Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  Suddenly the engine spluttered, recovered, spluttered again, cut out. In an overwhelming silence they found themselves drifting seawards. Ahead they could see nothing, behind almost nothing either. The day had a brightness which seemed to defeat vision rather than aid it. For several moments, shading their eyes, neither spoke: it could almost have been their intention to drift like this, Douglas felt, so calmly were they sitting, Edith looking to starboard, he to port.

  “He said something about overheating. We just wait.”

  “I don’t mind,” Edith said, and he saw that she meant it.

  He gave the engine ten minutes, then yanked the cord. It burst into life.

  After the drifting, however, motor power was a disappointment. Douglas missed the sounds, of birds and water, missed the silence. He went seawards for a time, then turned and headed home.

  Presently they spotted the base at the head of the loch. Going out, they hadn’t been aware of it. They slowed down, the engine making a put-putting sound now. A rubber tyre floated past, a life jacket, shards of timber. In a sudden patch of clear water they saw fish, in another, streaks of oil. Then there was the rainbow discoloration of petrol, a lot of this. Low sounds, as of barking or hammering, came to them. A whistle blew.

  Suddenly Douglas switched off the engine and they were drifting again.

  “At this rate,” Edith said, “we’ll collide with the base and be arrested. If we plead engine failure, though, what can they do?”

  “There are oars for emergencies.”

  “I’m not having you row.”

  “We just drift?”

  “Why not?” Edith was smiling. “Why should anyone suspect a cripple and a man with a heart condition?”

  They sat together at the stern, drifting down the loch to the base whose platforms and turrets and lights and antennae were becoming clearly visible. A soundless drifting, a move not so much off course as into another dimension. On the coast road Douglas saw a car, but for some reason didn’t hear it, as if it too were drifting. Beside him, Edith didn’t move, hadn’t moved since he’d switched off the engine. She looked implacable, eyes set in the mournful stare he associated with meditation. A soul going through levels, seeking painlessness. The signs were she was meditating now: shoulders back, chin slightly raised, hands clasped, eyes hooded. Aware of some agitation in himself, Douglas tried to imitate her, but the restlessness remained. He wondered at her readiness to let chance decide where they went. He felt her willing him to accept it too, forcing him, will upon will.

  The boat was drifting straight at the base. He would have preferred it to be going slightly to the left. But he did nothing.

  “Just sit still.” She spoke with the entranced slowness that came upon her when she was giving high advice. “Have faith. Our schemes are petty. Providence is all.”

  “If we damage the boat we’ll have to pay for it.”

  “So?”

  “I’d rather not have to.”

  “Douglas.” A dreamy rebuke.

  “Anyway, I don’t think our allies are just going to sit there and let us crash into them.”

  “Wait and see.” Her tone was sweet and sure.

  They passed through a line of buoys, the boat still aimed at the base, what looked like the submarine bay. Edith’s eyes were completely shut now; she looked almost peaceful. (Douglas could never see the point of this, of not looking. However hellish, the details.) A red light began to flash high up on one of the platforms and he wondered if it had anything to do with them, their nearness. For they were near now. He felt rather than saw the shadow of the base: it shut out the sun. The acoustic changed: sounds seemed either to issue from the submarine bay or be drawn into it. Then Douglas saw a submarine inside, black in the black belly, five or six men working on it. Now they were near enough to read signs and markings, to hear an insistent whirring sound, snatches of laughter, conversation.

  Near enough to see pairs of binoculars trained on them, a man on the top deck standing with an upraised flag. When the flag was brought down – as it was, with a shout – a siren sounded and a small craft shot towards them, its occupants standing to attention, the most exaggerated attention Douglas thought he had ever seen.

  “Open your eyes, Edith, for Christ’s sake. They’re coming!”

  “Don’t worry; they can’t do much.”

  “Oh but they can! We’re in American waters.”

  The craft, occupants still at attention, circled them so quickly and so many times it was as if that was its aim – to keep them trapped and helpless in the circle of its own speeding. Then it slowed, circling inwards, bobbing and lifting, stopping about a yard away. A high nasal voice, as of one arrested in late boyhood, asked them to explain themselves.

  “We were out for a trip,” Douglas said, “when the engine failed.”

  “What are those oars for?”

  “Rowing is out of the question,” Edith replied. “My husband has heart trouble and I’m disabled.”

  “What are your names?”

  “What are they to you?” Edith asked.

  “You’re obliged, madam, to supply them.” Saliva came from the young officer’s mouth.

  “Oh? Who says?” she asked.

  “Clause twenty-seven, section b, the NATO Naval Agreement.” He was about to quote from this when Douglas raised his hand. “Douglas and Edith Low, local residents.” He spoke with a kind of dismissive quietness.

  “Well, Mr and Mrs Low, I’ve got news for you. You’ll be towed ashore immediately. A complaint will be filed and in all probability a charge made.”

  “Do what you like,” Edith said.

  He moved from attention and by doing so released the others from it too. A rope was attached to the bow of the hired boat and in a violent and peremptory way Douglas and Edith were towed away. All seemed calculated to insult and humiliate, Douglas thought: the scream of the engine, the high speed, the occupants of the craft at attention again. It was done so well he suspected it was done frequently.

  The young man at the boat hire place came out to watch, arms folded.

  “More prisoners,” he said. “You must be proud of yourselves.”

  “We do our job.”

  “What about my dinghy then? If it’s not back by next week, there’ll be trouble.”

  The Americans ignored him. Bolt upright in their craft, they sped across the water to the base, disappearing round the back of it.

  “Home to mother,” the young man said, arms out to receive Edith. “You’ve no idea.”

  That evening, after sleeping for most of the afternoon, Edith said she wanted to meditate. She asked to be pushed into the bay window of the living room. (She often began by looking out of windows. Whatever the view, it could entrance, apparently.) The mood was on Douglas to lose himself too, but not in this way. Against a background of inner darkness, he imagined, Edith’s insights would glow and flare, on very good days become foreground, all there was. But the only dark background he knew was that of the night sky. And that could be background or foreground according to whether you saw the stars as peeping through the darkness from below or piercing and dominating it from above, like jewels. Either way, to study it was to enter it and to enter it was to be changed, to be lightened somehow. The “I” which looked through telescopes at stars not as they were but as they had been thousands of years ago knew vertigo, certainly, but also awe. And for a time could be forgivingly at ease with its world.

  Tonight it was too cloudy for stars. Still tense from the boat trip, he detached the telescope from its tripod and went outside, passing the window where Edith was meditating. He walked through the back garden, climbed a stile, started up the hill behind the cottage. A wind was getting up. At the top of the hill he turned and faced the loch. Horribly floodlit, the base was visible below him. He raised his telescope. Apparently the submarine was still being worked on. He had the odd fancy that attempts were being made to encourage it, persuade it to leave the base for the dark waters of th
e loch, the sea beyond.

  Next he turned the telescope on the cottage, on Edith meditating. Anyone seeing her would have thought she was asleep, but Douglas was prepared to believe that in meditation you could reach certain depths, and that this was where Edith was. More charitable to think it, at least, than to suppose her asleep. More comforting too.

  The wind roared in the trees behind him. An owl hooted – the first he’d heard since coming here.

  III

  For a day or two after an excursion Edith would have to rest, and Douglas would see to it that she did so. Such days could work to his advantage. Long practice had made it possible for him to combine nursing his wife with being free of her. If asked, in fact, he would probably have said that it was the second which made the first possible. And wouldn’t have minded being thought hard. Not at all. Not now. You did what you could; you struck balances.

  There were also the games. The more, watching from the wheelchair, she detected, or thought she detected, mere dutifulness in him, the more he felt challenged to make it seem otherwise. He had to keep a step ahead of her, as she, he supposed, strove to keep a step ahead of him. On bad days he feared that he only smiled when he thought he had deceived her, she when she thought she had caught him out.

  Since retirement, the most difficult day – the one on which he was both most excited and most uneasy – had been the one before he met Helen. In the city, this had been once a week, sometimes twice, but since coming to the Holy Loch he hadn’t met her at all. Now a meeting had been arranged. Six weeks had elapsed since the last one, their longest separation since they had met, eleven years ago. A passionate need and eagerness to see her had built up in him. To contain this, to keep control, he had lost himself in solicitude over Edith. If he despised himself for this, he couldn’t see what else he could have done. If suspicion as well as pain moved in her face, so be it. It was what his life had come to.

  Even at ten in the morning there were whores on the ferry. They came off first, singly or in groups, and then gathered, laughing and chatting – a kind of mandatory sociability – in the square before the ferry. Some were provocatively made up; some not made up at all; some were very young, mere girls, some in their forties. Soon sailors joined them, a tight group forming, knit together by bargaining and jokes, the odd sliver of affection. Coming off behind, the other passengers seemed like another caste, circumspect, self-conscious even, going to either side of the first caste. Then, arrangements made, the whores and sailors began to move away.

  Taxis were summoned, came forwards. Soon the mass of passengers was moving off as though there hadn’t been two castes at all, as though it had been an illusion to suppose so. (An illusion too to imagine, as Douglas had just allowed himself to do, that soon the ferry would be for whores and sailors almost entirely, these being terminal days, base, desperate.)

  At first, Douglas couldn’t see Helen, and, when he did, he was surprised. She seemed to be moving very slowly, as though, not having seen him for so long, a shyness was upon her. On the windswept gangway she appeared withdrawn. And, seeing her, Douglas felt withdrawn too, uncertain. He wasn’t sure whether she was waving or brushing the hair from her eyes, smiling or screwing up her eyes against the bright sun.

  When she stepped off the gangway, though, she seemed, like the whores before her, to gain confidence. Spotting Douglas, she smiled broadly, ran forwards.

  “Thank God!” Douglas said, holding her. “How good to see you!”

  “Such a long time.” She spoke calmly, as though, after the embrace, she knew what she hadn’t known on the gangway – that the separation hadn’t harmed them.

  “Too long,” Douglas said, embracing her again, touching her face, tanned from her recent holiday, and her hair, those strong white curls she said she had had since she was twenty.

  “It was unavoidable, what with your move and my holiday.”

  “And how was your holiday? From your letters it seemed all right.”

  “It was actually.”

  “You fell in love with Barnie all over again.”

  “Of course.” She laughed, pressing his hand.

  Across the square, there was a disturbance: a whore was being ejected from a taxi. She ran after it, shouting, and, when it drew level with Douglas and Helen, threw her handbag at it. The contents spilled, a comb, a packet of tampons, a purse, lipstick, loose change. Covering her face with her hands, she burst into tears, twisting and turning on the spot as if to stop herself from screaming, losing control entirely.

  Helen got out of the car to help, squeezing Douglas’ hand to keep him where he was, forestall any thoughts he might have that she was making a mistake. Quickly she retrieved the scattered contents and, taking the bag from the girl, replaced them, all the while the girl seeming unaware, lost in distress, twisting. A hand on her shoulder, Helen waited for her to take the bag back, speaking quietly to her, Douglas could see, offering sympathy. She didn’t respond at first, but then, suddenly, snatched the bag and walked away, legs awkward and stiffened by high heels, appearing far too young for high heels, crying now as from the difficulty of wearing them.

  “Poor lass,” Helen said, getting back into the car. “D’you know what I heard on the way over? A girl trying to get it out of a sailor when he was going off to sea. She was crying.”

  “They’re sworn to secrecy, I think.”

  “I know, but he was making a meal of it, enjoying it.”

  They sat in silence, holding hands. The whore, strutting now, looking abusive, went out into the road.

  “Yes, my holiday. Barnie needs so little now, so very little.” She made a nebulous gesture, as of something evaporating.

  Ever since Douglas had known her, Helen had referred to her husband, twenty years her senior, as old, in decline, on the way out. At first it hadn’t been true – merely a kind of shorthand for their unhappiness, their childlessness, their embarrassment at having married at all. Then it had started to become so. And now it undoubtedly was. One of her jokes had been to stop in the middle of something and pretend to usher Barnie off into death; another to find that he had been dead twenty years and she hadn’t noticed. There were no jokes now, however, only pity and forbearance (in which, she said, she had been inspired by Douglas, whose solicitude over Edith had always precluded bitterness and mockery).

  “And Edith – how is she?”

  “Very tired to start with, in a lot of pain, but better now. And meditating again.”

  “Oh good.”

  “We went out on a boat, you see, and had a close up of the base. It seemed to inspire her.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “To meditate again. A way of coping.”

  “With the obscenity of it?”

  “The horror, yes.”

  “How do you cope with it?”

  “I don’t think I do. I don’t think I can. Can you?”

  “No.”

  “We experience it but we don’t grasp it. The imagination is defeated.”

  They drove down the main street, but instead of taking the coast road, they took a back road. It wound steeply upwards between pine trees, straightening then and crossing a moor. On the right, after about a mile, there was a high barbed wire fence. Ministry of Defence land. Unpromising, bare and marshy, overlooked by cameras. Between the road and the fence there was a ditch, ten feet deep at least. Douglas had never seen anything happen here, but it was a stretch of road so uncompromisingly straight and with such desolation on either side that he always had the sense that something was about to happen. Hawks hovered or perched on the high fence, wind sang in the wires, and even from the car you could smell bog, the odours of stagnant mud and water, carcasses.

  “What a grim stretch,” Helen said. “A speed limit too.”

  “Yes, but I can’t understand why. Military officiousness. If I were to put my foot down, we’d be caught by the cameras.”

  “It gives the moor a chance to work on us.”

  “Exactly.”
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  Their relationship had had distinct phases, each associated with a place, a landscape. There had been the school in which they met as teachers, the impoverished housing estates surrounding it, one pub serving them all, a pub to which they had sometimes gone after school. There had been the flat near the Botanic Gardens which a friend of Helen’s had allowed them to use when she was away on business. In different schools now, they would meet there in the evenings or at weekends, looking down on blossoms and greenery in spring and summer, a river and black suspension bridge in winter. That had gone on for four years, and had been the steadiest time. Next there had been a rented room – their Pakistani landlord referring to them as “my business couple” – in which they had never felt at ease. And now, driving across the moor above the Holy Loch, Douglas felt they were entering another phase, one he would come to associate with this new landscape, a landscape annexed by armies and navies but still so remarkable he sometimes felt he would wake up one day (as though their presence had suddenly been found ridiculous, a folly, a vanity) to find the armies and navies gone.

  “I think I’ll follow you into retirement here.” Helen’s voice was low and quiet.

  “Good,” Douglas said briskly. “Who wants a relationship dependent on ferries?”

  They had developed a code for dealing with their hopes and fears, which allowed them to look forwards without mentioning their partners, without seeming to be waiting for their deaths. In their early days, they had spoken openly of what lay in the way of their living together, but as the vanishing of these obstacles had come closer, they had ceased to do so. As if that would have been offensive, sinful. Murderous even. The one time they made an exception, about a year ago, in the rented room, they had had a conversation so bad they were left unable either to speak or to make love. They had had to part for a while. Who was going to die first, Barnie or Edith, and how soon, had been the questions raised, and addressed so boldly they might have been in the habit of waiting for people to die, of hastening their ends even. Ever since, there had been no mention of such matters. Now conversations about their partners had a sort of strained ingenuousness, an ingenuousness born of despair at what lay beyond.