Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  “I fear I’ll have to humble myself before that happens. That won’t be easy.”

  There was a silence. Douglas was on his feet again. He was the obvious helper for Larry, he knew, but he was reluctant to offer himself. Helen would be a better choice, for she didn’t think much of marches either, she too yearned for something different. If he could find a way of involving her without Edith becoming suspicious, he would do so. They would be an effective couple, Larry and Helen.

  His will not to betray the march was strong. He thought of the loch on the days when it was flat calm, mirror for hills, trees and sunlight. It seemed to speak of the spirit in which they should march. Why get caught up with Larry, find himself required to crouch in undergrowth by the shore, worry about a craft with a small explosive device, not to mention about his son, author of the whole thing? As it was, he feared, he wouldn’t be able to march as he wanted to, in a truly steadfast spirit. Larry and Edith and Helen had seen to that.

  “Give me time to think it over,” he said, aware that his wife and son were looking at him. “I’ll let you know.”

  He had hoped to sound firmly principled, but suspected he seemed merely displeased, peevish even. He shrugged his shoulders.

  Edith’s Journal – 5

  I haven’t been able to sleep tonight because of the pain. Could it have been any worse if I hadn’t taken any pills at all? As it is, I’ve taken one more than usual. I groan into my pillow, not to disturb Douglas. Sometimes he groans too, in his sleep. Waking groans, sleeping groans. Arias of a kind, you could say.

  He’s used to me having the light on. He’s never allowed me to feel that anything I do at night out of my discomfort – reading, writing, listening to my little radio, writhing, cursing – disturbs him. Even when I wake crying from a nightmare (the pills definitely make these worse) and go on crying, from the pain, he’ll come to my bedside as though it’s a privilege.

  I’d like to wake him now, just to talk, but I won’t. I’d only wake him if it was absolutely necessary, if something absolutely had to be done for me that I couldn’t do myself. Or – yes – if his breathing was bad, shallow, irregular. That was his request after his heart attack, actually: not to be allowed to die in his sleep, without saying goodbye. To be wakened for last words. Mortus interruptus. One of his sweetest notions but one of his craziest. Nonetheless I have a stick hanging from the back of my bed to prod him with in the event. We both seem to believe in the pact even although I could no more grasp the stick and prod him with it than fly in the air.

  The window is open slightly, the curtains gently moving. There must be a slight breeze. I can smell the new wood from Larry’s hut. The night which belongs to invalids and lovers makes me very responsive to smells. I can picture the hut, proudly locked against intruders, inside it the raft, the raft of destiny. Saturday, April the thirteenth. He’s told me he can’t see beyond that day; time stops for him then. I understand perfectly, for it’s the same for me, even although I don’t yet know what I’ll be doing.

  Sometimes I think I’ll just position myself so that I can see the raft go out into the middle of the loch and explode. High up, there are many vantage points. To see it explode so close to the base – within hailing distance, mocking distance – would be great, a kind of honour, unforgettable. And maybe I can will success for him. Maybe the concentration of a soul is not in vain. Vain to think it may be. The spirit’s energies, the cleaving will.

  Still though I feel I’ll be doing my own thing. It’s on the tip of my tongue. The very verge. God is teasing me: a test of faith. Children of destiny, Larry and I. At least not dupes. Not that.

  Earlier in the night, before I took up this journal again, I lay with my right arm dangling out of the bed. I felt as if I was reaching out to Douglas, across the space between the beds, cripple to sleeper. Just sometimes, you see, the pain seems to refine my limbs, not numb them, to make them antennae. I have the sense that I can cross spaces. As if to compensate for my terrible immobility, cross spaces: I imagine it anyway and to imagine something is just about to do it. The imagination isn’t bound by space and time as this body is or this room in which it suffers.

  Tonight I felt it very powerfully, felt I was stroking Douglas’ brow, holding his hands, touching his neck, felt I was responsible for the calmness of his breathing, the health and even grandeur of his dreams. Involuntarily, so it seemed, I spoke a few words to him, his name, apologies, promises, endearments. Emollients into sleep’s darkness. Briefly all across the plain then the pain fled to the periphery. But came back almost immediately, violently, as before a wind. How vindictive it sometimes seems to be! After the sense of union – reaching Douglas even in his sleep, consoling and even loving him there – the sense that I can neither reach nor be reached. The pain does with me what it wills; I have the illusion of will merely. I’m a ball of darkness rolling about in the darkness.

  If I die naturally, rather than implore Douglas to give me an overdose – not inconceivable – it’ll surely be because the demon pain has grown tired of visiting me and wants to try others, unpractised and untutored souls, spoilt by health, over-confident. (Too much to hope it can feel pity. If it could, it wouldn’t be itself, would it?) Or because I’ve run out of strategies, simply that.

  At one point Larry went to the lavatory – about 3 a.m. I think it was. Considerately he tip-toed past our door, which is always slightly ajar. I was strongly tempted to call out to him. I fancied actually that he paused, tempted to call in. He isn’t sleeping so well at the moment. No wonder. He worries about the raft, the explosive device, the whole question of timing. So many things could go wrong. The worst, he tells me, is that the device could blow up in his face, killing him. He assures me it’s highly unlikely, a chance in ten million. I like to think his mention of it was just bravado, the inevitable manliness, the sweet boast of a proud son. His main fear, a realistic one, is that the raft will sink, the explosive device with it. He dreads the humiliation of this even more than that of an abortive explosion – a kindergarten pop and puff, as he calls it.

  Another anxiety concerns his father. Will he agree to help or not? If not, who will? I suggest David, but he shakes his head. Too unreliable apparently.

  He wants to be able to put the raft in the water and set it off towards the base without being seen. For this, he needs a look-out who’ll give a signal. When there is a gap in the march, a clearing (there always are, he needn’t worry), a sign or signal. I’d do it myself, needless to say, but a cripple in the road giving signals from her wheelchair would be very conspicuous.

  I’m inclined to think that Douglas will eventually agree. He knows as well as I do that for Larry to be caught would be serious, what with the recent arrest and so on. A prison sentence probably. My hunch is that his paternal feelings will overcome his principles. Larry is banking on it too, I know, but he’s not so confident. He’ll have a lot of explaining to do if he refuses, and could he face that? Could he? He’d also better take part sincerely, for otherwise Larry’s judgement might be affected. I’ll be telling him so.

  The thought of the march, or of the day of it, has us all on the boil, but we boil in different ways. We are three such different people.

  Some kind of celebration, I believe, will be called for if it all goes off perfectly, if the explosion takes place exactly when and where it should and if its effects are precisely as Larry believes they can be. A renewal of the nuclear wound, awe, consternation, panic, vision. I can’t think of a celebration though. Truly I can see nothing beyond the day. It’s as if I’ve given myself over to the idea that we’ll be staging the end of the world, dramatising it. Is that why I see nothing beyond? Because there is nothing beyond the end of the world?

  I tell myself this is to confuse fact with fiction, the world with the stage, but it doesn’t make any difference. Beyond Saturday, April the thirteenth, all is darkness, silence. God help me but I’ve never had such a feeling before. It concentrates the mind wonderfully. My God it do
es. Perhaps it’ll drive out the pain? Not much sign of that at the moment. Much more of this and it’ll take me hours to get going today. On the thirteenth, I can only pray, it won’t be so.

  Towards dawn it rains. I’m not so much aware of it starting as of it having been raining, very gently, for some time. It is the sound of mild spring rain irrigating the land. I welcome it, recognise it as something I’ve always known. So long as there is an earth to irrigate, it will be there, heaven sent apparently.

  Not fully awake, I allow myself the fancy that if it were to fall on me, if I were lying in a calm field somewhere and it were to fall on me, I would be restored. In fact when Douglas wakens, which should be quite soon, I’ll ask him to massage me, my legs especially. It won’t ease the pain really but it can remind me that having legs was once other than this.

  VIII

  The way sleep could change him, his mood and beliefs even, had always fascinated Douglas. Recently it had been more apparent than ever. It had got so that he occasionally flirted with the idea that he was two people, two temperaments. In sleep he could move from the one to the other. The journey had no stages and he would never know when it was going to happen. The being who had gone to sleep was not always the one who woke up, and, when it was, he sometimes had to admit to a sense of disappointment: sleep had not modified or extended him this time, had not cast him up on a new shore.

  How he saw it, frailty or strength, was itself subject to change, instance of the phenomenon itself. If it suggested an arbitrariness in him, an absence of core or nucleus, this didn’t trouble him for it seemed to be a condition of freedom. He would not be ground down in weariness of himself. He could depend on this shedding of skins. With a few exceptions, his beliefs were open to change apparently. In sleep he could be separated from them, they could be cut loose, as though to lodge themselves in another. Sleep, migration, metamorphosis.

  He could fall asleep longing for Helen and wake with the suspicion that she didn’t matter that much to him any more. Or go to sleep feeling dark about her but wake with the sense that somehow during the night she had moved closer to him. He’d think he couldn’t cope with Edith any more but then that he could, he longed to, it was essential to him. He didn’t respect Larry and would send him away for the good of his soul; he respected him very much and would strive to keep him at home. He was becoming an adventurer; he was becoming a recluse. Life with Helen, give or take an obvious fact or two, would be much like life with Edith; it would be utterly different.

  Sometimes he thought that what he was doing was paying for his adultery. He was a husband and a lover; he had loved two women. If you were with neither exclusively, however, were you with either at all? Were you anywhere? The fluidity of his being then could seem like evaporation, dissolution.

  For weeks the two women had been talking the same kind of language, the quasi-philosophical language of illumination and disclosure. They said how much they envied Larry his discovery of a higher purpose for the day. It hadn’t yet been revealed to them what they should do. They hadn’t had an inspiration. It was a matter of faith, of waiting. And so on.

  Both found Douglas’ position unacceptable, beneath notice even. He had virtually stopped talking to them about it, his commitment to the march obviously as irritating to them as their elevated and soulful uncertainty was to him.

  Gradually, however, he had been approaching the view that it was he who should be Larry’s helper. It would mean not marching, he knew, and that pained him; but the thought of his son struggling on his own or with an unreliable helper pained him more. It might be what he would have to do.

  But then, one morning, with spring approaching, he woke with a clear and vigorous mind. He saw what he should do. Not an insight which would change either, he was sure; it would be proof against time and sleep.

  He would march on his own, on the way perhaps striking up a few acquaintanceships. Afterwards he would listen to the speeches in the square, applauding if he felt like it. Then he would go for a drink in the Merchantman’s Arms, a pint or two. Edith could do what she liked. He would park her where she wanted to be parked. Collect her when the march was over.

  And Helen? It was she who would be Larry’s helper! Though excitable under pressure, with a tendency to panic, she would do it. They could rehearse together, minimising the possibility of error and mischance. It would be up to them. His business was the march. One mind through and through, and, afterwards, faithful to the memory.

  He rang Helen about it and she agreed immediately. He had made her day, she said. They would start rehearsals as soon as possible. They would work towards perfection on the shore. He let her talk on, excited gratitude, hyperbole and worse. At least now she wouldn’t march in mockery.

  He mentioned it to Larry. He too was excited. To spare Edith’s feelings, he quickly said, he would say that Helen was his friend rather than Douglas’. Douglas would be released to indulge in the “passive protest” of the march and Edith …

  “I’m not sure about her,” Douglas said.

  “What d’you mean? There’s nothing really she can do. Except sit on a high place and meditate.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not what she would have done had she been able …”

  “How d’you know? Maybe it’s exactly what she would have done.”

  “We just can’t know. But it saddens me – that it’s her only option.”

  “It’s not as if she’s making tea and handing out sandwiches …”

  “Do you know anything about meditation?” Douglas asked bluntly.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  Edith had been practising meditation for about ten years, but Douglas had to admit he was still vague about it. He couldn’t have talked on the subject for five minutes. He had tended to classify it, he suspected, with herbal remedies and homeopathy, to which occasionally Edith had turned in her pain. If he had given it any thought at all, it had been condescendingly. Trances, detachment, equilibrium: all gained at the expense of humour. He was ashamed.

  Also now he felt challenged. How might meditation be a significant alternative to marching on Saturday, April 13th? What might it mean to claim this? He believed he ought to try and explain it to Larry, obsessed, he thought, with his raft, his explosive device, his nuclear cloud.

  He might find, of course, that Larry knew more about meditation than he did – he could hardly know less. If so, Douglas knew less about Larry than he ought to, and less than he thought he had. Wife and son. It wasn’t too late to understand them better. It almost seemed it was, though, what with the march imminent, Helen beckoning, Edith’s restlessness.

  “Meditation,” he ventured gravely, “is an art your mother has been practising for years. I can’t say I’ve followed her in it, but each has his own remedies.”

  “And each his own pain,” Larry said, looking away.

  Larry had done many things in his twenty-five years. Few of his interests or passions had lasted however. Douglas had a sense suddenly that one of these might have been meditation. Edith could have inspired him to try it, remedy for depression, disappointment in love, boredom. Or he could have started it himself, without her knowing, tried it for a month or two, given up.

  He looked at his son anxiously, hoping he wasn’t going to be exposed, lectured.

  “Meditation is triumphantly sustained controlled breathing,” Larry began in a level voice. “If it’s an art, as you say, it’s the art of controlled breathing. You breathe with the universe; it’s mystical. If you’d had the art all your adult life, you’d not have had your heart attack. D’you know that? You keep yourself easy now by breathing well. You do. I’ve seen you at it. It’s admirable.”

  “True enough, I try that.”

  “Well, imagine that what you do in snatches, clauses, mother does in paragraphs and entire chapters. That’s the sort of triumph it is.”

  “No doubt. I like to think so.”

  The clamour and chaos in his chest th
at morning, his heart protesting. The haggard and irritable and demeaning days he had passed beforehand. Deadly sweats. On the day itself, the most deadly sweat of all. You’d have thought a tank was bursting.

  He smiled quickly, as if ashamed, caught out in a weakness. He hadn’t looked after himself in those days; wouldn’t have known what it was to do so really. He hadn’t gone on marches either. Now he did both and permitted himself the thought that there was probably some connection. For heart’s ease, it seemed, and even in darkness you had to pay certain attentions to the world.

  “You’ll have to practise a lot, you realise,” he said, “the two of you.”

  “That’s for certain! It’ll give me a chance to get to know her. She can’t help me in a venture like this unless we know and trust each other.” He grinned, looking at his father directly.

  “She can be excitable but she can also be cool.”

  “Fine,” Larry said. “Let’s just say that she can do … what mother would probably have done had she been able.”

  Douglas turned aside. The sense that he was about to see with great vividness what it would have been like to be married to Helen was upon him. Or what it would have been like had Edith not become crippled all those years ago. Such visions had been promised before but never realised. Now for some reason he thought they were going to be, one or the other, both. He felt very alert, was straining actually, perspiring. To what end though? To what end such knowledge?

  It passed again, however – perhaps would always pass. He turned back to Larry who, the way he had reached out a hand to him, might have thought his father was becoming ill again.

  “It’s O.K.,” Douglas said. “I’m O.K.”

  Not far from the town the coast road went through a series of S bends. For quarter of a mile in wet or misty conditions motorists could feel that they’d been claimed by a bad stretch of road. On Saturday, April 13th, the march was to pass this way. (With gaps or pauses between the groups or contingents, it might seem – to someone watching from a bank – like a succession of small marches rather than one long one; but to the marchers there would be a strong sense of unity.) On the left as the town was approached there was a row of beech trees; they followed the curve of the road, actually the curve of the coast. Behind them was a rocky promontory. Here, because it was the spot from which Larry planned to launch his raft, Douglas had arranged to meet Helen. She had said on the phone that she knew it well: everything conspired to make it the most dramatic part of the coast, in her opinion.