The German Numbers Woman Page 19

  At lunch he said to Laura: ‘When I was young my parents used to take me to the Lincolnshire coast for holidays. Well, they did once or twice. A time or two we went to Llandudno, but mostly to Skegness. I had a vision of Lincolnshire just now while I was sitting at the radio, a place called Boston. I don’t know why it came to me, but I’d like to have a sniff at the old place.’

  ‘Funny you should think of your boyhood.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Maybe I’m getting old.’

  ‘We both are, if you think about it.’ He had turned her down point blank at the mention of a holiday that morning, and now he was back on the subject, though in as courteous a fashion as he could manage. She would like to know what lay behind his change of mind, if anything did. Things often flashed into his consciousness, and into hers as well. Hardly a day went by without a glancing return of her horrible powerlessness under the sweating rage of the man she had trusted, who had ‘interfered’ with her, and done what she still could not put the right word to. She used to think that every miscreant was somehow redeemable, but the older she got, and the more her torment grew rather than lessened, the more she believed that some people were damned even beyond the grave.

  ‘We could go there, perhaps in three weeks’ time,’ he said. ‘And stay a few days. Won’t cost much, if we do it by car, and take a midweek bargain break.’

  She wondered why now, and why the excitement in his voice. It wasn’t something he had picked up on the radio, or heard on the street, since he hadn’t even gone into town from the bottom of the steps, yet the insistence was too strong to have shot out of the past as he claimed. Nor was he merely agreeing to her suggestion that they take a holiday, and leaving her to say where they should go. In any case there was nothing wrong with the idea, they had the time, and could afford it. Paris was the last place, and Malvern before that, but now he stipulated Lincolnshire, and she was always glad to go along with him, to improve the life of darkness and boredom he fought so well. ‘Yes, I think I’d like that. It’ll be a pleasant break.’

  He touched her hand. ‘Everything good in my life depends on you.’ But would it be so wonderful? The obstacles to getting close to Judy were like sheets of black cloth. They would surround him, zone on zone spreading out and impossible to break through, yet there was no problem in motoring to Boston, lodging there, and walking around, and even if he didn’t find her he would be happy at being within a mile of her whereabouts.

  ‘I’ll look Boston up on the map,’ she said. ‘I expect it’ll take most of the day. I’ve never been that way, so I shall enjoy it.’

  ‘We’ll go through Cambridge and King’s Lynn. Should take about five hours, unless we stop off in Cambridge for tea.’

  She marvelled at how thoroughly he had absorbed the geography of the country before his injury. He was never so happy as when they were planning a trip, though there was something unusual about this one. Adding the word fateful as well, she told herself not to be silly.

  Excited at the prospect of an adventure, he tapped out his letter to Richard: ‘All I want, all I can have, is to hear her voice unframed by a monsoon of atmospherics. I may not be able to talk to her, but it might enhance the platonic acquaintance if I get in any way close. And perhaps I’ll end up with some idea as to what she looks like.’

  He ran the tape back and started again, trusting no one to guess what he was planning, even regretted mentioning Judy and her lover in a previous letter, surprised again by his competent recourse to subterfuge. In a normal unblind life this is what I would have been like, he told himself. Near-fatal wounds distort the character, delay development, keep one in a still pool of inertia and quietude so as to give the strength to live from day to day. Such is my way of justifying the instinct of self preservation, rather than admitting to a lack of moral force in my character. An obsession forges its own rules, or acknowledges none. A man with nothing but his private world to keep him going needn’t share thoughts with anyone else.

  The downward slide was sudden and complete and, far from damaging his morale with vain regrets, he was buoyed at being able to act even in this small way. Though realising what he was doing, his state seemed preferable to how he had felt a year ago.

  Something had to be sent. A rule of civilised life was that you always responded to a letter.

  ‘Dear Richard, I hope your trip went well. Nothing worth reporting has happened to me. It was quite otherwise, though, on the radio. I intercepted a telegram from a ship’s engineer in mid-Atlantic to his wife saying he would be coming ashore at Southampton in four days’ time, and that she was to meet him at a certain hotel. Armed with her name and address I went to the library and had someone get her number for me from the local directory. Not knowing what to do with it, I nevertheless wondered how such information would allow a blind man to play God. On the way home I sat on low wall by a telephone box. All kinds of wicked plans went through my mind. I could call the police, like an anonymous informer, and say that the man was a smuggler of heroin who should be intercepted. I could contact the wife and, posing as an old friend, tell her about her husband’s infidelities. Or I could phone the man after he had got home and pretend to be the wife’s lover. Knowledge would become power, yet if it didn’t improve my position in life it would stay as malice.

  ‘I had no wish to do any of these things. It would be the height of evil to do so, which just isn’t me, though I suppose you could say that even thinking in such a way shows evil enough. In any case it is only the evidence of an exploding mind, a minor temporary eruption that subsides and, I hope, leaves no trace.’

  He was telling a story, having received no such signal, not recently, and similar ones that had come his way in the past had vanished into the mulch of so many others. He wanted to fill the tape, put marrow into the bone of his letter, out of polite reciprocation that mutual confidence called for. It was more a missive to himself, as they all had been, which made them instructive by putting his mind into a state of fermentation. It only mattered that you knew what you did, and squashed the temptations arising out of what you thought. Truth lit a way through the labyrinth, kept you close to yourself, and stopped you doing harm to others, but the light was yours alone, whatever its fuel, illumination known only to the Almighty who, he hoped, would forgive a darkening soul suddenly finding it necessary to use whatever light came close.

  ‘All in all, things are good with me. I still listen to the German Numbers Woman, and hear the Moscow latitude and longitude merchant trading position reports with aircraft toing and froing with cargoes of poppy dust between Europe and Central Asia. Some planes have four slow engines, while others do six hundred miles an hour on three or four jets. The traffic goes on, and I suppose the world goes down, and we can only make sure good people such as us don’t go with it. From what I hear on the news, and from what Laura reads to me out of the newspapers, the prospects for the world are dire, but we have to stay part of that rock of ages which holds the swamp back, hoping there are enough of us on earth to do the job.

  ‘An item on the news said a blind man was knocked down and robbed by some lads. Such mindlessness is appalling, and my response would be, if they were caught, utterly Biblical. Maybe they were drugged up, as many are these days, but that shouldn’t alter the quality of retribution. I do not say: “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” because everybody knows very well what they do. I become less of a Christian as life goes on; if ever I was one, that is.

  ‘I’m rambling, but what’s the point of a letter to a friend if you don’t say what’s on your mind? The troubled spirit needs the solace of communication, as I’ve always known, and it’s better to be in touch rather than talk all the time to yourself, as I suppose most people have to do, blind or not. I shall be away for a week as from the thirteenth. Laura and I want to have a break, and explore the Wolds (or is it the wilds?) of Lincolnshire. Which is all I have to say for now.’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Any flowers by the roadside?’
>
  ‘Only dandelions, as far as I can see, otherwise fields, green of course, but a sheen of orange from that few seconds of sun. Pleasant, though. Rich agricultural land, by the look of it.’

  ‘Petrol fumes must put the prettier flowers off,’ he said. ‘They run for the woods.’

  ‘There aren’t any,’ she said. ‘It’s better in spring, though, on the lanes.’

  ‘Dandelions are tough. Yellow and gritty. They thrive anywhere.’ He turned his head left and right, as if seeing their dull mustard faces, not knowing they were too far off. Such gestures used to bring tears to her eyes, ‘You are a lovely soft-hearted thing,’ he would say, ‘and I adore you for it, but don’t weep for me, dearest. I’m as hard as nails.’

  ‘I’m sure you are not,’ she said, and he loved her even more for disbelieving him.

  ‘Another roundabout, a straight road now. Still flat, of course. Enormous bales of straw piled on a lorry turning right. Electrical pylons we’ve just gone under. A cabbage field to the right.’

  ‘Are we going very fast?’

  ‘Only fifty. I’m way behind that lorry in front. Another roundabout.’

  ‘We’ll call it Roundabout Land,’ he smiled.

  ‘Six miles to go,’ she said.

  ‘It feels smooth.’

  ‘A line of houses, but we aren’t there yet.’

  ‘I like flowers in the spring,’ he said. ‘Also to smell them in cottage gardens.’

  After a silence she announced: ‘Boston, three miles. And yet another roundabout coming up. I can see the church.’

  Howard breathed, and she felt his excitement at picturing it more clearly from her description than if he hadn’t last seen it as a child.

  ‘I’m slowing down.’ Tarmac was slippery after the rain so she trailed behind a lorry, clearing the windscreen continually against an oily backwash. Impossible to know why – since it seemed to have meant so much – he had waited all these years to come back. Maybe he had met a girl before getting to know her, a storybook experience of unrequited juvenile passion. Since mentioning the trip there had been an atmosphere about him, and between them, that had never been there before. She wished her intuition wasn’t so finely tuned as to feel it, but having been married so long such nuances were hard to avoid. Life with him called for the sort of unremitting care and vigilance which demanded that she live within his skin, as much as he sometimes seemed to be in hers. She had never been discontented, having had the prescence of mind in marrying him to expect the kind of existence about which she would never be able to have any regrets or make complaint. Was there a firmer prison than that?

  ‘Can you still see it?’

  ‘There’s the lorry in front,’ she said. ‘A line of lorries, in fact.’

  ‘I thought there was, from the noise.’

  ‘We’re almost there. We’ve just passed the Boston Coat of Arms by the roadside.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ He was revealing too much. ‘I mean, it’ll be good to get out of the car and stretch the legs a bit.’ Both arms would be so far apart, as if trying to get them around the earth and pull it sufficiently open to let daylight pour from the middle – a common dream, or nightmare.

  ‘Same here.’ The subterfuge was plain, but what if I’m wrong, she thought, and things are as he says, and I’m tormenting myself into a kind of madness? ‘It was a good idea, to come up here. We certainly needed a break.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so. I can feel houses.’

  ‘A sign for the town centre. Over the river now.’

  ‘Muddy?’

  ‘Not sure. I think it was.’

  ‘It always was.’

  So he had been there before. The tide was out, water retreated from steep banks. ‘We’re turning towards a bridge.’

  ‘It smells the same. Mud, tobacco, beer, smoke. Cleaner, I suppose. It takes me back more than I can say. I first came in from the west side. My father had an Austin, and I was in the back. Ten I’d be. It was a real job winding the window down. No electrics then. But I managed it. My father had a leather map case, a special uniform set of England and Wales. I remember the smell of its leather. You opened the case with a little key, and whenever my mother told him she thought we were lost my father would stop the car by the roadside – you could in those days – and get out and say: “All right, lost are we? Unlock the maps! We’ll soon find where we are!” My mother went into stitches at him sounding so pompous, but he had said it like that on purpose, so that we could laugh together. We had wonderful times in Lincolnshire. At home, she would stick out her bosom and say: “I haven’t the foggiest notion where we are. Don’t you think you’d better unlock the maps, dear?”’

  More reason to believe him. He sounded like the boy he remembered being.

  They went around the town and came into it as if entering by the back door. ‘Looks a very old fashioned place,’ she said. ‘Handsome buildings. Most beautiful town I’ve seen for a long time.’ In the early days she used to wonder how far she ought to go in praising memorable scenes, because she didn’t want to make him too depressed at being unable to see, but quite soon she recovered from such a nicety, and described everything so that he could see almost as well as she.

  She turned a corner, and there they were. ‘Well, I shan’t have to unlock the maps, because this is where we are going to stay. It looks a very pleasant place. I’ll go in and register, then come out with someone to help with the luggage.’

  ‘And I’ll wait here, just to smell the place.’ He felt people going by, found the edge of the pavement but decided not to wander, strained all the power of his ears to hear a voice that would be Judy’s, or even Carla’s. Far too early for it to happen, but even the harshest exchanges registered like the best of music.

  ‘What we’ll do,’ she said, when they were in the room, ‘is rest an hour before dinner. We usually do.’

  He stood by the window. ‘I feel rather restless. I’d like to amble around the town while it’s still light.’

  The veins on his lids were dark, as if he was under some sort of stress. But then, he always was. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. You look so tired.’

  ‘I’m not at all. It’ll be pleasant to exercise the limbs. I know the name of the hotel, so I can ask if I lose my bearings. You know my navigation is good, though.’

  Not always, in a strange town. It was all according to his mood. Malvern had been easy, either up or down, but even there he’d needed a few outings on her arm. ‘I’d better come with you.’

  He couldn’t say no. Could, but it wouldn’t do. Besides, he could walk more quickly with her, cover a bigger area, hear more voices, sense more. Luckily the rain had stopped, and people were out in the main street. ‘The air’s clean. I’ll sleep tonight.’

  ‘Would you like to see St Botolph’s? It’s famous.’

  The more places the better, but he wouldn’t know if Judy was in the church, unless she walked with a companion and he heard her talking. Maybe her voice would sound different to when on the radio from two thousand miles away. It was so with Laura who once phoned the house to say she would be home late. He’d noticed a higher tone, not apparent when close. When he’d first heard his voice on a tape recorder he couldn’t believe it was his.

  He took in the local accent on hearing two men talking outside a pub. The hotel manager had come from somewhere else, and his staff were foreigners. ‘You’ll have to explain it to me.’ Graveyard mould was rank to the nostrils. ‘I must have gone into it in the old days, because my father insisted we call at all the churches. He ticked them off from a guidebook. Whenever he stopped the car my mother liked to annoy him by saying: “Make sure you get the right one!” But I don’t recall going in here, though if you describe it the memory might come back. I don’t think anything can be forgotten.’

  He could tell no one was inside, so didn’t care to waste time, but couldn’t say so because she was already reading aloud about the wood carvings, going on to explain the tombs a
nd a chapel as they walked its light and spacious interior, with its lofty arches, which he felt went up forever into a sky she couldn’t see, towards a God he had no feeling for. Bored and impatient, he stayed close, chilled at every step. Judy would never be seen in such a place, not even to get married, which he supposed she never would.

  He wasn’t interested, and she was glad when he said: ‘We can go, if you like.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Churches are much the same.’ They walked back towards the High Street. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever had much time for them,’ which was perhaps churlish, because Laura went to church occasionally. The frying of fish and chips brought a shock at the notion that Judy might be in the queue. ‘I salivate so much at the smell I feel like getting a bundle and eating them on the street.’

  ‘We’ll be having dinner in the hotel,’ she said.

  ‘I know. But I used to do that as a youth. We’d go into a pub for half a pint, then go out to eat fish and chips. Very daring, because we weren’t eighteen. Young people don’t bother about that these days.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is more freedom about. Maybe we’ll have some for lunch tomorrow. I’ve nothing against it. We can even sit down. I saw tables inside.’

  ‘Were there many people?’

  ‘About half full.’

  ‘We’ll certainly sit, then. The purpose of being here isn’t for me to re-live my childhood and youth. I’m not that old.’ He was chagrined they couldn’t go in now, but consoled himself by hoping that Judy might come to the hotel for dinner, though she wouldn’t be staying there. Carla would have flown up from Corsica, and they would put up at her aunt’s house. Unable to tolerate the cooking, and not being welcome to, they would go out for something to eat, and because Carla was a stranger to England Judy would want her to sample the local fare. Or the food of a typical provincial hotel. There wouldn’t be much on the menu to pick from, though neither would worry about that. Even so, he would rather encounter her voice when she was on her own, though that was impossible unless she talked to herself.