Elaine was alarmed by this suggestion but the colonel was so obviously good-intentioned that she did not like to hurt his feelings by a flat rejection of the idea and simply told him that she had been contemplating a very quiet wedding, and would require time to consider his generous offer and all it implied.
At this Woolston dropped a second bombshell. There was unfortunately, not very much time to think about it, for he had been posted back home, pending promotion and a command at a new training depot, in Virginia.
For a moment Elaine’s clouded expression cleared as she recognised certain possibilities in this turn of events. If Woolston departed for the States, and paid her a generous allowance, then there might be something in favour of getting married almost at once. It was unlikely that arrangements could be made for her to join him whilst the war continued, and the end of it was not yet in sight. Anything could happen between now and then, and Elaine had never been a person to take the distant future into consideration.
The Colonel, however, poured a cold douche on this hopeful shoot before it had showed an inch above ground.
“Ordin-ar-ily,” he said, with the indulgent smile of a film uncle, “ordin-ar-ily that would mean you kids would be separated by three thousand miles of ocean for the dooration, but it so happens we can get around that one! Yes, ma’am, we been right here figuring a way o’ flying you back within a month of Captain Ericssohn taking up his appointment. Now I wouldn’t say that is according to the book of rules, but I figure it can be done, Mrs. Fraser, unofficially that is!”
Elaine could only murmur a polite reply and excuse herself as rapidly as possible. She wanted time to think. She wanted to go somewhere alone, where she could fight this idiotic wave of panic that was now threatening to submerge her altogether.
She told Woolston that she “simply had to consult Daddy”, and as ‘Daddy’ lived right up in Llandudno, this meant that she would be away for at least two days! She promised to ’phone him on arrival in North Wales, and call again the moment she had discussed, ‘with Daddy the Colonel’s wonderful offer about the wedding.’
Even as she said this she knew that she would not go to Wales but to a drab town in the West, where there was a high red-brick wall and a steep, concrete ramp leading up to a gate in it
She hurried back to the Avenue and at once began to pack. All the time she was throwing things into her small suitcase she was telling herself that she was stark, staring mad, but she continued to pack, nevertheless, thrusting reason into the innermost recesses of her mind, and conversing aloud with herself as she opened and closed drawers. “I don’t care! I must get away! I don’t care! Maybe I will go through with it in the end, but right now I must get away! I must see Archie, just once more perhaps, but I must see him! I must!”
When she had finished packing, and was crossing the hall to open the front door, she saw Woolston’s silhouette against the coloured glass panel. She guessed that he must be calling on her with an offer to run her over to Euston and she did not want to go to Euston but to Waterloo. She felt incapable of pretending any longer, so she tiptoed through the kitchen, out of the back door, and along the garden alley to a point where she could slip through the shattered palings into the meadow and thence into Shirley Rise. This was the route that Archie had used early in the war, when paying her his Saturday night calls but she did not remember this, she was far too preoccupied in getting past the end of the Avenue without being spotted by Woolston.
They had breakfast in the ‘Coach and Horses’, a village hostelry a few miles short of Salisbury.
It was a good breakfast by wartime standards, porridge, sausage and tomatoes, toast and marmalade, and reasonably strong coffee.
When they were drinking their second cup Elaine noticed that he had hardly spoken during the meal. She said, banteringly:
“You’ve hardly looked at me, Archie! Is it because you were so hungry?”
“Yes, but not for grub,” he told her, quietly.
“You haven’t even kissed me, either!”
She said this lightly but he did not receive it so.
“If I did I wouldn’t be answerable for the immediate consequences!” he said, seriously, “I’ve never seen you looking so wonderful, and I didn’t ought to have to remind you that I haven’t had a woman in more than twelve months!”
She laughed, partly at his solemn tone, but more for sheer joy at being once more in the company of someone so stimulated by her. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be coveted.
“Poor Archie! Self-denial was never your strong suit, was it?”
He looked up and she was amazed to see that his face was troubled and that her banter was actually hurting him.
“It’s not that, Elaine, and it’s not just that you happen to be a woman, or that you look so exciting!”
She had never heard him speak like this before and her curiosity was aroused.
“Well, tell me, Archie?”
“Oh, to hell with it! You tell me about your Yank!”
“No, because Woolston isn’t important today and you are, Archie!”
He considered this for a moment. Finally he said, but without looking at her:
“No one’s ever done a thing like this for me! Come to think of it, no one’s ever shown me much decency or consideration. People have been all kinds of things to me, Elaine, nasty, patronising, servile…you know…but always with their eye on the ball! No one’s ever made the kind of effort you’ve made by coming down today, by getting this car and going to the trouble to look like you do! I won’t ever forget that, Elaine, not even if we never saw one another again after today! That’s something I’ll always remember and I suppose it makes a man feel that there must be some better way of showing his appreciation than by the usual way!”
She was touched by his words, more moved by them than she had been moved by anything anyone had ever said to her in the past. She was also amazed with herself for feeling so drawn towards him, so strongly that she dare not let him see it. She stood up, turning her back on him, and pretending to search for something in her bag.
“Get the bill and let’s go, Archie! Wait, you’ll want some money!”
She began to fumble in the handbag but he stopped her.
“Okay, I’ll see to this! They never turn a lag loose without money!”
He took out a small roll of notes, money that he had had in his wallet when he began his sentence, and the two or three pounds that had been issued to him with his civilian clothes and railway warrant.
She went out first and when he rejoined her in the car he noticed that her expression was strained and that her bantering mood of the first stage of their journey had gone.
“Don’t let’s go straight home, Archie!”
He paused, his hand on the door handle.
“Where then?”
“I don’t know! Anywhere! Do you know anywhere round here?”
“Bournemouth isn’t far.”
“All right then, let it be Bournemouth!”
He climbed in and sat silently beside her. She moved off with another clash, driving in second gear until reaching a junction with a painted out signpost. She took the right-hand fork and headed for the coast, and for several miles neither of them spoke. Then Elaine said:
“Do you know of a decent hotel in Bournemouth?”
He glanced at her and noticed that her expression was the same. Suddenly she steered into a lay-by and stopped the car.
At once he began to protest. “You’d better get back to town, Elaine! This is crazy and you know it’s crazy! The last thing I want to do right now is put a spoke in your wheel. You’ll be getting married to that Yank and.…”
“I’m not going to marry the Yank! It’s all over now, Archie!”
“You mean you’ve broken it off…to come here, like this?”
“No, but I mean to break it off.…I don’t want to go through with it, so for God’s sake don’t try and talk me back into it!”
He wa
s quiet for a moment. When he spoke it seemed to her that he was choosing words as carefully as a man chooses his steps down a steep, dangerous path.
“Listen, Elaine! I’ve got about two thousand saved from the wreck, and I’ve almost decided how to use it in order to get up again! I’m over forty, forty-two to be exact, and it’s not going to be all that easy! I’ve never proposed marriage to anyone…Old Toni fixed my marriage with Maria, and neither of us had much say in the matter. It was purely a business arrangement anyway, and now I can’t marry you because Maria’s a Catholic, and she’d never divorce me! Well, that’s how it is, so there’s not much in it for you, is there? I will say this though. If you meant what you said just now, if you’ve really thought about it and that’s why you’re here, then I’ll do everything I can to make a go of it. If I didn’t succeed, and we came a mucker, then you’d be absolutely free to pack it in, and I’d never hold it against you, never in this world! Is that sort of proposition any good to you, Elaine?”
She closed her eyes and threw back her head, so that her neck was pressed hard against the threadbare cretonne of the seat-cover. He noticed then that her hands were trembling so violently that she lost her grip on her handbag and it slid from her lap on to the floor.
He required a powerful effort to prevent himself from twisting round and taking her in his arms, but he made the effort, knowing that, at this moment of time, a frenzied embrace would only exacerbate their problem.
“You’ve got to have time to think about it, Elaine?”
She twisted round and faced him. “I don’t need any more time,” she shouted. “It’s the only kind of proposition that interests me!”
She seized his hand and pressed it hard against her breasts and with a wonder too deep and bewildering for words he saw that she was crying. The sight of her tears calmed him more than anything else could have done.
He freed his hand and ran the palm gently round the smooth contours of her chin. Then he kissed her very lightly on the forehead.
“Okay, then! We’ll make it, Elaine, and even if we don’t, we’ll have a hell of a good time trying! Here.…” He bent and retrieved her handbag, and tilted the driving mirror in her direction. “Get busy on your face before we hit Bournemouth! We can make it in twenty minutes if this vintage model holds out!”
He started the engine as, methodically and expertly, she began to repair her make-up.
“I don’t know why I should waste time doing this,” she said at length.
“Neither do I,” he replied, “but do it! Bournemouth is almost sophisticated these days!”
CHAPTER XXXIII
D-Day Roundabout
ON THE EVENING of the 5th of June, 1944, Jim Carver was despatched by his firm to make a delivery at a large Ordnance depot, near Basingstoke.
All day he had been helping to load tool-kits into the lorries and completing the papers that would pass him in and out of the camp. He wondered, as he set off at sunset, whether the crates he was now transporting were designed for the long-awaited invasion but decided not, for by now, he had almost lost faith in the great project.
His optimism of June and December, 1941, had ebbed throughout the subsequent year, to flow back for a spell on the tide of the North African invasion, and reach its high-water mark in the early autumn of 1943, when Italy surrendered and began ‘to work her passage home.’
That was the moment, Jim decided, for the all-out assault on the northern shores of the Continent, for what could be more promising than to hammer Hitler on three fronts?
It was all very well for old Winnie to talk about ‘probing the soft underbelly of Europe’, and ‘the matchless valour of our allies, the Russians’, now slogging away at German eastern frontiers, but what were we and the Yanks doing, apart from footling about Southern Italy, and hammering the Nazis from the skies?
What was needed now was an irresistible drive from the north-west, an invasion mounted on a scale so formidable (and ‘formidable’ was one of Winnie’s favourite words these days, wasn’t it) that the whole structure of Occupied Europe collapsed, and Resistance movements everywhere surged into the open and began to hound the invaders over the Rhine.
Such a course, felt Jim, was so obvious that he was astonished that Eisenhower and Monty did not insist upon it taking place at once…this very moment, before the Germans in Italy consolidated, and they and their snivelling satellites in the East had a chance to dig in behind the Carpathians.
Nothing happened, and the delay from September, 1943 onwards had soured him and awakened his pre-war suspicions of Churchill. What, he asked himself, was the old chap waiting for? Was it, as some were saying, for the Russians to bleed themselves white, so that post-war Europe would lie at the feet of the British and Americans?
Harold, of course, pooh-poohed this idea. Sitting over their maps in the kitchen of Number Twenty-Two, the Avenue strategists argued more acrimoniously than they had argued since Dunkirk.
“I must say that view’s a bit thick, old man!” Harold protested. “After all, as I’ve told you again and again, we daren’t risk a repulse when we do start. If we break our teeth on Festung Europa, as we did, I’m now persuaded, at Dieppe, then the war will last another three years, and the Russians will get so discouraged that they’ll probably dig in around Warsaw!”
“Damn it,” roared Jim, “would you blame ’em? What sort of encouragement are they getting? Here’s Stalin, screaming for a Second Front and has been, for months! All he gets is a shush-shush-now-now from our play-it-safe boys, and a few tramp-steamers full of aircraft spares!”
“Come now,” countered Harold, “you’re not going to tell me that the Reds could have got this far without our material, are you?”
“I ruddy well am!” said Jim. “Do you think their offensive depends on the trickle that gets through on the Arctic convoys? That wouldn’t equip a division, take it from me!”
“I certainly won’t take it from you, old man,” said Harold, stiffly, “or from that idiot, Bakersville, either! To hear him talk, on the way to the station sometimes, you’d imagine that he was in hourly telephonic communication with Moscow!Westerman’s as bad, too! He nearly fell out of the carriage with laughter when we passed an outrageous notice, painted on the side of a bombed building, in the Lower Road yesterday!”
“What sort of notice?” asked Jim, his curiosity getting the better of his impatience.
“One of those ‘Second Front Now’ notices, scrawled up by somebody as reckless as yourself,” growled Harold, “only this one was different for underneath it had got, ‘We Bull, While Russia Bleeds!’ Oh, so you find it funny, do you?”
Jim did and chuckled, the story restoring his humour somewhat.
“It only goes to show that public opinion as a whole, is in favour of invasion, Harold,” he said.
“Then public opinion doesn’t know what it’s blathering about,” snapped Harold, “and anyway, I’m late for my train, so you’ll have to wash up the breakfast things!”
He grabbed his coat, attaché case and umbrella and swept out, leaving Jim grinning. ‘Dear old Harold,’ he thought, as the front door banged, ‘I daresay he’d carry a torch for Goering, provided someone tied a blue ribbon round his fat neck!’
The unloading of the convoy occupied most of the night, and Jim, as the last driver in line, was the last to leave the camp.
He drove out on to the Great West Road just as the sky in the east began to brighten and promise a fine day. The road was unusually empty. All the way to the Staines bottleneck he did not meet, or overtake more than half a dozen vehicles.
“It might be a peace-time Sunday before the after breakfast exodus begins,” he told himself, as he slipped into neutral at the first set of traffic lights beyond the Hounslow junction.
A tanker drew up beside him, awaiting the lights, and a white-faced Cockney popped his head out of the cabin and whistled:
“Oi, mate! ’Eard the noos?”
“No,” said Jim, “what news
?”
“We’ve done it,” said the Cockney, “we gorn an’ invaded! Someone gimme the tip, back in Staines!”
“You sure…you absolutely sure?” shouted Jim.
“You betcher life, cock! It’s the real thing! Hey up, she’s green! So long, cock, see you in Gay Paree, eh?” and the petrol-lorry slid away, leaving Jim fumbling madly with his gears, urged on by the insistent hooting of the cars behind.
He drove on until he drew level with a roadside pull-up that he sometimes used when travelling this route. A group of men were standing at the counter flap, all engaged in animated conversation. Jim braked and almost flung himself out of the cabin.
“Is it true?” he demanded, of the nearest truck driver and when the man said that it was he thumped him on the shoulders and pranced about like a child, exclaiming, “I can’t believe it! Damn it, I can’t believe it!”
He seemed to have selected the surliest man in the group.
“I dunno why,” said the man, whose tea had been slopped by Jim’s excited caperings, “you bin expecting it ’aven’t you, ’cos if you ’aven’t you muster bin holed up somewhere since the Christmas before last!”
“How are we doing? How’s it going?” demanded Jim.
“Christ knows!” said the man, “I wasn’t there, was I?” and he flicked the dribbles of tea from his leather jerkin, and growled “Another cup, Lil” to the girl behind the counter.
An American Negro, eyes rolling under a huge forage cap, tugged at Jim’s sleeve.
“Dey’s asho’, Mister! Dere was sumphin on de radio, so I heard!”
“Thank you, son,” said Jim, “I expect it was just the bare announcement, I’ll get home and tune in!”
He hesitated a moment, anxious to mark the occasion with some kind of gesture. The Negro was in the act of fumbling in his breeches for money to pay for his tea and sandwich.
“Have this on us, chum!” said Jim, and slapped down half a crown. Without waiting for tea or change, he strode back to his lorry, jumped in and pulled out on to the main road. If he chose his route carefully, he decided, he might be able to get back to the Avenue before Harold left for his train. He must discuss this with somebody and who better than Harold?
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