The Death of William Posters Read online

  Getting up to close the kitchen door and stop a slow draught eating into her legs, she heard a car coming down the lane, a deceleration as if for a final drift into the village. It pulled up outside, wheels crunching the glass of frozen snow. She wondered who could be wanting her. It didn’t have the weight of Dr Abel’s stationwagon, or a police car. Her last thought, before the iron knocker flapped like a gun, was thank God something had come to snap away her useless self-questioning mood.

  A figure stood outside: ‘Hello, Pat. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ The voice penetrated her memory, a tranquil afternoon blown away by a cold wind nosing around. Neither of them knew how to make the next move. He immediately puts me into the same old role of deciding for us both. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘come in.’

  Light dazzled him. Such unwelcoming words had, secretly, been one of his expectations. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of you to come and see me, though I don’t see why you thought it necessary.’ Such irony made him doubt his own reasons. By nature optimistic, he was easily discouraged. The greater his effort to wring success from impulse and optimism the more likely was he to back down at the first snub. When the great fire blazed, the drop of water frightened – though not for long, because optimism would eventually frog-march him back to his obligations.

  He smiled, glad that whoever she was living with was not at home. ‘I’ve been meaning to visit you for a long time. Out of curiosity, let’s say. You seem to have a nice little place. How does work go?’

  She was short of answers, except for blunt truth:. ‘All right. I bring babies into the world. Old people go out of it more comfortably than you’d imagine. I’m more use in a place like this. I feel a real person now.’

  ‘Meaning that I’m not?’

  ‘I only mean what I say. I’ve spent two years unravelling myself from that black knot we got into, so it’s no use trying to put meaning into things I didn’t even say. If you’ve satisfied your curiosity you can go.’ She was aware of speaking too quickly, of saying too much. But Frank could walk in any minute and she wanted her visitor out of it.

  ‘I didn’t come to stay. Merely to have a talk. In any case this isn’t a special trip to see you. I’ve taken three or four days off, and I’m just driving around the country. Quite without thinking, I found myself in Boston. Thought I’d call on you.’

  ‘You could have telephoned. Kevin has the number. Enquiries would have given it to you. As you can see though, I’m well. I have a house. I’m working.’

  ‘I think I could say the same.’ He recalled that the main consolation in being married to her had been the knowledge that domestic peace would mean a living death – and who wanted that?

  ‘You could,’ she said, ‘but I’m not interested in it. You’re the one who came to see me. I still can’t think why. Did you expect a better welcome than this?’ His opening gambits were being thrown back on him. No, he hadn’t hoped it would be easy, but she seemed more icy and bitter than he ever remembered. He’d give a lot to meet a woman who wasn’t as neurotic as they bloody-well come. ‘I suppose Kevin told you that I don’t live alone any more?’ she added.

  ‘He did. He gave me the idea you were living very informally, breakfast in bed and all that.’

  She laughed. ‘What a way to put it! Though I suppose there’s no other way if you think it worth mentioning at all.’ He was bewildered, but hid it, had intended reaching this point only after, say, a couple of hours’ pleasant enough reminiscence. With a good memory and clear brain available for such occasions he’d planned it on the way up – but without anticipating the possible moves that would operate against him. The image of Pat in those few and far-off hours of peace between the great storms had been unclear, unrealistic, an ideal face of his own creation based on the best of her nature. He planned, but when the test came he only reacted. In the car, planted somewhere above his rear mirror, her face had smiled, but it was unlike the flesh-and-blood Pat before him now, tired from work, face lined, altered, but alert and full of energy at the opposing force of him.

  The world, she found, was a different colour every day, and now the spectrum, usually sombre in winter, had swung to purple. The clock ticked, someone walked heavily by outside, and for one moment she thought the steps would stop at the door and Frank would enter. Keith waited for her to say something, while all she wanted was to see him walk out, hear him drive off and vanish; but she knew how hard it was to discourage him unless she stood up and told him directly to go, and if she did this it would only confirm in him that there was even more reason to stay. His tenacity scared her, and she wished Frank would come back.

  ‘Kevin sounded interested,’ he said at last, ‘affected, I might say.’

  ‘I should hope so. He’s intelligent, and fully aware of what goes on.’

  ‘But he’s only eleven. It’s up to us to give him the protection he needs. I give it to him, at any rate.’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you, after all these years, that you and I have different standards?’

  ‘But we have the same son. We ought to have some common policy for his upbringing.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she retorted, ‘but whose? Yours or mine?’

  ‘Both. Maybe we can talk about it.’ He felt the initiative on his side. ‘I didn’t come here specially for that, though. I simply took off, on impulse, and ended up here. I wanted to see you. There must be a meaning to something like that.’

  ‘Oh no there mustn’t. You’re just craving after the past.’ This stupid, irrelevant, chance-meeting (which was what he made it out to be) had too much importance because of a unifying fatigue, and even this much in common she did not like. It coloured and thickened the atmosphere, made her doubt herself when she should have been decisive and brusque enough to send him away at once.

  He lit a cigarette – the same blue packet. Wasn’t it still chic in his job to buy a case? ‘We had a rough time,’ he said, ‘when we were together. Too rough for either of us. It was perfectly natural that we split up. But it’s more than two years since those battles.’

  There was a pause, in which he felt foolish that no one was talking, and until she felt the pity of so much wasted time: ‘I’d forgotten about it. Even when I remember, it doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Maybe it’s as well,’ he said, encouraged. ‘Instead of taking up where we left off, perhaps we can start even from beyond nothing. It’s not Kevin’s future that matters, but you and I. Things would simplify if we lived together again. It would solve all our problems.’

  ‘You were always so concerned to solve problems. That’s what made half of them. When you pull out you see that there aren’t any. At least, you do after a while.’

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ he said.

  ‘That’s honest, anyway.’

  ‘I love you, have ever since we separated, even when we were together. I still don’t know why you left. We could have survived that storm.’

  ‘And gone into others,’ she said.

  ‘And weathered those also. That’s what life is. One big storm after another. You go on and on, but you can’t let your-self sink under them.’

  ‘At one time you were the one to sink. Have you forgotten? You see it all in a rosy light now, but I’ve got a sharper memory. These so-called domestic storms eat the middle out of you. They were a way of destroying you, taking up your life when you’d got no job to do. You went off to the office each day no matter what happened, but I was left at home in that dead, miserable house. You thought I should be happy in it, imagined I was unhappy because I wanted to be, because I was born like that, because I had nothing else to do. But nobody is born like that. People are made by themselves and other people. You wanted me to work for some charity or other in my spare time, something which would leave me free for you but still not get at the core of what was eating me. And now you have the nerve to ask me to go back to the same thing. You can keep your image of a storm and a ship for a new brand of tobacco, but I’m on my own
feet now, and you’ll never know how much it cost me to get here. And as for going back, I’m not that sort of person.’

  He heard her out: ‘Suppose we forget all that? I still don’t see why there can’t be some advantage in us living together again. You can do the same useful job: there’s plenty of need for you in North Kensington. I know we’ll be more tolerable to each other after all this time apart. It will have been good for both of us.’

  Every word scraped against the carefully-built edifice of her self-esteem. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘every disaster is a blessing if you’re spineless and lack imagination. But you underestimate me. I could never live with you again.’

  He lost patience in a passionate way that he thought might appeal to her by its intensity. ‘Pat, why are you so bloody cold towards me? We have a son, remember?’

  Everything he said seemed out of context, unconnected, yet from it she tried to disentangle the threats he was making in his subtle faint-hearted way. ‘I don’t even loathe you,’ she said. ‘It’s not that. I just dislike you at times when you cross my memory. Seeing you doesn’t make things any better.’

  He was encouraged by the mounting force of her attacks, though they hadn’t yet attained that pristine viciousness of the final days before their break-up. Still, he hoped that at last he might be getting somewhere. ‘Even to say that means that I affect you.’

  ‘I don’t see any use in your wanting to recreate the holy family with me at the middle of it. The family is all right for the man perhaps, but it’s no use for the woman. I refuse to be tied up in that way. Don’t think my life’s easy up here, either. It’s harder than it ever was, but funnily enough, I like it. I actually like it, because I’m more myself than I ever was, and I don’t care how many times I say it.’

  ‘Even with your boy friend living here?’

  ‘That has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Hasn’t it? But why can’t you still have this life, but with me in London? Come back, and I swear we can make a go of it. I’m not the same person as before, and you aren’t the same, either. We’ve grown out of all that frightful quarrelling that puts you off so much. It puts me off as well, but we’ll be able to manage with each other now.’

  ‘Would you be prepared to give up your job and everything else in London, and come to live with me here?’

  ‘I can’t, you know that.’

  ‘So neither can I,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? There’s no real argument against it.’

  ‘Not to you. To me there are dozens. Also I’m in love. Do you think I could live with someone without being in love? That shows how little you know me. Do you think it was because I was lonely and needed a companion?’

  It stopped him too sharply, and he recognized it as being the end. His fatigue had changed to a pallor she had never seen before in him, a whiteness at the side of the mouth, a flexing of hard veins at his temples. She couldn’t believe that her blow had been so desperate, nor that he could simulate such pain. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘and this is the person you were in bed with when Kevin went into your room one morning, having innocently made breakfast for you both?’

  ‘Why make so much fuss of that? Kevin knew us well enough by then.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’ He smiled, in spite of his loud words. She was near to tears, iron control needed to dam them back: ‘You must have been playing with that piece of blackmail all the way up. Not that I didn’t suspect. I only hoped you’d never have the vileness to use it.’

  ‘Do you think I’m a complete fool?’ he cried, standing up. ‘I mean what I say. That’s real life, that you pride yourself on leading. The real life! These are the real facts of life. Simple and hard. What you think is real life is the fool’s paradise that you’ve made for yourself up here. It never solves anything, to cut yourself off.’

  ‘Real life isn’t that,’ she said, ‘it isn’t what the world says it is, but what you feel to be inside yourself.’ He was harder, more direct than years ago. He didn’t display miles of innuendo any more before coming to the point – in order to make the storm more violent and bitter when it burst. His skill and patience had gone, and the result was ugly to her. She didn’t know how to deal with it.

  ‘You left me,’ he stated, ‘and you abandoned Kevin, so he’s in my care. He’s only been seeing you in the holidays because I allowed him to.’

  ‘You mean I take him off your hands while you go off to Majorca or wherever it is with some typist or other.’ She raised her voice: ‘And stop talking like a judge. You’ve no right to judge me, in spite of your blackmail.’

  ‘I don’t want to. But Kevin won’t come here again. You can keep your facts of life away from him.’

  They hadn’t heard Frank come in. He stood at the open door: ‘What facts of life? What’s all this?’

  11

  Even before opening the door Frank knew who it was. His reasons were vague, but he didn’t question his instinct. Two cars outside made it seem like a bloody roadhouse. He heard voices within but not what they were saying, Pat’s tone quiet and insistent though edged with hysteria, the man’s gruffer, loud, but with an odd shrill phrase chopping it – as if they’d been arguing for a long time and not yet convinced each other.

  His instinct told him it was time to go, walk off, never look back, be a hundred miles away before midnight. The husband had returned, the game was up, and the rules said blow town. All’s fair in love and war. But love that equals war ain’t love. Running away was all right for a lark: it left everybody happy because things had fallen out as they should. But times had altered, and he happened to be in love, so there was nothing to do but turn that key and push that door.

  They were facing each other across the table, tea things still on it. His unexpected entrance froze them. They looked like a brother and sister who had been talking about him. Keith’s hands rested on the table, by his cigarettes, lighter, and cold cup. Hers were on her lap, out of sight. She knew some introduction must be made, but gave Frank time to take stock of what blind emotions were knocking about the room. Her normal reserve of control had been drained, left her pale, her life now at the mercy of the bare features of her face.

  She hoped Keith would not leave and drive away. That was all she wanted a few minutes ago, but if he went now he would never let her see Kevin again. It was so possible that she felt faint from the effort of holding down her blind misery.

  Keith forced himself to glance at Frank. Having lost himself in plans and hopes, pre-occupied to the utter depth of his life, pleading to the exclusion of all else, he hadn’t foreseen this sudden appearance. Having failed, he wanted to go, but a new factor stood by the door as if it would never move or say anything, as if all of them were waiting for a bombardment to end before returning to normal life. Time passed. To Frank it seemed short because he was the first to speak: ‘Why did you come up to see Pat, then?’

  ‘A chance visit,’ Keith said, easily.

  Frank, deciding not to sit down, felt that Keith was no stranger, since Pat had told so much about him. He was often angry that he could still take so much of her, while he had kept Nancy out of it. ‘It must have been important to bring you all this way. There’s a sharp frost tonight. It’ll need careful driving.’

  Keith looked at this strong-faced broad-shouldered man still in top coat and scarf, the sort of working-class chap who, once out of housing estate and factory, lost his callouses and the final trace of discontent. He’d seen such types some time after the war at Cambridge, inmates of various colleges able to believe their intelligence but not their change of life – even in their second or third year. He looked younger than both of them at this moment, which gave Keith an undeserved feeling of superiority – somewhat mauled though by the fact that Frank had been the first to ask questions. Keith didn’t like that at all, and he liked even less the fact that he had answered that question.

  Frank waited for him to stand up: it was always for the husband to make the first move, or try to
, though the rules were shaky these days because not only had he come into the house when he should plainly have fled, but he had already spoken to the husband in a way that seemed unlikely to start a fight. He was a traveller in a strange country, and he liked travelling. ‘I’ll make some more tea,’ Pat said, ‘if there’s any talking to be done. There’s no drink in the house.’ Frank followed her into the kitchen to wash his hands: ‘What’s he come up for, then?’ – the tap flowing loudly against the bowl.

  She looked at him: ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’

  He stood with wet hands, regretting a question that only disturbed her. ‘Has he been upsetting you?’

  ‘Well, I was surprised to see him. I’ve had a difficult day, in any case.’ That didn’t explain her general air of bewilderment and shock. Hard days often left her in a good mood. He remembered she was menstruating, which certainly didn’t help. People always choose the right time to visit those they don’t like but pretend to love, he thought. ‘If he did upset you I’d flatten him.’

  She put down the teapot, face rigid, eyes burning with the force of her words: ‘If there’s any of that, there’ll never be anything between us again. I’ll be finished with you. I won’t have any of that in this house. This is for me to settle.’

  ‘All right.’ But he knew something had been said, and that she was holding it to herself, too bloody tight and haughty to put the half-weight of it onto his back. ‘I’ll be subtle. Iron won’t melt in my mouth.’

  Both men looked equally at home. Keith picked up the evening paper, scanning the front page. Pat came in with the tea. ‘Are you looking for a job?’ Frank asked, sitting down.