Carter settled back in his chair. “It is a variety of the quest novel,” he said. “Wayne Booth, in his Rhetoric of Fiction—”

  “I know the book you mean. Tell me, these odd jobs Albert is always doing for her, tightening up the washers on her taps, for example, polyfillering her cracks, plastering her sitting-room recess and so on, I’ve been meaning to ask you whether that is a system of sexual symbols, based on the notion of Freudian transference, whereby you set out to satirise the fact that we live in a ruttish age?”

  Long before reaching the end of this sentence he was deeply sorry he had begun it. In his haste to forestall a disquisition on Wayne Booth he had said the first thing that came to his head. Carter was looking at him in surprise and some indignation. This is one below the belt, he seemed to be saying. “Albert is good with his hands,” he said after some moments of pause.

  “But he isn’t terribly, is he? Not when it comes to Sheila anyway.”

  “That is the whole point.” To his dismay Benson saw that Carter had made a recovery. His face was wearing again that sly, triumphant look of the small boy about to catch the teacher out. “You’ve missed the whole point,” he said.

  “Well?”

  “Albert’s ability at odd jobs, his dexterity as you may say with his tools, is meant to be a contrast with his uncertainty and clumsiness about feelings and relationships with the opposite sex. This is a statement about man the tool-wielding animal losing touch with his own tool, as you might say.”

  Carter folded his arms with the look of a man who knows he has made a palpable hit. Suddenly Benson knew that he could not go on any longer with Carter. Not money, not habit, not his intermittent compassion nor his fearful passivity could make him endure these absurd discussions any longer. Without some sort of jolt Carter would die before he finished his novel, thus condemning Albert and Sheila to an eternity of unfulfilled desire, a sort of endlessly repeated reaching for the briefs. He could not have it on his conscience.

  “Harold,” he said, “I think you will have to stop coming to see me.”

  Carter’s look of triumph vanished at a stroke. “But why?” he said, and the hurt in the question and the dismay on the rough face brought a feeling of tightness to Benson’s throat. Carter depended on these visits, he knew that. “I can’t go on,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. It’s about a patient in a lunatic asylum. He was totally apathetic, he seemed to be indifferent to everything, just passed his days in a sort of stony silence. They tried to interest him in things, construction kits, model aeroplanes, weaving, painting pictures. Nothing worked. Then one day the doctor suggested that he might try to write something. He brightened up at this. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I’ve always wanted to write a novel.’ ‘But that is marvellous,’ the doctor said, and they provided him with everything he needed, paper, pens, a quiet room with a view over the grounds. After a while the doctor asked him how he was getting on. ‘I’m getting on very well,’ he said. ‘I shall need some more paper.’ The doctor was delighted. They had given him quite a lot of paper to begin with. Now they gave him a whole lot more. ‘What is your novel called?’ the doctor asked him one day. ‘It’s called Riding through the Desert,’ he said. ‘That is a very good title,’ the doctor said. ‘How far have you got with it?’ ‘I am at page 420,’ the man said. ‘Surely it must be nearly finished by now?’ ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I’m barely half way through. I’m going to need some more paper.’ So they gave him a few hundred sheets more. Finally the man came to the doctor with his manuscript. It was over 800 pages by this time. ‘I’ve finished it,’ he said. ‘I’m really pleased to hear that,’ the doctor said. ‘May I read it?’ The man said yes, he could read it if he wanted and so the doctor took it home with him and after supper he settled down with eager curiosity to read it. He saw that the first page consisted of clippety-clop, clippety-clop repeated over and over again, and as he read on he found that every page was exactly the same, covered with clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Then, on the very last page, right at the end, there was a change. The last two words of the novel were, whoah there!

  He glanced at Carter, on whose face there was no expression at all. “The ride was over, you see,” he said. “The man knew exactly how long it would take to ride across the desert. He had a strong sense of form, of the dynamic of his narrative – and that includes, it must include, the sense of an ending. Now if you want to go on writing clippety-clop for the rest of your days, Harold, I can’t stop you, and it may even be what you need, but I don’t feel I can assist in it any longer. I’d like you to think this over very carefully.”

  There was a long silence. It was clear from Carter’s face that he was hurt and offended. He began to put Sheila and Albert slowly back into his green bag. He stood up to go. At the door, however, he rallied. Some flicker of controversy, the final desire to score a point, returned to his face. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “If he was riding across the desert, the hoofbeats would be muffled. There wouldn’t be any clippety-clop.”

  At this moment, possibly the last in their professional relationship, Benson felt more sympathy for Carter than he perhaps had ever felt. Prose-mangler, Thatcher-lover, tormentor of his own creatures, it nevertheless had to be admitted that he had spirit. Benson smiled at him with genuine affection. “That is true,” he said. “There’s a fault in verisimilitude there and you have put your finger on it. But the man was mad, don’t forget.”

  “But why Banana Split?”

  “I don’t know, really. Probably some sinister resonance from my childhood. It has a snarling menace about it, don’t you think? I carried it around with me, like a sort of verbal talisman or magic formula to keep off evil, or in this case grievous bodily harm.”

  I’m talking too much, he thought. He was nervous. Alma’s face was only three feet away in the quietness of this noontime pub. There are faces that disappoint on a second encounter but hers was not one of them, not for him. The glitter of the eyes, the tenderness and bitterness of the mouth, the abrupt, impatient movements, were enhanced rather, making his memory of them seem poor. He wanted her to like him.

  “Well,” she said after a moment, “it doesn’t seem to have worked on this occasion.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I thought at first it had been a failure, just another example of the mildewed Logos. As if I needed examples of that. I know more about loss of word power than almost anybody.” He paused on the brink. Mustn’t start boring her with my block. “No,” he continued, “when I thought about it afterwards I realised that it had worked, in a way. They were about to start on me when I said it. They must have thought, you know, that I was making some filthy proposition. They were outraged, they were shocked that someone about to be bashed would have the invincible lechery to suggest an evil perversion.”

  Alma smiled. It was the first time he had seen her do this and the effect on him was considerable. That drawn look of the mouth in repose gave the smile when it came a look of elemental joy about it.

  “So,” she said, “in the first shock—”

  “They relaxed their grip, just enough for me to break away.” He said nothing about the undignified sprint down the alley. There were limits to confidence after all. “Like another drink?” he said.

  “My turn.”

  When she came back from the bar the smile was there no longer. “It’s no wonder,” she said as she sat down, “that you’ve got these disaffected young people, when you think of the damage to the social fabric of this country that woman and her junta of yes-men have done in two terms of office.”

  “Disaffected young people?” It seemed an odd way of describing the youths that had ringed him round the other evening, whether they’d had the proper chances in life or not. “If you were one of my fictioneers,” he said, “I would take you to task for a phrase like that.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Some people I help with their writing.”

  “Well I’m not, thank God. There’s too much fiction in the world already, just look at the newspapers. What’s wrong with it, anyway?”

  “It does what language shouldn’t do. It is tendentious. It tries to make those thugs look better for the sake of making the government look worse. You can’t really think that a readiness to batter unoffending strangers half to death has been brought about by two terms of Tory rule?”

  “I’m quite ready to batter the Home Secretary half to death, or the Minister for Health and Social Security, and they’re both complete strangers to me. Of course they’re not unoffending. I suppose you’re right, one must be even-handed. I’d be willing to admit that those thugs in the Cabinet are no more than disaffected middle-aged or elderly persons, victims of narrow education, moral undernourishment and a deprived imagination, or perhaps I mean depraved. That satisfy you?”

  The smile was there again but it was different now, tauter, combative – it was the mouth that gave instant register to changes of feeling on this face, the brightness of the eyes was unchanging. Accident of physiognomy, the eyes, he thought. Some capacity for holding more light than was normal …

  “You take a reasonable line, don’t you?” she said. “I’ve got you down for an Alliance voter.”

  It was as close as she probably ever allowed herself to come to a sneer. Benson felt his blood quicken. She was waiting with something of the air of a prosecution lawyer but he would not let himself be cross-examined for his political views – or lack of them. Attempting to explain oneself gave up too much ground, it was bad tactics – he would need tactics, he suddenly saw, if he wanted to keep on with Alma. He would have to contest the space. Doctrinaire, foe to metaphor, impatient of the delicate middle ground of doubt on which all fiction depends – what kind of muse was this?

  He leaned towards her with a contrite expression. “It’s not only that, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m fond of opera too.”

  He saw the belligerence leave her face. Quite suddenly she laughed. “Yes,” she said, “you have a penchant for owls too, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t aspire to albatrosses.” Should he tell her about his sacrificial fire, his invocation? No, better she should feel her body desired than her spirit – and perhaps that was the truth of it anyway. “There was one, you know,” he said.

  “Was there?” She looked away for some moments, glancing through the window at the street outside. The bar door was open and sunlight from this warm May morning fell in a broad shaft half across their table. “All the same,” she said, “there is a generation growing up in the rubble of the inner cities that has known nothing but Thatcherism. Think of what it has done to them. Now we are in for another four years of it. People don’t know, they don’t know what has been done to Liverpool. I’d like to bring people up in bus-loads from the Home Counties and take them around Toxteth on a guided tour, show them the realities of this property-owning democracy of ours.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is appalling what has been allowed to happen here.”

  “Allowed to happen? They have brought it about, it’s the direct result of Conservative policies.”

  Benson felt oppressed: she allowed no space for difference, vagueness. It was assent she wanted, instant, total. At the same time the words seemed to come to her unexamined, too easily.

  “Well,” he said, “I am older than you and more cynical, I suppose. What is happening here seems to me to be because no one has cared enough, no one with the means of change has been capable of caring enough, none of the parties. When you look at the sum of folly and misery in Liverpool and on this planet as a whole, when you see how far things have gone, people who put the blame on a particular system seem like solemn lunatics to me, whether they do it at Westminster or at City Hall – or here in the Cambridge Arms, for that matter. This place is rotting from the heart while people argue about priorities.”

  “Where is that?”

  “What?”

  “This heart you are talking about?”

  “I was thinking of Toxteth, of inner-city decay generally.”

  “I don’t know how it is,” she said after a moment, “but some things seem to come from you too easily, as if the words were more important than the thing you are describing. I get the same feeling I had before about you, as if the whole thing is there just to provide a metaphor. Toxteth isn’t the heart of Liverpool. It’s just a ghetto.”

  Benson took a swallow of his beer. It was what he had been mentally accusing her of some minutes before. “All right,” he said, waving his glass as if to give her the platform.

  “The North of England is full of ghettoes. You don’t need walls, people are kept there by poverty and illness. Do you know what the life expectation is in places like that, compared to the national average? The incidence of chronic illness caused by sub-standard housing, the figures for mental disturbance, break-down, suicide? They’ve been trying to suppress the medical reports for years on one pretext or another. Not that it would matter if they shouted them from the roof tops. There’s nothing left to shock in the conscience of this country or that gang would never have been voted back in again.”

  Her voice had softened as she spoke, her whole manner grown less combative. It was with the vehemence of what she was saying, he realised suddenly, something that happened to him quite often. The last shreds of his resentment at her dogmatism were dissolved. He said, “In the sense you mean, the heart of this city is where the heart of a city always is, where the capital is managed. That goes on pumping away whatever happens in Liverpool 8. But that heart is ramiform – you can’t locate it.”

  “Ramiform, that’s a good word.” With a sort of awed fascination he saw her mouth draw down into a taut line, the whole face harden into an expression of passionate violence. “If you could locate it, we would have torn it out long ago,” she said.

  “Metaphor is an instrument of truth too,” he said slowly. “A good one is worth a lot of doctrine. It was with a metaphor that you defended me, that evening when we met.”

  “How did I defend you?”

  “You remember, I was talking about the man I had seen jump from the top of a tower block. I was making it into a story, which I shouldn’t have done. I got a bit excited and I spilled some of Morton’s beer. He said something that made me feel a fool.”

  “Oh, that.” She made the sudden movement of the head he liked so much, impatient, defiant, proud – he could not quite have said which. “Ben Morton is a lightweight character.”

  A certain silence followed upon this, one of those pauses that lengthen when no appropriate response is found. Benson looked at the broad shaft of sunlight streaming in through the open door. It lay across their table, shone on the brass handrail of the bar, on the head of the landlord as he leaned over his paper, gleamed on the bottles suspended behind him, upended, like vessels in some complicated life-support system. Did she mean she would have taken anyone’s part against Morton? And he himself, how did she rate him as a contender? On her scales he would probably weigh in as a bantam; useless at any weight as he didn’t really believe in fighting. She did, it seemed; but fighting, actual warfare, was practically the only area of experience, apart from male orgasm, that she couldn’t make equal claim to. She wouldn’t be interested in heroics. But it was not heroics that he now suddenly and urgently wanted to talk to her about.

  “I saw a man in the street the other night,” he said, not quite looking at her. “That same night, the night of the Banana Split. Someone I was in the war with. I was in the last war, you know.”

  “Which one was that? Chad, the Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf?”

  “I’m talking about the Second World War,” he said steadily. “That was the last war for me. I only saw action for a few months of 1944. I was in the Anzio landing, the fighting of that winter to establish the Beachhead, then the break-out on May 22. I was wounded during the break-out and spent the next three weeks in hospital in Naples. By the time I was fit again we had taken Rome and I stayed behind there in an office job. That was the end of the fighting for me.”

  “Is that how you got the scar on your face?”

  “Yes. I got a bigger piece in my thigh. I was lucky not to lose a leg like poor Baxter.”

  “Who was he?”

  “One of the others. He was always laying the law down. Most of the wounds were from shrapnel, you know. Grenades, mortars. Both sides used air-burst shells. And mines of course.”

  Alma was silent for a moment, then she said, “Did you say May 22? That’s the day I was born, the night rather. May 22, 1944.”

  “During the night?” He looked at her in wonder: her birth cries might have coincided with his wounds; two voices, one blended sound. “That is extraordinary,” he said.

  “Perhaps it is.” The remarkable smile lit up her face again. “One or two other people might have been born that night too, you know.”

  “He was singing,” Benson said. “Singing in the street. Begging. It seemed strange because he used to sing in this show some of us were in, run by a man called Slater, Second-Lieutenant Slater. We put on a show during those months of the stalemate, while they were building up for the attack. There were a lot of men there and almost no women. People were bored, a lot of the time. The show was a great success. Slater made it a success.”

  “What did you do in it?”

  “I was one half of a double act. Song and dance. The other half was a man called Walters.”

  He paused on the name. Now he had come to it he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control his voice. There were other risks too: he knew that if she mocked him or became sarcastic he would get up and leave and that would be that.

  “In conditions like that,” he said, “you form strong links with people, either of liking or disliking. Conditions of fighting, I mean. It was very difficult ground and the positions were always shifting – not very much but enough to make things uncertain. Walters and I always went out together. We were a double act at the front too. We were what you would call inseparable. He was very funny, you know, quick to see a joke. He was a good mimic too – he could take people off, other people in the platoon, various officers. It was an extraordinary friendship in some ways. We came from quite dissimilar backgrounds. His parents were working people. He had left school at fifteen and gone to work in a bank – he was a bank clerk in civilian life. I had grown up in a Norfolk vicarage, been to boarding school and so on. But it didn’t matter.”