Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  She moved more quickly than he had thought, just a week after the funeral phoning to ask if he would take her to see a cottage.

  He met her from the ferry, collected the cottage keys from the estate agent, and, feeling strange with her, out of touch, set off along the coast road. It was raining, and the sound of the windscreen wipers, loud and insistent, framed their silences. It struck Douglas that, if death played games, one of them was to come between lovers, subvert ease and understanding. When they spoke, their remarks seemed pointless, their enquiries forced and insincere, and, when they fell silent again, it was like another failure.

  They had discussed, of course, how they imagined they would be affected by these deaths, how, in spite of their patience, their striving for humility, it might seem as if they had willed them. This was now quite close, Douglas thought, to how he felt: as if he didn’t own himself, didn’t deserve to either. His body felt slack, boneless almost, and he drove badly, stalling, miscalculating on the bends, speeding up and slowing down like a learner.

  Once, feeling how bad it must be for Helen, and as if to assure her that the awkwardness would pass, he put out a hand, but she didn’t respond.

  Then he saw that she was crying. He passed her some tissues, but she made no move to take them. As if it was the very least that she could do, she let the tears course unattended down her cheeks. He thought it was the most silent weeping he had known. Like that of a ghost. Body mortified, tears free. He spoke her name twice, but as though into a medium which killed both voice and name.

  Eventually he pulled off the road, hoping that in the silence and with the loch before them they would find a way of coming together. They didn’t. He wished he hadn’t stopped; it had been easier in the moving car. He couldn’t move off so soon though without making an effort, without – as by some act of will – trying to summon up his love for her.

  Only the sound of rain now. Quickly the car became steamed up. Douglas wiped the windscreen with a rag. It seemed important at least to be able to see the loch. But within minutes it had steamed up again. He tried once more to take her hand, but all he could feel were knuckles. Her profile too had a compacted look, as if her spirit was turning in on itself.

  He surprised himself then, getting decisively out of the car and wiping the windscreen from the outside. Dimly inside he could see Helen, hunched, leaning to one side, staring straight ahead of her. Seeing her through the rain and the windscreen was like seeing her under water, he thought, victim of some kind of accident, adrift in another element.

  He walked down the road a little. It was raining very heavily. There was a mist over the loch, silver as aluminium foil. It was not thick enough though to conceal the black shapes of submarines moving seawards. So strongly did they compel his attention that, as if it was what they had come for, the object of all their searches, he pointed at them and exclaimed loudly. They were very black and vertical, bows sharp and easy, conning towers streaming with rain.

  Fearing breathlessness, he expanded his chest, took some deep breaths with his eyes shut. In the time it took him to do so, the submarines vanished, whether into the mist or the loch itself he didn’t know. Only for an instant did he think he had imagined them. Gulls cried, very close by, but he couldn’t see them.

  Approaching the car, he saw nothing. What was she doing behind the steamed up windows? How persuade her to come out? He didn’t want to get back in; it would trouble his breathing, he was sure, the confined space, the steamed up windows, the silences.

  He wondered if this was why the adulterer died before his faithful neighbour? The burden of two lives. The necessity of them too though. God yes.

  He worked at his breathing again, head back, chest out. Then, with the energy this seemed to give him (“Breathe and live,” the consultant had said, “breathe and live”), he roughly opened the door.

  Helen appeared to be asleep, curled up, leaning against the door. He stood over her in silence for a moment. She didn’t move. Some sort of simulation of death or dying or sleep? A hysterical precision to it which exasperated him. He hadn’t seen it in her before. Hoped never to see it in her again.

  He leant solicitously forwards, as he supposed she wanted him to, anticipating both further unresponsiveness and the exasperation this would cause him. Then – touching her shoulder – experiencing these exactly.

  “Come out!” he said. “Come out! We can walk here. At least that. Stop this!”

  Once again she didn’t respond, so he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled. She didn’t resist, but didn’t submit either. Eventually he got her into a crouching position, half way out of the car, the skills he had developed over the years with Edith having come in handy. She was starting to laugh, as if it was a game gone wrong.

  “Edith can’t actually manage this sort of thing at all, you know!”

  “Do I really want to come and live here?” Bitterly abstracted, she shook herself free of him. “Do I?”

  “I don’t know. Do you? We’ve discussed it often enough. It seemed a good idea once.”

  “Submarines below and jets above.” She spoke theatrically, pirouetting a little. “It’d set my teeth on edge.”

  “My teeth aren’t on edge and I live here. There’s more to the place than jets and submarines.”

  “It’s an end-of-the-world sort of place.”

  “Well described,” Douglas said, nodding. “It’s what I’ve said before. You can’t become complacent here; it’s too representative …”

  “I wonder if I quite know what you mean after all.” Interrupting him, she turned away.

  “You can’t buy butter without being aware of the world’s worst drift. It’s bracing, to say the least.”

  “But in retirement? Do we really need such reminders in retirement? Don’t we already know?”

  “We do, but we’re good at forgetting. Anyway, when better than in retirement? We’ve time to think, come to a reckoning.”

  They stared out across the loch in silence. The rain had lightened, become drizzle.

  “I can get you to the midday ferry,” Douglas said presently.

  He had known for some moments that he was going to say this. What he hadn’t known was that, having said it, he was going to wipe the rain very gently from her face and hair. Her tight white curls were beginning to soften, stick to her skull, and her eyes, if not mild, had a kind of fading strictness.

  “I ought at least to see the cottage first.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “What were you pointing at earlier?”

  “Oh, did you see me? Submarines. I was pointing at submarines. They were out there, in and out of the mist like phantoms. They’re on endless exercises, I’ve come to realise. A kind of endless flexing. Same with the jets. Our lives here are certainly stretched out on the network of these. But not to breaking point. They aren’t the bottom line.”

  “What is then?”

  “Silence, I think.”

  “Oh? And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Silence: it stands for peace and all that peace makes possible. In silence we can work at peace, we can think, meditate …”

  “Like Edith?”

  “Like Edith, yes. War is the interruption of peace, you see, not peace of war.”

  “I suppose, at our age, such simplicities are forgivable.”

  “Is that all they are?”

  “The way I’m feeling today, all this guilty sadness, this dire,” she waved her hand, seeking the word with difficulty, “regret, that is how they seem, yes.”

  “You’ll be coming on the march though?” The quiet way he asked it, it seemed like another simplicity.

  “I suppose so.” She smiled. “If you’re going.”

  Her manner made him feel unadventurous, fainthearted. A man for petitions, letters to the newspapers, marches. Worthy democratic ways.

  He opened the car door for her, but she didn’t immediately get in. Something about the scene seemed to be holding her; it was a
s if she was trying to memorise it. Sensing the depths, of anger and disaffection and dread, from which she was doing so, Douglas realised that he envied her. Such depths! Once he had feared them, their effect on his health, but not now. Now it was their denial he thought might do damage. Ambiguous nourishment. To follow your nose and let your breathing take care of itself. To court extremes, enjoy the shaping energy they brought.

  “You see, I can’t believe we’ve chosen to retire here just to be spectators,” Helen said. “We may not know what we’re here for, but we can try to find out.”

  “A destiny behind the obvious one, d’you mean?”

  “Something like that. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen in old age – an unexpected flowering?”

  “It’s what I was trying to get at earlier, I think. To retire here is to be challenged. A flowering becomes more likely.”

  “We’re in agreement then. Who’d have known it? I’m sorry.” She spoke gravely, close to tears. “It’s taken us so long to get here, hasn’t it, and I don’t just mean here the agreement, but here the place.”

  During this last exchange, they had wandered a little way from the car. Now, arm in arm, they returned to it.

  The cottage was about seventy yards from the coast road, a low white building with small windows and thick walls. A line of beech trees protected it from the road and marked the start of a garden. Behind was a grassy cliff which Douglas thought might once have been a quarry. Bushes and little trees grew from it sideways, straining for the vertical.

  Because of the mist, there wasn’t much of a view, but Douglas said that on a good day he was sure it would be excellent. They couldn’t hear much either; the cliff had a way of deadening sound. When they called out “Hullo”, the echoes died almost immediately.

  For a moment or two, as if wondering whether to enter, they considered the house from close up.

  “At least you’ll not be able to see the base from here,” Douglas said. “It’s round the headland.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if I did. I’ve never gone much for the picturesque.”

  Except for a white telephone on a directory in the middle of the lounge, the cottage was entirely empty. It was hard to believe, such was the smell of dampness, that it had only recently been vacated. With no curtains or carpets to soften or subdue, their voices and footsteps seemed too loud for the rooms, which were small anyway and gloomy. They also appeared to Douglas to slope downwards from the door, undulating slightly as they did so. Beneath the floorboards there was an impression of hard rock, some granite substratum; above, there were wooden beams, smoke darkened.

  Always behind Helen in his inspections, Douglas sometimes found himself walking on tiptoe.

  He didn’t want to influence her either way. He knew though that unless they chose to live apart, not risk it together, it would be a choice one day between his cottage and this one. He could tell from the way she lingered at each doorway, each window, that she was having similar thoughts and struggling to keep them to herself. Death the inadmissible pawn on the board of their hopes and desires. Almost silently therefore they went from room to room, Helen’s main response being to sniff the dampness now and then, and seem to be about to speak.

  “It’ll do,” Helen said at last. “I’m not as fussy as I used to be. Yes! Why bother to look any further? Save my energy. I’ll have to sell a lot, though; this’ll only take about a third of what I have.”

  Douglas couldn’t imagine the place furnished and welcoming in any season. His voice boomed in the bare room.

  “A little work and it’ll be fine. And if you don’t like it …”

  “Don’t worry, I fully intend to make a go of it.” She didn’t sound bitter exactly but nor did she seem entirely reconciled. “There’s no alternative.”

  She had her back to him, rubbing her left calf with her right foot. Her light brown waistcoat was tightly belted, her hands deep in its pockets. He moved towards her, but seeing her suddenly in profile – a kind of self-consuming strictness – stopped, turned away. A second silence seemed to descend on the first, the bareness of the room to spread. He felt that all he could do was touch her, whether he wanted to or not.

  There had been a time when he wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have touched her unless he had desired her; but he knew better now, he thought. The polite touch better than none at all. The unexpected spiritedness of flesh.

  He felt too that something ought to be done to mark her decision to buy the place. It was brave of her, he thought. About to touch her, however, he didn’t recognise himself. Didn’t recognise her either. Only her body was familiar, and even it had a kind of penumbra of pain and strangeness. Closing his eyes, he put his arms round her and held her from behind.

  After a while he slipped his right hand under her coat and began to caress her breasts. She shifted in his arms, but he couldn’t tell if it was desire or unease. Nothing was said. No sounds at all. He continued to caress her.

  Then, suddenly, he bowed his head, as in apology almost, and kissed her on the neck. She lifted her head a little. Out of confused bereavement, a sign, however uncertain. She didn’t want him, but wanted to want him. Perhaps that.

  His desire was strong now, but he knew it mustn’t be apparent. He could only bring her round if he appeared as troubled as she. She would respond to his confusion, not to his desire. He kissed her again on the neck, feeling that it was not just the next few hours that were at stake, but the next few weeks and even months as well. Worse, that if he didn’t arouse her now – in this bare cottage gradually filling with mist – he mightn’t be able to do so again. He continued to hold her from behind therefore, moaning a little, his passion pitched painfully between faith and despair, groundless for the time, blind.

  At last, boldly, she turned to him, giving him a quick look, then kissing him full on the mouth. He kissed her back, gripping her buttocks, lowering himself to her a little. Outside, he thought he heard something, a twig snapping, a bird passing, some trick of the wind. Inside, the silence excited him – an inviting barrenness. A fog-horn sounded. Too many promontories, he thought. A dangerous coast. The mist would have wound its way up from it, from the loch, but would have come first from the sea, bred there. It was definitely a presence in the cottage as they kissed. He had a sense of it as come from all quarters to be with them, participate with them in whatever they were about to venture. He thought he heard the sound again, again was able to dismiss it: just one of many small sounds that prey on country silence.

  Abruptly Helen broke away, saying they should lay their overcoats on the floor. She was flexing her fingers, pointing at a particular spot on the floor with her right toe.

  “It’ll have to be quick, and you’ll have to take me. Come on!”

  “D’you not …”

  “Hurry!”

  “I don’t …”

  “I’m beneath it for the time being. Beneath everything in fact.” She spoke desperately. “Hurry!”

  Suddenly, then, she was dancing backwards, pirouetting. And when she wasn’t, she was lifting her skirt, jigging. Douglas was both aroused and appalled. He believed he knew what it meant though. It wasn’t that she was bereaved as terribly ashamed that she wasn’t. Or wasn’t more so. He went after her, caught up with her in a corner, almost violent now, his desire become a desire to release her from this latest darkness.

  He forced her onto the raincoats.

  “I do believe I’m hysterical.” She was tossing her head from side to side. “I do believe that!”

  “Don’t say anything. It’ll be alright.”

  Legs raised, she began to laugh and it seemed to Douglas as he prepared to enter her like a parody of all the laughter he had ever heard. “My love,” he murmured.

  “No!” she cried. “No!”

  Now however it was not just the mist that was about them, circulating in the cottage as if it too had its purposes. As in its wake came the most dreadful smell, a smell as of drains, sewers. It came in wav
es, each worse than the one before, so that it was impossible not to imagine that the cause of it wasn’t advancing towards them also – some tide of silage or sewage or decomposing bodies even over fields and woodland, through hedges, ditches.

  Helen had stood up.

  “What a smell!” She was looking at the door.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never smelt anything like it.”

  “Nor I.”

  “It seems to be rising from the earth.”

  “Miasma.”

  “What?”

  “Miasma.”

  “Yes.”

  Next the sky was full of noise, a roar from all quarters, jets above them, wave upon wave of them, flying very low. Standing at the front door, they could see them very clearly. First they went under the mist, then into it, then out of it again, up and over the wooded hills on the other side of the loch. It took about five minutes for them to pass, and even after they had gone, vanished into the west somewhere, the sky was still loud with them, the earth trembling.

  Hand in hand, they had forgotten about the smell, but now in the returning silence became aware of it again, as bad as before, as engulfing.

  Round the side of the cottage, then, Douglas heard the sound again. A kind of scuffling at first, then chuckling, low and surreptitious. Had they been seen? He imagined someone bent double with mirth at the sight of a man in late middle age about to enter a woman also in late middle age. There was a short silence, and, when the sound came again, it was not chuckling they heard but cackling. Out of laboured breathing it struggled to a kind of crescendo, sank briefly into the breathing again before starting upwards once more. There seemed no limit to it, each climax of mirth more intense than the one before.