“No, but isn’t it rather your professional responsibility? Or am I pitching it too high?”
“Much too high. That’s the trouble with social work, no one has fixed on what to expect of it. You can’t be with people twenty-four hours of the day. If they’re really going to beat their children to death, they’ll find time to do it. And if you try to take the child away from them it gets into the newspapers, and you are shown to be a do-gooder and a tyrant. And you can’t improve people’s thoughts. You can’t stop them creating private hells for themselves, if that’s what they want to do.”
“Do you see eye-to-eye with your colleagues?”
“Not really. This miserable old woman today asked me how I would like it myself, some strange person coming into the house enquiring into things. I think, my reaction would be that things are bad enough without social workers.”
“I think perhaps you’re in the wrong job, Isabel.”
“Probably.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “I sometimes think I don’t care much for people. When I was a student I spent some time working with schizophrenic children. They frightened me. I used to think—I kept it to myself, of course—that there wasn’t a lot that was human looking out from behind their eyes. Then I studied the people I met on the street. They had much the same expression.”
“We’ll have to go,” he said. “Where do you want to go to?”
It was a blunt demand, but he could not think of any way to soften it. It was not quite time yet; they might hang on for another ten or fifteen minutes. But that would solve nothing.
“Let me just get my coat.”
He helped her into it. “Shall I take you home?”
“Do you want to get rid of me?”
“That’s the last thing I want.”
“Let’s drive then.”
“All right. Soon get the heater going, when we get out on the road.”
He opened the door and she slipped through it under his arm. The night buffeted past them like an animal avid for the hearth. They left the bright doorway for darkness and raw blue air. He felt her shiver against him, and took her arm. On the safe and public tarmac, splashed by yellow lights from the main road, he felt a fugitive wind on his cheek; the hollow-faced tossed bundles onto carts, eyes piercing for the camera. To be exiled, he had read, you need not leave home. Banishment is to the desert round of the familiar world, where small conversation is made and the weekly groceries are bought in good time. He had accepted this, as an intellectual conceit; now he felt the needles of loss. He tightened his grip above her elbow. “Come on, it’s chilly.” Their breath hung on the air. She slid into the passenger seat. “If that van would move,” he said. They had to stop and wait. He edged gingerly out of the car park and onto the main road. “Which way? Oh, Christ.” He slammed the wheel with his hands. He wanted to weep with frustration. “This is ridiculous. Nowhere to go. Like kids. Kids do this.”
She reached out and put her hand over his. “Colin, it’s all right, calm down. Drive to where we went before, and if you prefer it we can just talk. Or, if you prefer it, take me straight home. Whatever you think best.”
She spoke very softly, very gently. He would always remember the tone of her voice and the tips of her fingers brushing his knuckles, inside the woollen gloves she had just pulled on. Later, when it was all over, he would think: at that point, if at no other, she must have loved me. Then, if at no other time.
“We’ll go to where we went before.”
She pulled off her gloves again and unzipped her bag and fumbled for cigarettes. “Shall I light one for you?”
“Yes please.”
He hardly ever smoked now but he wanted her to touch him again. He could not wait until they got to the field.
As winter set in, Colin waited every week in the street outside Isabel’s house. It was not necessary for him to ring the doorbell. She never kept him waiting for more than a minute, and it gratified him to think that she must listen for the sound of the car.
“Take me to meet your father,” he said. “He need not know that I’m married.”
“I’d rather not tell lies.”
“There’s no need to lie. There’s no need to say anything about it. You shut me out of your life,” he complained. “When you aren’t with me, do you ever give me a single thought?”
Her dark almond eyes flickered over him. Her face remained impassive, unimpressed. “You have all the woman’s lines, Colin. Have you noticed that?”
Once or twice he had glimpsed the elderly man in the doorway, wearing spectacles and a bulky handknitted cardigan. He would wave a hand limply and forgetfully to see his daughter off, and then withdraw into the house.
Then, between the great yellow orbs which flanked the gate, she would turn to him the paler luminous oval of her face; not smiling, not speaking, she would slip into the seat beside him and their evening would begin. These days she wore a belted beige trenchcoat pulled in at the waist, and a long brown woollen scarf. Her hands when she lit a cigarette were often blue and mottled with cold. I will buy her some sheepskin mittens, he thought, at Christmas.
They did not go much to the field now. They were afraid of the car sinking in the mud. They had taken to getting further away from town. Colin would drive to the motorway intersection, slot them between the lights of other cars, and put his foot down. For miles and miles ahead the wet black road gleamed under the orange lights. Wrapped in their numb silence, their eyes on the tail-lights ahead, headlights reflected in the rear-view mirror, they were locked into the process of the road; parts on its conveyor, diminished to its function.
He would pull in at the service halt. They sat on padded seats of turquoise plastic, facing each other over the litter of stained paper cups and scraps of cellophane ripped from sandwiches.
