Her Victory (56 page)

‘It had to happen, but that part of my life is finished. If I was in any doubt about it I couldn't go on living.'

The pain of her weeping doubled itself in him. Such an incident could brush anyone. He had known rather more of the world in that respect than she had, but decided that, since it was now up to him, she really had seen the last of them. ‘We'll be away by this evening. I went to the estate agent's and settled everything. We're to leave the keys with Judy.'

‘I could have paid my own account.'

‘I did it to save time. All that's left is to hump our belongings on to the pavement and load the car. It'll be like quitting a wharf we've been tied up to for too long.'

She couldn't stay, yet didn't want to go. Every move was a bad dream. She had agreed, and the idea thrilled her, but her one-time family had spoiled her with dread where before she had been optimistic. She felt unable to eliminate such gall from her soul. It was impossible to imagine the kind of freedom from them that she craved. But the gorge rose as if to vomit them out even against her will. It was a matter of time. She would not let them blight her spirit.

She padded the corners of the case with underwear and socks, and folded his uniform while he emptied the cupboards. ‘We must leave things ship-shape, though Judy said she would give a final sweep in exchange for whatever goods we won't be taking.'

He put half a dozen out-of-date Pilot Books in a box, and protected his deckwatch and sextant with newspapers. His short-wave radio was placed by the door. There was a record-player, suitcase, roll of charts, and a kitbag of oddments – the tools and toys that had gone all over the world, moved by ship, rickshaw, taxi and human back, belongings as much part of him as his own fingertips.

There was no hurry, he said. It was best that way. She still wasn't fit. He topped whisky with water and gave it her to drink. He sipped from the flask. They smoked and talked. He took off his jacket and unloaded the shopping, cutting away damp bread where the eggs had broken. He set things on the table and they sat down to eat. She felt better. The stove kept them warm. ‘I'll leave it for Judy,' he said, ‘and five gallons of paraffin in the cupboard.'

She was in pain on trying to smile. ‘With so many things she'll open a junk stall on the Portobello Road. It'll make her a pound or two.'

They cleared away the meal and finished at the sink. All his life he had moved. He still hadn't stopped. But
she
was about to begin. After such a send-off by George and his brothers it was impossible to imagine the future. She was exultant from the whisky, but fought to stay calm and not show tears. Men hated to see women in tears, she thought, though not more than she hated them in herself. She had struggled for her life, and won. Even without Tom they wouldn't have taken her. Because it was her victory she could go with him and feel safe, as much out of her own will as because she was in love. Funny sort of love. But it was all she was left with.

Neither knew where it would end, and that also made the prospect acceptable when all through her life there had either been nowhere to think of going, or a straight road on which it would be intolerable to travel. She did not feel that he would be hard to know, or that to fathom him would lead her to a lake of pitch from which there would be no escape. It did not matter whether or not she got to know him. He was not difficult to be with, so it didn't seem important. The fever of wanting to know a man in order to find out whether he loved you or not, or whether you loved him, was a sure way of destroying any love that existed, or cauterizing any regard out of which love could grow. She had learned her lesson, reflecting that it had taken her long enough – if it actually turned out that she had.

In some ways he was foreign to her, though she couldn't say exactly how or why. Didn't want to. She was also a foreigner to him, she didn't wonder, and a foreigner even to herself much of the time, which was maybe why she had been able to stay alive through much of her past existence. She hoped she would continue to, no matter what happened between them. She flattered herself, she said, in imagining that she could be a foreigner to anybody apart from herself, but no doubt she might be, at her time of life and with the foibles that had surfaced after abandoning her funny marriage. That she felt like a foreigner to all and sundry seemed the first good fact about herself and their relationship. It thinned the emotions, gave them less importance when in operation. Not being ‘made for each other' meant there were sufficient novelties of behaviour for affection to fasten on without generating painful antagonisms. Because they were not familiar by temperament and background everything had to be said before the meaning was clear, and so only those meanings were made plain that clarity considered absolutely necessary. So they could be almost uncaring, a mood in which all revelations would come, if they must, in their allotted time.

Because they felt foreign to each other she sensed that it still might be possible to love and yet keep their separate identities. Many couples who lived together for a long time took on the worst traits of the other (and in her case she blamed herself as much as George) and so could not help but enter a battlefield from which neither could get free, an inbred fight in which, the longer it went on, the more impossible it was to call a truce or separate. Two people with common frontiers should cross them with circumspection, or by invitation only.

They talked well into the afternoon, as if unwilling to leave such a haven before emptying their minds of what thoughts it had bred in them. A conversation with long silences went on till she could no longer sit up, and the walls swayed towards her.

She lay on his bed, and was immediately asleep. He pulled up a chair and sat as if to guard her, knowing that they would need the whole world's space before their spirits could be contained. He looked at her relaxed face, which seemed younger than before her experience of the morning. He would provide space, but the word, as he observed while putting her hands under the blanket so that they would not get cold, had no precise meaning except in the picture of a blue ocean and a white sky that were empty for as far as the eye could see, but about to be filled by the first star of the morning.

11

A warm spring wind from the sea ruffled the curtains. He had drawn a six-pointed star on a sheet of cartridge paper, using a red biro and a long ruler, one triangle superimposed on the other so that all six points became small triangles of equal area.

From each point he ran a green line to the centre, and pondered on the diagram. Counting the indentations between the points, twelve directions could be marked off. Aristotle was said to have suggested a circle of twelve winds. The six-pointed star was the Star of David, the
Magen David
of the Hebrews, the Jewish Star, the sign on the flag of Israel. He wore one around his neck, under his shirt, two triangles of gold within a circle. It had belonged to his mother.

A box of instruments was open on the table. The drawing fascinated him, as a Euclidean object, a geometrical conundrum, and as a religious symbol with secular properties. He wondered if it had been used in ancient times as a surveying device, a mathematical instrument and angle-measurer for designing temples or building pyramids. The six points coming out of the centre and reckoned as parts of a circle could be used in finding latitude at sea, the sixty-degree divisions conforming to the sixty-degree angle of a sextant.

Each point could be part of a timing system to mark off the segments of the day. If a cord was suspended from the middle, as a gunners' device with a protractor, and a weight attached, it could have calculated calendars. In a land survey, a complete triangulation could have been based upon it. Science as well as art was cultivated before the Flood. He had read that Josephus ascribed surveying to the Hebrews, who were said to have derived it from the Patriarch Abraham, who brought it to Egypt from Ur of the Chaldees. The Star of David was mystical, yet scientific and rational.

She only half understood what he told her. He didn't seem altogether sure himself, except for the mathematical intricacies. On a desert island, armed with the double triangle of six points, he could within a week, he said, produce an accurate map of his territory. A
Magen David
was a star, a symbol for the spirit to dwell on, a design to exercise the brain in all kinds of technical beginnings. A spaced-out baseline would begin his survey, angles subtended by a fabricated tape to get the perfect equilateral. He rolled the words over and over, wrote them and crossed them out as if he had been born recalling them, from the moment the umbilical string snapped, or on first seeing the golden
Magen David
between his mother's breasts.

With such an inheritance, who needs anything else that the world has to give? A Star of David as the basis for a navigation kit could steer you a course through the heavens or over the surface of the world, keeping clear of hell and high water. You could periodically sell your expertise to the highest and most tolerant bidder for laying out irrigation ditches or building trireme canals on which boats with burnished thrones that queens sat on floated at dawn or dusk. Or you could check the sun's zenith, calculate heights and distances, make contour maps never found four thousand years later when the first marauding Europeans opened the pyramids. Or you made Portolan charts of the oceans for mariners to steer by in their ships towards empires only now crumbling away.

Jafuda Cresques of the school of Majorcan map-makers had his observatory in Portugal for Henry the Navigator, and made the first charts of the oceans, as is common knowledge among seafarers ancient and modern. Joseph of Spain brought the Arabic numerals from India. On his Great Voyage of discovery Columbus took with him Luìs de Torres and four more bearing the Star of David in their hearts. They had prepared astronomical works and made scientific instruments for navigation, and were otherwise intimately concerned with and connected to the guiding star seen also by Columbus, who knew that without such people the Great Voyage would never have started.

Covilhão went to the land of Prester John; Abraham de Beja to India; Wolf to Bokhara; Isaacs to Zululand; Palgrave to Arabia; Vambéry to Turkestan. The race of travellers and star-followers spread far and scattered wide, others ever in their wake. Tom knew that he too had been one of them all his working life, though too ordinary to be noticed, because every ship in the middle of the ocean needing to ascertain its position to within a few hundred yards was in effect (and as far as the navigating officer was concerned) there for the first time, since in the nature of things there could not be the marks on the water of who might have been there before.

With no country of their own, the Sons of Aleph (and of every other letter of their Divine Alphabet) looked at the stars for guidance, and the stars answered with their trust. Astronomical tables of practical utility were drawn up by those without country but to whom Jerusalem was the centre of the world. Prophiat Tibbon produced the quadrant to replace the astrolabe, and Bonet de Lattes invented an astronomical ring. Herschel surveyed the heavens. Beer drew his map of the moon, and Loewy invented his elbow telescope.

The world was a pitfall but the heavens were benign and gave their knowledge to whoever observed their mystery with penetrating reason. In the beginning were the stars, and among that unaccountable number were six which, when the points were drawn together in the mind's eye, became two triangles of guided light superimposed, making the Star of David. But those six stars were never mentioned by name nor delineated as such, though they were known and indicated by some sequential cabbalistic sign in the Book of Tables. They are known yet unnamed, and no one will claim to know them, but they exist and are eternally in their places.

She caught one word in ten as he laboured among his heaps of books and charts: reading, drawing, writing, staring out of the window and pondering on some problem which, he said, seemed useless but which delighted the mind and could not therefore be futile. He constructed a frame of two triangles and covered it with letters and figures to test his ideas, fixing sights and strings, and aiming it at the moon, the sun or the first star of the evening, covering sheets of paper with calculations, or pecking at the keys of an electronic calculator till he obtained answers that either satisfied or sent him back into more hours of frenzied reckoning.

She looked up from her reading, and realized that as far as he was concerned she did not exist. Yet he was happy because no obligatory companionship was necessary, no sense of either of them feeling deprived because the other wasn't ready to vibrate with good or bad emotions at a mere glance. They were cut off from each other, and she was glad, able to sit undisturbed and be herself.

She had prayed many times for such separation. When with George, he couldn't leave her alone. Her silence robbed him of his right to exist. Silence alarmed him, but it wasn't so much the actual silence – only that from within that silence she failed to provide the emotional contact he needed in order to feel alive. As he saw it, by cutting herself off she left him to float in a torment of disconnected space, as if to punish him for something which he knew he must have done but could not remember. He implied as much when union had to be resumed over some mundane detail of running the household.

From her side, she had craved solitude, a moment's peace in which to inhabit a world where she would find no one but herself. It wasn't selfishness, much of the time not even dislike of him, simply a part of the desired tranquillity that true love should have been able to encompass, but which in their case it could not, since love of any kind hardly existed.

She realized that by occasionally severing herself from George's zone of influence she had acted like a man. He became fretful and at times nasty because her detachment had robbed him of that soothing mother-like consolation which he had grown to regard as necessary and obligatory from her. When she was out of his mental area there was no feminine succour for his masculine needs. By his insistence on permanent comfort and care he had driven her into separating from him in order to avoid what she saw as tyranny.