Her Victory (64 page)

‘I had a lovely scheme cooked up,' he said, ‘to roam the Balkans for a couple of months, then go to Greece and visit one or two of the islands. But it's got to be altered now.'

She hated being responsible for any disappointment. The land was flat, with too much haze to see the mountains which, indicated on the map, lay north and south.

‘Your earth-shaking news from last night makes that prospect seem about as exciting as a fishing trip to the Sago Sea. You can't expect me to carry on as if it didn't mean anything.'

‘So what do we do?'

‘Go to a nice quiet town on the coast for a few days,' he said, ‘then wend our way north. It'll be holiday enough.'

He didn't have to remind her that they were in Italy, but the word had a loving and homely sound when he did. She wanted to get to a town so that she would really know where they were, instead of being encased in a metal shell and taken somewhere not exactly against her will but in a direction which up to a few hours ago had not seemed possible. She fastened her safety belt, and saw the faint smile. He wanted to please her. His will had changed to hers. He thinks that at forty I'm more fragile than a young woman, which is ridiculous. Being the first time for him made him young again, and apprehensive. She laughed to herself, felt fewer years pressing her down. She wanted to please him. ‘We don't need to run back so soon. I feel fine. There's plenty of time before I have to take care.'

He stared at the road, intent on keeping them alive but locked in his purpose of covering distance by nightfall. She saw, side-glancing, that he was not only fearful of the road but was fleeing as if before demons, on his way to a place where he thought safety lay. Demons would be waiting for him there also. They had driven him out and would beckon him in, the same with her. She read it clearly in his features, that they were leaving a point on the earth like refugees, and felt that her own soul was built into the same escape plan. She was as much the power of their progress to wherever it was to be, as he was the mechanism of hers. They were set on a combined course towards what both had wanted since the beginning, yet neither knew what it was. She touched his wrist gently.

‘There'll be plenty of time for roaming, afterwards,' he said. ‘We can always put the baby in the car and take off, spend a few years on the road before he or she has to go to school.'

She was blocking his escape route, turning him back by her revelation. If they stayed somewhere long enough she would take a specimen of her water and get her pregnancy confirmed. She was sure, but wanted to be certain. She wanted it to be female, yet was glad there was no way of knowing. It was sufficient for the moment that she had caused him to change plans. Perhaps he was happy that her condition had made him want to, because he was now part of her more than he could ever have been before. If he had not said anything, she would have gone wherever he wanted, though the pride that would insist may have been no more than supine behaviour. Something more important than either of them tampered with his decisions. She resented the interference for her own sake, but not for his. For him it was the appearance of a storm in mid-ocean, an inconvenience to be circumvented. He would alter course. He knew a routine for dealing with it. That part of his temperament she could never affect – just as there was much about her that he couldn't change.

She could have told him she was pregnant before leaving England, but such an early switchback of his aims wouldn't have had the significance of the alteration he was making now. She had left telling him, to see whether or not he would do so. It had to mean something, and he had passed the test – her test. Maybe he was scorching with resentment, and she would never know how hard the decision had been for him. But his happiness was obvious. She didn't know whether to be glad that he wasn't angry. Now that she had told him, and he wasn't, had she really wanted him to cosset her as a fragile girl? She could only accept that for the moment she had. The tune would be called by her, or not at all, though perhaps it was just as well that the situation was bigger than either of them.

South of Milan the speedometer read nearly a hundred. The southern hills were showing themselves out of the haze. ‘We'll take off in a bit.' But she wasn't afraid.

‘Over those mountains we'll get to the Mediterranean.' He slowed down. ‘There's a long way to go yet.'

He parked in a picnic place under trees, and topped up the radiator with cool water from a tap. He refilled the supply in his container, and washed dead insects from the windscreen. The air was humid. Birds and butterflies flitted over a meadow. A few families at benches ate an early lunch. Tom took off tie and jacket, and rolled his sleeves. There was food she had bought in Arras: rye bread, pâté, hard-boiled eggs, salt and spring onions from an icebag, and some congealed cake. He took a small stove from the car, boiled water and made tea, putting lemon and sugar-lumps into two mugs.

She laughed. ‘You should have brought a table and chairs.'

It was close to midday. ‘I could take a sight on the sun with the sextant.'

‘Have fun. Where are we?'

‘You tell me.'

‘Italy.' Her mouth was full. ‘Wonderful!'

He nodded. ‘No place like it – to hear such news. It didn't really sink in in France.'

Steam from the tea smelled of citrus, and mingled with her sweat. She leaned against the car, void of speculation. The sky was blue. She undid two buttons of her blouse. The intense heat cut her feeling of exhaustion. She wanted to describe everything aloud in case it vanished, but to pull words from her mind would be a negation of life in this idyllic place.

A British car, luggage topped with plastic ripped by the slipstream, was full of kids and coloured buckets. He passed all but the sportiest vehicles. At such a rate it was possible to see the fuel gauge sliding to zero. The straight road crossed the plain of Lombardy, a hundred kilometres flowing while she leaned her head and dozed. She awoke, startled but not alarmed at her dream of rainy streets. They stopped for petrol, black coffee, and to use the toilet.

The wide road curved into the hills. Milky white ribs of cloud looked like the pale x-ray plates of a ghost. There were grey outcrops, and chestnut trees near farmhouses. He drove to make distance, and to get away from the pull of the place he had set out from – before having to get back to it, as if circling the calm exterior of the storm while gathering courage to steer into the middle. She also felt that life wasn't like this, and she was sure that he also knew. He looked haggard about the eyes, with a tenseness at the mouth she had not noticed before, though when driving by cliff-like menacing lorries his features softened.

‘I dreamed of your aunt last night,' she said.

‘What about?'

‘I don't know. I just saw her. She was trying to tell me something. She was screaming, and upset. So was I. A bit frightened, I think. She was in the flat, in the bedroom. Funnily enough, I couldn't tell what she was saying, but it was more than just trying to get me out of the place.'

‘I suppose one could figure it out,' he said, ‘though I'd rather forget it.'

‘So would I. It was only a dream. I'd forgotten it until now.' She searched for a Kleenex to wipe her face. ‘After a night on the train, and all day on the road, I'm going to need a bath.'

‘We'll find a hotel on the coast.' He pushed in the cigarette lighter at the dashboard. ‘I've pencilled places on the map where there'll be accommodation.'

The road descended towards the signposted smoke of Genoa. ‘I can smell the sea already.' He was joyful at the prospect.

It was easier to love a happy man. He must have been marking the map last night while I was asleep, using a pen-torch in his upper bunk to change routes from those he had intended. In the cardboard box she had seen tourist pamphlets on Greece and Israel.

He tuned in to her thoughts. ‘“Thalassa” is the only Greek word I know. Hard to forget, if you've read the
Anabasis
. One of the masters made us read Xenophon's piece at school, but I've read it again since. I actually liked it, even though I was forced into it.'

She felt ignorant. ‘I don't know it.'

‘There are so many books.'

But she would read.

He told the ‘March of the Ten Thousand', of the struggle of Xenophon and his Greeks through the snows of Anatolia towards the benign sea that would take them home, a tale that whittled away the kilometres till the pale Mediterranean came into view for them also. Travelling was still his life. Being on the move meant nothing to him. He was taking care of everything as if it signified little to her. But it did. She was out of her element, a child again, wanting to be away from the car and in control of her own movements. It was hard to know what you wanted till you hadn't got it, especially when you didn't know whether or not you already had what you wanted. Equally hard to know what you wanted when you were in love, and even harder to know anything at all when you were pregnant. But what she wanted was what she had, and what she had was more than she'd ever had in her life, and because she had all she wanted at the moment she didn't doubt that there was far more to come – as much as she ever would want, in fact. A disturbing lack of doubt told her it might never be enough, whatever it was, and made her wonder at this stage if everyone had to settle for far less than they perceived it was possible to have.

Behind the city he turned west towards blue sky along the coast. They threaded tunnels and caught vivid sights of the sea. All windows were opened. She felt more carefree now that palm trees and villas were visible, and small villages that looked good to live in.

‘There are at least three hotels in town.' They drove off the motorway. ‘And it's only four o'clock. Plenty of time for a stroll along the seafront.'

8

She sat in the car, and hoped there would be a room. Singlestoreyed cottages were angled between eucalyptus trees and set on different slopes. The larger building had a café and restaurant. People were sitting in shirtsleeves and cotton dresses at outside tables. He tapped on the window, holding a key. ‘Plenty of rooms.'

He drove around the complicated lane system to their allotted dwelling. There were two beds and a wardrobe, desk, chairs and a telephone, as well as a bathroom. She liked its space and cleanliness. He washed his shirt at the sink, then put his underwear into the water, while she stood under the cool shower, a pleasure all the greater for the change she was going through. Impossible to think about getting back to the place they had left.

She ran a finger through her pubic hair, and let fingers stroke her belly. She had needed to pull him from death's cul-de-sac before seeing a way out of her own. In that sense she was connected to him for ever, and he with her, whether or not they stayed as man and wife – whatever that might mean. For who knew whether she would want to remain with him or he with her? To expect comfort from the future was no more than a pathetic cry for help. You could only live in the present, and trust that the way would be shown.

She soaped herself, and held her face to the downrushing water. With blinds drawn, they lay on their separate beds. When she awoke, two hours had gone. Her oblivion had been without dreams, or any indication of having been asleep except that she felt weak, and hardly rested.

He sat reading. ‘I couldn't lose consciousness. The road was still rolling along under my eyelids.'

She stood by his side. ‘I haven't looked at the Bible for a long time.'

‘I thought I'd bring something to read, for those empty moments when one needs solace. It's a book that reinforces my moral fibre. There isn't much left either in me or the rest of the world. It's on the wane, but we must get it back. My spirit is solidified by this, for instance:

‘“Give counsel, execute justice;

Make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday;

Hide the outcasts; betray not the fugitive.”

‘At one time I would have needed a sledgehammer to get such precepts into my senses. Every word is like bread:

‘“And I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

And joy in my people;

And the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her,

Nor the voice of the crying.”'

What caused her anxiety at hearing him quote such poems? She felt either fear or joy at the change she had seen in him, at the alterations in herself. Nothing in between. There was no anchor, no stillness or fixity for either of them. But they belonged nowhere if not to each other. He was someone come to life whom she had known but had forgotten, yet still did not know who he was. Was that the same with everyone – for the rest of their lives, no matter how long they were together? The mystery that could never be solved was to be the cement of their unity. The insoluble joined them more firmly than the certain or commonplace. He was going away from her, yet would never get so far that they would lose each other, all the same.

He sat by her on the bed. ‘You looked beautiful when you were sleeping, but even more so now.'

She put an arm over his shoulder, thinking they would make love. It didn't matter. She was disembodied, feeling affection more than passion. The air from outside smelled of flowers and pine needles. Their window looked up a hillside. He put on a grey light-weight suit, with shirt and tie, and she wore a cardigan over her dress because the air seemed cool.

They drank a bottle of Valpolicella before they began the dish of ravioli. ‘I wonder what happened to Aubrey?'

He broke the powdery bread. ‘Aubrey?'

She reminded him. ‘Your drinking companion of last night.'

‘Seems years ago. I expect he's in Rome by now.'

‘Would you like to be roaming around on your own?'

Was he, sailor or not, out of his depth and unable to admit that he wanted to end the jaunt? She was elated, then depressed, within a space in which no time passed. Either that, or it went backwards. Her spirit fled. It came back – always. Did he want to turn around, but his mouth wouldn't say so? To plan travel in the isolation of his aunt's flat was a pleasant way to pass a few evenings. All experience said so. But how about the reality of being with her? And her reality of being with him? Feeling lost, she knew that he wondered, too, and held his hand. It was getting dark. A few couples were dancing to the music.