It is closing time in the pump rooms, ejection time, shutters are being slammed down in the bar, others are already going out of the doors and down the steps. The alcove is no longer home.
“What about a walk?” says Sam. “Quite a long one?”
She has occasionally wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man with a beard. At one o’clock in the morning on the doorstep of the people with whom she is staying, she finds out: a little scratchy, but otherwise the experience as known, except that it is not because this is better than any previous kiss, it is brand new, arousing, unnerving, it is the one she has always hoped for, it is…
Oh my God, she thinks, I believe this may be it.
Sleepless, she lay staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. She heard Sam Priest’s voice, she saw him; again and again he returned to the alcove with a glass in each hand, and it was as though they had been apart for hours, days. He said certain things over and over; she felt his touch.
I’m going to be wiped out tomorrow, she thought. Must sleep. And at some point she tipped into a benevolent black pit, from which she awoke in daylight, gazing once more at the evening that was gone. How would it be when they saw each other again? Would there be embarrassment, and avoidance? What had happened? Had anything happened?
She was at the pump room, checking on ticket sales before the first event, when he came through the doors. He walked straight over, and stood in front of her.
“Good morning, Molly.”
And she knew then that it was all right. The way he spoke; the way he looked. It was true; whatever had happened, had happened: she had stepped overnight into some new dimension of being, she was floating, she could focus on nothing else, she had knocked onto the floor the cash till on the box office desk, one of the volunteers was scrabbling to recover the contents, and there Molly stood, impervious.
Sam said, “Comfortable night?”
Molly smiled happily. “Frankly, no. Didn’t sleep well.”
“Funny you should say that, neither did I.”
The volunteer finished retrieval of the cash box and its contents, restored it to the desk, and withdrew.
Sam said, “When and where do I see you?”
She spread her hands: the press of people around them, the impending event, the program that reached through the rest of the day.
“I know, I know. We’ll have to sort something out. Meanwhile…”
Meanwhile…she thought. Meanwhile, all I want is to continue in this state of…grace, to stay in this new world.
“Meanwhile,” said Sam Priest “I’ll have to make do with getting you a coffee in an hour or two.”
All through the day he is there. She glimpses him across the room, they are in the same group at lunch, they sit next to one another during the afternoon event. They are never alone, and yet entirely alone; they are surrounded by other people, but no one else signifies. When they manage to speak to one another, what is said is inconsequential, but they are in tacit alliance, they are a secret unit.
All day, Molly is busy. She is talking to people, she is troubleshooting, she is smiling and greeting and thanking, she is in the thick of it, but she is also cruising in her own stratosphere on autopilot.
And suddenly, somehow, the evening has arrived, and the last event, the panel discussion. She meets Sam at the door of the hall, shortly before.
“I warn you,” he says. “I’m going to let you down. I’m not going to be able to get my head around this. I’m brain dead today.”
“I don’t know whether to be at the back or the front.”
“The front. Where I can see you. Where you can be inspirational.”
There are three poets on the platform, and a chairman, who invites each to comment on the proposition before they embark on a general discussion. The first speaker flails around somewhat, wondering at too great length what is implied by the term “legislators,” it is apparent that he has not considered Shelley’s essay and is winging it. The second is an impassioned woman who is also distracted by terminology, and seems to be saying that poets—all artists, indeed—are a unique category and should not be concerned with the banalities of social organization. It is left to Sam to refer the quotation to its historical context, to cite Shelley’s unease with utilitarianism, to talk about the apposition of reason and imagination, to consider imaginative perception as a force for moral good. Shelley was incensed with the downgrading of poetry as significant comment, he says—Shelley thought poets were more crucial than political theorists. I’m not certain I buy that, says Sam, I’m not sure what sort of a fist we’d make of the blueprint for a perfect world, but I take Shelley’s point about poetic antennae; maybe what we can do is point things out, whether it’s a matter of moral choices or simply the perception and celebration of the world.
Molly is rapt. She basks. She basks in Sam’s eloquence, his good sense, the way in which the audience pricks up its ears while he speaks. She is…oh, dear, she is proud of him. Stop it, she tells herself, stop it—you have no right.
When the discussion is opened up, it is clear that lay members of the audience—the non-poets—have warmed to Sam’s level-headed interpretation of the proposition in hand, and are mostly picking up on points that he has made. Someone comments that reason enables people to behave in a sensible and prudent way, but only imagination allows them to anticipate how others may behave—anyone concerned with legislation required both capacities. Nobody quarrels with this, but a few exotic kites are flown: why not have a small quota of parliamentary seats for poets and the like, representing a kind of virtual reality intellectual constituency? One or two commentators fly off at a tangent in pursuit of the idea of the artist as having a special status, a concept which evidently does not find much support. We are all in it together, seems to be the general view, but maybe some are favored with particular insights, in which case we would do well to appreciate what they have to say. A girl—student, probably—asks Sam if all this has anything to do with Keats and truth and beauty and all that. Sam, who is looking a little battered by now, replies that he has a nasty feeling that it may do, but that the Romantics’ train of thought can be quite difficult to follow, from the viewpoint of today.
The chairman winds things up. The audience comes down to earth and heads for the bar, as does Molly. When she catches up with Sam, who has been buttonholed by one or two people keen to continue the debate, it is she who has a glass in each hand.
“You must be needing this.”
“Too right I am. Bless you.”
“You were…terrific.”
He shakes his head. “We got by, just about.”
“More than that. Thanks to you. I was…” She almost says it—pulls herself up.
“Proud of me?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Go on, that’s what I’d like to hear.”
In the weeks that followed, Molly walked into another life. There was then, and there was now. Her entire past was then, and her past self seemed like someone else, a person who had been fine, who had been content enough, but also quite ignorant, who did not know. Now, she was the person who knew, who knew how it was to be one of two, half of a partnership of delight, who knew the exquisite pleasure of anticipating the phone call, the arrival, the uprush of joy when you saw him coming down the street, or stepping off a train, or looking at you from the bed.
Sam came to London. Molly went to Devon. Ruth considered Sam and appeared to be graciously tolerant of the situation. Once in a while, Molly would catch her eyeing them with an expression of vague bemusement, as though she were observing the behavior of some unfamiliar species. Sam’s son, David, visited, and, after an initial stiffness all around, seemed to join Ruth in a conspiracy of kindly sanction. It was A level time; Ruth moved in a miasma of revision schedules from which she peered out only at the distant sunlit prospect of a summer hitchhiking venture in France with friends. Her mother’s euphoria was a side issue, of interest but peripheral.
Once, Molly said to Sam, “Is it alwa
ys like this?” Even as she spoke, she heard an echo; she had used these words once before, but now she was talking not of sex—which went without saying—but of love.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Sam. “Not in my experience. Not like this.”
Sam met Lucas, the Fulham house, the press, and came away richly approving of all three. “The place is a time capsule. Step back into the 1930s. I want to live like that.”
“Not with me you won’t. I once did, remember?”
“All right. Some discreet mod cons, if you insist. And your stepfather—I’ve never met anyone so untethered to the present. It’s magnificent.”
“It’s been called unworldly, by some.”
“Defiant, in my book.”
“He liked you.”
Sam looked complacent. “There’s talk we might do a little edition of one of my collections. Give the press some exercise, is what he said.”
“Oh dear,” said Molly, “I hope this isn’t going to be a full-scale retreat into an Arcadian past. Nothing Arcadian about Fulham in the 1940s, believe me.”
“You’re talking to a man who grew up in a schoolmaster’s household. Cold baths and early morning PT. The point about the past is selectivity. You home in on the virtues, like that press, and Lucas’s old trade—kicked aside by technology.”
Simon rang Molly the night after he had met Sam. “This one’s for real, isn’t he?”
“What do you mean—this one? You make me sound like some kind of floozie.”
“Not the intention. I was just recognizing a sea change. It stuck out a mile. He is, isn’t he?”
“Well…yes,” said Molly.
“High time too. Good on yer. Incidentally, I asked him to suss out Exeter for me, as a possible new home for the bookshop. See what the competition might be—that sort of thing.”
“You’re going to get married?” says Ruth. “You’re going to marry him?”
“Do you…mind?” This is not what Molly meant to say at all. The words fell out, somehow—nicely identifying her worries.
“I don’t mind. Actually, I like him. It just seems so odd to get married, when you’ve been not married forever.”
“Should I meet Ruth’s father?” says Sam.
“It’ll probably just happen at some point. Better not to make a big deal of it.”
“I have to say that half of me resents him and the other half thinks—poor bloke.”
“Poor?”
“You wouldn’t have him.”
“It was a long time ago,” says Molly.
Molly and Sam stand before the Registrar in Finsbury Town Hall. Register offices have done well out of my family, thinks Molly. She remembers her mother and Lucas; she casts back to her young parents, that legendary occasion. This time around, there is quite a crowd on the seats behind: Ruth, David, Lucas, Simon, various friends. Afterward, they all go back to the house in Fulham, at Lucas’s insistence: “I am after all giving the bride away.” Molly has arranged for caterers to supply the wedding lunch, which goes on for some while. Eventually she and Sam extricate themselves, to get into Sam’s Wolseley and head off to Devon, and what is scheduled as a honeymoon but is in fact the first stage in Molly’s move west. She is exhilarated at the prospect. No more fidgety shifts from one London postcode to another, just one big departure.
Ruth is aghast. “You’re going to live in Devon? In the country? We’re going to live in Devon? But we live in London. Everyone lives in London. And what about your job?”
Molly says that arts administration goes on in the far west too. She already has a couple of irons in the fire, an interview lined up.
Ruth’s indignation diminishes when it is pointed out that she will soon be elsewhere anyway, for much of the time, at university, and that when London-deprivation becomes too great she can always hang out for a few days at the house in Fulham—Lucas will be only too pleased.
The road signs tell them that they are now in Somerset. This was meant to be, thinks Molly, I was meant to come back to these parts. This is where I began, and this is…not where I am going to end, but where I am going to be in one place, and happy—perhaps forever.
On a whim, she says to Sam, “Could we do a quick detour? Could we go to the cottage? My parents’ cottage? I’d like just to peek at it.”
They leave the main road and plunge down lanes. “Left here,” says Molly. “Oh…maybe not. Sorry—have to turn around, I’m afraid.” She stares at the map, at hedges, at signposts. “I know it’s near here.” And at last she gives a cry of recognition. “This is it!”
They pull off the road onto a track alongside the cottage, and get out of the car. Molly feels disoriented; she could not have described the place, but now that she sees it, it is entirely familiar: the squat lime-washed building, the presiding oak tree, the high hedge around the garden, the wide five-barred iron gate.
She says to Sam, “I used to swing on that gate. It was much, much higher then. Huge.”
“Of course.”
They stand there, her arm through his. It is late September; the field alongside is rich red plough, the hedge is dark with blackberries, somewhere above a buzzard calls.
Molly says, “You could hear the train, down that way. The whistle…I used to tell my mother—There’s the train! And once my father came off it, in soldier’s uniform.”
“It’ll be gone now. Axed. Branch line.”
Children are playing in the cottage garden, invisible. There is an elderly car parked outside the cottage. A shirt-sleeved man comes out, a farm laborer perhaps, and glances at them.
Sam says, “Do you want to—introduce yourself?”
Molly shakes her head, suddenly awkward. “No, no. We’d better go. He’ll think we’re snooping.”
“We are,” says Sam. “But with good reason. I’m glad I’ve seen it. Is it the same?”
“The same, and not the same at all. I feel like Rip van Winkle.”
“Rip van Winkle had been overtaken by time—asleep for twenty years. Everyone else had moved on.”
“The cottage has moved on, somehow. The oak tree has grown, and the gate.”
“But so have you. More like parallel universes than Rip van Winkle.”
They get into the car. “Take me away,” says Molly. “It’s made me feel a touch unsettled. That it is still here—the same, but different.”
Part 6
EVERYONE HAD GONE. There was just the family left: Molly, Simon, Ruth, Sam, Tim. The house in Fulham could never have seen such a gathering. The kitchen had been full, and the sitting room, and the room that was once the Heron Press office—packed with all those who had come on from the crematorium: associates of Lucas’s from the thirties and forties—old men and women now—along with such neighbors as had held out against the eighties influx of wealthy young couples, a handful of former tenants who had never quite lost touch, and assorted people of whom Molly and Simon had barely heard, but for whom Lucas was evidently an iconic figure.
All these had crowded into the rooms; they had been given a glass of wine and something to eat, they had reminisced, and now they had dispersed, and the five others were left sitting around the kitchen table. Molly was exhausted, and angry with herself for being thus. How can you be exhausted when you neither walk nor stand? In the chapel, the wheelchair had had to be in the aisle; she had felt hideously conspicuous, stuck there in front of everyone, even if Sam was right by her. She had stared straight ahead at the coffin, at the sheaf of white lilies from herself and Simon, at Ruth’s wreath of white roses. She had listened to Simon’s tribute, to Ruth reading Lucas’s favorite poetry, to the address from an old printing colleague. A cellist she knew had been invited to play. The coffin had slid away, almost without you being aware, and eventually all was done.
Around the kitchen table, without the cohort of unfamiliar faces, they were able to relax, to subside. Molly thought: it’s over, we’ve done what had to be done, now for a world in which there is no Lucas. Simon thought: I am misera
ble and elated, both at once—it is obscene. Can I tell Moll? What are we going to do about the house? The press?
Simon’s partner, Tim, began to stack plates, to assemble dirty glasses. Molly said, “Don’t bother, Tim. The caterers are going to see to all that, later.” Sam put his hand on her shoulder. “Are you whacked? Do you want to go?” She shook her head: “Not yet. I’m all right.”
Ruth said, “The last time I saw him—a month or so ago—we had this weird conversation about whether life is a switchback or a maze. I said switchback—hurtling from a down to an up. He said no, no, it’s a maze—there’s a secret correct route, but one always picks the dead ends.”
Molly stared. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Whatever prompted this?”
“Oh, just—I was telling him I had to decide about something…” Ruth shrugged.
“Decide what?”
“Just something…”
What’s all this about? Better shut up, thought Molly. She never did like interrogation. But she’d have these chats with Lucas. Well, we all did. So what’s she deciding? New work? New hairstyle? Whatever—don’t pry. You’ll hear, all in good time.
Simon said, “As far as I’m concerned life is a matter of negotiation.”
“Negotiation with whom?” inquired Sam.
“With what more often than with whom. Currently I am negotiating with economic circumstance. I’m not sure who is winning, so far.”
Molly said, “And how do you negotiate with a war? Or childbirth? Or a man who drives with defective brakes?”