The Chalky Sea

by Clare Flynn

  Jim nodded. ‘I’d feel the same in your shoes. I can understand, because I’ve spent months training to fight this war. That’s what I joined up for, only to be sent here to do exercises and target practice. So, I do know how you feel. It seems to me that Allied Command has as little respect for Canadians as they do for women.’

  Gwen smiled, then sighed and offered him her hand to shake. He took it and his grip was firm, his hands warm. She looked up at his face. His eyes were a brilliant blue, intense, sad. The scar down on his face was paler than the rest of his skin. She had a sudden urge to raise a finger and run it down the ridge. She pushed the thought away. Her stomach gave a little lurch as she realised again she found him attractive. Squeezing her lips together tightly she turned and looked back at the sea.

  ‘Are you married, Private Armstrong?’

  ‘It’s Jim. No. I was engaged but not any more.’

  His tone told her not to ask any more questions but her curiosity overcame her caution. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I found out she preferred my brother.’

  She hadn’t been expecting that and was lost for words for a moment, then said, ‘How dreadful. That can’t have been easy. And I didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘It hasn’t been easy. It still isn’t.’

  ‘Did you love her?’ Why was she asking him this?

  ‘Still do. But I hate her at the same time.’ He paused for a moment then looked at her. ‘Can you understand that?’

  Gwen nodded but said nothing. She didn’t know what to say. The conversation was running away from her like a spool of thread.

  ‘We would have been married by now if it hadn’t happened. She married my brother pretty much as soon as I’d left. She’s knocked up now.’ Seeing her puzzled frown, he said, ‘Sorry, you don’t use that expression over here, do you? I checked into a hotel on a trip to London and they asked me if I wanted to be knocked up. They meant an early morning call. We use it to mean becoming pregnant.’

  Gwen smiled. ‘Yes, I can see how that might prove awkward.’ She hesitated before asking, ‘And it wasn’t your child?’

  Jim shook his head and picked up a pebble and hurled it at the sea. ‘Absolutely sure it wasn’t my child. We never… Hell, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.’

  She didn’t know either, but she said, ‘Maybe it helps to unburden yourself with someone you barely know, who won’t judge you.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Anyway that’s why I joined up. Couldn’t wait to get away from the pair of them. I was humiliated. We live in a small community. Everyone knew Alice and I were getting married. We’d been sweet on each other since we were in school. You can imagine the gossip I’d have had to face as soon as people heard she was leaving me for my little brother.’

  He threw another stone into the water. ‘Maybe they already knew. Perhaps the whole damn town knew. I might have been the last to find out that they’d been making out under my nose. Anyway, I wasn’t going to stick around to discover.’

  Gwen shivered and buttoned up her cardigan. She asked herself how they had got onto such personal territory so rapidly. She was not usually the sort of person to invite confidences and Jim Armstrong was a virtual stranger. Yet she felt attuned to him. Drawn to him. Comfortable with him. She wasn’t even annoyed any more that he had found her here in her personal retreat.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘I got the impression you didn’t like being asked about your husband the other day. I’m sorry if I was intrusive.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I was being touchy. I’m always touchy. I seem to have turned touchiness into an art form.’

  Jim smiled and nodded.

  ‘I suppose I avoid talking about Roger as it would force me to think about what I feel. It’s easier for me to bottle it up and keep it hidden.’

  ‘I can understand that, Mrs Collingwood.’

  ‘Call me Gwen.’ She was abandoning her habitual caution now. ‘I have no idea if he’s behind enemy lines – although I think he must be, otherwise he would have written to me. He could be in the Far East, in Africa, in France.’ She shook her head. ‘The Balkans, Norway. Germany even. I lie awake at night trying to imagine what he’s doing. All the time terrified that if he were taken prisoner I might not even find out about it. If he were dead I wouldn’t even know.’ She choked back a sob. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to become emotional. I never do usually. I hate to be soppy.’

  ‘Soppy? You’ve every right to be emotional about it.’ He laid a hand on her arm.

  Gwen looked down as he gave her arm a slight squeeze and she thought how nice his hands were. She always noticed men’s hands. Roger had nice hands too. Sandy Pringle had little fat hands with short stubby fingers. She often wondered how Daphne could bear to be touched by hands like that.

  What on earth was she doing, sitting here on a wall by the beach with a complete stranger, thinking about men’s hands? Get this conversation back onto a safer keel, she thought. Talk about him. Stop talking about Roger.

  ‘You’ll meet someone else,’ she said at last. ‘You’ll forget all about this Alice. It sounds to me as though she wasn’t worthy of you.’

  Residual loyalty to the woman he’d intended to spend his life with made him say, ‘Alice is a wonderful person. Beautiful, calm, warm and friendly.’

  ‘A bit too warm and friendly by the sound of it.’ Before the words were out of her mouth she regretted them. Why was she being so waspish?

  He took his hand away from her arm. ‘You have no right to say that.’ Hadn’t he told himself the same thing many times over the past months? But hearing it from a stranger was different.

  Suddenly reckless, she said, ‘Look, Jim, she was sleeping with your brother. I barely know you but it’s clear to me that you’re worth more than that.’

  ‘That’s right, you do barely know me. In fact, you don’t know me at all and you certainly don’t know Alice.’

  ‘I'm sorry.' She paused a moment and then said, 'But I do know that if I were engaged to be married I wouldn’t jump into bed with my fiancé’s brother. It's a terrible thing to do.’

  ‘Alice must have loved Walt a whole lot for her to do what she did. Or else Walt forced her. She’s not the kind of girl who would have done it otherwise. She’s not cheap.’ His words sounded hollow.

  ‘Forced her?’ said Gwen, horrified.

  ‘Not like that.’ He looked at her aghast. ‘I meant he must have exerted pressure on her.’

  ‘Is she a bit dim, this Alice?'

  ‘Why are you being like this? Why are you saying these awful things?’

  ‘I’m trying to get you to see that she's not the innocent you're portraying her as. I’m trying to get you to acknowledge that what you had was probably not worth having.’ As the words came out of her mouth she was shocked at what she was saying, but she was angry. Not with Jim, but with that girl far away who had so casually caused him pain and taken his feelings so lightly.

  ‘What right do you have to say that?’ Jim jumped off the wall and moved in front of her. ‘You don’t know her. And I loved her.’

  ‘Good. Past tense.’

  ‘Still love her.’ The words were lame and without conviction.

  ‘It was an infatuation, Jim.’ She paused, then decided she’d said enough. She barely knew Jim Armstrong but there was something about him that she was drawn to. It was not just his charisma and good looks but her recognition of the same self-hate that was in herself. This Alice had caused him to feel diminished and she didn’t want him to feel like that.

  Jim turned from her and walked towards the edge of the promenade where he picked up another stone and hurled it across the beach and into the water.

  Suddenly determined to make him see the truth she said, ‘When did you first know you were in love with her?’ Why was she asking him this? She’d die rather than reveal such intimacies about herself.

  He hesitated, d
ropped his hand as he was about to hurl another stone. ‘I can’t think of one moment.’

  ‘Well, pick a few. What was it about her that made you think, I’m going to marry that girl?’

  He turned back to her, his face puzzled. ‘How do I know? It crept up on me. I guess I always loved her. Since we were kids.’

  ‘What did you talk to her about?’ Gwen could barely believe what she was saying but felt compelled to keep going.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What kind of things did you talk about?’

  Jim pondered a moment, then shrugged. ‘Everything and nothing. The farm. Her job at the library. Hell, I don’t know.’

  ‘What makes her so special? Come on, tell me.’

  He moved back towards her. ‘Why? If you’re so smart tell me what made you fall in love with your husband.’

  ‘That’s private.’

  ‘You have the cheek of the devil, Mrs Collingwood. Who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘It’s completely different. My husband hasn’t slept with another woman.’

  Jim gasped then said, ’How do you know? He could be making out with some French woman right now.’

  Gwen heard the crack of her hand across his face, before she realised what she had done. Jim stood, rooted to the spot, then grabbed her by her shoulders.

  His eyes burned into her then he dropped his hands and let her go. ‘I’m sorry. I asked for that,’ he said.

  Before Gwen could answer, he was walking away, striding back along the promenade towards the town. She watched him disappear into the gloom, her heart pounding, her breath uneven. All she could think about was that when he grabbed her by the shoulders she had wanted his hands to move down and pull her against him. She had wanted to know what it would be like to be crushed against him, to feel his breath hot against her face, to feel his mouth on hers.

  Gwen had never in her life behaved like this before. She had deliberately provoked him, determined to get him to acknowledge that this Alice was nothing but a slut, determined to push him over the edge so that she could engage his emotions.

  With a sudden flash of self-knowledge she realised it was her own emotions she was trying to engage. What was wrong with her? Why was she behaving this way? Her desire had taken her by surprise. Where had this overwhelming surge of longing for a man she had met a few days ago come from? Was it because she missed Roger?

  Gwen began to walk back slowly towards the series of steps that led up the cliffside back to the roadway, her feet dragging as she went up. It would take her twenty minutes to walk back to the house and all she wanted was to be safe at home in her bed. Guilt and shame washed over her. She’d had no right to do what she did to that young man. To taunt him and push him like that. And to want him to kiss her – when she loved her husband, when he was facing God knows what.

  I am the worst kind of wife, she thought. The very worst.

  It was three days before she saw Private Armstrong again. Gwen didn’t know whether he had gone out of his way to avoid her – and she could hardly blame him if he had. Each day the two other Canadians stuck their heads around the dining room door as she ate her breakfast to wish her good morning before heading off, but there was no sign of Jim. Wondering if something had happened to him that night and he had not returned to the house, she mentioned his absence casually to Pauline when they were in the kitchen washing the dishes.

  ‘He gets up earlier than the other two. I saw him first thing this morning. He told me he was on duty later today up Beachy Head.’

  Gwen smiled. ‘That’s all right then. I thought for a moment he’d gone AWOL!’

  ‘Nice lad, that one,’ said Pauline. ‘He’s got lovely eyes. Makes you think you’re drowning in them when you look at him. Come-to-bed eyes my friend Betty calls them.’

  Gwen felt herself blushing and reached for the teapot, emptying the tea leaves on to a sheet of newspaper, ready to throw away.

  ‘Don’t throw the tea leaves out, Mrs C. Let them dry then put them on the fire. They burn beautifully and every little helps. Now what was I saying? Yes, that Jim. He’s such a handsome chap. Shame about the scar, but I can tell you if I wasn’t married to my Brian I’d have my eyes on him.’ She gave a dirty laugh. ‘Ooh no, I wouldn’t be chucking him out of bed for eating cream crackers.’

  ‘All right, Pauline. I think you’ve made your point.’

  Pauline laughed. ‘Come on, Mrs C, ease up a bit. I’m only having a giggle. There’s little enough to laugh about these days.’

  Pauline’s Night Out

  Eastbourne

  Gwen wasn’t thrilled about her new role in the typing pool. She didn’t mind the typing itself, but the sheer tedium of the stuff she had to transcribe was beyond boring. Far from the military secrets she had hoped to be party to, it was mostly reports from Canadian officers for the Canadian Military HQ in London and, as the troops evidently had little meaningful to do, the reports were extremely dull. Her main task was compiling an up-to-date address and telephone list with map references for all operational units in the town and its surroundings. This was a job of mind-numbing boredom, but one that required maximum attention to detail. As she walked along the corridor each day, she wished there was a role for her behind the closed doors with blacked-out windows where WRENs were hard at work on something too important for the likes of Gwen to know about. She kept telling herself to grin and bear it as it was all for the war, but it was hard not to feel that her capabilities were being wasted.

  Sitting at home one evening Gwen realised it was the third week running that Pauline had asked her to babysit while she went out dancing with the Canadians. 'They're lonely and bored, those lads and they want a bit of fun,' she'd said. 'And there's not enough women left in the town to go round. I’m doing my bit for the war effort.'

  Gwen had asked her if it was right to be out enjoying herself with other men while her husband faced all manner of dangers on the Atlantic convoys.

  'I'd like to think that if my Brian was lonely and in port a nice girl would be happy to have a dance with him. Brian and I love dancing. I'd never do anything I'd be ashamed to tell him about. No harm in a bit of dancing. You should give it a try. I could ask the lady next door to babysit the girls and we could go together. We’d have a laugh. Loosen up!’

  ‘I don’t need loosening up thank you, Pauline.’ But she couldn’t help smiling. She probably did.

  When Gwen had been to the hairdressers, earlier in the week, she overheard a conversation on the topic of loose morals. The women in the salon had been talking about a woman whose husband was in the air force, and who was allegedly having an affair with a Canadian soldier.

  ‘Soldier?’ one of the women had said. ‘More like soldiers. Lots of them. Little more than a prostitute, if you ask me. She may not take money for it but in my mind it’s as bad. She’s having fun while her husband is risking his life. It’s a different fellow every night of the week. Morals of an alley cat.’

  ‘As for those Canadians, don’t get me started,’ said the hairdresser as she dabbed setting lotion onto the woman’s hair. ‘They’re good for absolutely nothing. All they do is get drunk, play at target practice and churn up the Downs with their blasted tanks.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ the first woman replied. ‘My husband was talking to one of the Home Guard who said there’s almost nothing left of the lighthouse at Belle Tout. They’ve blown it to bits. No respect. Goodness knows what Sir James will say when the war’s over and he finds out his house has been blown up for no reason at all. They’ll probably blame it on the Germans. Those Canadians are a bunch of shirkers, if you ask me. If they were any good as soldiers Mr Churchill would have used them by now.’

  Gwen debated whether to jump into the conversation in the Canadians’ defence. Certainly she’d seen no examples of drunken behaviour among the men billeted with her, and it was hardly their fault if the army had yet to deploy them. In the end she’d stayed silent and carried on read
ing her book.

  Tonight she planned to say something to Pauline about her dancing expedition. It wasn’t that she minded babysitting for the little girls. There was never a peep out either of them once Pauline got them down, and Gwen rarely went out in the evenings anyway so it was no inconvenience. But there was something about Pauline’s casual attitude that riled her. She flirted with the soldiers, in particular with that Mitch fellow and Gwen couldn’t help remembering the night she had walked in on Pauline and her husband. It still made her blush with embarrassment. A woman who clearly enjoyed conjugal relations as much as that might well find it difficult to stop herself getting involved with another man.

  If she tries it on in this house that will be the end of it. Gwen dug her fingernails into her palms. She would ask her to leave. Never mind the cooking. Then she remembered Sally and baby Brenda. How could she possibly expel them from what had become their home? And she couldn’t deny how devoted a mother Pauline was. How much she loved her husband as well. Everyone had different ways of getting through the war. Maybe she did need to loosen up a bit. What was wrong with a bit of harmless flirting? It was wrong to assume Pauline was guilty of anything more.

  It was almost midnight when Gwen heard the front door open and whispering voices in the hallway, followed by the sound of boots being removed and muffled footsteps on the stairs as the Canadians went up. She waited in the drawing room for Pauline to come in to say goodnight, but there was silence. She got up and moved towards the door, opened it and found Pauline wrapped in the arms of Mitch Johnson, kissing him with enthusiasm.

  Gwen coughed and the pair jumped apart. Mitch’s face turned a deep beetroot and even Pauline had the grace to look ashamed.

  ‘It’s not what you think, Mrs C,’ said Pauline. ‘I was demonstrating what a French kiss is.’ She giggled. ‘For Mr Johnson’s education. He’s led a sheltered life back in Canada. He wanted a practice run before he tries it out on the girl he fancies.’