The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

Derbyshire hills, the Malverns, or Scotland. He was never happier than when they set out after breakfast from the hotel, walking a path between trees and bushes, into the open of higher land.

      ‘It’s like being in the clouds,’ he said. ‘It’s like flying in an open cockpit.’ Then his talk would stop, and he would go on, locked in for a while until: ‘At least I can feel the wind, and that’s worth a lot. There’s heather in it. Flowers and trees as well. The flowers are over there. Let’s look at them.’ He stroked the stalks, stamens and petals, bending down for a closer look, touching without damage.

      The bed hardly needed making, they slept so deeply in their separate dreams, but she pulled it apart for freshness. The room was large and gloomy, backing against the cliff. She shook the sheets smooth, pulled blankets straight and folded them in, banged both pillows into shape. At least the little iron fireplace when filled and glowing took out the damp ofwinter, the room a delight to be in then, shadows on the walls at dusk. Howard couldn’t see them, though said he could, at the sparking of the flames, lying in bed with a three-day flu last winter. ‘The first days out of action,’ he said, ‘since the crash.’

      Two people couldn’t be ill in the same house, so no debilitating flu or colds for her. Howard knew this only too well, and swore he would keep fit till his dying day.

      After bumping the Electrolux around the living room she noted its bag was full. Hadn’t emptied it for months, so unclipped the top, lifted out the paper container bulging with dust, and walked through to thump it into the kitchen bin. Fitted with another, the nozzle sucked perfectly, though there was little enough to feed on.

      She cleaned the house while he was out, easier than when weather kept him in, even though he sat in the wireless room, as he called it, listening to his eternal and mysterious morse. She liked him to go out because he was always more cheerful when he got back. He was like a baby to look after, but would die of shame if she told him. Which he might have assumed was why she hadn’t had any, not knowing the reason had been hers more than his.

      She fought against tolerating vain regrets. Regrets poisoned the soul, and the soul seemed frail enough at times, Howard knowing he can’t – she thought – tell me how nice I look, though he was able to at the beginning and did so in such a way as to last me for life. But I always dress for him and look smart, so that people will think the same when I walk out with him. And I dress as well as I can when in the house because it makes me feel good, and there’s always the thought that if there was a sudden miraculous peeling back of his blindness, I would want him to see me at my best.

       It was essential to tidy up so that he would know where everything was. If an ashtray or chair, or one of his three pipes was out of place, his system for getting about without knocking anything over would, he said, go for a burton, so she took care that nothing did. If he asked where something was it would be that even she couldn’t find it. The house was his universe, every object one of the innumerable stars that lit up in his darkness for guidance. As long as he could find the domestic radio, however, and the record player to put on a piece by Elgar or Gustav Holst, all was right in the world.

      She cleared the plates, all shining and stacked. He would be back for coffee, the newspaper under his arm. ‘Read me whatever you think I might find interesting.’ There was usually one item or another, to be marked with a pencil and reserved for tea time or after supper.

      She kept two pencils by the telephone, in case the point of one snapped off while writing a message. Sharpening both, though they had hardly been used, she threw the shavings into the bin. If she went out Howard could just legibly write the number of anyone who called and wanted to hear from her. Sometimes they descended the hill together, but mostly she let him go. He wandered everywhere, and came back happy, though occasionally exhausted. Or so it seemed. He always denied it. When she went with him he became irritated by the smallest thing, such as imagining she resented going slow for him. It galled him, but not her. When they got home he was burning with inadequacy, even after all these years, as if thinking he had failed to lead her to somewhere wonderful, or hadn’t brought her home to a heaven more alluring than the one they had left.

      They talked about it. She never asked, but he volunteered. ‘The secrets of my blasted heart,’ he said, ‘are all I have to give you. I want to be more than your ball and chain of flesh. I want to lead you to I don’t know where. But it’s a yearning, you see, and it gets me at the heart every so often. I can’t think why.’

      ‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought me there already.’ She proved it with a kiss, for it was true enough, had to be, after living so long in stasis, never moving beyond the vivid days of their youth. For his sake there was much loving she had to feel, yet did so with neither thought nor effort.

       On one level they lived beyond hope, but what loss was that? There never had been any after his crash, and being without hope was the unspoken compact, the firmest base there was, reassuring and reinforcing. To live without hope was less of a sin, and less cruel, because the peace it gave was the bedrock of an understanding which made them feel ageless to each other.

      In the small room side on to the house she dusted his heavy black-cased wireless with its curving multicoloured window and thick control wheel for changing stations. The new radio she had sent for from Derbyshire lay by its side, a key pad in front, and the brass morse key which he played from time to time. ‘My therapy,’ he said, ‘for when I want to shift the black dog from my shoulders. The black dog hates the sound of morse. It terrifies him. He runs back to his hidey-hole and leaves me alone.’

      When he sat with the door closed, earphones clamped on, he was in a world which nobody could share, a world in which ears were everything and lack of sight not an issue. Only his rounded back was visible through the glass panel, animally moving as he put what he was hearing onto the heavy sit-up-and-beg old capital-letter typewriter. The electricity of a modern one would, he said, distort the reception, and make it no easier to use.

      Nothing needed to be touched, a stack of paper in its usual position, a silver propelling pencil by its side which he’d kept from his schooldays, maybe as a symbol of hope (no one could be entirely without it) that one day enough sight would come back for him to handwrite what he heard.

      Once when he was out she’d polished the brass parts of his morse key to a brilliant shine, wondering if he would notice. He did: ‘I can see it glowing. Looks wonderful, I’m sure. Thank you, my love.’ But of course, he had picked up the Duraglit smell.

      The ashtray needed emptying, dottle and match sticks overspilling. He often did the job himself, anything to help, but she took it to the sink for a scouring and brought it back. The wastepaper basket was usually full of discarded transcripts, mere formulae to her, ciphers and letter codes she would never ask him to explain, even if he could, but the last few days he had hardly been in his wireless room, a worrying loss of interest, as if no longer drawn by his alternative world, without which he could neither fuel nor sustain his own. Yet after such periods he always went back to it, and she wondered which was more real to him.

      When the wireless didn’t hold him he brooded, though he would use a different word. Lassitude was obvious in every bone. He sat for hours, unable to move and then, not knowing how or why, he got up, took cap and stick, and set off down the steps, to walk for miles along the beach and about the town. When he came cheerfully into the house he said he hadn’t felt at all tired on his expedition, which at least proved that such lack of energy hadn’t been due to illness. ‘But then, it never would be,’ she said aloud, her palm pressing the grinder whose noise for a moment crushed out her thoughts.

      It was as if a shadow had slid across the window and come into the room. She knew what it was. The heart was as fluctuating as the weather. Only a looking glass fixed its effects on the face, as much as anything could, just as the weather was still, only a moment before altering for better or worse. If you accepted such rhythms, as of course you had to, existence was tolerable, hardly ever unpleasant for long.

      On first hearing the news of his blindness she said she would never look in a mirror again, because Howard could not, but there had to be one in the house otherwise he would wonder why, and she would have to tell him the reason.

      The