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  ‘We’ve got to find him.’

  ‘Probably already on his way to hospital.’ The ambulance man shrugged.

  ‘I’m going to have a look round,’ Paul said. ‘Will you stay here?’

  ‘Not all morning.’ He was an ungracious man, with a cold eye and a defensive way of speaking, on guard against public effrontery. His mate, more rubicund, his uniform less sharply fitted, was at the side of the public house, talking to a man with a raincoat over pyjamas who kept a hand on the edge of the door as if ready to slam it. At a window above, a netted woman looked out, chewing on her gums.

  ‘I told you — nothing,’ the man was saying. ‘I’d have known if there was any trouble. I know everything that goes on round here. Blood in the phone box — that’s nothing to wake people up for. Always cutting each other up, they are in these parts.’ He shut the door. The woman kept the window open until Paul and the ambulance men, searching the ground, moved out of her sight.

  ‘Better not be another false alarm,’ the defensive man said. ‘I was out last week to a chap who was supposed to have taken thirty nembutal, and found him in bed with his landlady. Gives your lot a bad name.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Paul disliked him on sight. ‘I think it’s the other way around.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ The man did not like Paul either. ‘Ten minutes, Jim,’ he said to his mate, ‘and that’s it.’

  He went down a passageway behind the public house. The rubicund man crossed the rood, and Paul went down the hill, looking in shop doorways, trying side gates, scouting the yard outside a garage. At the corner, there was blood again. Behind a broken wall, on a demolition site strewn with bottles and rubbish, he found the boy, his white ghost face half in the mud, his left arm bundled in a denim jacket wet and sticky with blood. Paul knelt down to him and shouted. The red-cheeked ambulance man came running, the other more slowly, with a face that had seen everything.

  The morning shift of Samaritans had arrived. In the bunk room, Victoria had changed into a dress, and was trying to make something out of her face in a two-inch square of mirror propped on the bookcase. Long greenish eyes that looked sleepy until half-way through the morning, her grandmother’s nose, which had been the only classy thing about her, a pale mouth that looked sad if she caught its reflection unawares.

  ‘You look as if you knew this had to end,’ Sam had once said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  But she did. They had both known. Sometimes now when she caught herself looking sad in a shop window or in a mirror at the turn of the cinema staircase, she noted: There is a woman who has lost her love.

  Andrew, who was a student at the University, put his shaggy head round the door. ‘Someone called Billie wants to know if you’re still here. Are you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She had untied the green scarf and she went downstairs with her hair hanging round her shoulders. ‘How are you, Billie?’

  ‘How do you expect?’

  ‘Didn’t you sleep?’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s such a thing as a hangover, dear heart.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Serves me right.’

  ‘Are you going to the cafeteria?’

  ‘After a night like that? Hell, no. I’ll tell you something, Victoria. I had a full bottle of aspirin in the drawer by my bed.’

  ‘So have lots of people.’

  ‘You know what’s very annoying about you? You won’t get excited. I was going to take the lot.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

  Billie’s jeer, a noise between expectoration and vomit.

  ‘I’ll be here on Sunday. Why don’t you come in and have a chat?’

  ‘Might. Might not. I’ll see what — you know — what develops.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Ta.’

  Victoria went back to the mirror on the bookcase.

  ‘Why bother?’ Helen came in with her coat on. ‘Aren’t you going home?’

  ‘I’m going to get some breakfast and then go to work.’

  ‘No sleep?’

  ‘It’s press day.’

  ‘You told me you needn’t go to the paper this morning. Why?’

  ‘Oh — I don’t know.’ Victoria told quite a lot of lies, sometimes to fend off solicitude.

  ‘If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have asked if you could do the extra night duty,’ Helen said.

  ‘I know.’ Victoria gathered up her long sandy red hair and began to wind it smoothly round her tired head. ‘That’s why I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  They felt easy and honest together after their shared night. To work as a Samaritan was an intensification of the focus of living, direct and clear. You knew what you had to do. You knew why you were there. Could even sometimes begin to grope towards an idea of who you were, as the pretence and defences fell away before the urgent truth of human contact.

  Paul stayed at the hospital until the boy’s arm had been sewn up. He had severed a tendon, and they put the arm in plaster to the elbow. A splint was bandaged to the other arm where the needle of the blood-drip went in. After they had taken him up to the ward, Paul waited outside until a staff nurse with a waist girthed in between bosom and swinging hips came out and headed for the kitchen, mouth working importantly.

  ‘The boy with the wrist — could I see him for a moment before I go?’

  ‘In the middle of my bedpan round? You must be mad.’ She went into the kitchen and poured tea out of a great metal pot that stood stewing on the stove.

  Paul wanted to ask, ‘Can I have a cup?’ but she had her back turned, looking out of the window in a sudden daydream, the calm eye of her storm of early morning activity. Through the glass of the ward door, Paul could see nurses panting round with shrouded bedpans. A few patients shuffled about in dressing-gowns collecting bottles from old men who drew them brimming forth from under the bedclothes where they had secreted them all night. By the far wall, the boy lay on his back under the drip bottle, his suffused face turned to one side, his arms stretched stiffly out beside him.

  ‘Tell him I’ll come back this evening,’ Paul said, as the staff nurse headed out of the kitchen again and through the ward door, twitching the curtain all the way across the glass to stop him looking.

  Two

  IT WAS A TOWN that had everything. Old, new middling architecture, pleasing to the eye, unremarkable, appalling. Shops, factories, seafront, slums, University. A satellite New Town full of disoriented families who would not think of it as home until the next generation. Floodable bungalows along the estuary where people pottered through the end of their lives. Esplanade hotels where ditto, but more lavishly.

  Peter Wallace, Samaritan number 100, who was the Director of the branch in this town, lived at the unfashionable end of the seafront, disguised as the proprietor of a small, comfortable hotel where families came back year after year and found their odd lost sandal still at the back of the cupboard. They knew that he worked somewhere else, since his wife seemed to run the hotel and he was not much seen in the daytime. They knew that he had an attractive, reassuring way of making you feel that the hotel was for you, instead of you and your cash for it. They knew that he and their children enjoyed each other, that his wife sang in the kitchen and that they somehow kept staff year after year. They did not know that he had studied for the priesthood until he saw that his ministry must be larger than the church. They did not know about the Samaritans, unless they happened to ask.

  Beyond the Wallaces’ Baytree Hotel, at the mouth of the small sluggish river was a pier, and a clutch of bothies where you could drink and dance and see a film with whips and snarling women, eat batter with a little acid fish inside, feed money into machines with flashing lights and belting music, and wander past bland wax figures of Princess Anne and Mao Tse-tung and Lyndon Johnson (Nixon not yet ready).

  On the other side of the river was the New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spreading like a brick psoriasis
over the downs and meadows. It boasted an elementary school, and a big comprehensive school where older children could learn anything from computer programming to fitting pipe-joints. In the comprehensive school, Paul Hammond, Samaritan number 401, was in the English department, not its head nor ever would be with that public-school-housemaster background, although the staff were willing to condone it, since he had had the sense to get out.

  Most of the Butterfields children could walk or bicycle to school, as their parents could walk or bicycle to the factory estate where great names of industry were taking root, company flags flying, storm-driven sea-gulls beating round the plate glass towers and concrete chimneys. It was in one of these shining towers that Mrs Barbara Frost had cooked lunch for Paul and the directors of Unitech Electronics. It was in the vaunted Butterfields shopping centre, where you could stroll without getting yourself or your pram run over, and chill sea winds swept through the holes in the pseudo-Moore statuary, that Jackie’s parents plied their trade in leather and plastic and Jackie did his Wile-U-Wate heels in the back workroom.

  Out to the west on the other side of this great conglomerate town, the richer people, who had moved away from its terraced streets as the town grew too crowded, had turned the outlying villages into suburbs. In the twenties and thirties, they had built timbered granges and brick mansions and stucco villas with red tiles in the back hall and a room with wicker furniture for the maids. They had set out lawns and borders and tennis courts and blue-grey conifers, and roses which they had to prune themselves now that all the old men of earthy aphorisms had been killed off by Welfare.

  In one of the half-timbered manor houses, with feather designs stamped in the plaster and unnecessarily latticed windows which she only cleaned when no one could see out any more, Helen, Samaritan number 434, lived with her fatherless children in a flat behind the kitchen and sustained a mutual love-hate existence with her employers.

  The tall terraced houses in the Victorian part of the town were now mostly cut up into flats and government bureaux and day nurseries and clinics and offices where social workers kept a one-bar electric fire under the desk, the heat not quite reaching the visitor’s chair. On the edge of these streets, strategically placed to catch those who fell through the holes in the passionless sieve of bureaucracy, the Samaritan Centre offered unconditional welcome. You did not have to fill in a form. You did not have to categorize your problems. You did not have to have a problem at all if what you wanted was to sit and be at rest in the comfortable warm room which ran from the jungle of the front garden to the wilderness at the back, and had once been the vicar’s parlour, with a paper fan in the fireplace and brown paper to keep the sun off the carpet.

  Above the Samaritans’ square stone rectory, Commercial Road deteriorated upward through the mazes of Flagg’s Hill. Half-way up was Darley Road, grim grey housing for the artisans of the early factories, now warrens where luckless families and loners like Tim and Frank paid four or five pounds a week for a peeling buggy room without heat or water.

  On the flatland beyond Flagg’s Hill were the austerity flats built after the war and never improved, the ground trampled as hard as the cement yards where children shrieked and fought and bloodied their grey knees. Billie had a flat in Block C, a prison address for a prison building, the stairway open to the rain and snow, the lift stinking of urine and vomit, even when it worked.

  On the mornings when she could face it, Billie put on her green cafeteria overall and hauled herself across the river to the other side of the valley where the University had kept part of that opposite hillside green, with a park and playing fields that dropped in terraces to the river and the boathouses. Upriver, the raw orange brick of the hospital where they had taken Tim, belching forbidden smoke as if it had a gas oven instead of a mortuary. Downriver, the old factories, spewing forbidden ullage. Many were defunct, all their dirty windows broken, their yards piled with rusted junk. One of their old office buildings, condemned but not yet demolished, was the house run by some of the University students for derelicts like old Michael who drifted in and out of town, and sometimes died there, from crude spirits, or drugs, or pneumonia, or starvation, or simply because they stopped living.

  Lower down towards the sea, the busy town-centre clustered on either side of the river, old and new unpat-terned, shops and offices and municipal buildings. On the second floor of an old structure that rocked perceptibly when the presses ran was the office of the bi-weekly local paper, where Victoria, Samaritan number 422, was receptionist and secretary to the editor.

  Behind the Courier building, wandering like a colon through the main part of the town and somehow ignored by the planners who dreamed of their city resurrected clean and white, Marsh Lane still held the miasma of its name. It started with the suspect Station Hotel where no one would choose to stay because of the noise, and petered out in an abandoned coal yard off Commercial Road. Somewhere near the middle, where Marsh Lane crossed the main shopping street, old Michael could be found off and on hobbling along the gutter, yoked back and front with boards that hectored, ‘Repent Brethren, for the end of the world is tomorrow.’

  There were three town bridges over the polluted river, two railway stations, cinemas, theatres, traffic jams twice a day, hundreds of places where you could drink or eat, and a famous little old seagoing village where chestnut trees grew out of uneven brick pavements and artists real and quasi set up easels in the leafy summer streets.

  It was a town that had everything, although chunks of it had nothing much. Singleton Court, where Paul and Alice Hammond had lived for the two years since he had been allowed the charitable chance to resign from the Cotswolds school, had not much to do with the town, the suburbs or the countryside, its flats designed with nothing much in mind but housing bodies. It was full of people like Alice who had nothing much to do but get through the day, and people like Paul who had not much choice but to survive their marriage, and hope for something better for their children.

  ‘Where have you been?’ When Paul went home for a shave, Alice was in the sitting-room, cutting her toe-nails on to the fireplace rug.

  ‘I left you a note.’

  ‘Can’t read.’

  ‘I was called out about five.’

  ‘Did somebody, as we say, “put an end to it all”?’

  ‘Almost. I think he’ll be all right. He lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll try and talk to him this evening.’

  Alice sighed. ‘Are you going to make some tea?’

  When Paul came back with a cup for her, she was sitting hugging her knees, her bare feet yellow, the toes distorted by the pointed shoes she had continued to wear after they went out of style, because it met some neurotic need in her to walk painfully.

  ‘Darling.’ She was staring at the fire which glowed and flickered through logs whose metal mesh foundation was wearing through the painted bark. They had inherited it from the last tenant. ‘Darling, you know, now that the children are off my hands,’ (they were twenty and seventeen) ‘I ought to have some purpose in my life.’ She said this about once a week. ‘I might try the library, or get a job in a boutique. I’d like to take a course at the University. Sometimes I think I’ll join the Samaritans. Would you sponsor me?’

  ‘We don’t “sponsor” people. Either you are the right type and they take you, or you’re wrong and they don’t.’

  ‘I feel I could offer so much to people who were plumbing depths, because I’ve been there myself.’

  ‘You said that when we started in A.A.’

  ‘Oh, them. I’m not an alcoholic, that’s why it was no good. And I don’t like coffee in paper cups. And everyone being nice to each other, and jolly.’

  ‘And not being able to have a drink.’

  ‘Right, as usual. Darling,’ as Paul went to the door, ‘the tea is too hot. I can’t drink it.’ She was whining like her own daughter, a dozen years ago. ‘Get me a little short one, will you
? Just to set me up.’

  ‘Help yourself.’ Paul went out yawning. Alice went into the kitchen, poured something, and had to be sick in the sink because Paul was shaving in the bathroom with the door locked.

  ‘One to bring up, the next to keep down,’ she chanted like a nursery rhyme, sitting red-eyed on a counter stool in the tiny kitchen, clutching a glass while Paul made toast and ate it quickly. When he went to get his jacket, she followed him and stood in the bedroom doorway, so that he had to move her aside to get out. Her shoulder under the torn frills of her birthday negligée (he should have bought something that was easier to wash) was a bony knob.

  ‘One day,’ she called after him when he was at the front door, ‘you’ll be killed in a car crash or stoned to death by the children, without kissing me goodbye.’

  He came back to kiss her and she bent her head to rub the dry colourless hair under his chin.

  ‘I couldn’t have married anyone but you.’ She put a sob into her voice.

  ‘Have I made you happy?’

  ‘So very happy.’

  Sometimes they played at being closely married, to disguise the possibility that under the misery and disgust and disappointment, they still might be.

  Hungry and with a headache, a little sick from sleeplessness, Paul drove to work through the thick morning traffic in the little red car which was mutilated with Alice’s dents and scratches. He crossed the river by Royal Bridge where he had sat and talked one night to a girl on the parapet, both of them dangling their legs over the black water. If you jumped in the river, it was said, you would be poisoned before you drowned.

  Turning north where the older factories squatted under the hill that hid the University from the town, he skirted the new factory estate, and saw the electronics plant where he had lunched yesterday, the executive building landscaped with readymade grass and pools and little trees, the huge window of the dining-room flashing an acknowledgement back to the sun. If there was to be a big lunch with things that took a long time to cook, might Mrs Frost be in there already, her small diamonds on the back of the sink and flour in her wedding ring? If Paul were to turn into the car park and go up to that floor in the silently chuckling lift, she would make him a cup of coffee, and he would be late for his first class.