The Invitation(81)

It fell a little ahead of him.

Morris behind him, the lifebelt in front. He could swim to Morris, and then try and get them both to the lifebelt. But already it was moving further away from him; there would be another wave – and soon, he could feel the tow as it gathered itself. He might have only a few seconds’ opportunity to get to it.

No: he couldn’t not try to save his friend. He began to try to swim towards Morris. But he was dragged back by the terrible sodden weight of his clothes, his boots. He tried to shrug himself out of them, but he was so weak, suddenly, his efforts rendered ineffectual. The cold had drained his energy, eaten it from him. Morris was reaching for him, but he seemed even further away. And suddenly he understood. He wouldn’t make it. Not to Morris and then back to the lifebelt. It was one or the other.

By the time he was hauled aboard, his friend had drowned. One of the men had seen him go under. He hadn’t resurfaced. And then the next wave had come, and put an end to any doubt.

He hasn’t told anyone this – not the whole of it, anyway. The men told him there was nothing he could have done. He couldn’t blame himself.

But he did. If he had tried a little harder, if he had been brave enough to risk everything, he might have done it.

Morris’ wife, Flora. When she had asked: ‘Did you see him, at the end?’ Did she, somehow, know? She couldn’t, could she? She was only asking in the way that a wife would, of the man who had seen her loved one’s last moments. Yet all the way back from her flat, on the bus, his hands had shaken.

He finds he can’t look at Stella as he speaks. He knows that she is watching him. But he doesn’t want to see her face, to see a judgement there.

‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I imagine that he said something to me, that he gave me permission. You know, that he understood.’ He laughs, without humour. ‘But he didn’t. He wanted to live – he was fighting for it with everything he had left. He wanted me to save him. And I might have done it. If I had only been less of a coward.’

He covers his face with his hand. It is done now, at least, his shame laid bare. He tries to tell himself that this is something. Whatever she may think of him now, however she may despise him, he has relieved himself of the burden.

‘We do what we have to,’ she says, carefully, ‘in the moment, to survive. It is easy in hindsight to think you might have done more, that you might have tried harder.’

From anyone else, this might sound like a mere platitude. But from her, with what he now knows of her, it is something different.

He shuts his eyes. ‘There’s more, though.’ Might as well tell it all, now. How, after the war, he had gone to see Morris’ wife Flora. She had sat and wept quietly, politely, as though she was embarrassed by her show of emotion in front of this stranger. It should have been him. He didn’t have anyone relying on him to come home. Not to the same degree, anyhow. His parents – his mother, certainly – would have been devastated, but they had one another, and they had money. Looking at little Flora Eggers, in her flat that rattled with the movement of the passing trains, looking at the mismatched furniture and her cheap haircut, he had become very aware that Morris must have been everything to her and the boy, Fred, too solemn for such a small child. This was what love did to you, he thought, watching her.

He had gone back, a few months later. He had remembered some anecdotes that he wanted to share with her – Morris at his best. He had some idea that it would help. He had bought a tin of biscuits from the Woolworth’s next to the station, but then, looking at them as he waited for her to answer the bell, they became inadequate. He wished then that he had had the foresight to go to Fortnum’s, get her some of the really good sort.

A middle-aged woman had answered the door, and he had stepped back in surprise. Flora’s mother, perhaps.

She had frowned at him, then at the biscuits. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘If I want to buy them, I can go and get them myself. Don’t like being sold to on my doorstep.’

‘Oh, no – I’m not selling.’

‘What are you after then?’

‘I was wondering if Flora was at home?’

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Eggers. Flora Eggers.’

Her demeanour had changed absolutely. ‘Oh,’ she had said. ‘Oh, my dear … you haven’t heard. And that poor little boy.’

She had gone out one morning, only a short walk to the track. Leapt into space.

There is a long silence.

‘Hal.’ She takes his hand, again with that tentativeness strange in two who are lovers. ‘Every day, since Tino died … it is what I go back to in sleep – every time a little different, but always with the same outcome. I’m too stupid, or too slow. I think of who he might have become. He was so bright, so interested in everything. He could have been a scientist, or an artist. He would have done a better job of living than I have. But,’ she grasps his hand with a new urgency, ‘hearing you talk of your friend has made me wonder something.’

‘What?’

‘Whether we blame ourselves because in a way it makes things easier to understand if they have a reason, a fault, behind them.’ She looks at him. ‘Do you think that could be part of it?’

For the first time he meets her gaze, and he finds no judgement there – only a surprising tenderness.