The Chalky Sea

by Clare Flynn

  Gwen remained silent.

  Mitch pulled his cap off and bowed his head slightly. ‘That’s right, Mrs Collingwood. I asked Pauline, er, Mrs Simmonds, for some advice as I don’t seem to be having much luck with the ladies.’

  ‘Maybe if you concentrated on the lady you are interested in and not on Mrs Simmonds your luck might improve.’ Gwen could hear the sarcasm in her own voice and felt ashamed. Mitch Johnson was barely a man. Eighteen or nineteen at most. It wasn’t fair to blame him. The fault lay with Pauline.

  ‘All right, Mrs C. So I fancied a kiss. Shoot me! Guilty as charged, m’lud. I’d have thought you’d understand, what with your husband being away too.’ Her eyes were defiant. ‘What’s so wrong with having a little kiss? I know my Brian wouldn’t worry. He knows I’d never go with another man, and he wouldn’t begrudge me showing a little kindness to a lonely young soldier.’

  All Gwen’s frustration and anger at the loss of her job, the absence of her husband and the way she’d let herself be drawn into that intimate conversation with Armstrong at the beach, came to the surface. ‘Show some self-respect, Pauline. I won’t tolerate that kind of behaviour under my roof.’

  Pauline whirled round, her face furious. ‘You might understand my behaviour if you weren’t all dried up and bitter like a bag of old currants.’

  Gwen leaned back against the wall, feeling her legs weaken under her.

  Pauline jerked her head at Mitch. ‘Go to bed, Mitch.’

  The soldier looked relieved at his reprieve and bounded up the stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Pauline. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It was uncalled for and I didn’t mean it. If you want me to leave I’ll have our bags packed tomorrow.’

  ‘Go to bed.’ Gwen walked back into the drawing room, shutting the door behind her.

  She sat on the couch and bent down, head in her hands. Dried up and bitter like a bag of currants. Pauline was right. She was.

  Two whiskies

  Eastbourne

  Jim was confused and depressed. He had loved Alice, hadn’t he? If he hadn’t, if he had never truly loved her, then his whole life had been a sham. Yet the things Gwen Collingwood had said the other night had unsettled him. She had been insistent in her questioning. It was none of her damned business and yet what she said had bothered him. If he had loved Alice shouldn’t he have been able to say why?

  In a corner of The Ship he sat and nursed his pint. He’d been avoiding Gwen for the past few days, angry with her but even more angry with himself. The pub wasn’t as crowded as usual and he was left in peace while a small contingent of his countrymen gathered around the piano, singing along as one of their number played the tunes.

  Jim tried again to find the right words to describe Alice. He kept coming back to the words beautiful, warm and friendly he’d used to describe her to Gwen. Instead of calm he decided on serene – then remembered that terrible night in the barn when Alice had appeared anything but serene. Wanton, passionate, hungry were better ways to describe what he had seen in her that night. She had never looked that way with him. It must be his fault. He was incapable of arousing passion in her. Jim realised with a jolt that their relationship had been built on friendship, familiarity and fondness. Maybe that would have been enough? But it evidently wasn’t.

  The pianist was treating the pub to a rendition of I’ve got Sixpence. The Canucks were singing along, drowning out all conversation. Jim downed the rest of his pint and went to the bar to buy another.

  A couple of Canadian soldiers that Jim didn’t recognise were buying drinks for two women. Port and lemon, Joan’s favourite drink. That and lemonade shandy. He thought about the night he had spent with her in that London hotel room. That hadn’t exactly been a night of passion – more a half-awake accident. A fumble at dawn. And yet there had been an intensity about it. Perhaps he only thought that because it was his first time? His only time.

  How would he have described Joan if Gwen Collingwood had asked him? Annoying, elusive, unexpected, inconsistent, interesting, disconcerting? Mysterious, mocking, manipulative, stubborn, fascinating, infuriating. He took his beer back to his quiet corner, wishing Joan was with him now. She couldn’t hold a light to Alice in the looks department and he had never known where he stood with her. Even if she hadn’t been engaged to another guy he doubted he would have asked her on a date. She wasn’t his kind of girl. They came from different worlds. He couldn’t imagine her raking hay or helping to round up a stray calf. Alice had happily done those all those things. And yet there had been something about Joan that made him feel excited and unsure of himself. But there was no point wasting time thinking about her. She’d well and truly given him the brush off.

  Women were a mystery. Jim wondered if he would feel differently if he’d had sisters. He doubted it somehow. Take Gwen Collingwood. She was a piece of work. All those questions. She’d been relentless. Why should she care about what he felt for Alice? He studied his pint, looking into its cloudy depths as if hoping to find an answer there. Gwen was a beautiful woman. Not in the same way as Alice – all pure and shining and blonde. No, Gwen had a cold beauty. Aloof and distant and yet somehow fragile. Brittle. Her voice was hard-edged, clipped, upper class – so different from the way Joan and Ethel spoke. Buttoned-up, that was what she was, she surrounded herself with a barrier to keep everyone at a distance. Stiff upper lip, they said about the British – but she had revealed something else the other evening – a pent up anger when she spoke about having to relinquish her job to him. And who could blame her? She had made him angry too. She had goaded him about Alice, got right under his skin until he had retaliated and she lost all that control and slapped his face, revealing another woman, one capable of raw emotion. Jim reluctantly admitted he had wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her. He tried to suppress the thought. It was ridiculous. She was at least ten years older than him, and married. He had deserved to have his face slapped for what he’d said about her husband. He still didn’t know why he’d said it. Maybe because she’d hurt him and he wanted to hit back?

  The men around the piano had been joined by the two women with their port and lemons and had moved on to singing ‘Doing What Comes Naturally’. Trouble with me, he thought, is nothing comes naturally.

  The door swung open and half a dozen men came into the pub, laughing. One of them was Walt. He hadn’t expected to see him in his local. Walt’s company were billeted in Old Town and Jim knew that most of them frequented the Tally Ho! pub there. He slugged down the remains of his beer and made his way to the other exit before his brother had a chance to spot him.

  When he got back to the house, the drawing room door was open and he noticed the French door to the stone-paved upper terrace was ajar and the light from a lamp in the hallway would be breaking the blackout regulations. He walked out onto the terrace which ran across the width of the back of the house. The terrace was higher than the level of the garden as the house was built on a slope. Underneath it and to the side was another paved area which was accessed via the rooms occupied by Mrs Simmonds and the children. The terrace was bathed in moonlight. He leaned against the wall, resting his hands on the cold red brick. The sea looked beautiful, the moonlight turning it into molten metal, bare skeletal trees outlined against it like dark veins.

  ‘Peace offering?’ Gwen Collingwood appeared beside him, holding out a glass tumbler. ‘It’s whisky. I never drank the stuff until the war but I’ve developed a taste for it.’

  He hesitated a moment then took the glass from her. She chinked hers against it. ‘I had no right to put you through such a cross-examination. It was none of my business and I overstepped the mark,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t you who was out of line. I shouldn’t have said what I did about your husband. It was unforgivable. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Then we shall both have to pretend it never happened.’ She smiled and sipped her scotch.

  Jim nodded in the direction of the sea. ‘It’s beautiful tonight.�
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  ‘The sea is always different,’ she said. ‘Every day, every hour. Always changing. That’s why we bought this house. My husband wasn’t sure, with it being so far out of the town and so high up, but I fell in love with the view.’

  Jim winced, uncomfortable that she had mentioned her husband again, still feeling guilty for what he had said about him. ‘You must miss him.’

  Gwen sighed. ‘I think about him all the time. I worry about him.’ She swirled the whisky around her glass. ‘I’m not sure about anything any more. This war has made the world we lived in before seem unreal and strange. It’s as if we were living in a false construct. Playing at living. What’s happening now is the reality. Being hungry, making do, listening all the time for the planes, clearing up debris, putting out fires. I can’t imagine going back to the life I had before.’

  ‘You make it sound as though you prefer things now.’

  ‘Perhaps I do in a way. I have a purpose. A reason to get out of bed each day.’

  ‘Until I took that away from you,’ he said ruefully.

  She waved a finger at him. ‘No more apologies. Besides even if I can’t work at the listening post any more I still have more to do now than I did before the war. Whether it’s fire watching, typing, or making tea for people who’ve been bombed out, it has to be better than the futile life I lived before. I make a difference, however small, to people’s lives.’

  ‘Funny that,’ Jim said. ‘It’s the other way around for me. The war has been a waiting game. Back on the farm I used to love my life and the way the work followed the seasons. Every day there were so many jobs to be done. My folks depended on me. Mind you, they must be getting by somehow without me and Walt.’

  ‘Walt?’

  ‘My brother.’

  ‘The brother who…’

  ‘The one and only. He followed me over here. He’s in the same regiment. His company are in Eastbourne too. He walked into The Ship tonight – that’s why I came back here early. I spend my life trying to engineer things to avoid having anything to do with him. I volunteer for stuff that I know he won’t be involved in. Anything that requires a single volunteer, no matter what, I’m the man.’

  ‘Why did he join up? I thought you said…’ She hesitated to mention Alice again, then said, ‘Aren’t they expecting a child?’

  Jim shook his head. ‘He didn’t know she was pregnant when he signed up. Once he found out he tried to get sent home, the idiot.’ He swirled his whisky round the glass. ‘I don’t know why he joined up. Said he felt guilty not serving. Our father did his bit in the last war and I was already here.’

  She was looking at him, expecting him to go on.

  ‘Walt’s always been competitive. Can’t bear to feel he’s left behind in anything. We did everything together but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised he must have resented me. Even now he’s got Alice he’s still trying to outdo me, or match me or however his twisted brain justifies it. I cared for him but it turns out he’s only ever seen me as a rival.’

  Gwen was silent.

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters, Mrs Collingwood, Gwen?’

  Gwen sighed, closed her eyes and then said, ‘I had a brother. He died.’

  Jim turned sideways, elbow on the balustrade and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was my twin. We were twelve when it happened.’

  ‘That must have been hard to bear.’ He laid a hand on her sleeve.

  Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Not even my husband knows.’

  Jim’s hand moved down her arm and rested on her hand. He left it there.

  ‘It was my fault Alfie died. We were playing. We used to dare each other to go further all the time, to take stupid risks. Our family was living in India although we were sent back here to England to separate boarding schools. We hated being apart and when we went home to India for the summer holidays we became wild children, undisciplined, spending our days climbing trees and swimming in the river. Doing anything and everything we weren’t supposed to do. It was paradise. We loved it. And we loved being together again.’

  ‘Your folks? Didn’t they know what you were up to?’

  ‘Too preoccupied. Theirs was not a happy marriage. My father was absorbed in his work. He was a district officer, travelled a lot. My mother was caught up in the British expatriate social life. She spent her days playing cards and tennis. Alfie and I were left to the care of our ayah – an Indian lady who had more or less raised us. But we knew how to get around her and how to get away. We believed we were invincible, indestructible.’

  She stopped, and Jim was uncertain whether she would continue. He waited, his hand still on hers. His thumb began to move slowly, involuntarily, making little circles between her thumb and first finger.

  ‘Alfie fell from a tree while he was trying to make a rope swing. He would have got down when he realised the branch was too thick to reach around with the rope, but I told him he was chicken.’ She stared out to the sea. ‘He overbalanced and fell into the stream. I thought he was play acting at first, but he’d cracked his head open on a rock. Died instantly.’

  Gwen’s voice was steady, dispassionate, as though she were describing the weather, but Jim felt her hand trembling under his. He continued to stroke it.

  ‘My mother never forgave me. Or herself. After Alfie was buried she never mentioned his name. We returned to England without my father and Mother found religion. When I was fifteen she got cancer and died. My father remarried and sent me away to school in Switzerland. I met my husband Roger in Germany. He was working there and I was visiting friends. Daddy didn’t come to the wedding. I never heard from him apart from a card at Christmas, written by his new wife. Then a few weeks before the war started I got a letter from her to say he’d died. Heart attack.’

  Jim could see her face in profile, lit up by the light of the moon. He felt strangely moved, protective, touched. She had shown him her vulnerability and he was overwhelmed with the urge to hold her. He pulled her towards him and took her in his arms, holding her against his chest, feeling her warm breath through the wool of his battledress. Gwen stood motionless, letting him hold her. Jim stroked her hair, then bent and kissed the top of her head. She moved back to look up at him and as she did, knocked her empty whisky glass off the balustrade. They heard it crash into pieces on the paving below.

  They jumped apart as a voice rose up from underneath them. ‘Is that you, Mrs C? You all right up there?’

  ‘Dropped a glass, Pauline. I hope the children haven’t woken. Don’t let Sally out there in the morning until I’ve had a chance to clear up the pieces. Good night.’

  Jim looked at Gwen Collingwood and saw that she had reassumed her formal and distant demeanour. It was like a curtain closing. The moment had passed. She didn’t look at him as she opened the French door and went into the house. ‘Goodnight, Private Armstrong,’ she said.

  Left alone in the darkness of the terrace, Jim was puzzled. Had he imagined it or had she been about to kiss him on the terrace? Had he misread the signals? What the hell was he doing? First an engaged woman and now a married one. Was it all a reaction to what Alice had done to him? Pull yourself together, man.

  Gwen was a beautiful woman and, in spite of her brittle exterior, Jim was drawn to her. He felt he could tell her things he would have never dreamt of telling anyone else and she had been equally open with him. They barely knew each other. They were years apart. And yet…

  Stop it. She's married. It must have been the whisky. Otherwise why would she have gone inside and cut him off like that? Don't think about her.

  But it was no good. No matter how hard he tried not to think about Gwen he wanted her with an intensity of desire he had never known before.

  The Cake Queue

  In the sanctuary of her bedroom, Gwen was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair. She frowned at her reflection in the mirror. Jim Armstrong’s pale blond
hair and blue eyes with the brightness of cornflowers, reminded her of a German boy she thought she had forgotten long ago. She had gone for a weekend to Bavaria with one of her school friends, not long before she met Roger. The young man had asked her to dance at a party, sweeping her around the room with his eyes locked onto hers until she felt herself blushing but was unable to look away. When the music ended he nodded at her, clicked his heels in that funny Bavarian way, and left the room. She never saw him again. He was probably up there somewhere in the sky now, diving and swooping and dropping bombs, or falling from a burning plane into the sea, like one of the men whose plane crashed in the Aldro school a couple of years ago. Perhaps he was one of the young Luftwaffe pilots she had listened into on the VHF radio. What a strange world they were living in, where total strangers tried to exterminate each other, solely because they had been ordered to do so.

  She studied her reflection in the mirror, with a critical eye. There were fine wrinkles around her mouth and at the corner of her eyes. Her age was starting to show. That had never bothered her before. She was not in the least bit vain. But now she wished she were ten years younger. There was no doubt about it – Jim Armstrong had been about to kiss her. And she had been about to let him. If she hadn’t knocked her glass off the balustrade and disturbed Pauline the kiss would have happened. But that would have been unthinkable. Wouldn’t it?

  What was happening to her? Almost kissing a Canadian soldier. A virtual stranger. A man at least ten years younger. Probably nearer fifteen. He had an excuse. He had been abandoned, betrayed, treated cruelly by his brother and his girlfriend and now far from home, probably bored, possibly afraid, certainly lonely. There was no excuse for her. She was a married woman and loved her husband. And she was a hypocrite. Hadn't she had a row with Pauline about kissing that Mitch fellow? She still felt guilty about the way she had behaved towards Pauline and now here she was herself. Allowing herself to participate in a pointless flirtation was out of the question. No, it was never going to happen.