by Janet Tanner
When he came back, wearing his everyday clothes, he caught her eye and nodded towards the door. She wove her way between the seats to join him, clutching the cup to her as if it were indeed made of solid silver. She was aware of people looking at her but she had eyes only for him.
Outside it was a bitingly cold night but very dark, the moon and stars obscured behind a blanket of cloud.
‘You were wonderful!’ she said. ‘And giving me the cup … can I really keep it?’
‘That’s why I gave it to you.’
‘But don’t you want it?’
‘I’ve got loads of them.’
‘I’ll put it on my dressing table. I’ll keep it for ever.’
He said nothing. His arm was around her shoulders, walking with her away from the lights. She glanced at him. His chin was hunched into the turned-up collar of his jacket and he was staring straight ahead.
‘You’re quiet,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
The seriousness of his tone cut a swathe through her delicious mood; suddenly she was filled with foreboding.
‘What?’
He stopped walking and turned to look at her.
‘I’ve got to go away.’
‘You mean on a training exercise or something?’
‘No. I’m being posted. To Norfolk.’
‘Norfolk!’ He might as well have said Singapore or Malta. It sounded like the end of the earth. ‘When?’
‘Next week. On Wednesday.’
‘Wednesday!’ Shock seemed to have robbed her the ability to do anything but echo his words.
‘I know. It’s a bugger.’
She’d never heard him swear before.
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘You thought you’d be at Colerne for ages.’
‘You don’t ask why in the forces. You just do as you’re told.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ She was close to tears again but this time they were not happy tears. ‘They can’t do this! Can’t you tell them …’ Her voice trailed away. They could do it, of course. As he said, he belonged to them and they could send him anywhere they liked, whenever they liked. ‘Is that why you gave me the cup?’ she asked.
‘Well – partly. I don’t want you to forget me.’
‘As if I would! Well, at least we’ll have the weekend.’
‘No, we won’t. I don’t think I’ll be able to get down again before I go. Some of the time I’m on duty and then I’ve got all my packing up to do. This is going to be our last time, Jen.’
The finger of ice probed at her again, sending shivers of misgiving through her.
‘Bryn, this isn’t …’ She swallowed. ‘… the end, is it? You will keep in touch?’
‘Of course I will. I’ll write as soon as I get there and I’ll be back to see you, first chance I get.’
She nodded, unable to speak.
‘And there’s another hour before my coach goes,’ he went on.
She thought of the last bus home, decided she didn’t care. If she missed it, she missed it. ‘Can we go somewhere quiet?’ she said.
They walked until they found a secluded spot at the rear of the car park, where they melted into one another’s arms. Jenny hardly noticed the raw cold any more; between them they were generating enough heat to insulate them in their own small world. She burrowed into Bryn’s jacket, the sharpness of desire now made poignant by the impending separation, and his lips on hers and his hands on her body made her long for him with an overpowering intensity. He was going away, she didn’t know when they’d be together again this way, and she didn’t think she could bear it.
She slid her hands down his back, pressing his hips tightly against hers and relishing that fine-tuned ache deep inside that sometimes reached the physical equivalent of a scream.
‘Jenny – don’t make it so hard for me,’ Bryn whispered against her ear, and the raw edge of his need echoed her own.
‘But I want you to,’ she said. She heard the quick, ragged intake of his breath. ‘I know what I said before but now … I want you to.’
‘Are you sure?’
She nodded, her hair brushing his cheek. She was trembling with the enormity of her decision but she didn’t want him to leave without them having been together properly. The time hadn’t been right before, now it was. Perhaps tomorrow she would regret it; tonight it was the only thing in the world which mattered.
‘Oh, Jenny …’
She could feel all the pent-up desire within him like a powerhouse of electricity reaching out to spark and fuse with her own, but his lips on hers were incredibly gentle, kissing her with a tenderness that was somehow even more evocative than the most passionate, bruising of kisses. Shyly she slid her hands round until they found the zip of his jeans and eased it down. His body, hot and swollen, surged forward into the palm of her hand and for a moment she hesitated, not sure what she should do, before she closed her fingers around it. She remained there motionless, enjoying the heat and the strength and the intimacy of the moment and then Bryn was rucking her skirt up about her legs, moving them both so that all that heat and strength was between her thighs.
‘Jenny – are you sure?’ he whispered again.
‘Yes – oh yes!’
She’d heard the first time could be painful, but it wasn’t. He slid inside her with unbelievable ease and she felt only full and complete. She buried her face in his shoulder, her arms wound around him so tightly that their hearts seemed to be beating as one and their breath rising and falling in unison. Then, as he moved within her, his breath came faster and faster and she tipped her head back, seeing the stars and the orange-tinged hue of the city lights in the night sky through a dewy mist. At the last he cried out her name and, as he slipped out of her and she felt the sticky wetness between her legs, she experienced the most enormous rush of tenderness and warmth. Strangely, her own sharp sensations of response had gone away the moment he had entered her and though they returned now, teasing, the overwhelming emotion was one of satisfaction that she had given herself to him, heard his cry of delight.
‘Oh, Jenny, I’ll never forget,’ he said.
And that, she thought, was the most important thing of all.
She couldn’t stop watching for the postman. She waited at the landing window, dashing into her bedroom or the bathroom if anyone came into the hall because she didn’t want them to know how eager she was. But they were in no doubt. The moment the mail dropped on to the mat she was down the stairs, almost falling over herself in her eagerness, pushing Sally out of the way. Sally had ears like radio receivers. She could hear the postman’s bicycle coming from way down the road and ran into the hall to attack the letters with a frenzy of barking. They were in no doubt either as to Jenny’s disappointment. She would deposit the mail on the dining-room table and disappear upstairs again, the picture of dejection.
It was almost two weeks now since Bryn had gone and she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t heard from him.
‘Forget about it and it will come,’ Carrie advised. But Jenny couldn’t forget. She thought about it every waking moment and her dreams were overlaid with a sense of gathering despair.
Why hadn’t he written? He’d promised! She hugged the silver cup, gazed at it, willing him to write, but still the longed-for letter didn’t come.
‘It’s the Christmas post, I expect,’ Carrie said, but she sounded more consoling than confident, and Jenny knew her mother thought that Bryn had probably forgotten all about her and was secretly glad it was over.
The post, it was true, was becoming more and more erratic. Sometimes now it didn’t come until lunchtime or even later, delivered by fresh-faced students with long striped woolly scarves, out to earn some pin money during the holiday. Jenny had tried for a job, but by the time she’d thought about getting round to it they’d all been snapped up. Her holiday was not as long as what Carrie called ‘proper colleges’, and meant university.
For her part, Jenny couldn’t believe that Bryn had forgotten about her, but the worry that he might have done was growing insidiously with every disappointment, and she veered between hope and despair, a roller coaster of emotion that was reducing her to a nervous wreck.
Supposing he’d had an accident on his motorbike? He could be in hospital, dead even, and she wouldn’t know. She said that to Carrie, because the fear was so intense she couldn’t keep it to herself, but Carrie pooh-poohed the suggestion.
‘It’s not very likely, is it? I don’t think it’s that for one minute.’
And truth to tell, neither did Jenny. The chance of Bryn having been killed was very small and if he was simply injured, there was nothing to stop him writing. Unless, of course, he was unconscious, or had both arms in plaster, or … Jenny realised she was stretching credibility, looking for an excuse. She also felt that if something terrible had happened to Bryn, she’d have known somehow, really known deep inside, as opposed to the imaginings of anxiety.
Whether she wanted to believe it or not it was actually far more likely that he’d simply used the posting as an excuse to finish with her. Perhaps he hadn’t even been posted away at all, just made that up as an excuse because he didn’t want to see her again. But it didn’t make sense – why would he have given her the cup if he hadn’t cared about her? Unless of course it was just a way of easing his conscience. Tears pricked her eyes as she remembered the way he’d said: ‘I’ve got loads of them’as if perhaps they meant nothing to him at all.
Round and round on the carousel of hope and despair she went, sometimes trying to forget him, tell herself at least now she could concentrate on passing her exams with really good grades and getting started on the career she’d always wanted. But it did no good. The terrible hollow ache was still there inside her and it refused to go away.
On the Saturday before Christmas she went to see Heather and Vanessa. Vanessa was highly excitable, unable to keep still for two seconds, and whilst Heather went to shop Jenny trimmed the tree that Steven had bought and stuck it in a bucket of sand. She let Vanessa help her but had to keep shouting at her to be careful with the ornaments – candleholders into which tiny candles would be stuck, glass icicles and incredibly fragile coloured balls, concave on one side, with pretty contrasting frosted linings. Inevitably, some of them had shattered since last year, which made Jenny feel even more sad. She remembered each and every one of the baubles from her own childhood; Heather had inherited them since Carrie, who hated the mess made by falling pine needles, had treated herself to one of the little artificial trees that were beginning to appear on the market. Jenny hated it – it was spiky and ugly and lacked the lovely scent of a real tree. It was also too small to trim properly.
‘Have you heard from that boy of yours yet?’ Heather asked when she got home from shopping and was unpacking her basket. Jenny shook her head.
‘Don’t upset yourself about it,’ Heather advised. ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea.’
Jenny turned away wretchedly. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear at all, and it didn’t help one bit. There might be plenty more fish in the sea but there was only one Bryn. If she never saw him again she didn’t think she could bear it.
As she made her way home though, back up the hill past the Jolly Collier and the butcher’s shop where cockerels and pheasants, still wearing all their feathers, hung above the window from a row of meat hooks, she suddenly felt better. There was no logical explanation for her change of mood, it was just that somehow the fog had lifted and the sun come out. Jenny walked along Alder Road with a spring in her step, humming ‘While Shepherds Watch’.
The boys were playing their inevitable game of football on the Green, their socks in untidy concertinas round their ankles, coats discarded, in spite of the chill December air, to mark the goal posts. The ball came hurtling towards her and before she could stop herself she had kicked it back to them. Not a bad kick either, covering at least half the distance, though it stopped short against the kerb. The boys came whooping to collect it and Jenny went up the path actually grinning.
The house smelled of cooking chips – chips and Spam was a Saturday staple, though sometimes for a treat they had fish and chips from the shop. The trouble with that was by the time they got them home they were cold and had to be heated up again in the oven, which always spoiled them, to Jenny’s mind. The other Saturday staple was sausage and mash, but since Jenny didn’t like Carrie’s mashed potato, which was rather stodgy and uninteresting, she was glad it was chips.
Carrie was standing on a chair, hanging newly arrived Christmas cards on a length of twine which stretched along one wall dangling in loops between the holly-decked pictures. She looked round as Jenny came in and waved her hand towards the table.
‘There’s something for you there.’
Jenny’s heart leaped, but somehow she wasn’t surprised. Deep inside she’d known. All the way home she’d known.
Jenny picked up the envelope with her name on it, a small square envelope addressed in a hand she didn’t recognise. She clutched it to her as if she’d never let it go and went upstairs without even stopping to take off her coat.
It was quite a short letter. His name, service number and address, written in neat capitals in the top left-hand corner, took up almost half the first side, and he began without any flowery preamble: ‘Dear Jenny’. There was a bit apologising for not having written before, a bit about what he’d been doing, and that was more or less it. But he finished: ‘I miss you. Please write soon. Love, Bryn’ and she melted inside just looking at his name. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t written much. It didn’t matter that there were no declarations of undying love. The letter had come. He hadn’t forgotten her. That was enough.
David was dreading Christmas. The brightly-lit shop windows, the decorated tree and the festoons of streamers and cards at home, and the general air of festivity only served to sharpen the terrible sense of loss which had closed in around him since Linda’s death. This should have been their first Christmas together as man and wife, instead he was living at home again just as if his marriage had never happened. Linda’s name was rarely, if ever, mentioned. David couldn’t bring himself to talk about her, hugging his grief to himself, and Carrie, typically, seemed determined to deny her existence, as if pretending it had all been just a bad dream would somehow make it so. The thought of sitting around on Christmas Day, opening presents and singing carols as they always did, was unbearable to him. Not only would he be missing her with the ache of sorrow that tore his guts out, he would also resent the way the family were celebrating. That they were sorry she had died he did not doubt, but they didn’t feel it as he did and Carrie would make sure the shadow of her death did not mar the festivities. That, David felt, was the ultimate betrayal. At this time, more than any other, he wanted to mourn her – needed to mourn her. And he wanted to do it alone.
‘I’m not going to be here for Christmas,’ he said.
The family were having Sunday lunch – roast lamb and onion sauce – and Family Favourites on the radio was playing one sickly love message after another from separated sweethearts. Love you – Miss you – Can’t wait until we can be together again. He and Linda would never be together again.
Carrie put down her knife. ‘What d’you mean – you won’t be here for Christmas?’
‘I’m going away.’
‘Going away! Where?’ Carrie sounded outraged.
‘I don’t know yet. I thought I might go camping somewhere.’
‘Camping! You can’t go camping in the middle of December! I never heard anything like it! You’ll catch your death of cold!’
‘Mum – I used to be in the army, remember? I’ve camped in worse conditions than this.’
‘Nowhere will be open this time of year. All the sites will be shut up for the winter.’
‘I’ll find somewhere. And if I can’t – well, I’ll just pitch my tent in the woods or something, like we used to on exerc
ises.’
‘I won’t hear of it!’ Carrie said. ‘Spending Christmas on your own – it’s the last thing you want to do.’
‘Leave the boy alone, Carrie,’ Joe said. His tone was level but unusually authoritative, the tone that, because he so rarely used it, always brought Carrie up short. ‘He knows what he wants.’
‘Do you think I could enjoy my Christmas knowing he was on his own in the wilds, in a tent, in December?’ Carrie retorted defensively.
‘This isn’t about you though, is it, m’dear?’ Joe said mildly yet firmly. ‘If that’s what he’s decided he wants to do then it’s not for you to interfere. Nor start making him feel guilty on top of everything else.’
‘What do you mean – make him feel guilty?’
‘He’s got enough to worry about without you making him think he’s going to spoil your Christmas.’ He turned his faded blue eyes on David. ‘If you want to go away, my son, you do it. And don’t you think twice about us. We’ll be all right. We’ve all got one another.’
David nodded. ‘Thanks, Dad.’ There were tears glittering in his eyes. His father’s understanding had brought to the surface some of the emotions he fought so hard to keep under wraps. But he was grateful, all the same. Joe might stay in the background most of the time, but when he did intervene he was able to put Carrie in her place better than anyone else could!
In the middle of the afternoon of Christmas Eve, when the house was full of the smell of mince pies baking and singed cockerel as Carrie burned the feather stubbles off the bird in preparation for the oven, there was a knock at the front door.
‘Can you get it?’ Carrie called from the kitchen.
Jenny went to the door. The postman was standing there, a proper postman this time, not one of the students. Jenny was surprised. She’d thought the post would have been and gone by now.
‘Couldn’t get this through the letter box,’ he said, handing her a thin white parcel. ‘Happy Christmas!’
‘Thank you. Happy Christmas!’ Jenny said.
She recognised the writing on the box at once – she had read Bryn’s letter so many times that the unfamiliar was now totally familiar.