Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  “A good place to retire to. One wouldn’t become complacent.”

  “That’s why we chose it, I think. There’s no dodging the twentieth century here. And yet it’s not without peace.”

  Across the moor, Douglas turned off the road onto a track which ran into the depths of a wood. He switched off the engine. Total silence. Then, slowly, they became aware of birdsong, now here, now there, now light, now throaty, now in cascades, now in single notes.

  The wood was on a hill. They decided to climb to the top, where it was open, views in all directions. Dappled sunlight, birdsong and silence composed the medium in which they moved. They went hand in hand mostly, a picnic basket in Douglas’ other hand (he had made the picnic before Edith woke, smuggled it out of the house into the boot of the car). Now and then he squeezed Helen’s hand and she, as in renewal of hopes and promises – hopes at least for the day, arranged with such difficulty – squeezed his.

  He was glad to see he wasn’t breathless, wasn’t even monitoring his breathing. Strange notes in the middle of the wood made them pause: not a bird they recognised. Further up, the wood thinned, a breeze fretting its edges. Beyond, there was bright sunlight. They were reluctant to emerge though, to take possession of the hilltop, bare and treeless, conical.

  Putting down the basket, Douglas drew Helen towards him. She was smiling. He knew of course that men of his age and with his medical history could die in the act of love. After his heart attack, in fact, he had been advised to wait awhile before “resuming relations”. It didn’t seem relevant now. His illness was as good as gone, he believed, and might even be said to have strengthened him.

  “We’ve got hours,” Helen said, spreading a rug on the ground.

  Normally, after separations, they made love uneasily, feeling their way back to each other. Not this time however. Helen cried out joyfully immediately Douglas entered her, tossing her head from side to side, and he, exhilarated, cried out too. It was over more quickly and completely than either could remember. They lay quietly at the edge of the wood, holding one another.

  “The seat of the affections,” Helen said, a hand on Douglas’ chest. “Listen to it go.”

  “Quite a workout.”

  “You’re not anxious?”

  “Not at all. I think, you see, it’s only the lustful who die on the job. Die of despair, probably.”

  “You’ll not die then.” She spoke gravely, with that touch of self importance he loved in her. “Though you were close to it.”

  “Too many contradictions, I think. Conflicting impulses translated into the heart, its very rhythms.”

  “I think that’s how it is, you know.”

  Just before his illness – an early symptom, possibly – he had hardly been able to make love. Each part of himself seemed compromised by some other part, each act shadowed by its opposite. Unaffected immediacy was beyond him, simplicity a memory. When teaching or in company, he had wanted to be alone, when alone, in company. When with Edith, he had longed for Helen, when with Helen, for Edith. His life had ceased to make sense. And directly out of this, as it seemed, had come, one morning, the first of the chest pains.

  They straightened their clothes, picked up the basket and went out of the wood towards the hilltop. Here too there had once been trees, they saw, but they had been blasted. Only stumps remained, hollowed out, some dry as bones, others damp and crumbling, a red dust inside. On the summit however, as though opposing itself to the surrounding blight, was a cairn. They stood with their backs to it, looking out over the woods and the moor to the loch beyond. The water was light blue today, but with dark patches, areas of greater depth, Douglas supposed. And very still: no breezes down there.

  Douglas became aware that Helen was looking at him.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The submarine.”

  While he had been contemplating the loch, Helen had been looking seawards. Following her gaze, Douglas saw the submarine. Intensely black, it was emerging from an area of hazy brightness, a giant fin cleaving the waters, something terrible in its uprightness. For a moment he wasn’t sure whether it was returning or leaving; there didn’t seem to be any wake. If it was a homecoming, it was a very stealthy one. The hazy brightness then appeared to be coming with it, as though created by it, at once halo and camouflage.

  Helen had moved closer and was saying something – what, he didn’t hear. He was aware only of her tone, low, perturbed.

  Perhaps it was the effect of the light, or of tiredness, Douglas didn’t know, but he suddenly had the feeling that there was no mystery to the submarine at all. He was about to be given a glimpse of life on board.

  Like rabbits in burrows, they were going to be revealed to him, ordinary men going about ordinary tasks. A disciplined crew, young, courteous and keen, aware for months that they would be at this spot at this time on this day, and that, two months later, say, they would be at it again, sea bound.

  A graceful concentration of lines, curves and angles, the submarine then passed out of sight behind the hill, to be guided in by computers, Douglas supposed.

  Helen was squeezing his arm to get his attention. Her voice had an edge.

  “Surely you’ve seen one before? Surely?”

  “Yes, but not from this angle, and not in this way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With such intimacy, the scales falling from my eyes, a close-up.”

  “Ah.”

  “Very fanciful, no doubt.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you …”

  “Yes, the same sort of thing,” Helen said. “I’ve seen Barnie in a high chair, an arrested child, leering, demanding food. And on his hands and knees, an old dog looking for a bone or a fuck.”

  She laughed mirthlessly.

  “Not like a dog, do you mean, actually a dog?”

  “Yes. And actually in a high chair.”

  “They could be figments, of course. I’m sure our imaginations get strained, crack a little, mislead us. Who am I to think that submarines are run by young men indistinguishable from one another in their passivity and ordinariness?”

  “I like to think it’s the best we can do.” She spoke stiffly, as if he had been guilty of levity. “Our truest moments.”

  “Actually I think you’re right,” he replied. “We have hallucinations, but we also have visions.”

  She remained a little stiff with him, however. Passionate in her certainties, she didn’t take kindly to jokes about them, sceptical insinuations. Once it had bothered him, the solemnity of it, but not now: now what bothered him was that he might appear patronising. He was careful to try and avoid this.

  He spread the rug before the cairn and busied himself with the picnic basket, pleased to be able to unpack at leisure what he had prepared surreptitiously at six that morning. Three half bottles of wine, chicken legs, various sandwiches, cheese, fruit, a cake, biscuits, a thermos of coffee. He laid it out on the rug with glasses, plates and cutlery, aware of Helen close behind him, watching at first with curiosity, then with approval.

  “I suppose it’s along these roads that they march at Easter time,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Will you march?”

  “We can march together.”

  “Edith?”

  “She’d not want to be pushed, I think, on an occasion like that.”

  He looked into the distance, as in search of other submarines.

  But the loch was empty, pale, glittering. Dark clouds had gathered over the sea, far out. As likely to retreat however as advance. He had learnt that much about the weather here.

  Late in the afternoon, they drove back to the ferry. In spite of the submarine and a helicopter which, for half an hour or so, had scoured the hills on both sides of the loch, as if looking for someone, they had been happy, at peace. They were calm as they crossed the moor again, the Ministry of Defence territory with its fences, bunkers, dit
ches, towers and cameras. Calm still when, high up, at a turn in the road, Douglas stopped to point out the base. “Charming,” was all Helen said, but lightly, as if she had absorbed the fact of the base into her world view long ago, accounted for it as well as anyone.

  Douglas had noted such moods of calm in them before. It was as if they were suddenly granted a break from the world, a holiday, a medium without static or distortion in which to renew themselves. Sacramental interludes. They had come to honour them, knowing they would be brief.

  And so it proved. They had to stop for a military vehicle, a lorry with a long covered trailer attached; it had got stuck at one of the bends. And, even then, it wasn’t until two men in uniform jumped down from the high cab and, without any kind of explanation, waved them back, further and further back, until they were round the corner and out of sight, that their mood changed. They were outraged. Helen said it was obviously an area in which you were obliged to put up with whatever the military threw at you, Douglas how damned right she was.

  Before he could stop her, Helen had grabbed her camera and was out of the car, running, bent double, to the corner. There, squatting, she took snap after snap of the lorry, toppled over in the ditch. Then, bent double again, she ran back, badly out of breath, flushed.

  “We can use these in the press,” she gasped. “Sell them.”

  “Why not?” Douglas said. “I can see it. Missile convoy in ditch.”

  He was already reversing when one of the men from the lorry came round the corner at the double. He was shouting for Helen to give over the camera. “Lady, will you hand that to me please. Lady, haven’t you got something you’d like to give me?” Still in reverse, Douglas accelerated violently. The man ran after them for about thirty or forty yards, and seemed to be gaining. Just when it looked as if he was about to catch them though – jump onto the bonnet and pound the windscreen, perhaps – he stopped, dropped to one knee, and began taking snaps in turn. Then he stood up, grinning aggressively, and vanished round the corner.

  “If there’s such a thing as a NATO file,” Douglas said, “that’s us in it. Right down to the number plate.”

  “Who do they think they are? These are public roads, aren’t they?”

  “Here for our protection, my dear.” He hoped she wasn’t going to give in to mere complaint. Sometimes she did so, and it could irritate him. “We can’t expect our protectors to be nice, can we?”

  “Maybe not. But does their role as protectors give them carte blanche?”

  “Of course not, but it would be naive not to suspect that they think it does.”

  “That’s obvious; they’re so arrogant.”

  “It’s always been so,” Douglas said. “Always.”

  By the time they reached the ferry they were calm again. For some reason, the meeting with the lorry hadn’t thrown any shadows. Holding hands, they made their way through the crowd of whores and sailors, their harsh banter, shouted arrangements and goodbyes.

  Douglas was still calm, seeing everything very clearly, the screaming gulls, the ferry, turning sturdily in its wake, heading out across the water, the passengers on the upper deck.

  Edith’s Journal – I

  Let me call these jottings. I don’t think I’ve the strength to develop things.

  I’m settled here, I think. The pain isn’t too bad at the moment, not too bad at all, though that probably means it’s gathering itself for an onslaught later, in the winter. I’m grateful though. I can look about me so much more when I’m not in pain. I can see and admire. There’s so much to admire.

  We went out in a boat the other day. I wasn’t aware of any discomfort at all. The nearer to the American base we drifted, actually, the freer I felt. Free of my body. Had we been captured and put in a cell I might have felt freer still. Much to be recommended.

  The blessing of self forgetfulness. How awful we need to be shocked into it. Douglas’ heart attack and that base. The aim should be to achieve it without such dramas, while sitting on one’s own, one’s partner out or pottering about. Pain a constant inhibitor though. But precisely that’s the challenge. (Imagine it: limbs which are both painful and useless!)

  Sometimes when falling asleep I have this image of myself as a ball. My limbs have gone, you see. I roll from room to room, from house to house, a happy attendant spirit, not really a woman any more, I suppose, but does that matter? Isn’t wisdom above gender?

  The simpler the body, the less the chance of pain. So I’m a little ball when I fall asleep. Why should the spirit need the human body as we know it for its dwelling place? If matter means pain, or the possibility of it, why not simplify matter? Give the spirit a chance, I say.

  I’m meditating again, which is the important thing. What with the disorder of the move, I had stopped. Just when I should have kept going. What started me again, I think, was the base. It was horrible. A world in itself. One can imagine other worlds being sucked into it, never to reappear. This is what I do: I sit in the bay window of the lounge and gaze at some pine trees. After a while, if the light and my mood are right, I find a place in the greeny darkness. And then I seem able to move downwards, towards a promise of light. I don’t will myself downwards; I’m drawn. Afterwards, I’m so refreshed. I avoid thinking about the base though. How can one think about it anyway? It’s unthinkable. All we can do is diminish it by having higher thoughts. The hope must be that one day it’ll have no place.

  I’d really thought that we were going to be two invalids together, Douglas with his heart trouble, me with this. I’d even thought I mightn’t die first after all. He’d become stooped and hesitant and his colour was bad. But he’s better now. And being so nice to me, though sometimes I can spot the effort it costs him. Poor Douglas. To have to dress and undress a sixty year old woman whose body has gone, do all the shopping and all the cooking. On the whole he does it very well, almost gallantly. His touch is kind, so that sometimes I get a little thrill when he’s dressing or undressing me. I don’t let him suspect it though. What would be the point? There are things better left unsaid.

  Today he’s gone to Glasgow to see his solicitor and have lunch with friends. He was eager to be off, I could see that, and I glad to let him go. An empty house is best for a journal – whatever this is – and meditation. We’ll be the better for it. He’ll have news for me tonight and I, well, news of a kind for him.

  IV

  Driving to the ferry to meet his son, Larry, Douglas found himself thinking, not for the first time either, that Edith and he could have been luckier with their only child. It seemed he only came home when he was unhappy. Two years ago it had been a broken love affair; now it was “a sudden redundancy”.

  He had the thought with affection though. In one sense only could they have been luckier, and that a trivial one; in another, deeper sense luck consisted in having a child at all. Their home was his home, and after they had died it would – if he wanted it, could stand the isolation – be his home still. There had been a time, however, just before his illness, when Larry’s waywardness had enraged Douglas. But these rages, as though part of the illness, early symptoms, had gone. He was left with a sense of space that was at once physical and spiritual. It allowed him to regard his son less personally – a child of the late twentieth century rather than simply of his parents. The silences between generations: he had learnt to accept them, not to fill them with tendentious talk.

  It was the same ferry he had met Helen off three weeks before. On a misty day with drizzle, fog horns sounding, he didn’t see it until it had almost docked. Its lights lit up the pier, the groups of whores and sailors sheltering under umbrellas. First off as usual, other whores and sailors came down the gangway. For some moments all Douglas could hear were male American voices marshalling the whores, ordering them here, ordering them there.

  The remaining passengers followed after what might have been seen as a decent interval. Or so it seemed to Douglas, sheltering under his own umbrella, looking out for his son.
r />   Larry was at the back, looking about him with a kind of ostentatious curiosity. Typical of him, Douglas thought. How he took his time on such occasions. Whether coming off ships or walking along platforms, he took his time, managed to give the impression that he was the first to have observed these places faithfully. It went with his inability or refusal to give you his full attention, Douglas felt. Charming in his unselfconscious youth, but now an irritation. Douglas had to work hard not to show it. It wasn’t easy. Seeing him again after so many months, for instance, wasn’t it the first thing he noticed?

  That and the largeness of his head. A big head, with straight sandy hair. Quite a thin neck though: almost feminine. Not that these features irritated him as the dilatoriness did. On the contrary, they made him smile and move forwards, start to wave.

  They shook hands, Douglas still with the vision of Larry’s large head and sandy hair, Larry not seeming to be responsive to anything in his father at all, but looking about him again, at the whores especially, their outrageous seductiveness.

  “Are they here all the time?”

  Speaking slowly, as though to combat his son’s excitability, Douglas replied that he had never been to the pier.

  “Wherever there are soldiers or sailors there will be whores,” Larry said. “War means business.”

  “War is business,” Douglas said, now also looking about him.

  “Fancy any of them?” Larry smiled.

  “On my day, all of them.” He smiled too: a joke for his son.

  For some reason he felt that Larry had lost the power to unsettle him, a development for which he was grateful. Still smiling, he said he supposed it was always possible to find someone to fancy. Our needs were such that someone could always be found to fit the bill, whatever that was. Didn’t Larry agree? He asked even although he knew that his son had not had much success with women, and even although he suspected that, behind “the sudden redundancy”, there was another sad story. Edith would probably be told about it before he was, and it would be she who told him then, not Larry.