You said, ‘I warned you, Helen, you might remember. I couldn’t guarantee you anything.’

  ‘I believed you, darling.’ She sounded weary all at once. ‘It’s likely to be your sister who doesn’t.’ Again she did her sharp inhalation as a preface. ‘Miss Glover, you mustn’t send him away. It’s you he loves.’

  At this, to Barbara, foul insight, the evidence for which she herself possessed, your face pulsed sweat: it had been the unutterably wrong thing to say. You cringed, seeing that Barbara had got up from her chair and come down the table. She struck Helen’s up-turning face. In a reflex way, Helen rose and struck Barbara back: her eyes followed her blow and came to rest on Barbara’s averted face.

  ‘If you find that offensive, you aren’t even as innocent in your mind as I am.’

  ‘That is possible,’ Barbara admitted softly, to the far corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Well then.’ Helen showed no remorse: it was against her platform. ‘I’d better go now. Damian, do you want to see me at all over the summer?’

  ‘Hasn’t she any pride?’ Barbara asked the same corner of the room.

  ‘No,’ said Helen. ‘What’s pride except a damned abstract noun? Do you want to see more of me, Damian?’

  You swayed on your feet and made a face. ‘I ought to —’ you confessed.

  ‘But you don’t.’

  ‘Not here,’ you hissed in a panic to get the message across, to convey your smotheration. ‘Not here, you can see that. The situation’s hopeless.’

  ‘You actually have parents?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She showed a wry gratitude for being given that much correct information.

  ‘So, you might give me another spin in first term and then measure me up against…the home situation when you come back in May?’

  She had descended at last from her attempt at sexual good sense, while Barbara still faced a corner, her shoulder turned to you. The rivalry had become more and more naked.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that to you.’

  Barbara was heard. ‘You must take the truck, Damian. I’m sure Helen will excuse me. There’s washing to do.’

  ‘Would your parents have heard all this?’ Helen wanted to know before going.

  ‘No. Well, I suppose so, yes. The…the gist of it. Don’t worry. They want to see her win as much as they want to see her lose. I’m sorry. I never really believe how strong it all is till I get home. I never do. You buffer yourself against it and think it’s been a dream. You know. Or that if you were simply more balanced, it would all appear differently. Until there you are again, right in the middle of it.’

  It occurred to you that what you were saying must all sound as flat as the explanations of some faith-breaking functionary.

  Nodding, Helen snatched up her keys from the table. You told her that you didn’t want to lose her, that she was so strong and honest and…As you gazed about for an adjective, ‘beautiful’ landed on your lips with a desperate insincerity.

  ‘I know what I am,’ she told you. In repose, insidiously reasonable, she waited for you to fetch your St Moritz jacket, and take her to the gate.

  There the station-wagon unexpectedly fired. She waved without any of the inverted bitterness you expect of women. You wondered whether her unsurprise was ultimately worse than spitting, weeping, and reproaches. But it was certainly tidier. Good-bye, pretty delegate to the Student Power Conference. Brother Helen.

  At about this time, the catchment water nudged a bough of peppermint from the top of the sluice-gate and slopped over to join the flood.

  As soon as you went indoors, you could hear your father calling for you. You strode out to them; you would have been grateful for the stimulus of a quarrel.

  But what they had heard had already fermented them sufficiently: your mother foamed grief down the front of her cardigan. Her udders’ distended veins looked hideously purple and you resented your kinship to such a pitiable ugliness. But your father displayed a zest for his son’s roguishness; last night seemed all forgotten. The parents could be as easily distracted as children.

  ‘Oh Damian,’ the mother wept. ‘The little slut. You shouldn’t have. You can surely pray for chastity. You don’t know the suffering of a mother when she hears that sort of thing about her son.’

  You were unkind enough to wonder if she really was so distressed. Largely, she must have been, on religious grounds alone. But through the strength of her grief she identified herself with the deceived mothers of the television serials and proved her human stature.

  Your father winked and muttered, ‘Is she going to have a child?’

  ‘No. She’s the sort of girl who can be trusted. You know, to take precautions.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the father. He smiled shyly. ‘There should have been more like that when I was young.’

  ‘Well, there are no end of them now,’ you told him bitterly.

  ‘I’m glad someone’s getting it,’ he said in a sort of reverence. ‘Hey, what was that she was saying about coupons?’

  SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE OF JEHANNE D’ARQUE

  Nearly everything you try to say to describe a person is a lie, because you can only say one thing about him at a time, and one thing is never the truth. So it’s harder still to say in so many words how people are related to each other.

  I think Jehanne’s friend, John the Duke of Alençon, two or three years older than her, but the soldier she probably saw most of.

  You can put their relationship in two ways, and then ask which is which. Nobody knows. Certainly not Jehanne and the Duke.

  1. The relationship of Jehanne and Alençon, idealistically speaking: He is young and believes immediately in the force of Jehanne’s character. He introduces her to his wife, who has only just managed to raise the money to buy him back, at the age of eighteen, from the Anglo-Burgundians. (He was captured at the age of fifteen. She married him before puberty!) Jehanne convinces the wife and promises to bring him back safe from the campaigns that no one in authority has yet said anything about financing. So there’s a touching air of vision about the first meeting of these three young people, all under twenty, two of them members of the Royal Family. Jehanne called him her beau duc and once warned him about a very accurate piece of English ordnance on top of the wall of some town on the Loire, which was aiming at him. The advice saved his life.

  They bivouacked together with common soldiers in the hay of barns and he often enough saw her breasts which he said were well formed, yet he had never suffered any carnal desire for her. Everyone said that, in evidence at her rehabilitation trial. Lucky Jehanne. I haven’t been so fortunate, judging by some of the things men whisper to me on the streets in towns on Fridays.

  Alençon is with Jehanne till the army disbands. Then after an emotional farewell, Alençon gallops home to his young wife.

  2. The relationship of Jehanne and Alençon looked at in strictest realistic terms: Alençon was weak in the head, had no talents, military or otherwise. Jehanne used him to force the full pressure of her visions on the Dauphin. I don’t blame her. She had a mission. But already the rich ‘human interest’ begins to become political. All the more so because he is said to have often tried to talk Jehanne into a campaign in the West, in Normandy, where his ducal estates were in British hands. He was a flatterer of ladies, he drank too much. Someone said it is impossible to imagine Jehanne liking him except that he is married to the daughter of the Duke of Orléans. I can remember someone (I ought to keep the references, but why? I’m no scholar) saying that Joan treated him with ‘breezy familiarity’—some phrase like that.

  Alençon had an embarrassingly husky voice and a childish sense of humour, he would believe anything and dabbled in magic. I wouldn’t believe what he says about his purity at bivouacs unless it were Jehanne that was involved and unless so many tougher and better men hadn’t gone out of their way to stress her sexual purity and the way they treated her as an equal rather than a girl to be taken advantage of.

  In the same way, the truth of Damian, Barbara, Helen, stated idealistically: Damian is distressed at being torn between the attraction of the girl Helen and the unsolved family situation. On both sides he has been handed or has taken on certain responsibilities.

  Helen is an honest, generous girl. Surely her willingness not to bind Damian is courageous.

  Barbara likes Helen, is embarrassed by her cleverness though, and by the silly slap she gives her. She wonders whether Helen is too available a person for Damian to be happy with her, or whether she is too strong for him.

  The truth of Damian, Helen, and Barbara, stated realistically: Damian is unchaste, He has even committed impurities, an impurity, with his sister. He is willing to make use of Helen’s availability, and to delay coming home on account of it.

  Helen is a childish girl who is throwing herself away to any taker.

  Barbara is a resentful and insincere bitch, not even as honest as Helen.

  Who knows what blending of the ideal and real is the right one?

  She had raised the order of her tasks to a sacramental and ritual significance, so that they had become balm and refuge to her, her surest tonic. In this way, Sunday afternoons were sacred to bait-catching. She wondered if one of the mineral trucks could take the bait to Stevens. But if the flood proved too high even for them, it didn’t matter. For Sunday afternoons were consecrated to bait-catching.

  She walked, finding the rain tonic too, a seal on her privacy. She carried her bright buckets, one in each hand. So close on both sides were the recurring aisles of paper-bark forest that the noise of downpour came to her with a distant resonance, as if she were walking beneath some high, watertight dome. Her misery ran up and down her back in fitful shivers so like small feet that she could almost believe it was domesticated, a reliant pet, hamster or possum.

  The road began to mount eastwards towards dunes, shallow and melancholy; and on her right a sullen plateau of black silt, residue from the refinery, intruded on her sight, imposing a sense of raw anti-climax. A half-buried company notice warned children of cave-ins and suffocation, but Barbara had never seen any child there, risking such extreme deaths.

  Beyond the notice stood a long ramp of logs where an emptied tip-truck waited, its motor running. She could see the driver smoking feverishly in the cabin, and pitied him for the demands some target of deliveries were making on him. You could always tell colleagues of his, dazed with rare leisure, spending their money in a bedazzled way in town. The road took her on past him to a point where it became a shifting sand-track through the hills.

  ‘Hey, miss!’ she heard. ‘Hey, miss!’

  When she turned she saw that he had been following her. Now he came bouncing to her at the run. She felt no fear at all, looking clinically at his big bone-crusher fists. But while she could not fear death, she feared madness, and her head jangled as she saw, above the standard overalls and black boots, the face of Damian.

  The dark eyes took her in, tentative but more obvious than Damian’s. The forehead was arranged in a clumsy frown of concern, and the head had a more prognathic shape than Damian’s, a narrower skull and wider jaws, carried with a blatantly false solemnity.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘do you live on the road there?’

  ‘Yes. We live there.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ With obvious labour, he was creating pretexts for stopping her: she could read the signs. Innumerable men in the Friday town had stopped her first and constructed reasons afterwards. ‘You and your husband.’

  ‘Me and my brother.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all you wanted to know…’

  ‘I was just wondering if you’d seen a mate of mine go past last night.’

  ‘Last night.’ She deliberately put weight on the word to let him recall that last night had been the blindest of all.

  ‘A mate of mine got hisself killed last night.’ His brow and eyes took on heavily the spurious dignity of bereavement. ‘He was driving a mineral trailer. You know. He went off the road just over that spur. You know.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s a long way from our place. And it was a bad night for driving, wasn’t it?’ She hitched one of her buckets as if about to turn and go.

  ‘But I thought you might of noticed who else was on the road. You know. Well, my friend didn’t know a thing. Went off the road. Head all caved in. You know. On impact. But the funny thing was there was a great heap of sick in the cabin.’ His eyes fluttered apologies for the indelicacy. ‘Someone must have made it. So if you saw any other traffic…’

  ‘No,’ she said. But she suffered immediate apprehensions about that fouled cabin, for she had heard, through her sleep, the truck turn in at the gate at some improper hour. Inappropriate nausea had always been characteristic of Damian. ‘I’m sorry about your friend, Mr…’

  ‘Call me Frederic. D’you want anythink in town?’ he thought to ask, frantic to keep the conversation alive. ‘I’m hoping to go in tonight. Don’t know for sure. Transport manager’s a bit edgy about my mate. You know. But if there’s anythink…’

  ‘No,’ she said with a sudden perversity, though she had all that bait to consign to Stevens. ‘Nothing, thanks.’

  She turned away and rose towards the low wracked sky, then downhill to the beach. The sea was up but seemed adulterated with grey downpour. The beach ran left and right a few hundred yards, but then was lost in an unalluring haze that the surf gave off. She was sickened to find it all so predictably dismal.

  When she looked over her shoulder, the truck-driver was straggling down the dunes and trying to seem offhand, as if on some company errand. Her undisciplined heart jolted once but then remembered the long attrition it had borne. Daring him to his worst, she bent to the sand, her back to his big, strangler’s hands. By the time she could sense him by her side, she had a dozen worms in her bucket.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I know you’re busy, but I’ve been waiting for ages for a chance to talk to you. You know?’

  She stood and stared at him, as contemptuously as she could manage. It made him smile—the contempt of women reassured him. His smile was broad, dawdling, stupid, reminding Barbara of some fat Disney animal. In his eyes was an honest anxiety about being sent away.

  Falsely confident, she became aware, without warning, of his heavy direct maleness, and she felt a movement in her belly, as if her widowhood was beginning to stir and find itself uncontent. The obviously male, she saw for the first time in her life, had some relevance to her. The fact frightened her.

  ‘I’m very flattered,’ she couldn’t help saying, through lips that could almost be called pouting; and then, with a will, she did her private smile which, she knew by instinct, few men ever saw among their tribes of women. She noted how much harsher her breath had become, and she thought how dangerous life must be in town or in the cities, when despite overalls and oilskins, people’s animal latencies could so thunder behind their polite faces.

  She bent again to her bag of fish offal and drew it over the sand. A hateful head, furry with crawlers, rose to the taste of salt corruption. But her fingers stumbled uselessly in the sand. The head vanished.

  ‘You’ve got to be quick,’ said Frederic. He breathed through his nose with laborious hope. ‘Here, I’ll do some for you.’

  She gave up the bag to him, and he bent. His fingers showed at first a little stage-fright. On his stooped back the white overalls pulled tight: she had never suspected that harsh white twill could convey so directly sexual a meaning.

  ‘It’s funny how they’re always here,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I thought I caught enough of ’em when I was a kid to wipe out the whole species. You know?’

  ‘Did your friend have a family? The one that was killed.’

  ‘No. He was a lonesome traveller. Like me. Wait there.’ He drew out a particularly long worm that coiled in violet convulsions all round his blunt fingers. ‘Here, d’you want to have a go?’

  They worked together. He applauded her successes, and she was surprised how willing she was to pose as a novice at the craft of worming. At last he stood back, supervisory, an indefinite presence at the corner of her vision. She felt giddily afraid, her breath rattled under her breastbone. She could sense, centred on this man she had fifteen minutes ago considered so limited, an ineffable spectrum of bodily possibilities.

  Suddenly he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s your name, anyhow?’

  ‘Barbara.’ A sexual electricity coalesced at her nipples. In some high chapel in her head she heard the challenging words Where’s your pride? severely intoned. He raised and embraced her.

  After a time, he showed himself first astounded, but then grinned widely, at finding the ground so familiar, that she was proving as direct and hungry as any number of ugly women in town. At some stage she shed her sou’wester and caped oilskin and dropped them by the buckets. They reeled together into the dunes; she knew nothing of the rain, and teetered on the edge of a sand-hollow.

  ‘You right?’ he asked. He was still afraid and wary of looking at her direct, as if he feared some balance might be upset.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured. ‘The legs…’

  She had always thought of herself as potentially a very detached lover, and what she could remember of May confirmed her suspicion, for her good intensions in the direction of abandonment had not been fully successful. Now it was appropriate for her, her rare chance, to break open, jabber, sweat, scream. A glimpse of his thighs brought to her a completely simple and unmixed will to founder on them. She babbled and begged for the play of his toil-hardened hand, she yelped for a larger intrusion. His sword-shaft-tower, hard as religion, warm as a bakery, actually held her left thigh, fencing her. She found herself clawing and crawling about to it, over flesh and sand.

  She was not unaware of the variety of sexual acts. With an honest revulsion she had encountered the enthusiasm of some characters in modern novels for what she considered oral depravity. With a similar honesty—though not perhaps with unmixed motives—she had educated herself in sexual morality through a large and exhaustive work by a moral theologian, lent to Damian by the university chaplain, after his, Damian’s, disturbed first year as an undergraduate. The theologian had used the term ‘improper receptable (vasa indebita)’; and Barbara had thought of the depravities he had listed as the ultimate refuge of the degenerate. Now the unexpected sexual meaning of her mouth broke on her; she felt both exhilarated and deliciously angry that this apparently innocent organ had lain so long undeclared within the walls of her camp. While strangled encouragement and moans escaped her glutted mouth it came to her that sexuality is man’s necessary purgatory, that he can be saved through humbly digesting it. For an instant, the formula behind the accident became apparent, that she could have permanent insight into it, if only the delirium would cease a second.