The sound faded. They stood about, thinking, waiting, peering at blankness. Nothing else happened.
Charley shrugged and went back to bed. After a little while, Greybeard climbed back into his blankets too.
“What’s the matter, Algy?” Martha asked, wakening.
“There was a steamer somewhere out on the pond. Charley heard it too.”
“We may see it in the morning.”
“It sounded like the ones mother used to take me on. Standing there looking out into nothing, I thought how I’ve wasted my life, Martha. I’ve had no faith -”
“Sweetie, I don’t think this is a good time for an inquest on your life. Daylight in say twenty years time would be more suitable.”
“No, Martha, listen, I know I’m an imaginative and an introspective sort of chap, but -”
Her small laugh stopped him. She sat up in bed, yawned, and said, “You are one of the least introspective men I ever knew, and I have always rejoiced that your imagination is so much more prosaic than mine. May you always have such illusions about yourself – it’s a sign of youth.”
He leant over towards her, feeling for her hand.
“You’re a funny creature, Martha. Sometimes you make me wonder how much two people can ever know each other, if you know me so little. It’s amazing how you can be so blind when you’ve been such a wonderful companion for thirty years or three hundred years or however long it really is. You’re so admirable in many ways, whereas I’ve been such a flop.”
She lit the lamp by their bed and said gravely, “At the risk of getting chewed to death by mosquitoes, I must put on a light and look at you. I can’t stomach disembodied miseries. Love, what is this you’re saying about yourself? Let’s have it before we settle down.”
“You must have seen clearly enough. It is not as if I chose to marry a foolish woman, as some men chose to do. I’ve been a flop all through my life.”
“Examples?”
“Well, look at the way I’ve got us more or less lost now. And far bigger things. All that miserable time after father died, when mother married that ass Barrett. It’s not enough to say I was only a child; I just never caught up with what was going on. I felt I was being punished for something, and didn’t know what the sin was, or even what the punishment was exactly. I loathed and dreaded Barrett, although when he flirted with other floosies I was miserable for mother’s sake. He went off with one of them on one occasion. Mother got picked up by an undertaker called Carter, and we lived with him for some weeks.”
“I remember about Carter. Your mother had a talent for picking men whose jobs were prospering.”
“She also had a talent for picking impossible men. Poor woman, I suppose she was very much a ninny.
Uncle Keith – Barrett – turned up one day and took us away from Carter. He and mother had rows for weeks after that. It was all so undignified… Perhaps that was what helped me in my teens to try and behave in a dignified way myself.
“Then there was the war. I ought to have refused to go – you know I was morally convinced of its wrongness. But I compromised, and joined the Infantop. Then there was the business of joining DOUCH.
You know, Martha, I think that was the slobbiest thing I ever did. Those DOUCH fellows, old Jack and the others, they were dedicated men. I never believed in the project at all.”
“You’re talking nonsense, Algy. I remember how hard you worked, in Washington and London.”
He laughed. “Know why I joined? Because they offered to fly you out to Washington to join me! That was it! My interest in DOUCH was purely subsidiary to my interest in you.
“It’s true I did the job fairly well during the after-war years, when the government collapsed, and the United made peace with the enemy. But look at the chance I missed when we were in Cowley. If I hadn’t been so concerned about us, we could have been in on a important bit of history.