In late afternoon, slightly the worse for drink but still fairly steady, Benson had passed through a gate and found himself standing on the touchline with this discourteous man in sudden, transfiguring storm sunshine that lit the rugby field with vivid green, burnished the bare poplars fringing the far side. Beyond, the clouds were massed, black with rain. The shirts of the players made patterns of colour, now clustering, now thinning, one team blue, the other red.

  “Never in this world,” Benson said, “Do you know Baudelaire’s theory of correspondencies, nature seen as a temple of living pillars? I think there’s a lot of truth in it myself.”

  “No, I don’t,” the man said. “I don’t know anything about Baudelaire. I’m trying to concentrate on this game. This is a trial game for the second fifteen.”

  “They look very young.”

  “Well, they are juniors.”

  “They don’t look more than nine or ten,” Benson said.

  In this strange escape of sunshine the shirts and the white shorts had a wild brightness about them. The players were too slight to enact the formal patterns of the game, they fluttered about the field, vivid and weightless, like creatures prompted to swarm by the burst of light, wavering after the ball with high-pitched cries. Tackles brought them down in the space of a stride, like butterflies alighting. A taller boy was acting as referee, one of the seniors presumably. His whistle sounded often and the children grouped and regrouped in obedience to it.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Billings!” the man beside Benson shouted in a tone of furious disgust.

  Benson was having difficulty now in focussing across the bright field at the wavering players. The pitch kept blurring into abstract patterns of red and blue. “They used to make them dance,” he said. “Some of the skippers did. Every morning, weather permitting, they would bring them up on deck in batches and make them dance. One of the ways they kept them alive.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about. Oh, well-done!”

  “Children too,” Benson said. “Gladstone was born not very far from where I live. W.E., the Liberal statesman. He was born in Rodney Street in 1809, two years after the last legitimate slave ship sailed out of Liverpool.”

  “I’m aware of that,” the man said. “I teach history.”

  “You teach these boys history?” Benson blinked at the man wonderingly. It seemed incongruous.

  The man had barely looked at him before, but he did so now. “I have a degree in history,” he said.

  “Ah,” Benson said. “Well, I was thinking, you know, when Gladstone was about the age of these lads, slaving from British ports had been illegal then for about ten years or so, but the implements of slavery must still have been about. I mean, they wouldn’t have disappeared overnight, would they? They were still being sold over the counter in 1807. They went on being sold under the counter for another fifty years or so. They would have lingered on in curio shops, junk shops, scrap metal places. It is quite conceivable that little William Ewart, out with his nurse, pressing his nose against the shop window, would have seen strange metal objects, the purpose of which might have baffled him. What is that, nurse? That is a branding iron, dear, so they would know who the slaves belonged to. And that is a pair of iron handcuffs, and that is a thumbscrew in case they refused to eat or were otherwise recalcitrant. Imagine the effect on an impressionable lad. It is entirely possible that Gladstone’s generous sympathy for oppressed races began right here, in the streets of Liverpool.”

  “Fanciful, very fanciful. What on earth do you think you are doing, Rogers? I try to give them a balanced view.”

  “A balanced view of the slave trade?”

  Abruptly, as Benson spoke these words, the clouds descended, cutting out the sun at one stroke, as if it had never been. And with this eclipse it became at once apparent how the sunshine had been abetting the illusion of day. It was suddenly evening, the trees at the far side of the field had taken on some quality of darkness, the boys’ shouts and the sounds of the whistle seemed more distant, as if they had faded with the light.

  “We tend to think a balanced view is virtuous,” Benson said. “Especially when it is applied to our crimes. We are not so keen on it when there are profits to be made. Have your pupils any concept of the ruin and devastation visited on Africa in the course of the eighteenth century, have they any notion of the scale of it?”

  “Look,” the man said. “I don’t intend to stand here arguing. These boys haven’t reached the eighteenth century yet, they’re doing the Wars of the Roses. I’ve got to go over and get a closer look at the game before the light is gone. I don’t know what you are doing here. You’ve been drinking.”

  “Forty million deaths at a conservative estimate. The Nazis were nothing to it.”

  Without replying the man began to walk away from him towards the centre of the darkening field, where the wavering game continued. It seemed to Benson, in the moments before he turned away, that the cries of the children had grown wilder, more piercing, as if in regret at the approach of night.

  6

  He began to see birds and animals everywhere; he became increasingly conscious of the encroachments of the brute creation. He heard the shuddering cries of owls at night, in the heart of the city. Sometimes he seemed to smell a warm, rank, feral breath on the air. Once, passing the tall dank Victorian houses that border Sefton Park, he glanced through an open gate and saw a fox standing on the gravel drive not ten yards away; it looked back at him for several moments before moving off into thickets of laurel. A woman sitting next to him on the bus, with whom he discussed the matter, told him that the week before she had seen not one but two foxes, emerging side by side from a gutted house in Toxteth. It was on the bus route – she had seen them from the upper deck of a number five. A council employee, a road-sweeper with whom Benson fell into talk, told him he had seen stoats and weasels in quiet streets; and once, on a grass verge, an adder. Rats too were on the increase; one day Benson counted four feasting companionably in an alley among ripped black rubbish bags. Later, when the April weeds were rampant in the enclosure behind the house, he saw a kestrel swoop down at a sparrow and narrowly miss, not more than three or four feet from the house wall.

  Predators were coming in then. Benson could picture them, exploiting the growing areas of waste, breeding in the choked parks and in the neglected tracts of Liverpool’s dockland, among the miles of ruinous wharves and warehouses, questing through the vales of the suburbs, penetrating to the inner city where amidst the rubble the small mammals they preyed on would be multiplying too …

  When he looked at himself in the mirror for signs of kinship he saw a mournful, obsessive animal there, an ageing specimen of homo bloccatus, rather handsome, with pale insomniac eyes slanting slightly downward under dishevelled eyebrows, the small triangle of scar tissue showing whitely below the left cheekbone.

  By that time he had given up all pretence of working. He continued to compile notes and to offer advice of a professional nature to his Fictioneers. Most of his time was spent walking around the city, waiting for something to happen. He tried to notice things, to involve himself in things, so that he would be ready, so that he would not be taken by surprise. The sense of change was in everything. The lake in the park glimmered with it, the sky was swollen with it, he heard it in the outcries of gulls over the Mersey, in the shouts of the men selling evening papers at street corners. Sometimes a painful, only just bearable tension mounted in him at the thought of this looming, possibly violent transformation. He grew frightened that it might be his own final breakdown that was impending. Once, in the stress of this, he overcame his chronic irresolution and made an attempt to phone Alma Corrigan, whose face he often saw before him. He was in Smithdown Road at the time, slightly drunk. He tried six phone boxes before his resolve failed and found them all vandalised in one way or another, smashed, jammed, wrenched out. When he had recovered from the frustration he was obliged to recognise that this too was a sign.

  Often he was still wandering about late at night and in dangerous parts of the city – dangerous for any pedestrian, let alone an ageing man of sedentary occupation. His fear of assault and injury, the knowledge that he would not be so quick or so strong as those that might attack him, that however purposeful he sought to appear he was visibly not securely at home in these streets or anywhere else for that matter – all this engendered a vein of violent fantasy. A fearsome gang of young thugs ringed him round, jeering, preparing to put the boot in, not knowing how adept he was in all branches of the martial arts, not knowing he had studied under oriental masters. They rushed at him in a body, cowardly brutes, ten against one. With marvellous economy of movement he strewed them all over the pavement. I did not seek this confrontation … Fear, the lonely rhythm of his walking, set up an amazing vindictiveness in him, a capacity for inflicting grievous bodily harm he had not known he possessed. One – two – three – Tac! Hammerblow on the bridge of a nose, double kidney-chop. That’ll teach you. Dextrous, deadly, spin round again and a knee to that bastard’s groin, one is kneeling vomiting, another groans and snivels with a broken arm, a third irreparably ruptured, ruined for life. Thought you had easy game, eh?

  With time, however, this savage sequence grew refined. The sublimation of art came to rescue Benson. He found a phrase full of snarling menace: banana split. Now when the gang surrounded him he fixed the ringleader with a cold eye. I don’t think you know with whom you have to deal. Jeers from the thugs at his meticulous grammar. Level glance, slight smile. Think again, chump. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the … banana split? At these words they would cower back, skulk away into the protective colouring of the darkness, leaving him free to pursue his unhurried way.

  Thus, in spite of impotence, in the midst of affliction, a belief in the primacy and power of the word still remained to Benson, in fantasy at least.

  Words lingered in his mind, snatches of song, things said to him or overheard; he could not decide their exact significance but felt sure they fitted into some close, intricate pattern. Athena, patroness of weaving … Then there was the odd remark made one Tuesday afternoon in parting by Carter, senior citizen, archetypal fictioneer. Carter’s novel, which was entitled Can Spring Be Far Behind?, was running at over 600 pages now, with the central relationship still unresolved. His was the opposite problem to that of poor Hogan, who could not get started.

  Carter sat facing him across the desk, grizzled, square-headed, argumentative, in a paisley cravat and a ginger overcoat, which he had declined to take off. Benson was looking in a glazed way through the latest chapter. The silence was lengthening.

  Sheila appeared to be musing softly in this flushed and fervent moment between their embraces. Albert urged himself to take the initiative. Knowing her value and her vulnerability, he did not want her to think he was claiming sexual favours in return for doing the plastering job on her ceiling but it was a case of nothing venture nothing win and it was not as if he was breaking new ground as he had been vouchsafed more than kisses on previous visits. To go away with less would be backsliding. He slid his hand along her back under the silk blouse, his fingers coursing and caressing along the warm flesh until they touched the stretched elastic of her unsprung brassière.

  Unsprung? Benson looked up vaguely. To spring a brassière? Was that really the mot juste? And there was the rather ludicrous echo, no doubt quite unconscious: to go away with less would be backsliding; so he stayed and slid a hand along her back. Worth mentioning? Probably not. He wondered if Carter ever re-read his work. He said, “Albert is a bit ponderous, isn’t he? Cranking himself up to get a hand under her blouse. When you think how often he’s been there before.” His mind lurched sickeningly over the vast savannah of Carter’s novel. “Quite a few times,” he said.

  “Well,” Carter said. “He is a ponderous character. He always ponders everything.”

  “That is not what I meant,” Benson said. “Then there is this habit of alliteration which seems to be growing on you. ‘Flushed and fervent’, ‘coursing and caressing’, that type of thing. It’s a good occasional device but it shouldn’t be over-used or it gives too much appearance of rhetoric. I like ‘knowing her value and her vulnerability’, because the words describe two distinct strands of feeling in Albert. But, as I say, I should use it sparingly or you’ll end by irritating the reader.” Benson summoned a smile. “You already risk that by the sheer length of your book,” he said.

  “I think this chapter takes things forward a bit,” Carter said in the accents of Liverpool, which to Benson’s ear seemed always to fall somewhere between complaint and aggression.

  “Well, it gets Albert down from his ladder. He had been up there quite a long time, hadn’t he, plastering Sheila’s ceiling? I suppose that is forward motion of a kind. But it is very repetitive, isn’t it? I mean, last time he came he fixed the washers on her taps. And it ends up with this sex scene again.”

  “It is cyclic, yes,” Carter said. “But then, so is life.”

  Silence, after this brief exchange, returned to the room. Benson turned the pages in slow desperation. He felt paralysis threatening him. “That won’t do,” he said, seizing on a phrase. ‘Twin orbs?’

  He paused again, however, working his jaw in the slight, mildly convulsive way habitual to him at difficult moments. He hated to deal a blow in this sensitive literary area, even to Carter, who never admitted faults. “It isn’t quite apt,” he said at last. “It doesn’t do the trick, it doesn’t convey anything to the reader. It has an archaic ring to it.” A joke might be in order: jolly Carter along a bit, take the sting out of the criticism. “In this day and age,” he said, “we can be more direct. This is 1988, we’ve had eight years of it, we can call a cow a cow.” He essayed a puff of laughter. “Not a dairy quadruped, you know.”

  “Margaret Thatcher is a woman of character,” Carter said. “She’s got guts. She is making this country great again.”

  “Tits would be too colloquial, I’ll grant you that,” Benson said hastily. “What’s wrong with breasts?” He had forgotten that Carter was a Tory voter. The last thing he wanted was a political argument. “The word ‘twin’ is redundant, really, isn’t it?” he said. “Everyone knows women have two of them, as indeed do men. I mean, you wouldn’t say twin testicles, would you? And as for orbs …”

  Without looking, he knew the kind of patient obstinacy that would have formed on his client’s broad, big-chinned face. Carter never took kindly to criticism. “Redundancy is dangerous, Harold,” he continued after a moment. “So is euphemism. One might call them the twin demons that besmirch a person’s prose style. You have somehow managed to pack them both into a phrase of two words. We live in a world where language is used to cloak the most appalling realities. You should see some of the things in my scrapbooks. It is our duty as writers not to aid this process.”

  Benson raised his head and assumed a smiling expression. In the midst of his words he had felt the onset of a familiar pain: that proud use of the collective ‘we’ – like a thumb pressed on the wound of his dumbness. Below this immediate distress lay a sense of mourning for his ruined world and self so profound that it needed no particular form of words to be released; it was ready to resonate, to gong out in his mind, at the slightest stroke of memory or association. “Not by one jot or tittle,” he said.

  Carter had not replied and there was no indication on his face that he was about to. Gesture was needed to fill the gap, raise the temperature, inject some brio into the conversation. Benson hoisted his shoulders, raised both hands palms upwards and caused them to shake in a small frenzy of remonstrance. “What’s wrong with breasts?” he said. “Sheila has got breasts, not orbs, okay? If anatomy is destiny, as Freud said, let’s at least try to get it right.”

  Part of the problem was that in Carter’s novel they were never fully exposed, though Albert persevered; they were always encased in some integument, delicate but definite. This constriction must be important to Carter since he had not allowed Sheila to unhook herself as yet. Retreating from the implications of this, he said, “I’ll just check the rest of the chapter. Be with you in a minute.”

  He ran his eye down to the last paragraph. Albert had departed, unsatisfied as always. Sheila was alone in her bedroom. With the mirrors revealing her breasts she cupped and raised them as he had done, sensing for herself the majesty of their varying contours and gyrations round the central points …

  The real question, of course, did not concern anatomy at all. Carter was approaching seventy, a sturdy, practical man, a retired builder, admirer of Thatcherism and the free market economy and the Spirit of the Falklands. That such a man should take to fiction in late career was strange enough but how had it come about that he had gone astray among his own inventions, lost himself in the trackless interior of his own novel, a strangely static world of odd jobs about the house, tea-breaks, unconsummated love and lingerie in blushing disarray, pantie-girdles, cami-knickers, gossamer bra cups, sliding shoulder straps, frictive nylon surfaces? There was deep mystery here, especially since the novel had not begun in that way at all, but as a story of dockland and family life in the Liverpool of the 1950s. Now hero and heroine had gone off the rails somehow; in chapter after chapter dogged Albert was stripping shy Sheila to her undies and then for one reason or another going no further.

  Carter had changed too, in a rather worrying way. His prose had got more and more muffled and meandering, increasingly clotted with strange, obsolete poeticisms. Then there were the clothes: the black felt hat, the knee-length, ginger-coloured overcoat with the Edwardian collar trimming in nylon fur. He had been reading literary theory too, it seemed: as his style deteriorated his ability to score points increased.