by Pat Barker
The clock ticked loudly, as it had done all last night, a malevolent tick that kept him awake. He picked it up, intending to put it in the kitchen, but it stopped at once and only resumed its ticking when he replaced it on the mantel shelf. For Christ’s sake, he thought, even the bloody clock’s trained to keep its knees together.
He could hear the girls getting undressed in the room overhead: the thump of shoes being kicked off, snatches of conversation, giggles, almost – he convinced himself – the sigh of petticoats dropping to the floor. Sarah’s momentary nakedness, before the white shroud of night-dress came down. He got up and went to the piano, stroking the keys, singing under his breath.
Far, far from Wipers
I long to be,
Where German snipers
Can’t get at me.
Damp is my dug-out,
Cold are my feet
Waiting for Whizzbangs
To put me to sleep.
The door opened. He turned and saw Sarah, a white column of night-gown, a thick plait hanging down over her left shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, closing the piano. ‘Have I been making too much noise?’
‘No, I just wanted to see you.’
Incredibly, impossibly, the sound of girlish whispering and giggling continued overhead.
‘Cynthia,’ Sarah said, closing the door. ‘She’s pretending I’m still there.’
She knelt on the hearthrug, and began feeding the few remaining sticks of wood into the fire. Then, carefully, so as not to douse the flames, she dropped shiny nuggets of coal into the fiery caverns the dying fire had made. A hiss, for the coal was damp after recent rain, and, for a moment, the glow on her face and hair darkened, then blazed up again.
‘We seem to keep missing each other,’ she said.
‘You mean we’re kept apart.’
That amazing hair, he thought. Even now, when it was all brushed and tamed for bed, he could see five or six different shades of copper, auburn, bronze, even a strand of pure gold that looked as if it must belong to somebody else.
She turned to look at him. ‘It’s her house, Billy.’
‘Have I said anything?’
The firelight, gilding her face, disguised the munitions-factory yellow of her skin.
‘We could get married by special licence,’ he said. ‘At least I suppose we could, I don’t know how long it takes.’
‘No, we couldn’t.’
No, he thought, because after the war things’ll be different, I could be getting on in the world, I might not want to be saddled with a wife from Beale Street. I have to be protected from myself. Sarah had a great sense of honour. About as much use to a woman as a jock-strap, he’d have thought, but there it was, Sarah was saddled with it. ‘I love you, Sarah Lumb.’
‘I love you, Billy Prior.’
She leant back, and he unbuttoned her night-dress, pushing it off her shoulders so that the side of one heavy breast was etched in trembling gold. He slid to the floor beside her and took her in his arms, feeling her tense against him. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’
And all he wanted, at that moment, was to hide his face between her breasts and shut out the relentless ticking of the clock. But a voice above shouted, ‘Sarah? Cynthia? Time you were asleep.’
‘I’ll have to go.’
‘All right.’
But his hands refused to loosen their grip, and she had to pull herself away.
‘Look, tomorrow night she goes to the spuggies. I’ll tell her I’ve got a headache, and see if I can stay here.’
Next morning, after they’d all gone to work, he went upstairs to Sarah’s room, exhausted after another bad night measured by the chiming of the clock. He needed to lie in the bed where Sarah slept, to wrap himself in these stained sheets, for even in this fanatically clean household the girls’ skins sloughed off, staining the sheets yellow, and no amount of washing would get the stains out. He didn’t mind. He would lie happily here, in the trough made by her body during the night, smelling the faint smell of lavender and soap.
On the bedside table was a photograph of himself, taken when he was first commissioned. Unformed schoolboy face. Had he ever been as young as that? Undressed and in bed, he squinted at the half-drawn curtains, wondering if it was worth the effort of getting up to close them. No, he decided, he would simply turn his back to the light.
He turned over, and for a second closed his eyes, his brain not immediately interpreting what in that brief glance he had seen. Then he sat up. On the dresser stood a photograph of a young man in uniform, a private’s uniform. Not Cynthia’s husband – he knew his face from wedding groups. He got out of bed and went to look. Johnny, of course. Who else? Sarah’s first fiancé.
The usual inanely smiling face half whited out by the sun. Behind him, a few feet of unbombed France. And why should he begrudge this? Because I thought I’d taken his place. He hadn’t even thought it, he’d just assumed it. She’d talked only once about Johnny and then she’d been drunk on the port he’d been plying her with to get her knickers off. Loos. That was it. Gas blown back over the British lines. He peered again at the unknown face. The whiting out seemed almost to be an unintended symbol of the oblivion into which we all go. Last night, he’d wondered what colour Sarah’s skin had been under the jaundice produced by the chemicals she worked with. This man had known. He’d known this Sarah – picking up a snapshot – this happy, slightly plump, hoydenish girl struggling to keep her skirts down on the boat-swing. What you noticed in Sarah now was the high rounded forehead, the prominent cheekbones, the bright, cool amused gaze. Always the sense of something being held back. He’d been looking all along at a face scoured out by grief, and he’d never known it till now.
‘Nice walk in the fresh air,’ Ada said, spearing black felt with a hat-pin. ‘Just the thing for a headache.’
‘I won’t be in the fresh air, Mam. That room gets awfully stuffy, you know.’
Ada bent down, thrusting her face into her daughter’s. ‘Sarah, go and get your coat.’
Sarah looked at Billy and shrugged slightly.
‘I’ll come too,’ he said, standing up.
‘Are you sure?’ Ada asked. ‘The spuggies aren’t everybody’s cup of tea.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
They walked down the street together, Ada leading the way, sweeping along in her black skirt, for in the matter of skirt length she made no concessions to the present day. She glided along as if on invisible casters.
‘I suppose she does know contacting the dead’s a heresy?’ Billy asked. ‘The Vicar wouldn’t like it.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t believe in it. She only goes for the night out.’
The meeting was held above a shop that sold surgical appliances, a range of products whose advertising is necessarily discreet. The window, lined with red and green crêpe paper left over from Christmas, contained nothing but a picture of a white-haired man swinging his granddaughter above his head.
They went up a narrow staircase into a tiny room. A piano, a table with a vase of flowers, five or six rows of chairs, net curtains whose shadows tattooed skin. They couldn’t find four seats together and so Prior found himself sitting behind Sarah.
‘How’s your headache, Sarah?’ Ada asked.
‘Bit better, thank you, Mam.’
How’s your ballsache, Billy? Bloody awful, thank you, Ma.
A man walked up and stood on the rostrum, looking carefully round the room. Counting the penny contributions to tea and biscuits? Assessing the general level of credulity? Or was he perhaps not a rogue at all but simply mad? No, not mad. A small, self-satisfied man with brown teeth.
Prior followed his gaze round the room, as the blinds were drawn down, shutting out the sun. Women, mostly in black, a scattering of men, all middle aged or older, except one, whose hands and face twitched uncontrollably. Too many widows. Too many mothers looking for contact with lost sons – and this was an area where they’
d all joined up together. Whole streets of them, going off in a day. And this man, smoothing down his thin hair, announcing the number of the hymn, had known them all – birthmarks, nicknames, funny little habits – he knew exactly what every woman in this room wanted to hear. Fraud, Prior thought, and that he deceived himself made it no better.
Angels of Jesus, Angels of Light
Singing to we-elcome the pilgrims of the night.
They sat down with the usual coughs, chair scrapings, tummy rumbles, and he stood in front of them, establishing the silence, deepening it.
At last he was ready. Their loved ones were with them, he said, they were present in this room. The messages started coming. First a description, then a nicker of the eyes in the direction of the woman whose husband or son he had been describing, then the message. Anodyne messages. They were having a whale of a time, it seemed, on the other side, beyond this vale of tears, singing hymns, rejoicing in the Lamb, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. Ah, yes, Prior wanted to ask, but how’s the fucking?
Then, without warning, the twitching man stood up and started to speak. Not words. A gurgling rush of sound like the overflow of a drainpipe, and yet with inflections, pauses, emphases, everything that speech contains except meaning. People turned towards him, watching the sounds jerk out of him, as he stood with thrown-back head and glazed eyes. The man on the rostrum was wearing a forced, sickly smile. One hysteric upstaged by another. I’d take the pair of you on, Prior thought.
He touched Sarah’s shoulder. ‘I can’t stand any more of this. I’ll wait outside.’
He ran downstairs, then crossed the street and slipped into the alley opposite, positioning himself midway between two stinking midden holes. He lit a cigarette and thought glossolalia. ‘A spiritual gift of no intrinsic significance, unless the man possessing it can interpret what he receives in a way that tends to the edification of the faithful.’ Father Mackenzie, preparing him for Confirmation, when he was … eleven years old? Twelve? What a teacher the man was – in or out of his cassock.
From his vantage point, watching like a stranger, he saw Sarah come out and look up and down the empty road.
‘Sarah.’
She ran across, face pale beneath the munitions-factory yellow. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. I couldn’t stand it, that’s all.’ A pause. ‘We have to die, we don’t have to worship it.’
They stood together, looking up and down the street, which was dotted here and there with puddles of recent rain. Fitful gleams of sunlight.
‘I’m not going back in.’
‘No.’
She waited, still worried.
‘We could go back home,’ she said.
‘Have you got a key?’
‘Yes.’
They stared at each other.
‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing her arm.
They ran along the shining street, splashing through puddles, Sarah’s hair coming loose in a cascade of pins, then down an alley where white sheets bellied and snapped, shirt-sleeves caught them, wet cotton stung their faces and necks. They arrived at the door red-faced, Sarah’s hair hanging in rat’s-tails down her back.
She rattled the key in the lock, while he stood looking back the way they’d come, half expecting to see Ada hurtling towards them on her Widow-of-Windsor casters. They half fell into the passage, and he ran towards the stairs. ‘No,’ she said. No, he thought. The front room, then. He made to pull the curtains across. ‘No, don’t do that, they’ll think somebody’s dead. Behind the sofa.’ He was already on his knees in front of her, his hands under her skirt, groping for the waistband of her drawers, pulling them down, casting them aside, he didn’t care where they fell. At the last moment he thought, This isn’t going to work. They’d had to leave the front door open – it would be impossible to explain why it was locked – but the thought of Ada Lumb looking down at your bare arse was enough to give a brass monkey the wilts.
‘Careful,’ Sarah said, as he went in.
But he’s always careful, always prepared – though never prepared for the surge of joy he feels now. He’s like some aquatic animal, an otter, returning to its burrow, greeting its mate nose to nose, curling up, safe, warm, dark, wet. His mind shrinks to a point that listens for footsteps, but his cock swells, huge and blind, filling the world. His thrusts deepen and quicken, but then he forces himself to pull back, to keep them shallow, a butterfly fluttering that he knows she likes. Her hands come up and grasp his buttocks – always a moment of danger – and for a while he has to stop altogether, hanging there, mouth open. Then, cautiously, he starts again. Cords stand out in her neck, her belly tightens, the fingers clutching his arse are claws now. She groans, and he feels the movement of muscles in her belly. Another groan, a cry, and now it’s impossible to stop, every thrust as irresistible as the next breath to a drowning man. She raises her legs higher, inviting him deeper, and he tries not to hear the desperation in her gasps, the disappointment in her final cry, as he spills himself into her.
‘Yes?’ he gasps, as soon as he can speak.
‘No.’
Oh God. He drives himself on, thrusting away in a frictionless frenzy, his knob a point of fire, feeling her teeter teeter on the brink, and then at last at last tip over, fall, clutching and throbbing round his shrinking cock till he cries out in pain. Oh, but she’s there, she’s laughing, he hears her laughter deep in his chest.
Only his groin’s wet, too wet. He lifted himself off her and looked down. Spunk, beaten stiff as egg-white, streaked their hair, flecks of foam on a horse’s muzzle, spume blown back from the breaking wave, but to him it meant one thing. The johnny – unfortunate word in the circumstances – was still inside Sarah. He hooked it out, and they stared at it.
Sarah felt inside. ‘I think I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all outside.’
No oiled casters, but a firm tread approached the house. He flung the rubber into the fire, a million or so Billies and Sarahs perishing in a gasp of flame. Small bloody comfort if another million were still inside her. She pulled her skirts down and sat, sweating and desperate, in her mother’s chair. He was about to sit down himself when he caught sight of her drawers thrown across the family Bible, one raised leg drawing a decent veil over Job and his boils. He snatched them up and stuffed them down the neck of his tunic, which left him no time for his flies. He picked up the Bible and sat with it in his lap.
‘Well,’ Ada said. ‘What happened to you?’
Sarah said, ‘Billy started thinking about a friend of his, Mam.’
Prior sat with his head on one hand, a passable imitation of David mourning Jonathan.
Ada sniffed. ‘I see you’ve not thought to put the kettle on, our Sarah. It’s a true saying in this life, if you want anything doing do it yourself.’
She went into the kitchen. Cynthia, glancing timidly from one to the other, sat down on the edge of the sofa. Billy pulled Sarah’s drawers out of his tunic and threw them across to her. Cynthia squealed, bunching her clothes between her legs like a little girl afraid of wetting herself. Sarah calmly stood up and put the drawers on, while Prior fumbled with buttons beneath the Bible.
Ada came back into the room. ‘You missed a good show,’ she said. ‘Mrs Roper had to be carried out. Still, no doubt you’ve been better employed.’ She indicated the Bible.
‘I was just trying to find the bit about the war-horse to show Sarah. But it’s all right, I know it off by heart.’ He looked straight at Ada. ‘He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’
He got up and replaced the Bible, aware of three faces gawping at him. An odd moment. ‘And now if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to lie down.’
Sarah was allowed to go to the railway sta
tion with him unaccompanied. They stood on the empty platform, exhausted mentally and physically, obliged to cherish these last moments together, both secretly, guiltily wanting it to be over.
He picked up her hand and kissed the ring. ‘Don’t worry, Sarah.’
‘I’m not worried.’ She smiled. ‘This time next year.’
He hadn’t thought about the actual marriage at all, once she’d made it clear she didn’t want a quick wedding. Next year was a lifetime away. Perhaps even a bit more. He watched a pigeon walk along the edge of the platform, raw feet clicking on the concrete. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk along.’
They stopped under the shelter of the roof, for there was a fine rain blowing. White northern light filtered through sooty glass. Sarah’s face pinched with cold.
‘Write as soon as you get there,’ she said.
‘I’ll write from London. I’ll write on the train if you like.’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’m glad you told your mam anyway.’
‘She was delighted.’
She was horrified.
–Marrying a factory girl not that it matters of course as long as you’re happy but I’d’ve thought you could have done a bit better for yourself than that.
His father was incredulous.
–Married? You?
–Oscar Wilde was married, Dad, Prior had not been able to resist saying.