A Soldier's Tale

by M. K. Joseph

  Come in, she said, it is cold. Let this be our house. Come into our house.

  So they went in; she drew the curtains and lit a candle while he livened up the fire with a knob of wood and a bit of kindling. There was a pack of old greasy cards on the mantelpiece. He took them down and laid out a game of patience on the table. The one candle was not enough, so he reached out to the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, where two candles in brass candlesticks stood on each side of a dark wooden crucifix.

  Please do not touch that, she said quickly, look in the drawer, there is another candle there.

  Why not, he said. They’re good candles, not used.

  They’re blessed candles, she said, for the dead. When a person lies dead in the house, one places the crucifix at the head, the candles on each side. It is the custom.

  She went over to the stove and began to make their supper. For a time there was a companionable silence, broken only by her quiet movements at stove and sinkboard, the scrape of the casserole being moved on the stove, the rattle as she opened the grate and pushed in more wood, the tinkle of a spoon in a bowl. The cards clicked as he laid them on the table. He played fairly and with concentration, turning the cards in rigid sequence. When the game refused to come out, he neatly gathered the cards, shirred them together and began again. The first card up in the left-hand column was the Queen of Spades: he frowned over it.

  Pique dame, she said, nodding towards it.

  She was standing behind him watching the game, with her left hand laid lightly on his shoulder.

  They say she brings misfortune, she said.

  Who says so?

  Oh—old women.

  Our old women say the same. (A death in the family, his granny used to say, but he was careful not to quote that.) Me, I think it’s a load of cobblers. You know, like teacups and horoscopes and all that bollocks. Look, there’s the Queen of Hearts, that could be you, couldn’t it? and here comes the Knave of Spades to cover her, like it might be me?

  He grinned slyly up at her, but her face in the shifting candlelight was shadowy and unsmiling.

  You know what that means? she asked. It is really swords—the Spanish say espada, a sword. He is a swordsman. Like you.

  She touched her fingertips to the knife in its sheath at his belt. He tensed up and pushed her hand away.

  Don’t do that, girl, he said sharply.

  Why not?

  I don’t like it, that’s all. I don’t want it touched, that’s all.

  (And he couldn’t explain this, because it was a kind of primitive tapu thing. This was a man’s weapon, and if a woman touched it the fighting magic might somehow leak away. In some ways he was very atavistic; as I’ve suggested before, he was an instinctive hunter and warrior, and this feeling of power in his weapons, part magical, part practical, part phallic, was an unthinking part of his special abilities. Without it, his skill would be diminished, perhaps disastrously.)

  Then she brought the supper to the table, and it was first a vegetable soup made up of scraps but tasty, and then bullybeef made over into a kind of meat-loaf with herb sauce and little dumplings manufactured out of tinned potatoes.

  You’re a great cook, you know, he said.

  I know, she said.

  When you come to England, he said carefully, you’ll be able to cook all you want.

  Thank you, she said mockingly, but I wish to come as your wife, not your cook.

  Don’t mistake me, girl, I mean there’s plenty of good food there. But it’s like my grandad used to say, God sends the food and the Devil sends cooks. He liked rabbit-pie, did my grandad, and fat bacon, and he lived to be eighty or more.

  Food was bad in England in the war? she asked.

  Oh, we ate enough, he said, but never too much, and some of it was poor stuff, it still is.

  So with us, she said. And the marché noir, the black market?

  So with us, he mocked gently.

  He poured rum and water into the glasses, and they ate and drank in silence. Abruptly—

  How many children shall we have? she asked.

  Three, he said promptly. A boy and a girl and a boy. Only I bet the girl will be a wicked little red-headed bitch like you. I’ll have to watch her.

  She nodded at him eagerly.

  You will watch me too?

  Like a hawk, he said. Like a hawk sitting in the air over a rabbit-warren.

  And if I am wicked?

  He touched his knife and grinned his hard grin.

  I wouldn’t lay a finger on you, girl. But the bloke, he better watch out, otherwise I’ll have his balls for breakfast. Fried, with bacon.

  You are a horrible Englishman and I love you, she said as she bent over him and kissed him hard. Now I go to have a bath.

  Don’t spend too long in that luxurious tub, he said.

  She took the stub of candle and went out to the wash-house, carrying the kettle with her. He heard the hot water poured into a bucket, and the pleasant sound of cold water being dippered from the waterbutt, and the splashing as she washed herself down. She had left the door open, so that by shifting his head slightly he could watch her long shadow moving on the wall in the wavering guttering light of the candle.

  He turned back to stare into the fire, smoking and thinking his own thoughts.

  When she came back she was naked under the old purple dressing-gown, with her hair loose and dark and damp about her shoulders. She too sat close to the fire, towelling and combing her hair till the rich brightness came back to it. He watched her possessively, appreciatively. In the firelight slowly dying in the open grate she was all pink and rosy, one shoulder exposed by the loose dressing-gown, scrubbed innocent face, hair shining like a copper kettle.

  Now, she said, you have a wife and children, so how will you make a trade?

  I might sign on for the regular army, he said. It’s not a bad life, not in peacetime, and I reckon I could make sergeant.

  She looked at him slyly.

  You would be away very often, she said. I should be unfaithful to you.

  Then I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll move out of the country into some town like Blandford or Dorchester. I’ll have a gratuity and I’ve got a little money put by what came from my gran. We’d buy a little tobacconist and newsagent’s—I reckon I could do well with that. Or maybe we could get into Swanage or Poole, where there’s a good summer season with holiday crowds. In peacetime that is. But we’d move out of the country into some town.

  She continued to stare into the fire.

  We should be old, she said, some day we should be old.

  And after they’d talked some more the big black kettle began to rattle again. He took it and the stub of candle and went out for his wash-down. She was still staring at the dull fire when he came back, with a towel wrapped round his middle.

  We’ve been married so long, she said.

  Years.

  She reached out for his hand and led him towards the bedroom, the purple dressing-gown trailing behind her on to the floor. She pulled back the worn patchwork quilt and the mended sheets and lay down on the bed. He went into her without words or play, yet holding her close and tenderly, and when he came it was so gentle that there hardly seemed to be a climax, just a dying away.

  Afterwards he rested on his back, staring up into the half-dusk of the summer night. She lay close to him, her head on his shoulder, her loose hair still smelling of the garden and of fresh pump-water.

  She laid hold of his free hand and drew it against her soft belly.

  Perhaps we shall have a baby, she said.

  Be good, wouldn’t it? he said. It’d be good.

  I feel it, you know. I feel it here, now. I can tell.

  Not so soon, you can’t. It’s just a feeling.

  No, I know it.

  All right, if you say so, girl. Anyway it wouldn’t hardly be surprising, would it?

  She laughed softly and hid her face against his shoulder.

  I do believe you’re blush
ing, he teased her. I do believe you’re shamed of what you done.

  She lifted her head and looked up at him. Outside in the night sky a flight of German fighter-bombers came in low with pulsing engines and roared away towards the beach-heads and the shipping in the bay.

  Not shamed, she said, I am a happy woman. But you make me feel—tu me fais timide. I am timid to you?

  I wouldn’t say that, he said. No, that’s not the word. You’re not scared of me are you, girl?

  Not scared. Timide.

  You’re shy with me, he guessed.

  Yes, shy, now. I feel like a young girl.

  Well, you’re not all that old, are you?

  That is not what I mean.

  We’ll have a lot of things to explain to each other, he said.

  He brought his hand up to her hair, bunching it, feeling its weight and thickness, while he waited for the roar of another flight of German planes to die away. Then he felt the words forced out of him and he said:

  You know, I’m the one that’s been shy, with you. It’s funny and I don’t quite know why. Years ago, though, there was something, it sort of stayed on my mind. This girl, she wasn’t my first, but she was the first I went with regular, and she was very loving but very modest. Thatcher’s daughter she was, name of Milly. Leastwise, her old man had been a thatcher, but it was a dying trade, and he earned a crust at odd jobs, like hedging and ditching, though most of the money went in the boozer. My grandad knew him well, used to call on him when he needed an extra hand. That’s how I knew him, then his daughter. We used to meet at night, we’d walk across the fields between our homes, and there was an old hay-barn only half-used, a good place to meet, and quiet. True, there was a farmer’s watch-dog thereabouts, but I could always make a dog be quiet, it’s all in knowing how to speak to them.

  Now, like I said, she was very modest, and she’d never undress, no matter how much I teased her. She’d just lift her clothes, and we’d go to it there in the dry-smelling hay.

  How her old man found out I don’t know, but find out he did. Maybe someone in the village night-wandered like me and spotted us, and told him. I should have explained that he was a sour-tempered man, what with him rather coming down in the world and then losing his wife sudden-like, and having too much liking for the drink, though some said that that had come later. And when he found out about her he took a rope’s end to her and called her all manner of foul names, so loud you could hear him t’other end of the village.

  She was a quiet girl, timid-like, and after that she dursn’t come near me. Only sent a message through another girl to ask my forgiveness. After that she just moped, stayed home and waited on her father, and moped.

  Well, one night, it was autumn and turning sharp, he came banging on our door at eleven at night, with us all in bed. So my grandad hollers out to him to know who it is, and what he wants.

  It’s Milly, he says and he sounds very strong in drink. It’s my Milly. I know she’s run off with your bastard grandson, and you got her there now.

  You’re wrong, says Grandad, but hold on.

  He pulled on his shirt and trousers and went to the door. T’other man, Milly’s father, he come in raging and wanted to go for me. If he had I might have killed him and swung, for I’d been told what he’d done to Milly with the rope’s end. But my grandad stood up to him, I can still see him standing there in his old flannel shirt and moleskin trousers with his braces hanging down, and the big man glaring down at him and raging, like a great raging bull bailed up by a little old bandy bull-terrier.

  She’s not here, says Grandad, and she’s not been here. And the way you treat her she’ll have run away, I reckon, and who’s to blame her?

  So the big man tried to push into the house, but whichever way he turned Grandad was before him, like the terrier at the bull’s nose, until he’d quite faced him down.

  After a while the other man turned crying drunk, and began to sob and carry on about his only daughter, and what a good girl she’d been before this, and what a comfort she’d been when his dear wife passed on. It began to look like he really was in trouble and wanted to search for her, so my grandad agreed to help. I went too, I didn’t really want to, but my granny made me, to keep the peace, she said.

  We couldn’t do much that night. When we told the constable, he didn’t take it too serious, knowing how the old man treated her, he thought she’d run off. We had a look around, and got out early in the morning to knock on doors—no sign of her.

  By evening the village started to take it serious, and the second day they made up search-parties. When nothing turned up, the excitement died away, though the police circulated her description, and everyone reckoned she’d made off to some town.

  It was over a week when some boys who’d gone to the river to fish spotted something among the brambles. Being curious like boys are, they fished it out and it was a bundle of clothes, her clothes, rolled up tight and flung away into the bushes. They took it straight to the constable.

  Then a boat was got and grappling hooks, and it was soon over. The body hadn’t gone far, and on the third try they raised it. I was there, all the village was there. I saw it come up in the late afternoon sun, all swollen and slimy. That’s the only time in my life I went and threw up. It was so strange, you see, she’d been so still and modest with me, would hardly lift her clothes. But she went naked into the river.

  Pauvre vieux, she murmured against his cheek, pauvre p’tit soldat.

  Her voice was blurred, close to sleep. He shifted slightly to make them both more comfortable and as he did so he felt her body relax itself completely as she slept.

  He lay there for some time staring up into the dark, and I know no more than you do what was going through his mind at that point. I see him clearly enough, as he lies there in the faint reflected sky-shine of a summer night, his left arm beneath her shoulders as she lies half-turned towards him, his right arm bent up, supporting his head. The sheet and the faded coverlet have been carelessly drawn up, leaving bare his wide flat-muscled chest and the curve of her arm across it. Her hair spills down opulently upon his body and her. He turns his face slightly to check on his sten gun and short knife laid handy on the rush-bottomed chair beside the bed, and his eyes seem to glisten in the dark like a hunting animal’s. Then he stares up again, reckoning over the sounds of the night, distant planes, lazy gunfire, ours, theirs. He lowers his free arm on to the coverlet. Calmly, lightly, he falls asleep.

  What is he thinking? He knows there is no help, but he has entered so whole-heartedly into the fantasy of domestic life and contentment which has been played out to comfort the woman that he almost believes it, wants it. For the first time in his hard, self-sufficient life he wants something for another. Tenderness begins to grow in him like green fern chance-dropped by birds on a rocky slope. Yet his face in sleep has its old sardonic look, his hand twitches on the coverlet, he moves his head from side to side and murmurs in his throat.

  I held this double image of him in my mind—him there smoking and looking down at the hot blue glow of the burner, him in the imagined past, doubly screened from me by time and sleep. I held it there while he politely topped up my mug before going out for a leak.

  When he came back into the barn he said, Getting quiet up at the mess, I reckon your bloke’ll be moving pretty soon now. You want to hear the rest of this, or you had enough of it?

  Tell me how it finished, I said. I’ve got to know that now.

  Sure you’re not bored, Bom?

  No fear, I said, I can’t wait. (But all the time I had a foreboding about how it was going to end.)

  Well, said Saul, I woke up with the sun still pretty low in the sky, and I decided I’d better get cracking. So I roused up Belle and she was sleeping sound. I says to her, Time I was going, girl, but no worrying, mind, because we got it all fixed up.

  All she says is, I will get you your breakfast.

  She got naked out of the bed and pulled on her old purple wrap. I w
atched her as she walked out of the bedroom, with the wrap half off her shoulders, yawning and brushing her hair back with one hand. Soon I could hear her rattling about in the kitchen, drawing the grate.

  We shall need some more wood very soon, she says.

  I’ll get some, I says, I’ll bring you in a good pile before I go off.

  I shall need some now, for the breakfast, she calls.

  Right, I says.

  Now, I didn’t want to waste a lot of time at this stage, so I slipped on my trousers and I went quickly round the back where I’d left the wood ready chopped. Not much mist about today, but low cloud. The early Spitfires seemed pretty busy and there was a local barrage going in over on the left. I hauled in a big armful of wood and dropped it with a crash in the woodbox. It startled her where she stood there in a brown study. She turned round with a sort of troubled look.

  Saul, she says, Saul, tell me again, will it be all right?

  Belle, I says, Belle—supposing—would they really harm you?

  Yes.

  How d’you know?

  I shouldn’t have said it really, because I wasn’t sure. Something made me want to know. She was close to the edge, it was as if her face broke up, she sat down in a chair.

  Bon dieu, she says (again I’m helping out Saul’s French), oh yes, there was another woman, they say she had—on dit qu’elle avait chanté—

  Then she lost her English, like she did when she was moved or frightened—in bed sometimes too, when she had her climax. Ils l’ont violée, puis crevé les yeux, enfin fusillée à la mitraillette. And although the foreign words were too slurred to follow, there was no mistaking the pantomime that went with them. She mimed with little fierce gestures, clenched fist thrust at crotch, thumbs stabbing at eyes, the ritual gesture of traversing a Schmeisser. Rrrrudududuh. A kid’s game gone bad.

  I’d made a mistake (went on Saul) so I took her quick into my arms and kissed her.