The Complete Stories (47 page)

He could move among these familiar things and feel easy. But when Fran was here the course he followed, the line he clung to, was determined by her. He liked the way she led him without knowing it, the form she gave to his turning this way and that, and how she held him while herself moving free.

She came to the edge of a group where Jonathon, his new girl leaning on his shoulder and pushing segments of sliced apple between her perfect teeth, was listening to a story Audley's cousin, Jack Wild, was telling. Jack Wild was a judge.

Most of the group had heard the story before and were waiting, carefully preparing their faces, for the punchline. Catching her eye, Jonathon gave her one of his bachelor winks.

They had a compact, she and Jonathon. They steered clear of each other on these family occasions, but meeting as they sometimes did on neutral ground, at openings or at one of the places in town where they liked to eat, could be sociable, even affectionate, for twenty minutes or so, teasing, reliving the times before Clem, before the wars, when they had been like brother and sister, best mates. He wasn't hostile to her or sternly unforgiving, like Rupe and Di.

She winked back, and saw with satisfaction that the girl had seen it. A little crease appeared between her perfect brows.

A moment later she had moved to another group and was half listening, half inattentively looking about, when she caught the eye of someone she had never seen before, a boy—man—who was lounging against the wall and observing her over the rim of his glass.

She looked down, then away, and almost immediately he came up to her.

He was called Cedric Pohl and rather pedantically, a bit too sure of himself she thought, spelled it out for her: P-O-H-L. He already knew
who she was. Oh yes, she thought, I'll bet you do! He was an admirer of Audley's, but his time with the clan had been in one of her periods away. He had been away himself. He was just back from the States.

She listened, looking into her glass, wondering why he had picked her out and searching for something she could hold against him, and settled at last on his expensive haircut. Her mouth made a line of silent mockery.

Because, his gathered attention said, the powerful energy he was directing at her—because you looked so lost standing like that. Alone and with your eyes going everywhere.

He was attracted, she saw, by her desperation. It attracted people. Men, that is. They felt the need to relieve her of it. To bring her home, as only they could, to the land of deep content. She had been through all this before.

She lifted her chin in sceptical defiance, but had already caught the note of vibrancy, of quickening engagement in his voice that stirred something in her. Expectancy. Of the new, the possible. Hope, hope. And why not? Again, the excitement and mystery of a new man.

Moments later, she was outside, taking breaths of the clear night air. On the grass below the new deck, some young people, children mostly, were dancing. A single high-powered bulb cast its brightness upwards into the night, but so short a distance that it only made you aware how much further there was to go. The stars were so close in the clear night that she felt the coolness of them on her skin.

She had moved out here to get away from the feeling, suddenly, that too much might be happening too fast. Glass in hand, she looked down at the dancers.

Ned was there. So was Jen, along with three or four of their cousins, one of them a little lad of no more than five or six, Rupe and Di's youngest. They were moving barefoot to the ghetto-blaster's tatty disco, looking so comically serious as they rotated their hips and rolled their shoulders in a sexiness that was all imitation—of sinuosity in the girls, of swagger in even the tiniest boys—that she wanted to laugh.

Jen glanced up and waved. Fran raised her hand to wave back and was suddenly a little girl again at the lonely fence-rails, waving at a passing train.

She had always been an outsider here; in the clan, among these people who believed so deeply in their own rightness and goodwill. They
had meant to pass those excellent qualities on to her, having them, they believed, in their gift. But for some reason she was resistant and had remained, even after her marriage, one of the hangers-on, one of those girls in lumpish skirts and T-shirts (though in fact she had never worn clothes like that, even at nineteen) who'd got hooked on the Tylers, not just on whichever one of the boys had first brought them in but on Aud-ley's soft attentions, Madge's soups, the privilege of being allowed to do the drying-up after a meal, the illusion of belonging, however briefly, to the world of rare affinities and stern, unfettered views they represented. Girls, but young men too, odd, lonely, clever young people in search of their real family, were caught and spent years, their whole lives sometimes, waiting to be recognised at last as one of them.

She had told herself from the beginning that she could resist them, that she would not, in either sense, be taken in.

In the early days, on visits like this, she had spent half her time behind locked doors, sitting on the lowered lavatory seat or cross-legged on her bed, filling page after page of a Spirex notebook with evidence against them: the terrible food they ate, their tribal arrogance and exclusivity, the jokes, everything they stood for—all the things she had railed against in grim-jawed silence when she was forced to sit among them and which, as soon as she was alone, she let out in her flowing, copybook hand in reports so wild in their comedy that she had to stuff her fist into her mouth so that they would not hear, gathered in solemn session out there, her outrageous laughter, and come bursting in to expose her as God's spy among them. At last, in an attempt to rid herself of all memory of her humiliations and secret triumphs, she had torn up every page of those notebooks and flushed them down the loo in a hotel in Singapore, on her way to Italy and a new life.

Remembering it now, she was tempted to laugh and free herself a second time, and was startled by Audley's appearance, out of nowhere it might have been, right beside her.

“Let me get you something,” he said very softly, relieving her of her glass. Setting his sorrowful eyes upon her he gave her one of those looks that said: We know, don't we? You and I.

Do we? she asked herself, and felt, once again, the old wish to succumb, then the old repulsion and the rising in her of a still unextin-guished anger.

These cryptic utterances were a habit with him, part of his armoury
of teasing enticements and withdrawals. They were intended, she had decided long ago, in their suggestion of a special intimacy, to puzzle, but also to intimidate.

“You don't understand him,” Clem would tell her; "you're being unfair.” But the truth was, there was something phony in these tremendous statements. A challenge perhaps for you to call his bluff and unmask him. Crooked jokes.

He paused now and, after a silence that was calculated, she thought, to the last heartbeat, went off bearing her glass.

Once again she felt the need to escape. I'll find Angie, she thought. She'll get me out of this. The last thing she wanted now was to get caught in an exchange of soul-talk with Audley

She saw Angie standing alone in a corner, in a dream as usual, wearing that dark, faraway look that kept people off. How beautiful she is, Fran thought.

She was in black—an old-fashioned dress that might have belonged to her mother, with long sleeves and a high neck that emphasized her tallness. Fran was about to push between shoulders towards her when she felt a hand at her skirt. It was Tommy Molloy's wife, Ellie.

“Hi, Fran,” she said. “You lookin’ good.”

“Hi, El,” Fran said, and, settling on the form beside her, stretched out her legs and sat a moment looking at her shoes.

“Wasser matter?” the older woman asked, but humourously, not to presume. She was Tommy's second wife, a shy, flat-voiced woman. “You in the dumps too?”

“No,” Fran said. “Not really.”

In fact, she added to herself, not at all. I'm holding myself still, that's all, so that it won't happen too quickly. So that I won't go spinning too fast into whatever it is that may be—just may be, beginning.

She let these thoughts sweep over her to the point where, suddenly ashamed of her self-absorption, she drew back. “What about you, El?” she asked. “Why are you in the dumps?”

“Oh, I dunno. Things. You know. It gets yer down.”

Fran looked at her, smiled weakly, and really did want to know, but Ellie of course would not tell. Not just out of pride, but because she did not believe that Fran, even if her interest was genuine and not just the usual politeness, would understand.

I would, Fran wanted to say. Honestly, I would. Try me! But Ellie only smiled back and looked away.

Fran knew Ellie from the days before Audley's retirement, when, from the Camp, which was less than a mile away, she had kept an eye on the house and a key for visitors. Sitting beside her now, Fran felt a weight of darkness descend that for once had nothing to do with herself.

Occasionally, driving out to collect the keys, she had had a cup of tea in Ellie's kitchen, had sat at the rickety table telling herself, in a self-conscious way: I'm having a cup of tea in the house of a black person.

What she felt now, with a kind of queasiness, was how slight and self-dramatising her own turmoils were, how she exaggerated all her feelings, took offence, got angry, wept too easily, and all about what?

“See you, El,” she said, very lightly touching the woman's hand. She pushed through to where Angie stood.

“Listen,” she said, "can we get out of here? I'm being pursued.”

Angie looked interested. “Who by?”

“You know who,” she said. “He's got that look. He keeps—hovering.” She frowned. This was only half the truth.

Angie laughed. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go down to the beach.”

When Audley returned to the deck, a moment later, Fran was nowhere to be found. He was disappointed. There were things he wanted to ask—things he wanted to say to her.

He set the glass of wine on the rails, an offering, and sat on a chair beside it.

He would have liked to consult her about one or two things. About Clem. About his own life. About Death: would she know anything about that? About love as well, carnal love. Which he thought sometimes he had failed to experience or understand.

Absent-mindedly, he took the glass he had brought for her— forbidden, of course—and sipped, then sipped again. Just as well, he thought, that Madge wasn't around!

6

From the headland above, the sea was flat moonlight all the way to the horizon, but down in the cove among the rocks, almost below sea-level, it rose up white out of the close dark, heaped itself in the narrow opening, then came at them with a rush. Fran leapt back at first, up the shelving sand. “I don't want to get wet!” She had to yell against the sea as well as get out of the way of it. But when she saw how Angie just let the light wash in around her ankles, then higher, darkening all the lower part of her skirt, she laughed and gave in, but did tuck her dress up. It was grey silk and came to her calves. She did not want it spoiled.

They walked together, Angie half a head taller, along the wet beach, their heels leaving phosphorescent prints, and laughed, talked, regaled one another with stories.

It was a secret place down here. With the sea on one side and the cliffs on the other, you were walled in, but the clouds were so high tonight and the air so good in your lungs that you didn't feel its narrowness, only a deep privacy.

“Do you know this Cedric What's-his-name?” Fran asked after a time. “Pohl—Cedric Pohl. Isn't that a hoot?”

She disguised the spurt of excitement, of danger she felt at saying the name twice over. “He's a good-looking boy, isn't he?”

“He isn't a boy,” Angie said. “He's thirty-three.”

“He asked if he could drive back with me.”

“I thought you were staying.”

“No. That was a mistake. I can't stay.”

They walked on in silence.

“Actually,” Angie said at last, "he's a bit of a shit.”

“Who is?”

“Your Cedric Pohl.”

“He isn't mine,” Fran said, but it exhilarated her to be speaking of him in these terms.

“So,” she said when a decent interval had elapsed, "what do you know about him? He's married, I suppose.”

“Was.”

“Well, that's nothing against him.”

“She left him and took the kids. He was two-timing her.”

Fran gave a little laugh, then thought better of it. “Well,” she said, "I haven't committed myself. He can go back with the Bergs.”

They came round the edge of the knoll and once again the sea was before them.

A slope, low dunes held together by pigface and spiky grass, led down to the beach. On any other occasion they would have hauled up their skirts at this point and sprinted, but the beach was already occupied. There was a party down there round a leaping fire. They made a face at one another, lifted their skirts like little girls preparing to pee in the open (was that what gave the moment an air of the deliciously forbidden and set them giggling?) and sat plump down in the cool sand to spy.

The fire had been built in the most prodigal way, a great unsteady pyramid of flames. A man with a sleeping bag round his shoulders was tending it, occasionally tossing on a branch but otherwise simply contemplating it, watching the sparks fly up and the nest of heat at its centre breathe and glow. Something in his actions suggested a trancelike meditation, as if the pyre had drawn his mind out of him and he were living now as the fire did, subdued to its being but also feeding his and the fire's needs. Watching him you too felt subdued yet invigorated, taken out of yourself into its overwhelming presence.

They sat with their arms round their knees, unspeaking, and the silence between them deepened. Drawn in by the slow gestures of the man as he tossed branch after branch on to the pyre—and, like him, by the pulse of the fire itself, which was responding in waves to the breeze that came in from the sea, and which they felt on the hairs of their arms—they might have stepped out of time entirely.