Of those few days spent together in Dorchester, I can hardly remember a thing. Though we must have wandered out of town to look at Max Gate, must have peered into the reconstruction of Thomas Hardy’s study in the County Museum, nothing of either trip remains. Like an ordinary break in a picturesque part of England, those days and nights out of harm’s way have blurred into all the other such excursions and visits we were to make down through our years together. No, not quite nothing: perhaps unintentionally, it turned out your mother had booked us into a room for two with a little double bed. Waking in the small hours, it seems I’m lying there unable to get back to sleep, you not stirring, the sounds of wind and rain in the trees outside. If so, that will have been the first of many such nights. For years I suffered from the sound of rain falling in the dark. Starting awake, I would find there was nothing else for it but to lie in sleepless anguish, as if for no other reason at all, but suddenly remembering.
Your father drove us up the A3 to London at the end of that week and back to the flat in the Belle View House Settlement. The idea was that I would be allowed to stay there and sleep in the spare room until somewhere else could be found. Even this provoked a difficulty, because you had already agreed the spare room would be available for Roger—Captain Psycho’s agent—while he was on his forty-eight hour shifts. So when you were off duty, you would let me sleep beside you in the double bed. That was how things continued through a chilly October, during which I disappeared for a couple of nights to Bristol. You knew about that, of course, and didn’t outwardly object. After this, slowly but surely, there seemed less and less point in traipsing off each evening to Roger’s spare room, and the idea that I was looking for somewhere, or planning to move out, gradually got forgotten.
All through the autumn, the days dwindling down from September, while the lectures of Michael Kitson and Anita Bruckner started at the Courtauld, I was keeping my proximity, you, Mary, living and working at the Home, your children no less alarmingly wayward. During those months in Warwick Crescent, where it turned out Robert Browning lived after his wife’s death and his return with their son from Italy, I got to know Danny, the senior social worker and his series of girlfriends. Your co-worker Roger would tell us about his string of part-time clients. And we were soon only too familiar with the antics of Sylvester, Justin, Tessa, Althea—and Edwin forever combing back his Elvis quiff. Mr. Draper no doubt sent his letter to Roy Jenkins, probably during our staying in Dorchester, and, although we never heard from him about that again, behind the scenes the processes were coming to a head.
On a New Year visit to Port Isaac Bay, we rented one of the whitewashed cottages at Trelights. You had found the advert for a holiday let in The Lady. From the upstairs back windows I could see St Endellion church on its hill. When the wind was in the right direction we could hear its bell ringers practising. It was a freezing winter, and the dark evenings were spent playing game after game of bezique in front of a chimneybreast clad in stone with a brass fireguard. After a few days of exploring the environs, you seemed to soften and relent.
‘You know, I never really intended to finish with you,’ I made myself say into one of your thought-filled silences, your hand held high with the card you were threatening to play.
‘You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?’
Now you had slapped it onto the little table between us, and were holding the cards firmly against your pink cardigan.
‘Well, I do, because it was me who kept saying we should stay together, wasn’t it?’
Then you looked up from your well-concealed hand.
‘Ah yes,’ you said, ‘I can see things haven’t quite turned out the way you planned them.’
‘You know I don’t think I ever had a plan exactly—just making it up as I went along. I was sort of experimenting.’
At that, you played another card.
‘Doubtless,’ you said. ‘So what do you imagine we should do?’
‘Good question,’ I agreed, and played one of mine.
We would take up the same topic the next day over lunch at the Heartland Head Hotel, its draughty dining room deserted, the walls lined with enormous framed jigsaws, difficult ones of facial features, dunes, or stretches of sea and sky.
Walking back along the winding road up towards St Endellion, we paused and leaned on an old field-gate. The dark winter trees were whipped back by fierce sea wind, wild grasses driven flat; it was exactly then that we found a way ahead. You were making up your mind to leave Belle Vue House at the end of the year’s contract. You were planning to train as a hospital manager.
‘We could try and find somewhere to live together … and a change of place might make a difference.’
‘Are you telling me you want to mend your ways?’ you asked with a faint smile at the appropriate, slightly antique-sounding phrase.
Yet by then my ways had been mended for me. So we strode on down to Port Quinn’s hidden shore, found a smugglers’ cove where the waves came pounding, a pebble beach with shards and wrack, soapstone and razor shells. There were a few shallow caves in the cliff face. Wandering in and out of them, picking our way among the tide pools, two young people yoked by violence together, it was here that the one future we could live found its course in us again.
Your summons to appear at the Court of Milan was waiting for you when we got back to Little Venice.