Pasmore Page 3

  He still loved Kay, he was sure. Although unable to touch her, or to communicate with her, now he came to think of it, in any way whatsoever, he knew the moment she was out of the house his thoughts would turn to her, wondering where she was, trying to imagine what she was doing; so that if, say, she were a little late in returning he immediately began to worry, growing, as the time passed, almost distracted, looking out of windows, going to the door, even to the street corner, to anticipate her arrival. His anxiety was so near the surface it could do nothing but reassure him.

  Yet plainly something was wrong. On certain mornings he would waken beside her to be immediately aware of the tension, like waking to a room on fire, to flames and smoke. The whole place was alive with the vibrancy of the figure beside him. His body ached. If he had given in and touched her he was sure he would have cried out, in rage, in grief, in some peculiar and wholly unimaginable torment. He couldn’t understand it. He was oppressed.

  Towards the end of the summer they went away on holiday. They took the children to the coast. The land was flat, the beach broad and empty. It was almost the beginning of October.

  He went out a great deal on his own, walking on the sands. It was possible to walk a mile or two miles in either direction without meeting a soul. It was cold and quiet, in the evenings very misty, the sun setting down the coast where the land and the sea met.

  The children too were quiet, subdued, suddenly aware, now they were on their own, of a peculiar inertia. He would come across them in odd corners of the hotel crying, unable to give any explanation. He talked to Kay, yet very little came out of it. He resented having to acknowledge her at all.

  One day a dog appeared on the beach. He threw a stick for it into the sea, watching the dog flounder through the shallow waves and eventually, dutifully, bring it back.

  It appeared the next day, and the next, walking behind him as he strolled along the beach, away from the hotel, towards the low headland which he invariably set as his destination. He whistled to it, and even gave it a name. Occasionally, in the evenings, the owner of the hotel had to drive it from the door.

  ‘Why don’t you play with the children?’ Kay said. ‘Instead of the dog.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her.

  ‘I suppose because it makes no demands.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  There was very little now that passed between them.

  On the last night of their holiday there was a gale. Kay had already fallen asleep when he first heard it. He got up and dressed, glanced in at the children, then went down to the beach.

  The place was a howling immensity. Great, thrashing bulwarks of water streamed in with tumbling, broken crests, fanning out over the hard sand. The sea had risen, covering the beach where previously he had been walking. Banks of shingle and debris had already been flung up, mounds of weed, fractured beams and stacks of large, whitish stone. The air shuddered to the movement of the waves, visible far out, the white spume glowing, and flooding in from the darkness.

  He gazed out towards the sea, shaken, as if some segment of his life had been dislodged and was floating off, like an island. He felt like calling out, screaming. He pulled up his collar and went back to the hotel.

  For some time he sat behind the shaking windows, staring out at the darkness and the sea.

  The following morning the storm had subsided. At the station the dog appeared on the platform: it had followed the taxi the short distance from the hotel. He sat watching it from inside the carriage. It stood looking up, barking, wagging its tail.

  The train started. One of the children leaned out of the window. Beyond the child’s head Pasmore glimpsed the sea: a barrier of fir trees beyond which the long breakers rolled smoothly in to the beach.

  After a while downland rose on either side and a little later the train pulled into a town.

  The Autumn term began. Coles, considerably tanned from his life in the open air, treated him with the same coolness. He tried to examine what had happened between them but could see nothing to justify his friend’s aloofness. He looked round at the children, at Kay, at the house which, in the past, he had spent so much of his time renovating and repairing, and wondered what it was in all this that was somehow misshapen. He felt a kind of fury gaining momentum inside him, yet at what he couldn’t be sure.

  One night Kay woke him from his sleep.

  She was leaning over him, one arm on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

  He waited, uncertain.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  Without waiting to be reassured she released him and turned over on her side.

  A few nights later she woke him again. It happened more frequently. On each occasion she said nothing, merely nudging his back or shaking his shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her.

  ‘You were talking,’ she said.

  Yet, a few nights later, he heard the sound himself. It was a kind of moaning, a whimpered sound, like an animal caught in a trap. He struggled to wake, assuming it was one of the children. His mouth was open; tears streamed from his eyes.

  Kay had mounded the blankets round her head.

  The following morning, aware of some new mood, she asked him what had happened. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He watched her intently. ‘Something’s the matter. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘To do with me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It must be.’

  After a while he said, ‘Yes. I think it is.’

  That evening, when he came home and the children had gone to bed, he said, ‘I think it’s better, you know, that I leave you.’

  She scarcely raised her head.

  ‘If only for a while,’ he told her.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know how to explain it.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘I think it’s better.’

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not what I want,’ he said. ‘I just feel I haven’t any choice.’

  Later that night she said, ‘Why don’t you talk about it if I’m to blame?’

  He had never seen her so distressed. The fear it aroused only drove him on.

  ‘There’s nothing more to say,’ he told her.

  She watched him with a kind of horror. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘How can it suddenly be like this if it’s been good and we’ve been happy so long?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said.

  She shook her head, crying.

  ‘Haven’t you any feeling left for me at all?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘You’d better go.’

  And yet, looking round for a room came as something of a shock, and not merely the price – for he certainly couldn’t afford to run another establishment – but the whole world of living in single rooms and flats to which he was suddenly exposed: tiny garrets, rooms at the tops of small hotels, rooms in houses which had long forgotten the meaning of life, of family life, as he knew it. It was like lifting up floorboards and finding nothing but ruin: the self-containment, the cramming into a single space of all the utensils necessary for one person’s existence; a fire, a basin, a cooker, a bed, a chair; it was worse than prison for it pretended to some sort of freedom. It was a kind of hell.

  He found, as he had begun to suspect, that there was no going back: he had lived in such rooms as a student. Neither, it seemed, was there any going forward. He didn’t know what to do. He no longer knew what he felt. He saw nothing but confusion. He turned hi
s attention increasingly on Kay.

  He began to watch her like an executioner; cold, practical, a role thrust upon him out of nowhere. He watched her for faults that might reassure him, certain physical defects, animosity, hatred, contempt. All he saw, however, was her bewilderment. Like him, she didn’t know what to do nor what to feel because she didn’t know what had happened. Here was a decent home, a respectable marriage, broken in two for no reason at all.

  ‘The house, decorating it, everything,’ he said, ‘was just to hide the rot. Blind us to it.’

  Yet he had felt so happy and pleased restoring the house: even now he tended to look round at it with a certain nostalgia for faults that might be corrected.

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ she said. ‘Anything’s better than this.’ It was this threat he held over her, hoping she might crumble.

  ‘When I find a room I will,’ he told her as though the suitability of such a room, when it was found, was important to them both.

  Yet he had given up searching. He still glanced at the accommodation board in the college, but never followed up the addresses.

  ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him again.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious enough?’ He grew wild at his helplessness. ‘Whatever there was has vanished.’

  ‘Does it go as easily as that?’

  ‘It comes as easily. It goes as easily. There’s no need to go looking for precedents.’

  ‘And that makes everything else futile as well?’

  ‘You don’t believe it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’ She refused to cry.

  ‘It’s because you don’t want to.’

  ‘No. I don’t,’ she told him.

  And because he waited and hung around, demanding that she crumble, her hopes began to rise. It was dreadful. He was locked in on every side.

  Even Coles was affected. His look, almost imperceptibly, had grown into one of condolence, those suspended feelings with which one watches a fatal illness, helpless oneself, a little deranged by the futility: the look of someone who, even had they wished it, could think of nothing to do or say.

  His helplessness turned to fury. The entire house shrank in gloom. In order to justify his situation he began to devour the children. No sooner was he in the house than the tyranny began.

  The sensation of inertia mounted, the opposite to hysteria, some considerable distance from resignation, an indefinable, raging immobility imposed, he could not help feeling, not from within but without. His life seemed cancelled out by a series of endless contradictions. He loved Kay, yet he couldn’t bear to be near her. He loved his children, yet their existence numbed him to the bone.

  Three

  He shared a course of evening lectures with Coles and Abercrombie. It had, as its general title, ‘Portraits from the Past’: his own contributions were drawn from the Commonwealth, Coles’s from the Restoration, Abercrombie’s from the Industrial Revolution. Their audiences were comprised of elderly men, middle-aged women, several youths and a group of nuns.

  One evening his attention had been caught by a face smiling across at him from the bank of listening heads, a look almost of ridicule if not abuse as if it had found in what he was saying, or in the manner in which it was expressed, something absurd if not grotesque.

  The face was that of a woman in her late thirties, a vague, rather anonymous figure sitting high up in the theatre, to one side of the audience.

  The following week he noticed her arrival. Her look was cold and austere, almost frightening. She wore a belted coat; her head was bare. She had sharp and very clear features.

  On other evenings, quite fortuitously, he would catch her eye. He learned to recognize her looks. ‘This man is a fool’, ‘This woman likewise’, were conveyed by a slight pulling down of the corner of her mouth. A raised brow indicated some form of appreciation, a fixed smile some sort of disfavour. A rather tense expression, her eyes glazed and wide open, indicated, if not boredom, at least a certain disbelief. A turning away of the head, glancing down, came whenever some point had been recognized, or she were pleased. Over everything hung an incredible aloofness.

  One day he met her in the college. He was crossing the yard from the wing of the college when he saw her walking away from the office towards a large car parked in the centre of the area where as a rule no cars were allowed at all.

  A chauffeur was arguing with the beadle, a tall, red-faced man in a tall hat and a purple, gold-brocaded suit.

  ‘Is this a friend of yours, Mr Pasmore?’ the beadle said when he tried to intervene.

  ‘It is, yes,’ he said, glancing at the chauffeur. He too was in uniform, virtually anonymous, however, but for the shiny neb of his cap.

  ‘The parking of vehicles, sir,’ he said, ‘isn’t allowed in this part of the quad.’

  ‘Quad’ was said with a certain affectation: more usually it was referred to as the yard.

  ‘It won’t happen again, Jim,’ he said.

  ‘Harry,’ the beadle said and walked slowly away, pulling on his gloves.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as if this incident alone had brought him back to mind. She looked up at him, then at the buildings.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she said. She shook her head.

  She was dressed in a dark blue coat.

  Its collar ran out directly from under her dark hair and was fastened by a single button at her throat. The darkness and sobriety seemed habitual, like someone in mourning. She had no hat.

  ‘You’ve caught me, I’m afraid, in the midst of changing courses.’

  She held up several leaflets in her gloved hand.

  From a nearby window several students had begun to whistle, not at him, he suspected, nor at her, but at the idea of a chauffeured limousine in the precincts of the college.

  ‘You wouldn’t recommend them?’ she said.

  ‘Well.’ He maintained a proprietorial air, glancing at the window.

  ‘What would you recommend?’ she said.

  ‘For popularity, or interest?’

  ‘Both.’

  She looked back at him directly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably nothing you could get in this place.’

  She examined him a moment longer then turned to the car. The rear door was already open. ‘Well, thank you again,’ she said, ‘for interceding with the beadle.’

  ‘Any time,’ he said and stepped away.

  The door was closed. For a moment he stood gazing in at her.

  Then the car slid away.

  It scarcely made a sound. It negotiated the ranks of parked family saloons and tiny student roadsters and turned, past the beadle’s lodge, into the busy street outside.

  One evening he saw her emerging from the college building. Behind her walked three nuns, their cowls glistening in the lamplight. A slow procession of people trailed across the yard to the gates. At first he assumed she had seen him: she crossed directly towards him only to pause by a small car and open the door.

  She glanced up at the sound of his steps on the gravel.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He sounded immensely cheerful, some genial guardian of the place she couldn’t help disturbing. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Come for a drink.’

  He saw the look of surprise, if not annoyance, then the hesitation: it was contained in a single movement. She opened the door of the car a little further and threw in several books. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Is it far?’

  He shook his head. ‘Just to the corner.’

  She began to walk off then as if no invitation had been given. Her heels dragged slightly in the gravel.

  ‘How are
the lectures?’ he asked her. He had to walk quickly to catch her up.

  ‘Not very interesting.’

  ‘What were you hoping for?’ he said.

  ‘Oh . . .’ She shrugged, glancing up as they reached the street. He indicated the way and, as they crossed over, wondered whether he might take her arm.

  There was little traffic.

  ‘You can’t expect a great deal of enlightenment,’ he said, ‘for thirty pence a term.’

  ‘The fee’s a pound,’ she said with no expression at all.

  The bar was almost empty.

  She went to a table and sat down.

  As he carried the drinks back he glanced up at her directly.

  She was gazing abstractly before her. Her eyes were set in a slight frown. As he set the glasses down she glanced round at the bar.

  ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She nodded, took her drink, sipped it then put it down.

  A moment later she picked it up again and finished it completely.

  ‘Let me get you another,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  She caught the barman’s eye and signalled him over. There was a certain briskness about her now. She gave the order with an upward, open, half-seductive look, as quickly retracted as it was presented, her eyes momentarily alight.

  He indicated the college. ‘Perhaps you’re not cut out for this kind of life.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘perhaps not.’ And a moment later added, ‘I don’t know. You can’t be sure.’

  She opened her handbag, a small, sling-like case, and took out a cigarette. ‘Would you like one?’