He put the letters aside and continued to gape at her. ‘But you’re off your chump, old girl! You must be! Clean off your chump!’
It might have been the ‘old girl’ that did it. Only since he had moved into this magic circle had he reverted to the patronising form of address, borrowed from his father. In the past he had used slang phrases when addressing her but they had been more flattering. ‘Glam’ was one, and ‘Kid’ was another. She had never liked them but had put up with them for they signified nothing worse than delayed adolescence. Now she snapped, ‘For Jesus Christ’s sake stop calling me “old girl”! I’ve told you before and I’ll not tell you again! Get your silly clothes on, go and see that hearty C.O. of yours, and tell him what’s happened.’
‘But it hasn’t happened!’ he protested, as pitifully as a boy falsely accused of cheating, ‘it hasn’t happened, and it’s bloody well not going to happen! Do you think I could crawl out by the back door while this show is still going full blast? God Almighty, I’d sooner … sooner be grounded! You’ve got a damned nerve, old girl, going to these lengths behind my back and I’ll tell you something you’ve overlooked. Those letters are only so much bumph until I apply for a discharge back to industry. Nobody can hook me back to Civvy Street without my signature on a lot more bumph, and I can’t see me letting myself in for that!’
‘Letting yourself in for what? For doing a real job of work and doing it in comfort? For living a civilised life among civilised people, instead of holing-up in places like this where you never meet anyone but a knock-kneed old waiter, a Brylcreem Boy, or one of their synthetic little wives? There’s nothing disgraceful in making armaments instead of using them, is there? God knows what might result from you being a civilian today and in your line of business! Sit and think about it a moment if you have to, but it shouldn’t take you long to weigh the money and risks you’re taking now against what those two letters represent.’
Suddenly he remembered he was naked and at a disadvantage. He draped a towel round his middle and trailed after her into the bedroom. Outside, across the patch of sky seen between the oh-so-gay curtains, a trainer plane chugged slowly from east to west. His eye followed it and when it disappeared he sat down on a mock antique chair that was too low for him.
‘Let’s get this clear, Monica,’ he said, talking slowly and carefully, like a man anxious to give an impression of sobriety. ‘I’m in for the duration, and flying for as long as I can wangle it. At thirty-plus I had a hell of a job to get this far and I’m not putting on civvies again until it’s all over. You can pull what strings you like, you won’t get me budged! A trained pilot is worth a damned sight more than a trained civvy, no matter what you hear from the civvies you’ve been touting!’
‘You mean this kind of life is to go on indefinitely? For both of us?’
‘What’s wrong with it? What’s happened to you all of a sudden?’
‘You think it is all-of-a-sudden?’
He looked at her with a degree of patience, noting the set of her mouth, the hardness of her blue eyes, and deciding that they were a bit too blue, like the inner core of an oxyacetylene flame. It struck him then that she was and always had been a woman who would go her own way regardless of ties and loyalties and at the same time he made another disconcerting discovery. She had hated every minute of the time she had spent following him round from camp to camp and he must have been blind not to have realized it months ago, when he and Andy and Andy’s wife had been living it up in the local pubs and jaunting about on fiddled petrol between operations and courses. He said quietly, ‘Can’t you begin to look at it from my point of view?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘and I’m not trying anymore. Either you take advantage of this opportunity or I’m off!’
He was astonished in spite of himself. He was also incredulous. ‘You mean we split up? Just like that! For good?’
‘If necessary, yes. In your own silly language I’ve had it! Right up to here,’ and she raised a well-manicured forefinger level with her chin.
He said quietly, ‘Okay, Monica. Then that’s how it’ll have to be until you come to your senses.’
He seemed to have succeeded in surprising her for she turned pale and clenched her fists as though she would have liked to beat reason into him. Then, bracing herself, she returned to the attack. ‘Senses!’ she screamed. ‘Senses! Who’s talking about sense? You’re a grown man, or I once thought you were. Do you imagine the life we’ve been leading since 1939 makes any sense to me? Or to anyone except those bloody fools in fancy dress out there, risking their lives every day for a gesture? They’re phonies! The biggest phonies I’ve ever met, pretending they’re making the most tremendous sacrifices when real sacrifices are being made by overworked little clerks doing a day’s chores on a rasher of bloody spam and a tin of pilchards. Christ, you make me vomit, the whole damned lot of you, with your squadron scoreboards, and all that mumbo-jumbo you use to convince one another you’re a race apart. Talk about the Germans seeing themselves at Herrenvolk! You people are a damned sight worse than the Nazis. You’re steeped in self-deception without even knowing it. I could understand it in kids about nineteen, with the cradle marks still on their backsides, but you and Andy, and all those other married men in that mess over there, you’re old enough to recognise it for what it is, for something people will feed to red-nosed comedians at the end of the pier after the war. If you don’t understand this at your age you never will, so to hell with it all! I’ll give you five minutes to get your clothes on and go over to that camp with these letters. If you don’t then I’m going, and if you want to get in touch with me you can do it through my solicitors.’
He was appalled at her vehemence and protested, ‘But good God, old girl, we can’t just break up like that …’ but she cut him short with a sweep of her arm that came close to overturning the bedside light.
‘We can and damned well will,’ she said. ‘I packed a case thinking you would get a forty-eight hour pass to fix things up but if I go out of here alone I go for good, understand?’
He did not look foolish now so much as drunk and drained of the power of decision. He sat looking across at her as she dragged her night case and vanity case out of the wardrobe, flung them on the bed and then shrugged herself into her leopardskin coat. Overhead more aircraft zoomed towards the runway and downstairs a tinny gong was beaten for the evening meal. To Monica the sounds were the knell of their past and future. She said, cramming on her hat, ‘Well? You still think I’m bluffing?’
‘I don’t know what the hell to think unless you’re tight,’ he answered. ‘You’ve been talking cock ever since you came in, flapping those damn silly papers under my nose. Dammit, I’ve never thought of myself as having much upstairs, but I’ve got far more than to do what you’re asking me to do! Now for God’s sake let’s both have a drink and …’
He stopped because she had walked out and he sprang in pursuit, not realising he was naked until he reached the stairhead and saw her walk into the circle of light thrown on the first landing by the miserable 25-watt bulb. Then, feeling more deflated than he had ever felt in his life, he rushed back to the bedroom and pulled on his trousers and greatcoat, but on recrossing the threshold he stopped, recollecting that there was no main line train to York until half-past-seven and that he would have plenty of time to dress and pursue her to the station. He rang down for a large whisky that was brought up by the hotel’s sole waiter, a man who moved as if he had served drinks to officers home from the Crimea. Stevie called him ‘George’. He called all waiters George and had done, long before the R.A.F. made so free with the name.
‘When you go down hold the taxi, George,’ he said, ‘I want it to take me to the station,’ but George said, in the deferential voice he had used to address young hunting bucks who met at the pub before the airfield was built, ‘Madam took it, sir, and it can’t make the return journey to York in less than an hour. Would you
like me to find out if Mr Armitage’s hack is free?’
‘No, scrub it,’ Stevie said, and finished his whisky at a gulp.
When George had creaked away he sat on the bed a long time, racking his brains over what event or chain of events could have led to such an extraordinary scene and wondering if it had anything to do with his current flirtation with a W.A.A.F. parachute-packer called Gwen. He thought not or Gwen’s name would certainly have been flung into the dispute at one point or another and besides, so far, he had not taken Gwen to bed and had not even intended to. He wondered then if Monica’s outburst had its origin in nervous strain due to the possibility of him crashing, but again he ruled a line through the supposition. Monica had been sharing living-out billets with him when he had been on daily operations and had never shown a flicker of nervousness, so that occasionally he saw other men’s wives looking at her in a curious, half-envious way, Margaret, on the other hand, had been a bag of nerves, and had once shamed Andy by bursting into tears in the middle of a flap, but now that he thought about it he had never seen Monica shed a tear on his behalf or anyone else’s, so that it followed, to some extent, that she meant what she said about being browned off with the role of camp-follower. Even so, her furious tactics, indeed, her overall strategy, continued to astound him. She must have been planning this back-door exit for weeks and it obviously hadn’t occurred to her that he would reject a discharge to industry out of hand, not from reasons of patriotism but simply because a life that kept a man at a desk whilst such things were happening was not to be thought of, not even objectively. ‘She doesn’t understand,’ he told himself, aloud, ‘and she’s never bloody well understood.’
He sat there drinking a large gin (the whisky had run out and George murmured that he was privileged to get the gin), thinking back over various aspects of their association, but although he recalled many occasions when she had seemed out of it at a party, or homesick for a place of her own, he could recall nothing that might have warned him that he was sitting on a land-mine; and the devil of it was he still hadn’t the least idea what to do about it now that it had exploded. He supposed she would write, or he would write, and she might even phone, although not in her present mood. Normally he would have carried his troubles to Andy but Andy was a thousand miles away, fiddling about over Sidi Barrani or Mersa Matruh. He had plenty of friends on the station but none who were more than casually acquainted with Monica, and then he remembered that Andy’s wife had gone back to nursing somewhere in town after his twin had been posted overseas and that Margaret, whom he had always liked for her amiability and the Celtic lilt in her voice, had known Monica intimately and might, conceivably, come up with an answer. He was a man of quick decisions both on the ground and above it and within minutes of getting Margaret’s address he was ’phoning her number. The bell seemed to ring a long time and he had almost given up hope when the burr ceased and Margaret’s voice said, ‘Who’s there, now?’
He was delighted, not only because he could now unload his troubles on someone but also because, in the sharply rising note of the last word, he could picture her, a small, kittenish woman, with a shade too much of this and that here and there, but a femininity that Monica lacked, despite her good figure and impeccable taste in clothes. He said, ‘Margy? It’s Steve. Look, I’ve got to talk to you. Something’s happened. No, not a damned thing to do with Andy, to do with me and Monica. She’s just walked out. Blew her top. Made me feel like something the cat’s brought in! No, not a row, at least, not one I started. She’s gone loco! She’s been hawking me all over the ruddy auction. She got Monteith-Parkinson and God knows who else, to fix an industrial discharge for me. And when I told her to get knotted she said it was Civvy Street or else, just like that!’
He waited, giving her time as he thought to absorb the shock, but when she spoke she seemed no more than mildly surprised and even a little amused. She said, ‘Well now, where’s she gone? Home to mother?’
‘How the hell do I know where she’s gone? She took a taxi to York and that’s all I know. She surely wouldn’t be fool enough to go back to the Archdeacon. He’s church militant and would soon send her packing if she shot the line she shot to me! The point is, why! I mean, what have I done for Christ’s sake? No, there’s no other Judy, cross my heart. If there was I could make some kind of sense out of it. Well damn it, what a bloody silly question. Of course I want her back! It’s bad enough being stuck on an F.T.U. up this ruddy desert without having to sleep at the mess. Besides, she talked as if it was for good unless I agree to go back to Civvy Street!’
‘When are you due for leave, Stevie?’
‘Not until the course is finished but I could get a crafty forty-eight if I played my cards right.’
Margaret laughed and the ripple that reached him brought some kind of sanity back into the evening. She said, reasonably, ‘Then you’d better play them, come to town and have a long talk with Auntie Margaret. You could take me out to a dinner and show. I’d love that, I’ve had no male company for months, except the odd Yank at the Embassy, and they’re so bad at it! Pawing, I mean, and working overtime at being masculine.’
‘I’ll put in for a forty-eight tomorrow. Right now I’m going to get plastered. Before I do tho’, did you ever have the idea she might fly off the handle like this?’
‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘I think I did, Stevie, but it isn’t the kind of thing I can discuss on the phone. Hold on—tomorrow’s Wednesday—ring this number lunch-time Friday and I’ll try and meet the train.’
He scribbled the number on the back of his identity card and rang off, already feeling a great deal better. Quarrelling didn’t come easily to him. Such disputes as had cropped up in the past had been adequately handled by Andy, the more aggressive of the two. Now that he had told somebody he could begin to relax and make some kind of attempt to come to terms with Monica’s extraordinary conduct. Whistling tunelessly he dressed, went downstairs and across the blacked-out town to The Mitre. He forgot that he hadn’t eaten and when he was roused by George at seven the next morning he had no appetite for anything except a pick-me-up laced with Worcester sauce.
III
He did not see her in the crush at the barrier and had resigned himself to waiting in a telephone kiosk queue to ring the hospital when a knot of sailors, toting enormous kit bags, moved aside to reveal her standing alone outside the buffet, legs planted astride, hands clasped behind her back, her smile asking him to join her in a parody of the military turmoil of the platform, with its aimless swirl of blue, navy-blue and khaki. To Stevie she looked like the last pre-war woman alive.
She gave him a couple of sisterly kisses but her gesture in holding on to his hand, and pressing it hard against her breast, told him at once how much she was missing Andy, and how genuinely pleased she was to see him. Stevie was not an intuitive man but there wasn’t much you could teach him about affectionate women. He was flattered to note that she had gone to some pains to dress for him, for he had expected her to be wearing a coif and one of those dramatic cloaks nurses wear when they snatch an hour or two from the wards. She had never had Monica’s taste but today he was glad of it. She was her old self, half jazzy, half svelte, with a hairstyle that was manifestly a copy of Veronica Lake’s ‘peek-a-boo’, one hazel eye almost masked by a shining husk of hair that swept across her cheek and ended defiantly under a small, dimpled chin. He said, ‘By God, Margy, it’s a joy to look at you! Barring Monica every Judy I’ve seen in three months has been a compromise between a wardress and a musical-comedy bandsman. Where do we celebrate?’
‘I’m off until six a.m. tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I swopped duties with a staff nurse. It cost me thirty bob. It took a world war to make me understand the real value of money!’
‘What the hell made you go back to nursing?’ he asked, chuckling. ‘You didn’t have to. Andy told you to keep the Birmingham flat going. It couldn’t have been the bombing or you wouldn’t have
come here.’
‘I was bored and I didn’t fancy joining anything and being bawled at by one of those horse-faced daughters of the Empire. Besides, nursing was the only thing I knew. You remember how Andy abducted me from a hospital, don’t you?’
He hadn’t remembered but he did now. They had both been involved in a road crash in South Wales and Andy had been detained with a rib fracture. Later he had returned to the hospital and whisked her from under an outraged sister’s nose, and Monica had thought it all rather silly and common, until she realised how completely Andy was bewitched by this droll little Welsh girl. She got used to her however, for Andy had seen to that and so, in a less direct way, had Stephen himself, for he had never underestimated the value of her cheerfulness that offset, to a great extent, Monica’s starchiness and Andy’s occasional sulks. Until now he had never thought of her as anything more than a woman who was pretty and companionable, and he realised that this was because, without actually giving offence, Monica had always contrived to downgrade her into the shop-girl class. She said, as they hailed a taxi, ‘Don’t unload now, Stevie, wait until we’ve got a meal inside us. I’ll take you to a joint the Americans use in Soho. All the places you once knew are blitzed or closed up. It isn’t easy to eat in town nowadays, you have to know the right people and pay the right price.’
He was surprised by her newly-acquired sophistication and wondered where she had found it. Was it the company of civvies she had taken up with since Andy had sailed away, and if so, did she do more than flirt with them? He decided that it wasn’t his business and also that she was entitled to make the best of a bad job in this drab ruin of a city.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 5