6

“So there was no way of telling how much of it was genuine,” he said. “But the woman broke down and I was sure she wasn’t acting. I don’t know what I’m going to say to Rathbone next time I bump into him, I can’t feel the same about him anymore, what he did up there on the stage was evil. But he has a great future.”

“Evil? What does that mean?”

“Ah, I see, not in your vocabulary. I mean he corrupted the solidarity that should exist between the members of the human race. As I say, I can’t think of him in a very friendly way now. But it was one of—”

“Solidarity?”

“We seem to be having trouble with terms this morning. What I mean is that he made us consent to the business, with himself as ringmaster, conducting—”

“Yes, I understand what you mean. It’s just that I don’t happen to think there is such a thing as solidarity in that general sense at all. It’s a political word. There can’t be solidarity between men and women, for example.”

“Are you saying there couldn’t be solidarity between you and me?”

“Never. Among men, yes. Among women, yes. That’s why I say it is a political word.”

“Good God,” Benson said. “And you accuse us of distorting the language. What I’m trying to get to is that Rathbone is a kind of genius. It was one of the most gripping things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I missed something then.”

“Yes, you did, but I’m actually not sorry you missed it.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” Alma said, “but I like to make that kind of judgement for myself. Anyway, perhaps you’ll be able to use it in a book.”

“Highly unlikely. I haven’t been able to write anything for a long time now. The Liverpool slave trade was to have been the setting for my next book but it has defeated my imagination. Somewhere in the process I have fallen sick. And then, you know, it went on so long, I couldn’t think of it just as an historical episode. I couldn’t deal with it and I couldn’t leave it alone.”

“I know what you mean. That’s how it was with my marriage. Of course you get out in the end, otherwise you’d die. It’s how they’re supposed to catch monkeys, isn’t it, put a banana in a little cage with a very narrow entrance, the monkey puts its hand in, gets hold of the banana, but he can’t get his hand out while he’s holding it and he can’t let go, so he just sits there.”

“Hm, yes.” Benson had not much cared for this comparison. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s why the meeting with Thompson was so important. The war was a kind of slavery too. The essence of slavery is having a role imposed on you, being made to perform. And I see now that that is true of everything. The meeting with Thompson made me think again about Walters, that’s the chap I told you about, the one I got killed. I found something out from Slater, you know, I tricked him, really, into an admission, and it changed my whole feeling about Walters’s death. After all these years. Walters transcended the condition. He died as himself. It may not sound much, put like that, but it is terribly important to me. It doesn’t make me less to blame but it makes him less to be pitied.”

“To tell you the truth, it always seemed to me that there was more of pity than blame in that business. Who is Slater, by the way?”

It was a brilliant morning. Sunlight lay across the table, over the remains of their breakfast. Benson had opened the window and they could hear the squabbling of sparrows in the eaves outside and see swifts wheeling high above the city in a cloudless sky. A faint, acrid smell of smoke came drifting in on the mild air, only sign of the previous night’s disorders. She looked at him across the table with a sort of ironical patience which he felt marked a deeper acquaintance between them. Her face still had some of the softness of sleep on it, but the eyes were as dangerously bright as ever.

“Of course, there hasn’t been time to tell you,” he said. “He’s been so much in my mind, I was assuming he must be in yours.” He was silent for some moments, then said rather awkwardly, “I was going to make some more coffee. But I suppose you have a lot to do …”

“I haven’t got anything to do. It’s Sunday, isn’t it? I’ll have to go and see about my car later on.”

He glanced through the window at the bright day. It was undeniably Sunday. “I’ll go with you, if you like,” he said.

From the kitchen, busy with the coffee, he told her about his visit to Brampton Manor, the forthcoming show, his talk with Slater, Meredith’s revelations. “He’ll do it, you know,” he said. “He’ll get to screw Erika. He’ll get his knighthood. Just as he got to be Officer i/c Entertainments, just as he has made a packet out of the commodity market. It’s monstrous, really. I wish I could put a spoke in his wheel somehow.”

“Perhaps you could,” he thought he heard her say.

“What?”

He was advancing towards her with the jug of coffee when the doorbell rang. He put the jug down on the table and went to the door. He found himself confronted by Dollinger, massive in a dark suit, holding a long white envelope.

“I hear you lit a fire in your grate,” Dollinger said in a deep, deliberate voice as soon as the door was opened.

Benson gaped at him. Did the envelope contain his notice to leave? It was three months now since that votive fire. Had the greater fires of last night finally moved Dollinger to action? In this dawn of riot he had judged the time ripe.

“I wanted to make an offering …”

But a wrestler would not be interested in that aspect of things. Was he now, with Alma looking on, about to be subjected to the Crab or the Boston Whip? “It was a cold day,” he said.

“Mrs Dollinger informed me about it.”

This was redundant, something they both knew, a sign of weakness then, to state it now. Benson looked for a moment into Dollinger’s eyes. They were deep brown and amazingly gentle. Within their depths he saw the ordeal of a sensitive soul. This was a man who abhorred altercation. Dollinger had not come in wrath to throw him around. He was here because the implacable Mrs Dollinger had finally nagged him into it. Three months he had resisted; now, in his Sunday suit, after Mass, he had been able to resist no more.

“It is true, what I hear?” he said.

“By God, yes.” Benson said, with experimental boldness. He saw wavering and dismay on the other’s face at this defiance.

“It’s all right,” he said quickly. “I’ll apologise to Mrs Dollinger in person, this very day.”

Dollinger nodded slowly. “Thank you,” he said. “Do not forget to do it.” He held out the envelope. “This came for you. In the night they brought it. I found it downstairs on the mat.”

“Thanks.”

Dollinger’s face broke into a sad smile. “Good, very good,” he said, “we have understood each other, no?”

“Yes.” With a strong sense of sympathy Benson returned the smile. He watched Dollinger retreat down the stairs. As he went back towards the kitchen he opened the envelope and took out the folded sheets. He recognised the handwriting at once: it was Carter’s.

He took the pages back to the breakfast table. “Will you excuse me a moment,” he said, “while I have a quick look at this?” Out of long, self-protective habit, he began reading at the last page.

Albert was squeezing her breasts inside their gossamer-thin casing, seeking by the urgency of his handling of them to make her equally desirous of him as he was for her. He had already removed her briefs and he was hoping with a hope as clamorous as his need for her, a need that had grown so mighty and potent that he could no longer contain it, that she would remove his, because he knew that in so doing she would be elated by her own audacity and so more ready to give of herself. She, knowing his desire for a love uncluttered and unhindered, hastened to meet his wishes because now the time had come for both of them to abandon reserve and reward themselves and each other for the strength and constancy of their love.

With a strange smile on her face, half dreamy, half self-conscious, she uncupped her breasts one after the other as her brassière sprang below. Albert brought his mouth to them, exciting her to a pitch almost unbearable. “Oh, my love,” she said between a groan and a sigh, and “Marvellous, marvellous, Sheila,” he kept repeating and now as their passion mounted she eased the implement of his power into the deepest fronded recess of her being. On her face he saw an expression he couldn’t read, abstract, as if she were looking at something far away. Then he was surfing home on a gathering tide of ecstasy all rhythmic to her throbbing convulsions and so there came to Albert and Sheila after all their long tender trials the supreme oceanic floodings of saturated and seraphic completed love …

Benson raised a delighted face. “Thank God, they’ve finally done it,” he said. There was a disturbing touch of the Black and Decker in the description of Albert’s member and that faraway look of Sheila’s was a bit ambivalent, as if she might have been imagining it was Clint Eastwood. But they had got there, they had broken through.

“They’ve done it,” he said again. Waving the papers he performed a brief impromptu dance. He remembered now Carter’s triumphant gesture of the evening before. He must have been intending to hand it over then, but the riot had delayed him; delayed, not prevented: he had come through a battle-torn Liverpool to drop this long-deferred consummation on the mat.

“They have finally fucked,” he said, unconsciously employing in his exhilaration Carter’s favourite stylistic device. “Albert and Sheila have finally fucked.”

“Who are they, friends of yours?”

“Not exactly. I’ll tell you. But first, what did you mean just now? Did I hear you say you thought I could do something about Slater?”

“Well, you could, if you really wanted. You said you had a programme of next Sunday’s events.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How is your memory these days? You said you had a good memory for landscape, details of ground and so on.” “Yes,” he said, “but that was in the war, you know.”

“This is a war, too. You can’t really stop people like that, short of revolution. What I have in mind is a token, something symbolic – it should be just up your street. And I think it would be good for you.”

“Good for my character you mean?”

“Your character is beyond saving. No, good for your spirit. Do you remember the lay-out of the grounds, where exactly the marquee was and so on?”

Benson thought for a moment or two. He could see the exact curve of the drive, the house on the rise with the wooded skyline beyond, the long slope of parkland, the lake, the summer-house, the marquee. “Yes, I think so.”

“How easy would it be to get to the marquee on foot from the road without being seen?”

“Well,” he said, “it would be a question of leaving the drive at a certain point and going through the wooded part of the grounds. Of course it’s difficult to be sure. There was a hawthorn hedge not far behind the marquee, I don’t remember how far exactly …”

He stopped, looking at her with sudden awe. Her eyes were glittering.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course it would depend on how my car has fared overnight. We’d need a get-away car. And we’d need recruits. Two at least. Young and active, if possible.”