by Unknown
He smiled, standing at the sink, trying to picture himself in the early days of the war. His hand slipped between the buttons of his shirt to touch the coin hanging there on a chain about his neck. Curious, that incident. He had been in some public urinal in Yorkshire in 1939, without a penny to his name, not even the price of a cup of tea. He saw the coin glinting through the water. It had cost him something, mentally, to do what he had to do, reaching down to retrieve it.
If May could only know how his experience of the world protected her. The world was a deep deceptive forest, full of promises and little glades and clearings, and in the dark depths roamed the wolves, savage, snapping their great teeth, waiting to spring on those who wandered from the path. May was so unaware of the dark places, so trusting, so unconscious of danger. He had to watch for both of them. In the darkness of the world she was a little flower, glowing like a star, beautiful as a pair of little eyes. Sweetheart! How her eyes gleamed. She might now find it boring to be guarded by him, but she was only a child. One day she would tell him that she understood, that she realized what it was he protected her from. She might fret, she might argue with him, but it was only to impress Joseph. He had met Joseph’s sort in the war. Different conditions of course, but the basic problem was the same: lack of backbone, deficiency of guts, absence of moral fibre. Those chaps were always the first to find the local brothel, always the first to get a dose of the clap. One or two of that sort in a platoon and the general standard went for a burton. A grand platoon, old Whitey Briggs had told him. ‘First class, my boy. I’m proud of you. But I don’t altogether care for your VD rates.’
May thought that the only way to live was to throw oneself into the depths. He could tell her a few things about that – he’d done so – but she became irritated. The war, the war, she would cry impatiently, not realizing that the army dealt with destruction and death and disgust, trained a man to stay upright instead of falling on all fours like an animal among the carnage. And life was war, in a more subtle form, that lasted for ever, and only discipline and careful entrenchment would see you through until your own great Armistice Day. He would see May safely through the lines, even if he had to carry her, kicking her little shoes off on the way.
Such emotion rose up inside his breast that he thought he would break out weeping, and he ran the water into the metal basin and blinked back the tears of love, love fulfilled – for she did love him, he knew – and he cleared his throat again. He was suddenly reminded of a poem. He just had to tell them.
‘The moon like a ghostly galleon,
Set in a silver sea …’
He couldn’t find the next line. ‘D’you know it?’ he asked Balfour, who was getting spoons out of a drawer.
‘S-set in a s-silver sea,’ repeated Balfour, discomfited. ‘I d-don’t think I do.’
‘Grand poem, grand.’ He went out again into the blackness to fetch the tea towel from the blackthorn bush, and they heard him fall heavily and the short splatterings of his good-humoured laughter as he rolled about the alien field. He reappeared, hopping about the table on one leg, spitting through his military moustache, whimpering that he’d broken his leg. He was so boisterous, so full of fun. He made them all feel half dead.
‘For God’s sake,’ May pleaded. Hurriedly Lionel composed himself, dabbing at his drooling mouth with his sleeve and wrapping the tea towel about his hand like a bandage to lift the steaming kettle from the Calor gas cooker. He couldn’t contain himself. It was so exhilarating out there under the racing clouds and the far-away moon. He had to tell Balfour the other poem he’d remembered. He had to.
‘I must go down to the sea again
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall, a tall ship,
And a star to – ’
‘Mary in the garden sifting cinders,’ interrupted Joseph, rattling the dice in its little cardboard funnel and emptying them across the table. ‘Lifted up her skirt – two fours – and farted like a man. The force of the explosion broke fifteen winders, and the clappers of her arse went bang, bang, bang.’
There it was, thought Lionel, sniggering with the rest of them – the hatred of womankind, the wish to defile. ‘It’s a bit not on in the company of ladies,’ he said, knowing he would be ridiculed but compelled to speak.
‘You’re priceless,’ his wife told him, giving little whoops of resurrected joy behind the paraffin lamp.
‘It’s not that I’m a prude,’ he said, ‘I could cap that if I cared. Indeed I could.’
‘Go on then,’ May goaded. ‘Go on, St Lionel.’ Not that he was a prude! How fantastic he was. Obscene was the word for him, with his sick sagas of the temple. ‘Tell one of your very own stories,’ she said daringly, sitting up straight in her chair. But he failed to take her meaning. He simply didn’t think she could mean the histories he whispered in her ear when they lay together in bed.
‘I-I know a story,’ Balfour said. ‘A rhyme that is.’
‘Go on,’ encouraged May, though she detested dirty jokes. Balfour began to recite:
‘There was an old Jew of Belgrade
Who kept a dead whore in a cave.
He said I admit
I’m a b-bit of a – ’
‘Why Jew?’ asked George, raising his head and fixing his censorious eyes on Balfour.
‘It’s just a joke,’ apologized Balfour lamely, glad that he had been interrupted. He had forgotten George’s preoccupation with the Jews and his interest in Israel. It was just another example of how far short he fell of the high degree of sensitivity attributed to him by Mr and Mrs MacFarley. He supposed he could have said ‘There was an old Scot of Belgrade’, but it was too late for that now. Ashamed of his blunder, he helped the gentlemanly Lionel with the tea-making, putting cups ready on the draining board.
‘Go on, George,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Pull your finger out … You’re in gaol, man. You can’t come out yet.’ Spooning sugar into his mug, he kept a watchful eye on the unwilling player.
Stubbornly, Kidney played alone, counting his moves and collecting his money from the bank at Joseph’s elbow. Beyond the amber circle of the lamplight Balfour and Lionel dissolved into the darkness. Lionel could hardly bear to look at his sweetheart, so beautiful had she become, so luminous in the wooden hut amid the trees. Emotionally he stared at her dewy mouth, slack with tiredness. When she had drunk her tea she stretched herself and told Lionel she wanted to go to bed.
‘Sweetheart, of course,’ he cried, leaping into the lamplight, his little moustache trembling.
George said he would show them to their hut.
‘But you’re not out,’ protested Joseph.
‘I don’t want to play any more,’ George said, standing up and looking away from the board.
‘Well, don’t take the lamp.’ Joseph put his hand about its base in annoyance. ‘The wind would only blow it out.’
‘Perhaps,’ George said. He opened the door and looked out into the blowing night.
Joseph reluctantly left the table to wave the departing players from the hut, holding the lamp in the doorway and smiling fiercely in the yellow light. Balfour, walking sideways to gesture to the friendly Dotty, was blinded by a sudden gust of wind that blew the hair into his eyes. When he looked again, the door had closed and clouds flew above the roof of the hut.
May hung on to her husband’s jacket, shivering with cold. ‘It’s freezing,’ she said, hating the whirling trees and the unseen path. Lionel removed his coat and covered her shoulders. His white shirt glowed in the field … ‘There, there, sweetheart … There, there.’
‘It’s like winter,’ she wailed, lowering her bleached head and pushing it against his shrapnel-ploughed buttocks, her two arms wrapped about his waist, the man’s jacket trailing about her uncertain feet.
‘It’s quite light, sweetheart,’ he told her, seriously endangered by the way she clung to him and worried about his good coat being trampled underfoot. Like a milkmaid with her cheek pressed to
the warm flank of a particularly restless cow, she slithered down the path under the wild trees. Small stones stubbed her exposed toes in their absurd sandals. She screamed thinly at regular intervals. Balfour, following behind the joined and lurching couple, couldn’t become accustomed to the sound. On each occasion he started and trembled as if a screech owl had flown in his face.
At the hut George said he would fetch the storm lantern from his bedroom for them. Lionel began to thank him profusely. ‘Most kind of you, old man … Much appreciated … The little woman doesn’t – ’
‘He’s not there,’ May said, lowering herself on to the wooden bench dimly outlined outside the hut. ‘He’s gone.’ She looked with surprise at the thin trunks of trees glittering in the night. ‘Is that the sea?’ she asked Balfour, her head down, listening to the sound of waves breaking all about them, seeing her toes lying like pebbles in the grass.
‘It’s just the t-trees,’ he told her, and she looked up and saw the forest moving and a grey smear of light shifting across the tops of the trees like a ridge of mountains. ‘You went on about a moon,’ she accused the white-shirted Lionel. ‘Where is it now?’
‘It’s gone down behind the hill, sweetheart.’ He laughed jovially and spread his cold fingers across her neck, digging his thumb into the hollow behind her ear.
May was so cold sitting out here in this damn countryside, feeling her bones bitten into by the coldness. Ice was forming on her eyeballs. She would die of the cold. ‘I want to go home,’ she said with difficulty, clamping her jaws together to stop her teeth from breaking against each other. And louder, more firmly, anger giving her warmth, ‘I can’t stand the bloody place, Lionel, I can’t.’
‘Hush, hush, sweetheart,’ he said, rubbing at her back with his knuckles. ‘You’ll soon be in beddy-byes.’
George came back along the path with his storm lantern held at shoulder height, his shadow running like a river behind him. The silver birches at the side of the path lost their slenderness. Splotches of brown smeared the fattened trunks. The grass lay flat like hay gone rotten in the rain.
It was only a little warmer inside the hut. George hung the lantern from an iron hook in the ceiling and the wooden walls rolled outwards and back as the lamp twisted above their heads.
‘I’ll go now,’ he said, standing in the doorway, his long face white and his eyes never quite looking at them. Despite his height and the terrible size of his boots he appeared insubstantial. He opened the door and the wind blew at the lantern and shadows disintegrated the quiet pool of his face. He went out of the door, without saying good night. May listened for his footsteps, but she couldn’t hear anything.
Maybe, thought May, he had simply flown, like some terrible bird to his nest higher up the hillside.
Lionel was fussing about the bedding.
‘How many blankets, old man?’ he asked Balfour, looking about the room for another doorway. ‘Bedroom through there, eh?’ he said, nodding his head in the direction of the kitchen, his hands caressing the army-issue blankets of the upper bunk.
‘No, there’s no b-bedroom. That’s the kitchen, L-Lionel.’
‘The kitchen.’ He looked up incredulously at the discomfited Balfour and then at the double-tiered bunks on either side. ‘I say,’ he began, smiling broadly, and stopped, not wishing to appear suggestive. It was, he thought, a bit of a lark. A bit not on, of course, but still quite a lark. He hoped his sweetheart would see the funny side. She was sitting hunched and shivering with cold, on the rocker by the black stove.
‘Sweetheart,’ he called. ‘We’re all together.’
‘I know,’ May said, massaging the ends of her toes and noting the cuffs of mud on the sleeves of Lionel’s best jacket.
Relieved, Lionel decided it would be more sensible to move one bunk unit to the other end of the hut, near to the kitchen opening – more privacy for the little woman. He began to drag the iron frame across the wooden floor. Balfour helped him. It was the second time that day that they had carried a bed together.
‘What are you doing?’ May asked. She was damned if she was going to let Lionel sleep on one of those narrow beds with her.
‘Just making a little more space,’ he panted, his large nose resting on the side of the upper bunk, his ginger moustache sunk in the bedding. He positioned the bedstead sideways across the room, shutting out the kitchen doorway, and draped a blanket from the top bunk to the floor. It would mean less warmth, but it did curtain them off quite successfully. He stepped back to admire his arrangements and smiled at Balfour with satisfaction.
‘Very good, old boy … pretty good, don’t you think?’
‘Very good,’ agreed Balfour, wondering if the little woman would perversely insist on sleeping above, so that it would be the orderly Lionel who would be modestly hidden away behind his curtain, leaving May with her breasts exposed in the moonlight. Shaken, he went to the red curtains and drew them together, though it was black as pitch outside. Better to be sure, he thought, though the moon was not needed to make May visible to him. Imagination alone would fill the occupied hut with light.
He said, ‘I’ll just take a walk round till you’re s-settled, till Mrs – ’ he stumbled, not knowing what to call her – ‘till you’re settled.’
‘All right, old boy.’ Lionel appreciated his thoughtfulness. ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ he said. ‘Shall I give you a call, old boy?’
But Balfour had already fled into the damp wood.
May knew she must look awful, absolutely awful. Probably blue with the cold and her hair all over the place and her make-up rubbed clean off her face. She would have liked to beautify herself quickly before Balfour returned, but she didn’t want to give Lionel the comfort of thinking she was back to normal again. She could hear him on the other side of the bunks, behind that ridiculous blanket, running water in the kitchen. Dear God, did he really expect she would rinse herself in a bucket of ice?
He called, ‘You can wash now, sweetheart. It’s all ready for you.’
‘I don’t want to wash, Lionel.’
There was a moment’s silence. Only a moment. The resourceful Lionel appeared with a bowl in his hands, manoeuvring himself around the bedstead, slopping water as he came.
‘Now, now, little love. Your sweetheart will help you.’
Gently, yet not wasting time, for he was considerate of the walking Balfour, Lionel slipped her sandals free and splashed her feet with water.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘how warm you are – how we love each other.’ He pulled her head down and further disarranged her hair, which reminded her anew of Balfour. If he slept over by the window he would see her face when he awoke. He would surely see her. She couldn’t bear anyone to see her when she first awoke. He mustn’t sleep by the window. She must make Lionel move the other bunk closer to their own. That way Balfour would be so near he would never dare to look at her, not without branding himself as a Peeping Tom. He would just have to bound out of bed in the morning embarrassed, leaving her in peace to renew her crumpled face.
‘Lionel, I’m sorry, but I don’t intend sleeping in that bottom bunk with you.’ She leaned backwards in the rocking chair and pushed him with her bare foot so that he sat back on his heels.
‘Steady on,’ he protested, knowing she was about to be difficult and feeling there wasn’t time to cope with it. Couldn’t let that poor fellow run about the woods all night. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked, defeated.
‘You sleep on that bed,’ she said, pointing to the bunks at the window.
‘That bed?’ he repeated, flushing red.
‘Not over there. You bring those beds over here and put it beside my bunk.’
‘Beside your bunk.’ He looked at the window and back again in despair, thinking of Balfour. Didn’t she realize what she was suggesting? Didn’t she realize the temptation she was throwing in Balfour’s path? But of course she didn’t. She was so innocent. But it was a bit not on – more than a bit not on. Balfour
was bound to get the wrong idea. He said, ‘I don’t see what you’re driving at.’ It was one of his expressions. It meant she had offended him.
‘I’m not driving at anything. I sleep on the bottom bunk of that bed, and you sleep on the bottom bunk of the other one, and Batman, or whatever his name is, can sleep above you.’