George was carefully laying the salt and pepper cruets, the sugar cellar and the plastic tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser to one side of the table so that there was nothing except a couple of feet of checked, chipped Formica between him and Rosemary. She in turn removed her tea-cosy hat and her mittens.
"It's no Joe Lyons," he remarked.
"There aren't any of those any more." She lowered her voice. "This is the best we can do."
"I know. I have been keeping up with current events."
"Can you do that?"
"I thought you didn't want to know anything about it," he said with a teasing grin. "I distinctly heard you say -"
"Yes, sorry, you're right. But you can't blame me for being curious. I'll find out soon enough, won't I?"
He nodded somewhat sadly. "Don't get your hopes up."
"We'll be together, though, won't we?"
"Yes," he said.
"That's all I've ever wanted."
"It can get frightfully dull."
"Then we'll liven it up."
"There are rules."
"You make it sound so stuffy. That's not like you."
"I'm simply preparing you. I don't want you to be disappointed."
The waitress slapped Rosemary's coffee down on the table and looked at George. He shrugged. "Sorry, I've no money on me."
Rosemary fumbled for her purse.
The arrangement was that they should meet near her house that Sunday, not actually at her house, because she didn't think she was ready for him to meet her parents quite yet, but by the railings of the church a couple of streets away, and then they would take the bus out into the countryside. She was to prepare a picnic, he would bring something to drink. Her mother was wise to the game, but for her father's sake they pretended that Rosemary was going on a jaunt with Maureen, and Maureen helped cement the alibi by coming round the evening before on the pretext of making plans. Maureen giggled a lot and dropped the unsubtlest hints, but Rosemary's father did not cotton on; at least, he gave no indication of cottoning on. He merely told the girls to enjoy themselves, be careful and watch out for strange men. This sent Maureen into gales of laughter. Rosemary was not amused.
George was late, naturally. He didn't seem to be aware that he had no sense of time. He wore a watch and wound it regularly but it was no more than a sartorial adornment, like a tie or a collar stud. Rosemary didn't criticise. It was one of those faults that could only be corrected with constant dedicated attention, in months, not minutes. And she didn't want him to think her a nag. She merely said, "We've missed one bus already."
"Then we shall catch the next one," he replied.
They walked to the bus shelter and waited for the noon bus. The weather was hectic but warm, and Rosemary regretted her decision to wear a tweed skirt. They talked idly, and Rosemary made George laugh with a story about a difficult customer she had had to assist yesterday, a woman who was clearly a size fourteen but who insisted on trying out nothing larger than a ten and then complaining that it was too tight around the bust and waist. When Rosemary had had the temerity to suggest a garment with a little more room in it perhaps, the woman had rounded on her and given her a good ear-bashing. Are you calling me fat? she had roared. Are you implying I'm blooming well fat? Rosemary could laugh about it now but at the time she had been quite upset.
"The perils of honesty," said George.
The bus came and George bought two day-return tickets to a small village ten miles west of the city. Half an hour later they alighted on the village green and stood there swaying slightly beneath the oppressive weight of the sun. Ducks preened themselves beside a standing pond and from somewhere there came the sound of a hammer striking an anvil, tolling like a bell.
George spent a moment or two in consultation of his map, then shouldered the knapsack that contained the picnic and two bottles of stout, pointed to the hills, said, "This way," and set off at a brisk pace. Rosemary followed.
They soon left the village behind, taking a bridlepath until it met a chalk track that curved upwards into the flank of a hill, then following this. Blackberry bushes sprung about on either side, their fruit mellow red and tightly budded. Trees drooped their branches in the young couple's hair, and in cool recesses of shade flies and gnats swarmed. A dragonfly kept pace with them for a while, supporting itself with a blur of air, until some urgent errand called it away in a wink of electric blue. George took a clinical delight in each and every manifestation of nature, even a spongy cluster of horse droppings; it made a welcome change from the vicissitudes of life behind the teller's window, he claimed. Rosemary agreed. She loved the smell of fresh air.
She didn't want to appear weak and she kept pace with him as best she could, but eventually, when they were about halfway up the hill, she had to beg for a rest. George glanced around and decided this was as good a place as any to stop for lunch, and they sat down on a sloping patch of grass beside the track and ate potted beef and tomato sandwiches and apples and shared a bar of softening chocolate with the entire valley spread out at their feet. George uncapped the beer bottles with a rock and Rosemary drank just enough of hers so that she wouldn't get tipsy and, when George wasn't looking, poured the rest away.
Gazing across to the next ridge of hills, pale with distance, lilac in the haze, she suddenly said, "Do you think we're really going to war?"
"I think there's a pretty good chance," said George after a moment's thought, "now that Mr Hitler and Uncle Joe have joined hands. It all depends. You can't predict these things. We've sworn to protect Poland, and that's good. It's important we show that we're prepared to fight. If we don't do that, we might as well let them walk in and hoist the swastika over Buckingham Palace tomorrow."
"Can't we talk with them? Bargain? Negotiate?"
"We can. We have. We should keep on doing so, and we should hope for the best but prepare for the worst."
"But so many people will die."
"Come on, old girl," said George, leaping lithely to his feet and extending a hand. "Let's not think about that. Not today. Let's think about it when it happens."
They gathered up their things and began the slow steady climb to the top.
For the next four weeks, and then even after war was declared, they spent their Sundays this way, taking the bus to some remote unpopulated area and losing themselves in the vastness of the land. They would find trails and byways not marked on the map and follow them to their conclusion, which was more often than not a dead end or a gate leading to farmland and signposted KEEP OUT. They had a none-too-perilous encounter with an angry bull, and passed the whole of one afternoon lying in long grass watching a ploughman and team convert a fallow field to a corded rectangle of dark brown earth. Conversation as they walked was unforced and easy, and when they were out of breath or had run out of things to say they carried on in companionable silence, the subtle background sigh of the countryside filling in the vacancies. It never rained on their Sundays.
The inevitable meeting with Rosemary's parents went well. George and her father discovered a mutual love of Will Hay, and one whole course of the meal was taken up with improvised quickfire music-hall repartee which left the men red-faced and helpless with laughter and Rosemary and her mother nonplussed but quietly smiling. After George went home, her father's seal of approval was characteristically terse: "Nice fellow. You can bring him round again."
George's parents lived in London, so the obligation did not have to be reciprocated, at least not yet, and Rosemary was relieved. She doubted she would have made as good an impression on George's parents as he had on hers, for she behaved awkwardly in the company of strangers, and she was hardly the sort of girl she imagined George's mother had in mind for her son. She had few illusions about that. Looking in the mirror at her little nose and drab brown eyes and narrow lips, Rosemary wondered again what George had first seen in her at the tea-dance, what had drawn him - heart in mouth, or so he claimed - all the way across the ballroom floor. What was it? What qu
ality did she possess that was invisible to everyone except him? Was he playing some sort of game with her? She knew there was a certain kind of man who liked to string a dull plain girl along while romancing a whole chorus-line of glittering beauties behind her back, returning to the dull plain girl whenever one of the glittering beauties rejected him because the dull plain girl was always there, the dull plain girl would inevitably be waiting for him; but they were a vicious breed, such men, a terrier breed. Charlie Blakeney was one. Although he had taken Rosemary out on a number of occasions, and had once asked her to marry him, Maureen had told her that he kept a gaggle of dolly-birds on the go, flitting from one to the next. Besides, he was flash with his money, and flash men only wanted one thing from a girl.
George was not like that at all. He would never betray her like that.
She picked up the coffee and sipped at it loudly. George stared at her, just curiously, with a slight flicker of amusement in his eyes. There were argumentative shouts from the portable television. She set the coffee down again, not sure she had even tasted it.
At last she said, "Does it hurt?"
"Does it still hurt?"
"No, I mean in general. When it happens. Does it hurt everyone?"
George sighed. "To be honest, love, I wouldn't know. I know it hurt me, but that's because it took about a day, after the wound, a day lying in a cot in the field hospital with this heaviness in my chest, this feeling of wrongness, and blood filling my throat, and -"
She held up her hands, wincing. "Please. I can't bear it."
"I thought you wanted to know."
"In general. No details."
"It varies from person to person, that's all I can tell you. Some slip peacefully away, no struggle. Others linger."
"I'm prepared for it to hurt. I don't mind a bit of pain. Especially if I know there's an end to it and something beyond."
"There's an end," George assured her.
Night had drifted down outside, and Rosemary caught sight of herself in the window, and the other diners and the waitress and the chef, all pale ghosts in the darkened glass. Of George in that black mirror-café there was no sign, yet there he was sitting right in front of her. She wondered if anyone else would notice that her companion cast no reflection.
There were all kinds of pain.
There was pain the day George volunteered. He came round to her house as soon as the bank closed, and even as she stood at the top of the stairs while her mother opened the front door, Rosemary knew what he had done, because his face was calm, the self-control more in evidence than ever before, and because a recruiting office had opened up on the high street yesterday afternoon. Before he could even say, "Hello, Mrs Thomas," to her mother, Rosemary turned and fled to her room.
His knock was quiet and polite. He had never been in her bedroom before. "Love? Love?" He opened the door softly. He looked for her on the bed but she wasn't there; she was standing at the window with her arms folded and her head held high, gazing out at the rows of roofs that rolled away and grew fainter in the thick autumnal twilight. He came to her and took her waist in his hands and turned her gently around to face him. He was surprised to see tears. He simply had not prepared himself for tears. He reached for his handkerchief, this being the appropriate thing to do, and she let him dab it around her eyes. If it made him feel better.
"I can't explain it," he said, leading her to the bed and sitting her down and sitting himself down beside her. "I can't expect you to understand."
"Why? Am I stupid or something?"
"It had to be done." Not I had to do it. It had to be done. "I saw that poster in the window, and it was as if it was calling out to me."
"But I thought you said we should negotiate."
"But it's too late for that now. It's been tried and it's failed. I said we should hope for the best but prepare for the worst, and the worst has happened. I can't simply ignore it now. I have to show how I feel."
"So much of being a man is about show," she said, half to herself. She thought she hated him then, but that hate was just a darker love.
"It would have happened anyway," he said, as if this was some compensation. "This war isn't going to be won overnight, and sooner or later they're going to have to start calling people up. I'm young, I'm healthy, and being a bank teller is hardly vital to the national interest. It would only have been a matter of time."
"So when do you leave?"
"A fortnight tomorrow."
"Where are you going?"
"A camp down on the coast. After that, who knows? But I'll write to you. I'll write every day. If that's what you want."
It wasn't what she wanted but, all things being equal, it was the best she could hope for.
And there was pain that final fortnight: a long drawn-out ache of loss that tainted everything Rosemary did, made her dreary work days drearier, fragmented her sleep into short naps that lengthened the night, and, on evenings out with George, required her to wear a brittle mask of jollity from beginning to end. He for his part gamely struggled to be himself and keep her amused at all times, and she smiled whenever possible, and both of them avoided the subject that they had to avoid, but the anticipation of their parting lurked behind their laughter, dogged them along the gas-lit streets, trailed them into restaurants and clubs, and squatted at their feet sighing quietly throughout their goodnight kisses on the front doorstep to her parents' house. It was as if the sadness to come had cast its shadow back through time, and the closer they came to the day George had to leave, the deeper, broader and thicker that shadow grew.
And there was a special kind of pain the very last Sunday they shared together.
As usual - even after only a couple of months the habit had worn itself comfortably smooth into their lives - they packed up a picnic and took the bus out into the countryside, to walk and lose and find themselves. It was the first day that really felt like autumn. The air smelled of brown leaves and bonfires and had that cold tang that would not really disappear now until spring. Trees slumped (the effort of summer having finally taken its toll) and, with the harvest in, the fields were turned and empty and expectant. Rooks like priests and inland gulls like white-coated doctors ministered to the broken earth, dragging out worms and grubs. In two days' time, George would be on the train to the coast.
They picked their way through the raw landscape until they found a spot to eat their picnic on the wrinkled slope of a hill. Rosemary drank all of her bottle of stout, pouring none away, and then said, "You will be careful, won't you? When you get out there?"
"Careful? As in dodge bullets? As in hold back while everyone else is charging forwards? I can't be careful, old girl, I can only be lucky."
"You sound brave."
"I'm scared silly. I don't want to die any more than you do."
"Then don't die!" It was a ridiculous thing to say but, through a mist of sorrow and anger and beer, it made perfect sense to her. You could choose not to die in the same way that you could choose not to live. It wasn't a question of bullets or grenades or shells or gas. It was a question of belief.
"I'll try," George said, taking her hand and patting it. "I'll do my level best. When it's over, I'll come back for you, and we'll..."
"Yes?"
That was when he should have asked her to marry him, on that cool green hillside on that brisk afternoon. Why didn't he? What stopped him? What thought came to him holding a grim finger to its lips? A foreboding? Fear of tempting providence? Or was it merely the fear of making a promise that he did not know for certain that he would be able to keep? That was most likely it. And when he turned away, Rosemary could tell what he was thinking. She had seen it in his face. He was thinking, Well, there'll be time enough for that later, when I come back and there's a future again. There'll be time for plans and schemes and dreams. There'll always be time.
"We'll see," is what he said eventually.
It was then that a magpie swooped down, landing with uncharacteristic boldness less than
five yards away from them. It stood for a while, gazing at them both with eyes that were filled with deep dark glittering avian understanding, and then it seemed to come to a decision and it opened its beak and it cried: ak-ak-ak-ak-ak! ak-ak! ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!
And Rosemary, remembering something her mother used to say when she was little, that the chattering of magpies signified a death, felt a coldness steal over her.
And there was a unique pain in the bus shelter that night.
The city was silent and dark, and inside the bus shelter was darker still, and on the slats of the wooden bench, awkwardly, Rosemary gave herself to George.
During the clumsy overtures, as they shuffled into position, clothing rustling about them, he asked her in a choked whisper if it was safe, wasn't there some risk if he...? And she hushed him and said it was safe, she had seen to it that it was safe, perfectly safe.
It was only the whitest shade of a lie. Maureen, being better versed in such matters than she, had given Rosemary sound advice on choosing her moment, striking when the iron was, so to speak, cooling, and Rosemary had listened carefully because she wanted nothing more to come from this moment than a memory.
And the memory was made of this: of George's quickening gasps, of his fingernails digging through her jersey into the flesh of her back, of the terror of being caught, of his final cry, of her relief as he climbed off her that no one had chanced along. But above all the memory was of the initial exquisite lancing between her legs. That pain fixed the memory into place like a pin through a butterfly.
And there was more pain when it came to accompanying George on the bus down to the railway station and saying goodbye to him there, but this pain was mitigated by the fact that she had been preparing herself for it for over a fortnight. It was like the pain of an injection, worse in the anticipation than the execution. Surrounded by clouds of steam and other couples parting, it was also a pain shared and therefore lessened. The two of them simply clutched one another, just as the other couples were clutching, and their kisses were no different from anyone else's kisses, just a pair of lips pressing a pair of lips, and then the train's whistle screeched impatiently and George clambered up into the carriage and had to go. He waved to her all the way down the platform. He waved until he dissolved in steam.
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