My reunion with Helen, although on the surface warm and affectionate enough in a well-rehearsed way, inwardly left me dismayed and apprehensive. The drift had gone too far, and suddenly I could see our relationship in all its barrenness, our posturings as no more than a game of charades that had been played too often and for too long and had become tiresome. Perhaps too many other substitute Helens had intervened, but the feeling she evoked in me now was only a desolate despair.
I saw that she had only grown older in the time that I had been growing different. She was thirty-seven now, and there were clear hints of desperation and uncertainty in her gaiety, and somehow this filled me with a bitter sense of exasperation. She had formed no permanent liaison during all my absences. She still frivolled with her officer friends, who were always Americans now, but they were always changing, because this was a time when everything seemed to be working to a series of quick, spasmodic changes. The time for constancy, or even the possibility of constancy, had already passed. She had missed her opportunity.
It was this harsh and bitter reflection that made me realize the final resentful truth of the matter: almost throughout the entire war, and certainly during all the time I had been abroad, I had been subconsciously hoping – even expecting – that she would take the decision into her own hands, that she would find her own way out and relieve me of the necessity for action. But she had just gone on – on and on and on, skimming the shallow surface of her social revels. She had let me down, I told myself angrily. God knows, I had given her all the liberties in the world! Endured my own humiliations, suffered the boredom and the condescension of her friends, just so she could continue the gay, smart, meaningless life which she desired. She had had any number of opportunities with her endless, ever-changing court of admirers, her gay majors and handsome colonels! And she had let me down! Heavens above, countless thousands of other Australian marriages had been broken into smithereens by wartime absences and the romping hysterias of the times … why, her own best friend, Sandra Solomons had flown the roost, hadn’t she? … why should Wally Solomons have all the luck, and poor bloody David Meredith be the one to get the short end of the stick?
And what if nothing did happen? This was the deadliest thought of all. Was I to be expected to go back to that life in Beverley Grove? To resume everything as before, as if there had been nothing in between? To have travelled the world as I had only to have to drop back again into the mundane horrors of the Beverley Park Gardens Estate, and Helen’s bright parties? Yet what was quite certain was that this more desperate Helen, moving towards the treacherous quicksands of her forties, was hardly likely to relinquish me willingly. Oh no, she would clutch and possess this husband of hers who had already achieved some distinction, who provided her with security and the established social standing, who would emerge from the war with reputation and a great potential – the coming man … even perhaps the heir-apparent … There were quicksands for me, too, I began to realize.
On the Sunday I was escaping from both Helen and this desperately troubling issue, and I found it very lonely walking the streets of my own city in a soft pale drizzle of rain, and I was quite uncertain of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go – excepting that I had the strongest feelings that I had nothing at all to go back to at Beverley Grove – so I just went on despondently walking around until the dusk became night and the street-lamps were blurred and blobby through the fine slide of rain, and the spires of St Paul’s shone against the street-glow like the points of licked lead-pencils, and the coloured tram-tickets at the street corners had been trampled and muddied into patchy little Braque-coloured collages, and I had the oddest sensation of being nowhere at all, or anywhere, because I had flown all the way from the province of Szechwan in West China and I had brought myself and my loneliness and my solitude all that way with me in the same uniform and with the same badges, and if I wanted to I could find a nice smart bar somewhere, or a nightclub, and the vivacious undemanding companionship of some other Helen with a bracelet of black silver heavy on her wrist, who would smile at me across her glass, and there would be a slightly tired terror in her eyes, too, for the curtain falling on something that had never quite added up to what it might have been …
And then I remembered it was Sunday night, so I turned and began to walk up towards Mario’s, because there would be wine there and Continental food, and there would be a guitar and a mandolin and an accordion, and Italian singers among the waiters who would sing ‘Sorrento’ and ‘Santa Lucia’, and they would sing the new nostalgia back into me, the nostalgia to be somewhere over there, thousands of miles away from the emptiness of here.
And the marvel of it was that as I was climbing the stairs to Mario’s upper restaurant I met Cressida Morley coming down.
There was a little interval of non-recognition for both of us, and for my part this was understandable enough, for she looked tall in her beautifully-tailored officer’s uniform with the carefully scoured buttons and the Australia badges and two pips on each broad shoulder, and artillery patches on her sleeves and the tunic pockets lying almost as flat as a man’s so that she seemed to have no breasts, and the soft brown hair was not tousled now under a tin hat but pulled back into a sleek chignon, and she was not a child any more and immensely beautiful, but it was I who spoke first because I knew that there could be no other eyes in the world quite as green as these.
‘Well, hallo!’ I said. ‘You have come up in the world!’
‘Oh, that,’ she said, and smiled her recognition and pleasure and a kind of diffidence too, and I saw that she also had grown different as well as having grown older, and her ‘older’, after all, was still so breathtakingly young. ‘It’s war-time,’ she said. ‘Things happen.’
‘Thank you for your message, by the way,’ I said. ‘I got it in Rome.’
Her mouth lifted a little. ‘Oh, that,’ she said again. ‘I wondered if they’d pass it on. Your father was one of the nicest of my Sunday gentlemen. He talked often about you.’
I hesitated, then said, ‘You wouldn’t be alone, I suppose?’
‘Here? Hardly!’ But she still lingered on the stairs, young now and shining in a way and delighted.
‘Pity,’ I said ruefully. ‘Because I am, you see.’
‘Actually I’m here with my boss,’ she said, and now the smile was all over her face, mischievous and speculative. ‘Why don’t you join us? I am sure – I am absolutely perfectly sure – he would be very happy. Truly.’
‘Well …’ I shrugged and followed her, and walking into the crowded, buzzing, candlelit room, I thought her back seemed to be shaking with laughter. She was threading her way through to a table in the far corner, and sitting there was a thin, shaggy-haired officer with a major’s crowns on his shoulders, and one sleeve, the left, emptily pinned up above the elbow, and an expression of incredulous recognition already breaking over his long horse face.
‘My darling Cress!’ he cried, and he seemed to uncoil from his chair, rising like a cobra emerging from its basket, pushing out the one arm he had. ‘You merely said you were going to the loo! And you come back with this … this Troilus.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ I gasped. ‘Gavin Bloody Turley!’
And the girl was there between us, radiant and glimmering in the candlelight, laughing.
‘Well …’ I said, and I was laughing too, and then I broke off the laugh because of the pinned-up sleeve and the major’s crowns and the ribbons on his tunic – that silver 8 again on the Africa Star and the white and purple bands of the Military Cross, and there was a silver rosette on that, too, and it all came back to me quite suddenly and I said, ‘I was very upset about Peggy, Gavin. I was terribly sorry.’
‘So was I, David,’ he said. ‘Thanks, cock. Well … well, now let us … umm … let us arrange ourselves comfortably and get some more grog and another glass and start in to natter. My darling Cress, since you are the most eye-catching thing here, do be useful and catch a waiter’s, will you?’
I gla
nced at him gratefully for getting us over the moment, and then I said, ‘How the devil did you pick up Tristram Shandy here?’ They looked at me blankly, so I smiled, possessing her in a way, and said, ‘When last I saw her she was very grubby and she was sitting in a gun-pit on a golf links reading Tristram Shandy.’
‘How did you know that?’ she gasped delightedly.
‘I have my sources,’ I said. ‘I am a newspaper man. But you still haven’t told me. How?’
‘She is, in fact, my military compensation,’ Gavin said. ‘The ways of the Army are mysterious, as no doubt you have discovered. When I got back they shoved me into Military History and Information, which is a kind of knacker’s yard for the no-longer-serviceable longhairs like myself, and as a sort of a sop, shall we say, my darling Cress here was given to me for an offsider. You will remember Samuel Johnson’s observation on Shakespeare that he had little Latin and less Greek: well, Turley’s observation on Lieutenant Morley is that she had little History and less Information, but on Military she has acquired some considerable breadth of knowledge. Field-rank and above, usually. Isn’t it a briggy who’s chasing you now, Cress?’
‘He’s fat,’ she said. ‘He’d have to run a lot harder than he’s capable of doing! Do you want me to pour you some wine?’
‘Bless you,’ he said, and patted her hand affectionately. Her hands were no longer grubby, I saw, but still muscular and brown, and looked after. ‘Pour some for old Golden Boy, too. How bloody good to see you, old cock!’ he said in an exuberant rush of pleasure. ‘Marvellous! Cress dashing off and simply conjuring you out of the loo or somewhere! As David Meredith said to Churchill … “Winnie, old boy, the essence of victory is in surprise.” And the honour for us! How does it feel, Cress, a mere lieutenant, to be sitting here not only with a distinguished major but with the distinguished war correspondent? Don’t just sit there with that minx expression in your eyes, girl, be over-awed. To have him here, as one of us! We do read all your dispatches, David, don’t we, Cress? And now we are waiting with bated breath – bate your breath, Cress – to hear something off the cuff or on the record, the inside story, the informed summing-up, the word from the unimpeachable source. When, for instance, is this bloody war going to be over?’ I saw then that he was a little drunk, and with a pang of compassion I realised that he would often be a little drunk now.
‘God only knows,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later.’ Sooner, I thought … the decisions, the commitments, the readjustings, the end of easy evasions. Helen. Beverley Grove. But no Peggy for Gavin, and no pie with a pastry rose on top. I looked at the girl and back at Gavin, and I wondered, and a little current of uneasiness stirred inside me. Could this one cook?
‘No worries for you, though,’ Gavin said. ‘You’ll be right. Old Brewster genuflects even now at the golden ring of every syllable of your byline. You’re tipped as the heir-apparent, did you know? You jolly well are! Which reminds me, when the sceptre does fall into your little hot hand do reserve a tiny cubby-hole for me, won’t you? Nothing fancy, just a bark lean-to somewhere for your old mate.’
‘Oh shut up, you silly bastard!’ I said.
‘You just wait and see. You’ll never believe this but I bumped into old Curt Condon a few weeks back and he told me he bought your last book. Actually bought it! Thought it was first rate, he said. Doubtless he’ll want you to scribble something endearing on the fly-leaf. You know – but for whom … I told him your next one was to be entitled Famous People Who Have Met Me.’
‘There is no next one,’ I said, laughing.
‘Really? How sad! I had planned to keep feeding you your titles. Inside John Gunther was one that rather pleased me. But seriously, David, how on earth have you managed all this?’
‘I simply followed your advice, Gavin. I sharpened up the flairs. Polished the apples. Preserved that precious little asset of the unscrupulous. Learned several more very useful tricks from the Great Masters – like it not being necessary to have actually been there. For example, did you know I escaped from Crete on your raft? You don’t mind, I hope?’
‘Not in the least, old cock. It’s just that I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘It’s a game I play with other correspondents and people gullible enough to believe that I escaped from Crete on a raft … on your raft. It’s a sort of intellectual exercise on seeing how far you can go and still get away with it. You would be amazed how many people there are eager to believe anything that sounds adventurous. I covered Spain, too. I was at the bombing of Guernica. I saw the Anschluss. Aren’t you proud of me, Gavin?’
‘My dear chap, if we weren’t so crowded in here I’d be kowtowing!’
‘No doubt I would have used that arm of yours, and that MC twice over, had I only known the details.’
‘Too sordid,’ he said. ‘The arm, I mean. Trampled underfoot in a brothel in Alex during a surprise raid by MPs. I never like to talk about it in front of the child Cress here.’
‘And the gongs?’
‘Influence,’ he said, with his big soiled toothy smile. Only then did I realize that he no longer rubbed at his teeth with his fingers, so probably it had been a mannerism of his left hand. It was curious to think of a mannerism being blown off as well as an arm.
‘Vicarious identification with other people’s adventures,’ I said. ‘Surely that’s essentially part of our trade too. Well, just that, really, and deciding on the stockades that can be raided, then whipping in and pillaging and grabbing the trophies. Oh, yes, I came out with my trophies all right!’
He gave me a long considering look, and that old familiar quirk of irony was in his face as he said, ‘You know, David, it’s possible I may have guessed the wrong fallibility in you, after all. I do believe you’re beginning to acquire an odd, indeed a most peculiar, sort of honesty. Watch it! Because that, old cock, could be the stone end of you!’ He paused and looked at Cressida, who through all this conversational back-and-forth between us had listened with a still, intent sort of pleasure with her strong boyish hands cupped around her wine-glass, and his glance was like an understood signal, because she lit a cigarette for him and refilled his wine-glass, and he turned to me again. ‘Some of your stuff has been very, very good indeed,’ he said. ‘Was that in spite of yourself?’
I didn’t have to answer because this was when the waiters bustled in with a flapping of long white aprons, an interruption of flurrying activity like an unexpected gust of wind billowing out a curtain, and there were platters of cannelloni and ravioli on the red check of the cloth, and bread rolls in a wicker basket, and two more flagons of Chianti, and crumbs and white napkins, and the candles seemed to be almost jumping out of the wax-dribbled Vat 69 bottles. I had a heightened awareness of all the smells of wax and candlewick and food and smoke and wine and perfume, and of the dove-grey steam from the food that was different from the cigarette smoke, because cigarette smoke when it was exhaled was a kind of dirty yellowish-grey and it only turned blue when it wreathed up and joined the flattened cloudy bars hanging below the ceiling like soiled silk ribbons. There was a waitress, an Italian girl, moving between the tables playing ‘Santa Lucia’ on an accordion, and the people all around were swaying their heads to the rhythm and singing, and quite suddenly I knew that I had no nostalgia inside me. No nostalgia at all. And I was not lonely any longer. And nothing of the packed restaurant or the singing had done this, because in all this noise and crowding and confusion it was just the three of us isolated around a table under a canopy of smoke. The candlelight seemed to jump everywhere, without the discipline of light, making rainclouds-and-rainbows and runny oil whorls on the mother-of-pearl decorations on the accordion, and jerking the grooved pained lines on Gavin’s dark face as if someone with a carbon pencil was tentatively sketching them in, looking for the right place to make an expression, and the flickering light played in the girl’s eyes like seaweed moving in the shoalwater tides, and I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world but here. And I was just
like the sheep-faced lieutenant on the gun-site, because I could not keep my eyes off her …
And I saw that she broke his bread roll for him, much in the way she would pour his wine or light his cigarettes, and there was some obvious warmth and tenderness in these small solicitudes that linked them in a kind of unique communion, for I knew instinctively that she would be one of the very few people, perhaps the only person, whom Gavin would allow to do such things for him, and this disturbed me in a queer way, and then Gavin said:
‘It’s Venezuela, you know, that really intrigues. I mean, I am quite aware that the rear is the rear, and that very often much valuable bumph is to be picked up there, which is fair enough, but how could anything in the war – global as it might be – be quite so rear as Venezuela?’
So I told him about Venezuela, and I told him about the Old Silk Road, and about some of the other odder places, and even as I talked I knew that I was showing off a little to impress her, as she had showed off to impress me on that gun-site more than two years earlier, and I saw with a little surge of triumph that she was impressed. And everything I was saying was being painted against the grey of smoke and the black-and-white of waiters coming and going and I saw two empty flagons of Chianti moving away and two full ones descending in their places, and Cressida just kept watching my face as I talked, and finally I was saying, ‘So, you see, Gavin, it really isn’t Golden Boy at all. It’s Little Jack Horner. Who sat in his corner, eating his Christmas pie. And he put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum …’ I left it at that and his long face glowed in delight.
‘And I’ll bet you that every time you got a plum you said, “And look what a good boy am I?”’ Pleasure almost seemed to bubble out of him, and I wanted all three of us to burst into laughter, and I realized that I was getting a little drunk too, and suddenly I wanted to bring it to an end and talk about something else, or just give attention to this girl between us, so I put on a serious tone and said, ‘All right, Gavin, now you tell me what you would have done in my place,’ and he met me on that level, quite sincerely, and said, ‘Exactly the same, I dare say. But not half as well.’ And it was at this point that Cressida said, ‘I am going to Venezuela after the war,’ and she said it with an absolute conviction in that husky voice that was now a little blurry with wine. ‘I am going, to Venezuela and to New York, and London and Rome and Paris. The Old Silk Road, too, I think. And places where other people haven’t been. Like Timbuktu.’
My Brother Jack Page 40