes glittering with smiles, and I thought what the hell does this silly old bugger want? What's he trying to tell me? I was young and all stuffy-English, and wanted to push by him and carry on walking, but he was so amiable and familiar that I saw he had taken me for someone else, though it never occurred to me to wonder who it would be. I only wanted to make the most of my day in New York. He realized he'd made a mistake, so waved his hands in the air, almost pushed
me
out of the way, and walked on. Bumping into someone in a town of millions of people happens all the time, but what I didn't know then, yet know now, was that that wise old man, even in his understandable error, saw more closely into me than anyone else. And when I suddenly recalled the incident his face was so vivid and close that I could have touched him. I was about to say something, but realized I didn't know his language. I thought it a pity that we couldn't understand each other.'