The Listening Silence

by Marie Joseph

  Sally nodded, too tired to argue, too filled with conflicting emotions to be able to think of anything else but the single bed in the room at the top of the four-storey hotel. She could still feel the vibration of the train wheels clacking on the rails, still see the blacked-out stations gliding by the dark windows, still see that first uncertainty in Lee’s eyes when he had seen her walking towards him.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ she said, wanting to weep without knowing why.

  In Piccadilly Circus the famous statue of Eros was boarded up, and covering the boards were yellow and blue posters. ‘Save in War Savings’ the ring of onlookers were ordered, and Lee pointed to the huge drawing of sailors signalling the same message in semaphore.

  Sally was beside herself with excitement. Here she was, in London! With the man she loved standing beside her. It was all too much. Sentimental tears filled her eyes as she clung to Lee’s arm. A good night’s sleep in the strange hotel bed had brought back the warm colour to her cheeks, and her hair, unfettered now by the stocking-top, clustered round her vivacious smiling face.

  They had already walked the length of Oxford Street and Regent Street. She had exclaimed over the clothes in the shop windows, calculating their worth in clothing coupons, sighed at the prices. She had seen servicemen of every nationality, crowding in the big stores, eager to spend their leave money. Gripping Lee’s arm hard she had read the flashes on passing shoulders. Poland, Canada, Norway, New Zealand and South Africa, and at one point two Czechs crossing the busy road deep in conversation.

  It seemed as if the whole of the Allied Forces were represented there on that bright morning. Staring up at Eros, she turned her face up to Lee.

  ‘I once read in a book that if you stand on the steps of Swan and Edgar’s over there for long enough someone you know is bound to walk by.’

  ‘Is that so, honey?’ His own face reflected her happiness. He nodded to himself, more than content that the subdued girl he had met at Euston Station was no more, leaving in her place the lovely girl he remembered from their last time together.

  ‘That’s Leicester Square down there, honey,’ he told her. ‘Last spring that whole area was bombed and set fire to. Like your city of Liverpool.’

  He pushed his cap further to the back of his head. ‘You’d never believe it when you see all these people strolling around, would you? Shall we go down there and get in the queue for a movie? It’s Gone with the Wind showing right now.’

  ‘Oh, Lee. Look at poor old Shakespeare!’

  Sally pointed to the statue, damaged and bomb-scarred. ‘I wonder what he would have made of all this?’

  The queue moved forward slowly. ‘I never rated him all that much,’ Lee confided. ‘We read him in the eighth grade, but I guess he only registers when he’s acted in the theatre. I know he just about bored the pants off me.’

  ‘Me too.’ Sally giggled. ‘Aren’t we awful?’

  The film lasted for three hours and forty-eight minutes. The cinema was packed, and even during the interval the majority of the audience stayed in their seats as if totally mesmerized. When the lights came on and Lee told Sally she was the dead spittin’ image of Vivien Leigh, she said she wished she could endorse his flattery by swearing he was Clark Gable’s double.

  ‘But I cannot tell a lie,’ she said, her whole face crinkling into laughter.

  And the following days were equally laughter-filled. Hand in hand they walked for miles, absorbing the beauty of the war-torn city, stopping to stare at famous landmarks, walking on once more, then stopping again.

  ‘I can’t imagine Park Lane with the railings round the park.’ Sally waved an arm. ‘If you didn’t know they’d gone for salvage you could imagine this was a wide road out in the country. London keeps surprising me all the time.’

  Following directions pointed out to them by a newspaper seller, muffled against the cold by pieces of sacking tied round his old legs, they wandered down the middle lane of Covent Garden.

  ‘Rhubarb!’ Sally gasped. ‘And crates of apples! Look, Lee, it says Canada on the boxes. It’s like a fairy grotto, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you discount that fair-sized bomb crater, honey.’ Lee sniffed. ‘Strikes me it’s being used as a dump. I reckon someone ought to have filled that in.’

  ‘We’re fighting a war!’ Sally told him, raising her voice a little. ‘On our own soil, for heaven’s sake! Would New York be as tidy as I’m sure it is if bombs had fallen on it?’ Then she wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Sorry, love, that was unfair. But even that dump looks good to me. I want to go back with so many memories of what I’ve seen that they last me for a long, long time.’

  Lee swung her round to face him. ‘I want you to remember me!’ He bent his head and kissed her. ‘That’s the most important thing, sweetheart.’ For a moment they clung together till the freezing wind wrapped a piece of packing paper round their legs. They drew apart, still laughing.

  On the day before Sally was due to leave for home, a winter sun, round and red as one of the Canadian apples, hung in the sky over London.

  ‘What would you say if I told you I’d like to go to church, honey?’ Lee touched her nose gently with his finger. ‘I haven’t suddenly gotten religion, but back home Sunday was always church-going day, and I guess I’d like to go with you. Would you mind?’

  They walked the short distance to the badly bombed church of St James’s. Sally felt the ache of tears in her throat as she saw the extent of the damage to the centuries-old church. The usual smell of decaying walls was almost hidden by the stronger smell of charred wood and disturbed earth. She saw Lee’s lips move in awe as he read the inscription on the only plaque untouched by fire:

  ‘William Van de Velde the elder, who died in 1693; and of his son who died in 1707.’

  ‘Holy smoke!’ Lee mouthed, and Sally stifled a giggle.

  When they knelt down to pray, Lee peeped through his fingers at Sally’s bowed head. A wave of tender caring suddenly engulfed him as he tried to imagine the isolation of her totally silent world. For him the service had been marred by the sounds of cars and taxi-cabs hooting their way along Jermyn Street, but for Sally there was nothing.

  ‘But that’s not why I love her,’ he told God in all seriousness.

  At nine o’clock that night he heard on the hotel wireless that American bases in the Pacific had been bombed by the Japanese.

  ‘We’re in!’ he told a startled Sally, bursting into her bedroom without knocking, his previous gentlemanly behaviour forgotten. ‘Roosevelt will declare war. He can’t fail. Oh, boy oh boy, what will old Colonel Lindberg have to say now? We can’t hold back any longer! We’re in! We’re in! You’ll see!’

  He was as excited as a young boy, his blue eyes shining, his fair hair standing on end as he ran his fingers through its short silken stubble. He seemed not to notice that Sally, about to change into a warmer skirt and jumper for their proposed walk to a Regent Street café for a farewell drink, was standing in front of him wearing a skimpy pair of cami-knickers.

  ‘There seem to have been a lot of casualties,’ he told her, suddenly serious. ‘The Japs will have had themselves a field day if they dropped bombs on Honolulu.’ He came towards her and pulled her into his arms, then remembering held her away as he went on: ‘Australia will have to wake up now. And what about those Japs we saw in church this morning? They’ll have to hide their yellow faces now, honey, that’s for sure!’

  When Sally reached behind her for her dressing-gown on the bed, he held it out for her, helping her on with it as if it were a coat, words bubbling out of him, the elongated dimples at the sides of his mobile mouth coming and going, his eyes blazing with excitement.

  ‘Do you mind if we stay in?’ he wanted to know. ‘We can get a bottle of wine maybe, and keep the radio on.’ He nodded to the set at the side of Sally’s bed. ‘There isn’t one in my room, believe it or not, and there’s bound to be more news. They said there’d be more on the midnight bulletins, but there may be more befo
re then.’ Kneeling on the bed, he twiddled the knobs, groaning with disgust when the sounds of a Palm Court orchestra filled the little room. ‘It means you too, honey. Your Mr Churchill swore that if America was involved in a clash with Japan, then Britain would join in “within the hour”. Oh, boy oh boy, did you ever believe that it would actually happen?’

  With an almost motherly expression on her face Sally watched him prowling round and round the small room, the muscles of his broad shoulders rippling beneath his blue shirt. His excitement was infectious, and yet suddenly she burst out: ‘Lee! Stop and think! It’s marvellous news, but don’t forget it also means total war and that means your boys being killed. Stop waving a flag and just think!’

  ‘What’s gotten into you, honey?’ He was genuinely bewildered. ‘God damn it, the war’s as good as over!’

  Sally shook her head at him. ‘Okay. You go and get the wine. We’ll stay in and listen to the wireless. Who knows? Old Hitler might have decided to throw the sponge in already!’

  Lee shook a mock fist at her as he almost ran from the room, and even before he came back Sally knew what would almost certainly happen.

  She had no clear idea of what to expect. At school, then at the office, she had struggled to lip-read as her friends whispered their experiences, but unable to join in had accepted that they regarded her as some kind of retarded freak.

  She had never seen a man naked, not even her brother, but she remembered with awful clarity the terrifying hardness of David Turner’s body as he had ground himself up against her.

  Lee had never treated her roughly. His kisses had always been slow and sweet, and when her senses had responded he had put her from him, smiled at her with his blue eyes and trailed a finger down her cheek. Sally frowned and bit hard at her lip. Tomorrow she was going home. Lee was moving on to the final part of his training before, like David, he went onto operational flying. She trembled and rubbed the tops of her arms.

  Lee wanted to marry her. He had said so over and over again. He was going to take her back to America. In his heart he was confident this would come to pass, because unlike David he seemed to be immune from fear, assured of his own immortality.

  David knew the odds, but Lee refused to consider them. Sally shivered.

  ‘Flying is so wonderful, honey,’ he had told her. ‘I like it best early in the mornings when we fly through the clouds. Up there is the sun, and down there the clouds are like snow raked up with a garden fork.’

  ‘And when you fly at night?’ she had wanted to know.

  ‘Still beautiful. Okay, sometimes you’re lonesome just sitting there watching the dials. I tell you, honey, it’s guys like your friend down the road who do all the hard slog. It’s the observer who has the brains of the outfit. Me, I’m just the driver of that darned crate.’

  It was at this point that Sally had almost told Lee about David. Missing, believed killed. The words had been there, but such a feeling of terror had gripped her heart she had let the moment pass.

  If that should happen to Lee … Sally looked over at her case on the luggage stand by the bedroom door. The oyster satin nightgown was inside, folded into slippery silken folds. For a brief moment she considered putting it on, then her northern sense of humour came to her rescue.

  ‘This isn’t a picture, and you’re not Joan Crawford sending her man to his almost certain doom,’ she told herself, and when Lee burst into the room waving two bottles aloft, she was laughing softly to herself.

  ‘I can’t bear the thought of you going back tomorrow.’

  There was only an inch or so of the rough red wine left in the first bottle when Lee told her that. They were sitting close together on the bed, and as Lee pushed her gently back Sally knew a sudden brief moment of fear. Then, as his hand moved slowly over her breasts, she wound her arms round him to draw him closer.

  ‘How lovely you are, Sally.’ His voice held a quiet wonder, and because she could not see his mouth Sally heard nothing. She knew he was murmuring words of love and even at that moment of surrender she felt an aching frustration because his tender words were lost to her.

  ‘I want to make you happy,’ she whispered. ‘For the rest of my life I want to be the reason for your happiness.’

  Her sweet flat little voice with the unusual inflections in its rise and fall was stilled. The tears were stinging behind her closed eyelids, but soon the pain ebbed into a sensation of such intensity she felt she could die of it.

  ‘Oh, Sally … my own darling Sally …’

  Lee held her close when it was over, murmuring his love until they fell asleep.

  They slept, drugged with wine and love, right through the midnight news on the wireless.

  Held close in each other’s arms, they were totally oblivious of the solemn voice of the announcer telling of bombs falling on far-away islands in the sun.

  Seven

  ‘CHRISTMAS!’ JOSIE WAILED. ‘What am I supposed to give him for food? Fed on the fat of the land, Yanks are. He’ll expect a turkey with all the trimmings, and God knows what besides! And where’s he going to sleep?’

  She sat down at the kitchen table and gave Sally a baleful look. ‘There’s only our John’s room, and I’m in there.’

  ‘You can move in with Dad, surely? It’s only for the one night.’ Sally slewed her eyes ceilingwards as if begging for patience. ‘I’m going to marry him! Don’t you want to meet him, for heaven’s sake? You’ll like him, I know that. You can’t help liking Lee. He’s special, you’ll see.’

  Josie stared at her daughter in disbelief. Where was the good little girl they had moulded, protecting her and unwittingly cramping her development as surely as if they had bound her feet with bandages. It was startling, to say the least, to see the way Sally had come back from London a changed person. Her face seemed all upswept curves, with the closed-in look gone completely. It was as though even her former vivacity had been all a pretence. Josie raised her shoulders in an exaggerated sigh, remembering the days when she herself must have looked like that. In the days of her loving, when a phone call from Bill could send her flying to meet him as if flamin’ wings had been taped to her heels. Now, since the weekend at Morecambe, nothing. Bloody nowt.

  For a while she had made up excuses for his silence. Reasons like, well, like his wife had contracted an incurable ailment, so terrible that they had given him his discharge to look after her. Or that he had been killed drilling his men on the seafront at Morecambe, waving his hands above his head to warn them as a lone German fighter swept in from the sea to dive-bomb. Unlikely, maybe ridiculous, but just possible, she had told herself in despair.

  But the truth was, she knew now, that Bill had been plain scared off. When she had told him she was prepared to leave her husband, that had put the lid on it. Good and proper. For ever.

  ‘I don’t know what your father will say,’ she grumbled, reaching for a packet of cigarettes, taking one out, then shaking the packet as if she refused to believe it could possibly be empty. ‘You know what he’s like about Americans.’

  ‘And the Irish, and the Welsh, and anyone who comes from south of the Wash,’ Sally reminded her. ‘Well, he’s going to have to get used to Americans. Lee says this country will be full of them before long. The girls at work say there’s going to be a US army base not far away from here, so there’ll be thousands of them.’ She waved a hand at the cloud of smoke hiding her mother’s face across the table. ‘You’ll love it, Mum. There’ll be dances, lots of them. Wouldn’t you like to start going dancing again?’

  ‘With Olive and her one leg?’ Josie refused to be cheered. Puffing doggedly at the cigarette she pulled the collar of her dressing-gown closer round her throat. ‘He’ll expect a fire in his bedroom, and where would I get the coal? Even if there was a fireplace in John’s little room. Americans like overheated rooms,’ she added darkly, ‘and showers and toilets. They’re years ahead of us.’

  ‘He has stayed here once, remember?’ Sally was just going to add ‘t
he weekend you went to Morecambe’, but one look at her mother’s set face stopped the words in her throat. ‘Mum? Lee lives on a farm. He told me they have wood-burning stoves. It’s not as if we live in a back-to-back house with the lavatory in the backyard. And even if we did, it wouldn’t matter to him. He’s not a snob.’

  ‘Before I married your father I lived in a house like that.’ Josie dredged up a long shuddering sigh. ‘We shared a toilet with the family next door, and a lot of dirty buggers they were. It was just a wooden seat with a hole in it, and a flap let into the wall for the muck men to shove a rake in. It used to be my job to tear the newspaper into squares and thread a string through the corners, and the boy next door used to write rude things on the whitewashed walls. I remember once he wrote: “Even the King shits”.’

  ‘Mum!’ Sally realized that when her mother was at her crudest it was usually because she was doing it purposely, for a laugh and to shock, but now there was no gleam of humour in the bleak blue eyes. And her mother’s brand of honest vulgarity without its qualifying laughter was offensive, Sally decided, then was immediately ashamed.

  ‘I want you to like Lee,’ she said quietly. ‘It means a lot to me that you at least try to like him. He’s miles away from home, and soon he’ll be going on operations. Mum, listen! He told me that now America is in the war he could be asked to transfer to the United States Army Air Force, but if that happens then he’s going to fight it all he can. He won’t do it unless they make it official. He’s been in this war right from the beginning. In the worst of the fighting in France before its capitulation. He was with the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps, and at one time he was fighting with a Free French squadron. That was when he knew he wanted to fly. For us. For England. Lee is special, Mum. You’ll see.’