“Once, no twice, some time ago.”
“Have you been in the trenches? You must have, with those ribands. What are they?”
“Oh, the sort of thing you get over there.”
Hoarsely the old driver called through the glass window, “What number, miss?”
“This will do.”
When the taxi had gone she said, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go and stay with your friend? Say so, if you do, I shan’t mind.” She took his hand. “But he will—Snakey, I mean. He’ll bite you.”
“I’d rather be with you.”
She knocked at a door, they went in, she whispered apart with a woman, who led the way upstairs. His doubts returned. “Here you are, ma’am, you’ll find it clean and comfortable, I hope. What time would you like breakfast? Eight o’clock? I’ll bring it up to you. Good night, sir.”
“Surely you know the landlady?”
“No more than you do. I told her you were my boy, going back to France. Do you mind?”
Under the hanging fly-freckled electric light bulb the room looked bare and shabby. There was an iron bedstead covered by a worn counterpane, a rug beside the bed, otherwise the boards were bare. A wash-hand stand against the wall, ewer and basin, one towel, no soap, water carafe and glass. He avoided looking at her, then catching her face in the looking glass, piquant with large dark eyes, he turned and sat on the edge of the bed beside her, feeling gratification that she was pretty. She looked at him, then held his face in her hands and kissed him lightly on the lips, saying, “You have beautiful eyes.”
“So have you.”
“It’s nice and clean, isn’t it? The floor’s well scrubbed. Say you like it!”
“Yes, I do, I think.”
“Do you mind if I wash first?”
“Not at all.”
“I can’t sleep if I don’t wash. I love cold water.”
“So do I. I used to swim in the sea last winter.”
“Where?”
“At Felixstowe, on the East Coast.”
“Ooh, I’d like to go there, I’ve heard it’s lovely!”
“There’s no soap,” he said.
“What, in Felixstowe?”
“No, in the soap bowl!” he laughed. This was fun.
“I’ll borrow some. Be back in half a mo’.” She went out, but looked round the door to say, “Snakey likes you, too!”
While she was out of the room he removed shoes and tunic, then his trousers, hanging them on the bedrail, beside his cap; and got into bed, with its dumpy mattress but clean sheets showing the creases of ironing. His momentary exhilaration was checked by the thought of possible consequences, a thought at once dismissed.
She was soon back, waving a slip of soap. Then in rapid time she took off green jacket and skirt, to stand in her chemise and bend to unclip her stockings; sat on the floor to take them off, and standing up, pulled her chemise over her head. He caught sight of two swelling breasts, then she was naked at the wash bowl, pouring water, stooping to sluice face and neck, armpits, and when the upper half of her body was soaped and rinsed by her hands, she vigorously washed her middle parts. When all was dried, she came over to him and climbed in, saying, “Ooh, I feel good, now. I’m so glad you came along. What’s your name?” He told her, adding, “I must wash, too.” Off with shirt and vest, and he was naked, keeping his back to her until with a start he remembered the scar on his buttock. Then holding the damp towel before his stomach, he crossed the room and switched off the light, opened the window, and got in beside her, to lie still and feel free from all thought.
Noises of trains shunting, blowing off steam, short whistles, came through the window. He sighed deeply, put hands behind head, and breathed contentedly.
“What’s your name?”
“Phillip. What’s yours?”
“Stella. Tell me something, Phillip. Are you all right?”
“I feel all right, yes. Do you?”
“I mean, have you anything the matter with you? You know what I mean. If you have, please use something.”
“Oh, you mean have I got one of the two things you read about in those large official advertisements in the newspapers? Not that I know of.”
“Have you been with other girls on leave? Tell me truly!”
“I have told you. The last one was September, 1916. My young cousin.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.” She seemed happy. “You are sweet, you know. I could fall in love with you.” She snuggled under his arm. He held her, stroking her head with the other hand. A dear little head, female little head, smooth skin, neck and shoulder and arm of a girl. He could not believe in his luck. His other hand moved down to the hollow above the hip, then up the ribs again until he held the firm breast with its small hard nipple in his hand, while he heard her sigh before she turned to kiss his collar bone, then he got down in the bed and put his lips to her breast, afterwards snouting the nipple gently with his nose as he had seen a little pig snout the teat of its sow. But there was so much to explore, the breadth of her back, the shape of her loins, the smoothness of her legs, the delicate small bush between her loins. She put arms round his neck and drew down his face to fit her lips upon his and there was no difficulty, as he had feared in the taxi, in his taking her.
Afterwards they lay side by side, while the arch of her foot stroked his shin.
“You’ve been wounded, Phillip.”
“Only slightly.”
“Did it hurt very much?”
“At moments—afterwards. Tell me about your boy.”
“He went to France, and I never heard from him again.”
“Was he killed, or something?”
“Oh no, he didn’t really like me. He came back on leave, took up with another girl, and cast me off.”
He turned, and possessed her again. They fell asleep. In the morning when he awakened he saw her sitting up in bed, in her chemise, looking at him. “I was just going to wake you, Phillip. Breakfast will be here in five minutes.”
“I’ll get up.” He saw the line of her bosom. “No, let’s hide under the bedclothes.” He pulled her down. Both were prepared to look demure when the landlady knocked on the door. A false alarm, for her voice said, “I’m leaving the tray outside, sir.”
After breakfast, another jag of lust, started by sight of a chemise with frayed lace edgings, a child’s shift; a long look at her face, with its small mole above one eye, the slightest down of a moustache, the skin with pores not yet covered by papier poudre, which, after dressing in her green frock, she rubbed over her face, before screwing the two-inch paper into a ball and putting it in her handbag. He put a pound note beside it, folded eight times. “Do you mind?”
“Can you spare it? I didn’t ask for it, you know.”
“You’re ‘not that sort of girl’? I’m sorry—I didn’t mean it, truly.”
“But you thought it.” Meditative gentleness left the brown eyes.
“Yes, of course I thought it, otherwise I couldn’t have said it. But it came from long ago, and was a stupid remark, for obviously it has nothing to do with you. Please forgive me.”
“All right, I will.” She began to put on a stocking, and the sight of her white leg against the black made him push her backwards on the bed. “No, Phillip, not now, or I’ll be late for work.”
“Damn that Remington.”
“I mustn’t be late, honestly.”
He dressed rapidly and left to pay the bill.
“You’ll come back?”
The old woman said, “Will fifteen shillings the two be all right, sir?” He thought it rather a lot, but paid without remark. He met the girl in green coming down the stairs. “I’d rather say goodbye here,” she said.
They walked to the end of the terrace. “I go this way.”
“To the smart new Remington?”
“Shall I see you again?” she said, ignoring his levity.
“I don’t know your address.”
“I’ll give it y
ou, if you promise to be careful what you write, as my step-mother steams open my letters.”
“All right, I won’t write, then.” He only half meant it, crossed by a self-destroying mood which induced obstinacy in her.
“Please yourself,” she said, and walked away. He went along the terrace, with its porticoes of scabby paint, to find Eugene’s number; then hurried back. He waited at the corner, and when she did not look back, “Oh well, that’s that,” he said to himself.
Gene was putting a tin kettle on a rusty gas ring when he reached the top flat. His grey, slightly sallow face looked somehow shrunken in the northern light of the unwashed kitchen window. Desmond, he said, was still asleep.
“Where did you get to, Phillip?”
“I dossed down with a friend. I was too late for the Grafton Galleries.”
“I had Leonora. She’s a natural casse noisette.” Phillip connected with with Tchaikowsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Leonora’s plum-black look.
“Most Jewesses are,” went on Eugene.
“I wonder if there is ever a fair-haired one?”
“Peroxide, every time.”
“Where was Desmond while you were tactically employed?”
Eugene told him, adding that Desmond was the sort who attracted elderly married women. “He sleeps with one in Yorkshire, who tells him he reminds her of her son.”
“Killed, I suppose? I’ve heard of women like that. I suppose it’s the maternal instinct.”
“Yes, she gives him decent presents, what’s more. Have you seen his pigskin hold-all? Also a pair of gold cuff-links. Then there’s the wife of that tenor who was in the Electrical Engineers with him, and gave him his singing lessons free. One night he went outside in the garden, when Des was staying the week-end with them, leaving the two together in the drawing-room. But Des read his mind, after he had let down one blind a couple of inches short at the bottom. Desmond pretended to be reading a book, and saw his friend’s eyes staring into the room below the blind. He couldn’t help laughing, he said, for old Frank and he had been singing Vesti la giubba from Pagliacci a few moments before. He reckoned that was his last lesson, he said.”
“Just as well.” Even so, it was not very nice, to be a guest in a friend’s home, and carry on with his wife. “Does he ever say anything now about Lily, Gene?”
“No. I think it was you more than Lily he cared about. But anyway it’s all forgotten. Desmond’s practically engaged to that girl in Yorkshire. Want a cup of tea?”
It was a cracked cup, and it began to sing like a grasshopper warbler. Or was it his ear? Or his brain? People who heard things, like Moses in the burning bush, had some sort of epilepsy. Perhaps that shell which burst near him and buried him at Messines on Hal’o’en in 1914 was having a delayed action which showed itself after sexual excess. He became worried.
“Want some saccharine, Phil?”
“No thanks. My ear’s singing, and yet it seems to come from the cup.” He went on after a moment, to screw himself up to mention his fears. “It was that mustard gas, perhaps. Hope to God I’m not going deaf.”
“That cup always makes that noise. It’s air coming out of one of the cracks in the hard covering, as water seeps into the porous part behind the crack.”
His relief was great, and when Gene took a cup of tea to Desmond in bed he began to imagine a story of the clay in the cup, dug from soil made of a thousand millennia of fears and hopes, among them the creeping, skin-winged life that later evolved into a bird with feathers, and a song of joy which it reeled in some Staffordshire wilderness upon which kilns had arisen, to burn with dull glares in the night, and bring phthisis to the former moor-dwellers in their slum cots. Long ago the warblers had died out in the waste land, but the spirit of one bird had survived in the clay, and now was trying to sing itself out of the cracked cup, because it was near to its migration time. But its way across France to Africa would be through areas of fire more terrible than the Staffordshire kilns, and it would perish. Better to remain in the cup until it was broken, when its voice would be lost for ever.
“What’s the time, Gene?”
“Ten to nine. I must be off to the office.”
“Still got your job in the corset factory?”
“Yes. I’m going back to Brazil after the war, to start a business there.” It was sad. He would miss Gene. “Shall we meet tonight?”
“I’m going to Brighton for the week-end.”
“Same bird as when I saw you last?”
“No, that’s long over. Her niece is the one I sleep with now.”
“How many women have you had, Gene?”
“About a hundred, more or less.” He lathered his chin. “Afraid I’ve not got any breakfast for you. I never eat it.”
Phillip returned to see Desmond. “When are you going back to Yorkshire?”
“Sunday night. How long are you up for?”
“A week. Doing anything today?”
“Not particularly. I did think of getting a mount at Woolwich, where I did a course recently, and riding on Blackheath. Would you like to come, too? I can get you a nag.”
They went down to Blackheath together, and had lunch at the ‘Shop’ mess, then got two riding-school hacks. He had a bony chestnut, 17 h.h. After cantering on the Heath, Phillip suggested riding up to the Hill. When they got there, he proposed a race around the Warm Kitchen, the level area below the bandstand. Football matches were being played as the two horsemen galloped around the rectangle enclosing three pitches; mud was flung from the hind feet of their mounts about the heads of some of the spectators. Shouts and cries came to Phillip, the usual cockney humour—“Go it, Dick Turpin, you’re winning!—Wrong direction, mates! We’re not the Germans!—Does yer mother know yer out?” etc. etc. Suddenly it seemed idiotic to be riding in such surroundings, as well as flat, a mere imitation of his 1915 self, showing off, so he led the way down the gulley; but turned back half-way, not wanting to be seen in Hillside Road.
They went back the way they had come, down the northern slopes of the Hill to Mill Lane, small and shabby terrace cottages beside the river Randisbourne, where in the past he had walked to and from school, sometimes with Tom Ching. The place was repulsive with cinder path and empty tins and bits of paper and meat bones in front of ricketty doors with paint flaked away, with squares of cardboard and sack-cloth replacing broken window panes. Children in bare feet were as ragged and dirty as in those faraway days, boys with cropped heads and small girls with pale, blank faces—fathers dead, he supposed, the wretched widows existing on small pensions. Passing by the tall brick mill he stopped to watch the water flume rushing under the culvert beside the unseen water-wheel, sighing as he thought of his father in the early days of marriage peering there with mother, hopefully for sight of trout or roach. The brook was dead, dead, dead, with oily sheens on the black water.
They hitched the bridles of their mounts outside the Rat Trap, a small beer-house bearing outside a rotting sign-board with its official name of The Maid of the Mill telling of fairer days before the Kentish stream was Londonised. The beer was dark brown, and tasted of saltpetre, put in to give it a bite; he forced it down, feeling that it was a mistake to have joined up with Desmond, to have tried to bring back the past, to live again as in the old days. In silence they walked their horses up to the Heath, passing the school which he viewed with mixed feelings. It was all too sad: one must never go back.
But tea in the gunners’ mess and a couple of whiskey-sodas afterwards revived his spirits, or rather induced a return to pre-1916 flush, before the break with Desmond over Lily Cornford. He made an attempt to get straight with his friend, who by now surely would be able to see that affair in perspective.
“Did you hear that Keechey was sent to prison for getting some old woman to make a will in his favour, under threats, Des?”
“Yes, Mother wrote and told me at the time.”
Silence. He tried another line. “I didn’t congratulate you, Des, on be
ing engaged, because I understood it wasn’t official yet.”
“It isn’t.”
“As an old friend I’d like to say that I wish you the very best.”
Desmond sighed. He, too, was weighed down by memories. His father had deserted his mother when he was very young, and had another family in Essex. The girl in Yorkshire he had asked to marry him was second-best: he had always to convince himself, by thinking deliberately that she was pure and simple, that he felt any kind of love for her; he had also to convince himself that he did not mind that her people, small village shopkeepers, were dowdy. He had first noticed her for a slight resemblance to Lily Cornford, the only girl he could ever have loved, to whom he had yielded body and soul until Phillip had gone behind his back and, with his plausible ways, stolen Lily. His new girl was no Lily, not thoughtful and understanding like Lily, but—ordinary. Her brain was that of a simple village girl; so he had deliberately forced himself to be simple, too, to see the world through her eyes. Desmond was at times so lonely that he had seriously thought of committing suicide.
“Yes,” he said, in low, languid tones, putting away all feeling, “I thought Keachy going to quod was poetic justice. But all rogues in the end hang themselves by their own rope.”
“‘There but for the grace of God go I’,” laughed Phillip. “Tell me about your lady, Desmond. I’m awfully glad you’re happy.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to tell. She’s just an ordinary country girl. My uncle in Nottingham talks of paying for a farming course for me after the war, and then setting me up on my own somewhere. Pansy has a good business head, and is capable of making a home for a farmer.”
“I am so glad! Yes, farming’s the thing to do after the war. I shall never go back to an office life; in fact, I’ve thought once or twice of emigrating.”
They left the Shop precincts, while Phillip began to feel closer to Desmond; they laughed over Eugene’s adventures, and soon their friendship appeared to have reassumed its pre-1916 flush, so much so that Phillip suggested that they go on to Freddie’s, although he had made up his mind, nearly two years before, never to go there again. And there was dear old Freddie wearing the same faded yellow straw ‘boater’, tipping it to each in turn.
A Test to Destruction Page 38