by Simon Mawer
“Don’t be silly, Mummy. It’s just the excitement.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, get a move on.”
She waited until her mother had gone. She was picking distractedly at things — her new dress, the counterpane, the top of her stockings where it looked as though there might be a run beginning. “How is he?” she asked.
“Guy? You’ll never guess…”
She looked around, her expression vulnerable, open, eager to hear. “Never guess what?”
“That business about being a conchie. It’s all over — he’s in uniform just like everyone else, been in uniform for years, actually. I tell you what…”
“What?”
“Tell me you won’t mind…”
“Won’t mind what?”
“We went out together.”
Diana swallowed. Something, the heat, the nervous tension, made her head swim.
“Well, come on, darling. You haven’t got property rights over him.”
“No,” she said. “No rights at all…”
“And it wasn’t as if…”
“What wasn’t it as if, Meg?”
“Well, he wasn’t a great love or anything. Just a weekend, for God’s sake. A weekend that went a wee bit wrong.”
Diana stared at Meg. Her expression held within its compass elements of fear and amazement, and other things that Meg couldn’t quite name but which she found rather frightening. “But I did love him, Meg. I did.”'
“Don’t be silly.”
“I did,” Diana insisted. “I have never been more certain of anything in my whole life.” She wasn’t going to cry, that was the interesting thing. She was tough, Diana was. Maybe the Blitz had done that. She breathed in deeply and stood up. She’d got over that awful moment of shock, and the nausea had died down. She stepped into her frock, pulling it up over her hips and wriggling her arms into the sleeves. “Can you help with the buttons, darling?” She smoothed the dress over her hips where it was a bit tight, adjusted it over the shoulders, and smiled at Meg’s reflection in the mirror.
Meg fiddled around at Diana’s back for a moment. “So you’d rather I chucked him?” she asked.
“I never said that…”
“But that’s what you were thinking.”
“All right, that’s what I was thinking.”
“Isn’t that being rather bitch-in-the-manger?”
“I’m not the bitch in the manger,” Diana retorted.
“Who is then?”
There was a pause. Diana examined her own reflection. How long, she wondered, can you keep a person in suspense like this? “His wife is,” she said eventually, noting the widening of Meg’s eyes, the faint flinch, the hasty effort at composure.
“His wife?”
“Yes, darling, his wife. You know: what I’ve just become and you haven’t bothered to.”
Meg ignored the taunt. “My God, the bastard never said a word.”
3
A FEW DAYS later, Guy rang again. Could he speak to Flight Officer York? She felt that little snatch of anticipation at the sound of his voice, that was what was so damned infuriating. “You already are,” she said tartly.
“It’s Guy.”
“I know it’s Guy.”
“How do you know that?”
“I recognized the tone of apology and evasion.” She took delight in his laughter. He was, apparently, going to watch some cricket at Lord’s. He thought she might like to come, or would it be a terrible bore? It was in aid of the Red Cross. They were calling it the Victory Test Match. What did she think?
What did she think? She toyed with the idea of turning him down. She toyed with the idea of saying something extremely unladylike, something like Fuck you, Mr. Guy Matthewson; fuck you, with your cheerful ability to have a girl fall in love with you and then get her pregnant, all without even realizing it, and all despite the fact that you are married. But she didn’t. Instead she said, “All right.” Just that. Nothing more than that. Nothing that would show that he aroused any kind of emotion in her, be it solid anger or something more undermining: those shifting, unstable currents of desire that flowed beneath the surface of her personality, the desperate desire — she hardly dared say it even to herself — to have him inside her, there between her legs. So she said yes, and they arranged to meet outside the gates of the grounds, and it transpired (but it was no great surprise) that Guy took her in through the members’ gate, that he wore the hideous red-and-yellow tie of the club, that stewards knew him by name.
There was a good crowd, people eager to see such a peaceful thing as a cricket match after the years of war. Meg and Guy sat in the spring sunshine, watching distant white figures move around the pitch. She glanced uncomprehendingly at the score-card and asked him for explanation.
“You give me one,” he said. He must have been saving the question, waiting for the right moment. “Why do you think I’m apologetic and evasive?”
“You have reason to be.”
“Is it about Diana?”
“Perhaps.” She was enjoying taunting him. The cricket could go hang.
“Does she know about us?”
“What is there to know?”
“That we’re seeing each other?”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“Well, isn’t it?”
Out in the field someone did something, took a wicket, reached fifty, something sufficient enough to evoke a round of applause from the spectators. Even Guy clapped — “Well done, sir,” he cried. “Well done!” — before turning back to Meg. “Look, I don’t quite know how to deal with this. I feel that you may know things that —”
“That I shouldn’t?”
“Perhaps.”
“Like the fact that you got Diana into bed with you within twenty-four hours of meeting her?”
He glanced around nervously to see if any of the other spectators was listening. “If you want to put it crudely.”
“There’s another way? Look, Guy, we’re all much older and wiser now, aren’t we? We’ve spent the last few years jumping in and out of each other’s beds. Why not admit it?”
“You might have,” he said. “I don’t think that follows for most of the members of the MCC.” There was a silence. “It was a particularly difficult time for me.”
“And for Diana.”
“But now it’s resolved itself, hasn’t it? At least for her.”
It was apparent that he had no idea, that’s what was incredible, no idea at all about what had happened. Di hadn’t told him and he had no idea. Meg wondered whether she should shatter once and for all the even surface of his complacency and tell him the whole story about the aborted baby, there and then, amongst the respectable spectators at this most respectable cricket match. “But it hasn’t resolved itself for you?” she asked.
He shook his head and turned back to the game. “No, not for me.” A wicket must have fallen, for there was a new batsman taking guard. “Edrich,” Guy said. “Bill Edrich. Sounds German, doesn’t it?” The crowd was silent while the bowler ran up to the wicket. There was the sudden trajectory of the ball and a flashing stroke from the new batsman, and, out of phase, the impact of ball and bat. Fielders were running, the batsmen crossed over, the ball was returned to the bowler.
“He’s a Squadron Leader,” Guy said. “Bomber pilot.”
“Who?”
“Edrich.”
“We weren’t talking about Edrich,” Meg said. “We were talking about you. And maybe even me.”
He nodded, sitting with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped beneath his chin. The batsman called Edrich was crouched at the crease again, a small, compact figure waiting patiently for the next ball. The bowler ran in and this time the batsman rocked onto his back foot and hit the ball powerfully past cover point. There was a further burst of applause from the spectators. “I’m probably going to join the Control Commission that they’re setting up,” he told her. “I’ll probably be going to German
y.”
“Germany?”
He shrugged. “It’s my knowledge of the language, you see. They seem to find that more useful than the fact that I can climb mountains. Now that everything’s over.”
“You know the language?”
Guy nodded. “Didn’t Diana tell you?”
“That you speak German?”
He looked around at her in surprise. “No, Meg. That I’m married. That I have a wife and daughter. That they are German.” He corrected himself: “At least, I had a German wife and daughter. I know nothing about them; I’ve heard nothing about them since 1939.I don’t even know whether they are still alive.”
Meg shrugged. “There are plenty of stories like that these days.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“What’s it got to do with me?”
“I thought it might put you off. I thought perhaps that was why you seem so…hostile.”
Meg laughed. “I think you’re mixing hostility up with suspicion.”
“Are you suspicious of me? Is that what it is?”
“I was suspicious of a married man who was happily taking a girl out without mentioning the existence of his wife.”
“But I assumed you already knew…”
“I also suspect that you are still in love with her.”
Did he look startled? “Who?”
“The little wife, of course.”
He smiled, shaking his head. “I doubt it. Maybe I’m in love with the idea of her, but I doubt I’d be in love with the reality. Not Greta. Not any longer.”
“And your daughter…?”
His expression changed. Beneath the outward equanimity there was pain there, like a splinter beneath the flesh. “‘I have not seen thy sunny face,’” he said quietly. “‘Nor heard thy silver laughter.’”
“What’s that?”
“Alice. Through the Looking-Glass.” He looked at her and attempted a smile. “It goes on…” But his voice faltered and he stared away toward the players out there on the square. “I’m sorry. I’m being sentimental.”
“No, tell me.”
A pause. There was a small battle with the balance of his voice, like someone trying to tune an instrument. He coughed and faltered and started again: “‘No thought of me shall find a place, in thy young life’s hereafter.’ That’s how it goes on.”
“How sad. But you’ll find her, and so it won’t apply.”
“Perhaps.” He didn’t sound convinced. “I’ve tried to get news. I don’t know how soon I’ll hear anything…”
They watched for another hour, until the players came in for tea. “Shall we go?” he asked. “I’m sure you’re bored by the game.”
“Let’s go back to the flat,” she suggested. So they caught a bus that went down Edgware Road and got off at Sussex Gardens. Meg’s apartment was in a modern block nearby, a redbrick building whose front was pockmarked by shrapnel from when bombs had fallen immediately across the street. They went in through the glass doors — suddenly no longer boarded up, suddenly blaz-ingly transparent — and into the featureless hallway. The elevator took them upward. Apologizing for the mess, she let Guy into the apartment, and they sat awkwardly on the worn sofa while one of her roommates, the one who worked nights, went back and forth to the bathroom complaining all the time about the rationing, the shortages, the inconveniences of the Tube, a whole gamut of things that made Guy smile and Meg frown, so that when the girl had eventually gone they suddenly had laughter in common, their shared impatience with this scatterbrained girl and her scattered possessions. And laughter did what laughter so often does — pushed aside the barrier that separated them so that he put his hand out and touched her arm, and she, for a moment, allowed him to turn her head and kiss her (the strange fragility of his lips). Yet at that instant of contact she surprised herself by drawing away and putting up her hand against his chest to keep what little distance remained between them. “No,” she said. She shook her head, not really understanding what she was denying. She had done this with a dozen other men, this and far more than this, for God’s sake, sometimes with indecent haste, sometimes with a terrible burgeoning desire inside her. But this time she just shook her head and turned away from him. “No, Guy, not now.” And she got up to clear away their tea things and run a bowl of hot water to do the washing up, their own things and all the dishes that her roommate had left. “I really don’t know, Guy,” she said when he came anxiously into the kitchen after her. “It’s just…” What was it just? “It’s just that you’re still married, and somehow that matters…” But it never had before.
4
HE HEARD a few weeks later. A letter finally came through the tortuous channels of the military machine that was now governing the wreckage of Germany—an envelope camouflaged by official stamps, one of which said OFFICIAL CENSOR in blue letters and bore the hieroglyphic scrawl of some nameless army captain. He rang Meg at work. His voice was unsteady, as though he didn’t quite know how to pitch it, as though he had reverted to adolescence and his voice was breaking all over again. “What is it, Guy?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“I’ve just heard about Greta and Charlotte.” He seemed to cough or clear his throat or something. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve just got a letter. From Greta’s father.”
“Tell me.”
“They’re both…”
There was another silence. “Guy? Guy, are you there?”
There was a silence on the line for a moment, that silence that the telephone brings, which is the silence of detachment, the silence of complete separation, as though the other person was not there at all.
“Guy?”
“In an air raid last year,” he whispered. “They’re dead.”
“Meet me,” she said. “Can you? Now?”
“I suppose I can get away.”
“Of course you can. It’s not as though there’s a war on. Meet me outside Horse Guards Parade, ten minutes.”
He was waiting for her when she got there. The guards outside the gates were still in khaki, but there was a truck parked inside and the sandbags that had barricaded the building for the last five and a half years were being removed. Things were changing; the country was loosening up. She waved from the other side of the street and crossed through the traffic, and when she reached Guy, she held his hands and stood on tiptoe to place her cheek against his for a moment. “Darling Guy,” she whispered. “Darling, darling Guy.”
They walked through the archway and into St. James’s Park. It was a warm day. There were people sitting on the grass, just as they used to in peacetime. This was peacetime, for God’s sake. The country was still dominated by things military, but it was peacetime. A military band was playing from the bandstand, and there were mothers pushing carriages, and it was peacetime, and Meg was suddenly, unconscionably happy. She held Guy’s hand tightly, as though to comfort him.
“They weren’t in the city,” he was saying. “Apparently they’d gone to relatives in the country—a market town south of Frankfurt. For safety,” he added, in case the point hadn’t been taken, in case the irony had been missed. “Something went wrong, some bloody Pathfinder dropped the target markers in the wrong place, something like that, and the town got hit. Flattened. Five hundred bombers or something, all aiming for Frankfurt, all on the wrong target.”
They walked some more. The band played “Land of Hope and Glory,” and someone in the small crowd applauded. “Fuck,” Guy said quietly, and the word was shocking on his lips, far more shocking than it would have been coming from her own. “Fuck everything.” He said it loud enough for passersby to overhear. A woman looked appalled and muttered something to her companion: shell shock, maybe, or socialist. Or perhaps it was just a complaint about how there was a different class of person in officer’s uniform these days.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Meg as the women walked on.
“Don’t be.”
“It’s Lotty. My daughter. Oh, y
es, and Greta in a kind of abstract way. But Lotty…”
“Of course.” What does one say to the bereaved? There had been so much practice in recent years, and yet no one had got much better at it.
“Poor little Lotty. It’s what I said at the match, isn’t it?”
“The match?”
“The cricket. That quotation from Alice…”
“I never liked the Alice books,” Meg said.
They crossed the Mall. There was a small crowd outside the palace, hoping to see a sign of the royal family. The sandbags had gone there too. “Time,” she told him. “That’s what you need. Just time. Time cures everything.”
He tried a laugh. “But we haven’t got time, have we? You’ve got to get back to work.”
It was a joke of a kind. She laughed encouragingly. “I’ve got all the time in the world. I told my wing commander that I was taking the day off, and he always agrees to what I say.”
“How do you manage that?”
“By not going to bed with him.”
They walked. They went almost entirely by parks, right across the city, from St. James’s to Green Park, then across the road at Hyde Park Corner and into Hyde Park itself. There were horse riders along Rotten Row and some boats on the Serpentine, all those peacetime things. At Speakers’ Corner there were the usual orators and the usual hecklers. Someone was talking about famine in India and the dismemberment of the British Empire; another was preaching the end of the world. A man with one arm was arguing about the future of Europe, about how it was time to throw off the yoke of capitalism. Marble Arch was decked with union flags, but the triumphalism of the city was only halfhearted. The future held too many unknowns. Revolution hung on the coattails of war.
“What’ll you do now?” Meg asked as they crossed Bayswater Road, their feet on pavement for almost the first time. “Once you’ve been demobbed, I mean.”
“There’s the family business. Shoes. Unfortunately it’s not a very good time for shoes, but we’ll muddle along.”