The Blind Light Read online

  *

  In the wrecked library, he thinks of that moment. Of her face, the way she was surprised, interested or bored, often almost at the same time. He liked that expression. He liked the conversation they went on to have, the way she talked about books, the way she talked about one day working in a library as if that were something people like them could do. He liked that she put her hand on his arm when he said he never knew his parents, that they’d died in the war. He liked listening to her talk of her father; the way she bit her lip when she mentioned her mother. He liked it when she said he could see her again. He liked it when she kissed him.

  There is the clanking noise, the clinking noise again. He looks around the room, to see if the noise is coming from inside the library but there is no obvious cause. He checks his watch again. She will be on her way to meet him soon. He should leave now.

  12

  Patty loved Tony, but Tony loved Glenda. Gill loved Harry, but not as much as Harry loved Gill. Richard loved Gwen, but Gwen didn’t really love him back.

  Patty loved Tony, but Tony married Glenda. Gill loved Harry, but Harry got a girl, name unknown, in the family way, so Gill tried to love Frank. Richard stopped loving Gwen, but Gwen did not pay it any mind.

  Patty no longer loved Tony, but did not permanently transfer her love elsewhere. Gill still loved Harry, but loved Frank enough, and their daughter above all else. The reverend took an interest in Gwen, but Gwen was not interested.

  Patty loved Gwen, but no longer loved Gill, for she disapproved and talked only of baby. Gill loved Gwen, but pitied Patty and talked only of her baby. Gwen missed her mother and her brother.

  Patty loved a serviceman called Carter. Patty was sure that Gwen would love a serviceman called Drum. Patty asked Gwen to meet with him at the hotel bar that night.

  Gill called in on Gwen the same afternoon. Gill invited Gwen for tea because her handsome brother-in-law was staying with them for a time.

  Gwen decided to go to the hotel bar. Gill could not cook and her brother-in-law was Scottish.

  This the backstory. Most of which she won’t tell Nick.

  13

  This is what she tells Nick:

  ‘Patty met a serviceman at the Queen’s. Posh lad, she said, sweet but a bit of the devil in him. I could tell she was smitten. Always is. Anyway, she asked me to go along with her to the Grand to meet him and his mate. “Looks like Montgomery Clift,” she said. “At least according to James . . .” It was Jessie’s night on so I was free. I could have just stayed home, but why not? I’m allowed to have fun, aren’t I?’

  Nick nods. ‘But of course, my dear. Of course you are.’

  ‘So we met up and he looked a little bit like Montgomery Clift, I suppose. If you squinted. Patty’s bloke looked like Marlow, you know, who lives in Haverigg? The one who drives that sports car? Posh and full of himself. He didn’t shut up. Thinks himself a bit of a comedian. His friend hardly said anything though. He asked me where I’m from and all that, but you could tell he was just going through the motions.

  ‘He had this accent. He sounded Australian to me. I said that and he sort of laughed at me, with his eyes more than anything. And I thought we’d be done after two drinks. Thanks for the drinks and home. Shame, because he was nice-looking. Had nice manners when he wasn’t vacant.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Nick says. ‘I take it there were more than two drinks.’

  ‘I blame you, Nick,’ she says. ‘It’s your fault entirely. I opened my handbag to get cigarettes and he saw the book inside. The one you lent me. He saw it in my bag and said, “Carter bought me that for my birthday.”’

  ‘Which book?’ Nick says. She ignores him. Makes him work it out himself.

  ‘I asked him if he’d enjoyed it. “I’m not sure enjoying it’s the word,” he said. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m living it. Carter thinks it’s exotic. He keeps asking me if it’s authentic. I told him the author got the boredom right.”’

  She pulls in closer to Nick.

  ‘It was like I saw him, or he saw me. Or we saw each other. I don’t know. Not love at first sight, nothing as trite as that, but this deep kind of . . . I don’t know. Not connection, not empathy, but something more dramatic, and more ordinary than that.

  ‘You told me once about how you met your wife, Nick. And I love that story, I really do. And the way you described it, that’s the way it felt. “Like blind light glimpsed/on a shared horizon/no one else lit/but only we two.” You understand?’

  Nick nods, feeds the bowl of his pipe.

  ‘He took the book from me then, and he flicked to a passage he liked, the same way you do when you’re excited about something. He found it and his fingers were below the line “Whatever people say that I am, that’s what I’m not.” He read it to me. And so I said to him, “And what do people say that you are?” And he said, “I don’t know. I have no idea who I am.”’

  Nick takes a long sip of his black and tan.

  ‘And what did you say?’ he says.

  Say it. Shock him. Give him what he wants. What he’s been after. Do it for him. A last thing before you go. Perhaps, if you say it you’ll have to go. Say it. Shock him.

  ‘I didn’t say anything, Nick,’ she says. ‘But I wanted to. What I thought, Nick, what I was going to say to him was: “If I fuck you, you’ll know who you are.”’

  That face. Oh worth it for that face.

  ‘Go on,’ Nick says. ‘Tell me more.’

  THE COSMOLOGY OF THE BOMB

  At the civil defence training base where I was stationed between 1957 and 1962, the most comprehensive nuclear library in the country, if not Europe, was assembled. Books arrived daily, volumes with any passing connection to the subject, from vast scientific tomes to works of premonition and prophecy, were unpacked and shelved under one of three subject headings: technical, cultural and esoterica. It was not off-limits to the servicemen, but few to my knowledge ever set foot inside.

  Though the library was dank, it did have two comfortable armchairs arranged around a gas fire and a table on which to set a bottle. Not long after arriving, I claimed it as something of a personal sanctuary. I read the technical and scientific journals. I read the speculative fiction. I drank and I warmed myself at the fire. Most of all, I sat and I communed with the bomb.

  Some years after being stationed, I took a bottle of brandy, as was my custom, to the library. The door was open, the lights on, and there was a glow from the gas fire. Inside, two servicemen were engaged in deep conversation. One of them I knew, the other I didn’t.

  They were talking about what the base meant, and how much of it was planned. It sounded like a conversation they had had many times already, a familiarity in their discussion, one that neither believed could ever be concluded. I’d heard the same arguments before, and they were both half right. But it was not their theories that interested me, more the conversation that followed.

  After a brief silence, the man of my acquaintance asked about a woman with whom his friend was involved. I can clearly recall his reply.

  ‘I think I’m in love with her,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if it’s just because of here. Because of this place. Maybe I’m being provoked into loving her because of the bomb.’

  All the books I have read on the subject of thermonuclear war, and it is this conversation that, to me, gets to the true heart of the matter. It made me think what the doomed town actually meant to those who viewed it. It made me think about the effect the bomb has on us all, on all our decisions, even down to the people we choose as lovers.

  At these times of heightened tension, it is both a boon and a necessary distraction to look beyond the obvious and the presented. It is our duty to delve beneath what we are told and uncover the truth. There is what I like to think of as a cosmology of the bomb, a systemic underpinning of its influence on the world. There is a netherworld over which the bomb has dominion. It is not enough to ‘protect and survive’; one must understand the powers at work, the
control the bomb exerts. And through this understanding come to halt those powers. Halt them, take back control, and find ourselves in a new age. An age of wonder, of clarity, of hope, and of love.

  Bryan Jerrick, My Cold Wars (Underworld Press, 2001)

  15

  Nick clearly wants to know more, but she does not wish to reveal the length of the relationship, the length of her deception. It would raise too many questions. She wants to make it feel fleeting, some heyday in the blood, something dangerous and passionate. She wants to make it more dramatic than it is.

  She could tell him more. She could tell him of the walks they have taken, the drinks they have had, the alleyway kisses they’ve snatched. She could tell him of discovering Drum’s parents were both killed in the war, young people both, and how he was brought up by his grandparents. She could tell him of the longing she felt when not with him, how she resented the base for taking him from her. She could tell him of the night in the hunters’ lodge, the thrill of waking next to his body. She could tell him all of this. None of this he would want to hear.

  Nick looks excitedly up from his black and tan. She wishes she’d not said that word, the word he likes to drop into conversation to see her colour. It’s only fuck, my dear. It’s just a word. She wanted to make him blush, but the blood has clearly gone another way.

  ‘You remember Richard?’ she says. ‘This is nothing like Richard. It was sweet, the way he loved me. But there’s nothing sweet about this. I blame you. You and the books.’

  Nick picks up his jug, takes a small sip and puts it back down.

  ‘You intend to elope with him?’ he asks. ‘Run off into the dark, dark smog? Is that the plan?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘I don’t know.’

  Nick nods and puts his pipe back in his mouth, puffs away until the bowl needs relighting.

  ‘Have I ever told you of my sister Ethel?’ he says, holding the open box of matches. ‘Quite the catch in her day. All the boys loved her. They used to bribe me with sweets so I’d deliver her messages. A glorious girl, she was. Had her head turned in the first war though. Met some tiresome cockney and that was that. Left home and never came back. He beat her, of course . . .’

  How true this? How much invented? From his look, impossible to say.

  ‘I love him, Nick,’ she says. ‘He loves me too.’

  They have said this to each other. She has not told anyone else. What does that say?

  ‘Oh, how foolish that sounds,’ Nick says. ‘How very girlish and green. You love him? He loves you? You want to run away? How old are you, my dear? Have you not learned? Have the books we’ve read been wasted upon you? You love this gurning ape and so you’re going to leave, be his skivvy and chambermaid? You’re more than that, Gwendoline. You were always more than that. Anyone can see that, my dear.’

  There is salt-spite back on his cheeks, the wattle under his chin has inflamed like that of a turkey. Once he was probably handsome. Still has something to his eyes. Something livid in them.

  ‘You said I might be jealous,’ he says, ‘and I am. I am jealous of your youth. I am jealous of your days to come. But I pity you for it, too. I pity you because I would change nothing of my life. Not one thing. A rare gift, that. Hindsight that nods approvingly.

  ‘I’ve loved one woman. We courted, we married, we lived, she died. You want my wisdom? My advice is stay here. My advice is wait. My advice is that this will prove ephemeral, and before you know it, you’ll be my sister Ethel, dragging kids around dirty streets, dreaming of home. You are a fine woman. Don’t let some man take that from you.’

  He downs the last of the black and tan, puts his Wordsworth in his pocket.

  ‘The comforts of home,’ he says, ‘are worth ten of the big dreams. And you can still have them here –’ he taps his head – ‘you don’t need to go running off to find them.’

  He is flush as he gets up from the table, stinking more as he puts on his coat, winds his scarf around his chicken neck.

  ‘Told you you’d be jealous,’ she says.

  16

  Outside the library he looks up and down the high street. There is nothing there, nothing moving, just the fog sitting low against the rubble. No clanking or clinking. He checks his watch again.

  Gwen will be happier here. Safer here. She will find another here. One better suited. Yes. To go all that way south, to leave her family, and for what? How many years before they’re ash and soot, before they’re holding a dead child, or hiding in basements and cellars? So much safer here, so much better here, with the fields and the brooks and the sea lapping at the bluffs. Let her live. Be in peace. Marry a vicar, a plumber, a librarian. Let them give her the love she is due. Allow her to go on, forget him except for low days when she wonders what might have been. How her life might have panned out hundreds of miles from her father and her brother. The bomb could drop and she would still be safe.

  But she is happy to go. She wants to go. She has been planning it. If not him, another will come, another up from the base, a child unplanned and up the aisle before it starts to show. No safe places anyway, this learned in the study rooms. Safety an illusion: the only defence is preparation, is knowing the drills. She would be safer with him. Loved by him. Protected by him. He has survived the two years of Service; there must be a reason for that. To be so safe, and then to come here, to be safe again. Reason in that, surely. Come the bomb or no, he will be there to save her. Be there to hold her against the blast. Yes.

  The wind rattles down the high street. The wind and the fog and the bomb and him. And the clank again. A tapping sound, like leaking pipes.

  17

  The bar remains empty until the midday crowd arrives. Six or seven of the regulars. They all have names and she greets them individually, and individually they tell her to give them a smile or tell her to cheer up. That it might never happen. She smiles and pours their drinks as normal.

  Where is Nick? Gone straight home, or at angry march across the town, appalled at her naivety, disgusted with the ease of her affections, muttering to himself like Lear? Right, to think that of her. Right, of course, all the things he’s seen. Madness to ignore his wisdom. Madness to listen to it, too.

  She didn’t tell him enough. Had she told him more, he would have understood. He would have liked the stories. He would have enjoyed them.

  She should have told him about when she knew. Knew properly. That would have convinced. Not the moment with the book, but later, in the countryside, far from the town, the two of them in an old hunters’ lodge belonging to a discreet friend of Carter’s. He would have seen it then.

  *

  The boys had Leave owing and Carter drove Patty, Drum and Gwen in a big car to somewhere up in the Lakes. The girls sat in back, supposedly on their way to visit an old school friend in Barrow; the boys up front, talking and giggling, fiddling with the radio. Patty was too excited to talk, just squeezed Gwen’s arm, believing this the weekend her serviceman would propose, and nothing Gwen could say would disabuse her of the notion.

  They arrived at a stately place, too stately for the likes of them, and at the groundsman’s entrance, Carter gave their names as Mr and Mrs Price and Mr and Mrs Jones. An unnecessary deception, the groundskeeper barely containing his disgust at Carter and his accomplices; this clearly far from the first time he’d used the same aliases.

  The hunters’ lodge was a semi-detached cottage with two front doors, one red, one black. Carter went to the black door; Drum, like a dutiful husband, took Gwen’s small suitcase to the red door. Patty said goodbye to Gwen, kissed her by the car, then followed Carter into their lodge, disappointment and upset no doubt close behind.

  Inside, under the watchful glass eyes of a Canadian moose, Drum kissed Gwen. They made love in a four-poster bed with duck-down pillows and thick cotton sheets. Afterwards Gwen smoked cigarettes and laughed as the sunshine crept through the open windows. That the moment. The sunlight and the smell of Drum, the play of sheets against her legs. T
hat the moment. The one she should have told Nick about. The burr in the air between them, the very ordinariness of it. The absolute humdrum of it.

  She knew it when he got up from the bed. She knew how it would go. Was sure of it, more certain even than Patty.

  He went to the bathroom. She heard taps turned on and the sound of running water. She knew what she wanted and did not want; both of them possible, both of them alluring in their own way.

  He closed the door on the bathroom, naked and muscled. He knelt down at the side of the bed and apologized for not having a ring, or any clothes on, or a house to call his own, but that he would like to share these absences with her forever.

  In the light, he looked just like Montgomery Clift. In the light, she said yes. She said yes, but to keep it a secret, even from Carter. Not to tell him until she was ready. In return, she would not tell Patty. Not that Patty would ever want to hear it anyway. To this he agreed. In the light, like Montgomery Clift.

  *

  She can still feel the softness of the bedclothes. She can still feel the sense of completion, of a stage conquered, of something final. She can still imagine a world in which she did not go to the lodge, in which she did not make love to Drum, and did not, in the after-swell of lovemaking, see her life entwined with the man relieving himself behind the noise of running taps. She does not much care for that world.

  Jessie comes into the bar in a cloud of perfume, hair styled high and blonde, the kind of woman who is described, by herself and others, as brassy. She’s an exceptional barmaid and does shifts whenever needed across town. She rarely works the same bar two nights in a row and always turns down the offer of full time. She likes to say she is free.

  ‘All right, love?’ Jessie says. She opens the hatch and slips behind the bar. She takes off her coat and the regulars’ eyes dart towards her chest, better to see the kind of blouse she’s wearing.