by Henry Green
‘Not for me.’
‘Really and truly?’
‘No, it hasn’t. What were you before the war?’
‘Didn’t I ever tell you? I was a sort of superior filing clerk, that’s all, in my uncle’s business. I hated it. They sold umbrellas and walking sticks.’
‘Well you understand Dy, that is we, decided Christopher, that’s my son,’ and as always, he felt pompous when he brought out that he was a parent, ‘we made up our minds he ought not to stay in London in case there were air raids, so we hoicked the old chap down to the country, and Dy felt she ought to stay there with him. He doesn’t cost any more, in fact it’s an economy. But I can’t get rid of our house and it’s not the same when she does come up, I can’t thank why. So there you are,’ he ended lamely. He had shied away again. It was too intimate. He knew well enough the only change must be in himself, that the alteration in his circumstances, by which he was more alone every evening on leave, had made him restless. He imagined, as has been described, a great deal going on all round between girls and men. What he might be missing haunted him. ‘And I enjoyed my job,’ he went on, getting back to firm ground, ‘I still look in there on the days I’m off, to keep them sweet. They make up my salary. I’m going sick for a few days to help get out the dividend warrants.’
‘When?’
The moment she asked Hilly told herself she was a fool. She could not think what had made her. He would realise she was interested, and really she never even considered him. As she formulated these words to herself she knew she was lying. It gave her the old, the remembered, small thrill. But he had not noticed. He went on to tell the date their year ended, and how they prided themselves on holding their Annual Meeting within three days of the books being closed.
‘Well, you’re quite right to keep in with them.’
‘I’ve got to. But I say,’ he said, ‘I wonder how many of these people here are going to bed together later?’
‘I don’t know, Dickie,’ she replied brightly, thinking I’m sure most of them are. But you aren’t, not with him my dear, she told herself, oh dear no, because it makes you quite sick to think of it with him, though you know what you are, after a few drinks, but not even then, she concluded, knowing she probably lied again.
They had not been out eating together at night before. So that they had never until this moment shared the spectacle, dreary, commonplace and sad, of dim lit faces leaning two by two towards each other beside pink-shaded table lamps, solid, rosy, not so young couples endlessly talking, talking within their little coral pools, in half whispers, waited on by those hopeless, splay-footed, black-coated waiters.
‘It’s a bit disgusting when you look at most of them,’ she said.
‘It sure is,’ he agreed, ‘but there you are. Piper for instance.’
‘No, I know you’re hopelessly out about him and Howells. Honestly, they’re past it. Besides he’s married.’
‘Well a few weeks ago you said that made no difference, d’you remember, when you were twitting me with going up to that Swedish girl’s flat.’
‘Was I?’ she said, remembering perfectly, ‘I forget.’
‘I believe you see a lot in very little, Hilly. I expect you made a great deal out of my trying to help Ilse and Prudence when it was entirely innocent.’
‘I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother,’ she said, looking huffy.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you would.’
‘That’s quite all right. I might have, you know,’ she said and smiled, because she felt she had been a bit rude really. ‘No, but if you want me to tell you Richard, quite a lot happened about them, and is still happening, but not with you. Does that make sense?’
‘No, it doesn’t, and I can’t believe it.’
‘It is true, cross my heart.’
‘Well then, what?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘You must. You can’t not tell me, it’s unfair not to.’
‘I really am sorry, I know it’s too tiresome, but honestly I can’t, I promised. Look,’ she said, and drained her glass, holding it out to be filled again as though she had decided, ‘we haven’t finished what we were on with about the war. I don’t believe there is anyone who hasn’t enjoyed the change.’ She put this to him because she was curious to know more about his wife.
‘Of course,’ he replied, content to talk of himself, ‘it was a great relief to have done with being polite to Hitler, and let go at last. The summer was an awful strain. But what I miss is family life. One of the troops said to me about his small daughter in the last war, “I was away at sea most of the time, so missed all her pretty years.” I never really used to give Christopher a thought, but I do now. D’you see?’
‘Yes, and it must be horrible for you with your wife away,’ she said, wondering is it?
‘It is,’ he said truthfully but, as he spoke, a sensation that he was being false attacked him. He thought he had made himself sound pathetic.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No, no, I’m all right. Anyway, we both decided about her staying in the country. It’s mean of you not to share Arthur Piper and Mary.’
‘I never said I wouldn’t,’ she replied.
‘Then do tell me.’
Because of the fuss she had made she decided she would. She said, severely:
‘It’s simply this. Her only daughter ran away with a soldier. They were married, and she’s had a baby. But he treats her badly, and now she has come home. The sad part is that she has gone a bit silly in the head. Something to do with having the child. And Mary has gone up to Doncaster to see the husband. Old Piper doesn’t come into things at all.’
‘Probably the worst thing she could have done,’ he said.
‘I know, but I couldn’t make her change. You know what old people are.’
‘You’re telling me. Well, I must say that’s very dull.’
‘What made you think the old Pied Piper had anything to do with her?’ she asked.
‘Is that what you call him? Oh, Hilly, I don’t know, he got her the job, didn’t he, and someone was saying they’d overheard Pye make some remark about Arthur being the cause of her not turning up.’
Why doesn’t he take me some place where we can dance, she thought, but explained what had occurred over the daily return of personnel at the substation, how Pye covered Mary for a day, and posted her sick after that, which seemed a shame, and how Pye feared Piper would tell on him if he did otherwise. ‘As a matter of fact I heard Peewee thought you might have let them know up at Number Fifteen about his being adrift himself. You see, he imagined, once, you had something to do with Trant turning the station out.’
She was, of course, hopelessly wrong in this. She was confusing the episode of Richard’s bed with the fact that Trant had caught Peewee absent when on duty. Roe, however, because his relations with Pye were awkward, had no alternative but to take her assertion at face value.
‘What me,’ he asked, horrified, ‘how could I?’
‘I can’t imagine, but you know what they are.’
‘But what would I have to do with Trant?’
‘I shouldn’t think of it again. I was only telling you as I heard it. In any case, you know who really must have told the DO, why, the old Pied Piper. Now that he’s got this job redecorating Trant’s quarters up at Number Fifteen, I’m sure he repeats everything. Still, how he can have got to find out that Peewee was going off early is a bit of a dark mystery, isn’t it?’ she asked, though she had some days ago discovered the way she thought he had found out.
Richard said:
‘He mentioned nothing about Christopher?’
‘How could he? Pye d’you mean? No, of course not.’
‘Well, it isn’t exactly of course not,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean?’
At that he came out with the story of Christopher’s abduction. She was so interested she forgot to slide her glass forward to be filled. At the end of hi
s tale he leant over to pour more of the dark, tale-telling liquid in.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘how perfectly terrible for your poor wife.’
He ordered another bottle. He went on:
‘And now that man is trying to set the station against me, because his sister walked off with my child. As if that was my fault. Saying that I tipped Trant off about him.’
‘No, Richard, he didn’t,’ and she reached to put a hand on his arm, ‘it was only talk.’
He drank up his glass of wine. He said angrily, ‘where’s that damned waiter?’ In his own way he became dramatic in the Howells manner. ‘I’d like to kill him. As if I’d lower myself by putting the squeak in, to sneak. I knew it would be hopeless the moment they put me in his station. I hate the lot of them. Damn.’
‘They don’t hate you,’ she said, telling a white lie, ‘you’re very popular with the men.’
‘I wish now I’d gone into the Army. I could have got a commission any day. Only the other morning, as I came along in the bus, an old lady said in front of everyone when she saw the ridiculous uniform, “Army dodgers, that’s what you are.”’
‘Richard, you know that’s silly. Who cares what they think? I told you about Ginger Garton, my friend who is one of the Chiefs. Well, he is all for Auxiliaries against the Regulars, and they wouldn’t let him go back to the Navy, they told him he had more important work to do in this Service. So there.’
‘Well, well, I suppose I’m being ridiculous.’
‘I don’t think so at all, and it’s most frightfully important that there should be men like you in this, I mean who are different. Look, has the skipper ever mentioned Christopher again?’
‘Only once, the first night in the pub. I say, I never knew old Piper was working on Trant’s quarters. It’s quite an idea his passing bits on. Very awkward too. As far as I can tell they’ve never heard up there about the skipper’s sister. Suppose the hermit, as they call him, tells Trant, what d’you think?’
‘Honestly, I don’t see they can do anything to the skipper now, it’s all over and done with.’
‘I’d like to see them try. I’d have something to say about that. Christopher has got nothing to do with the Brigade. And Pye’s a decent enough old stick when all’s said and done.’ She breathed again.
‘But you must promise you won’t tell anyone,’ she said, ‘about Peewee being caught adrift, I mean, it’s not supposed to be known.’
‘Why is everything so secret in our place, I can’t see why?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, ‘but the more you get to know them, the Fire Brigade I mean, the more terrified they are of letting things out. They seem to be every minute spying on each other, and telling.’
‘As if there was any Auxiliary would bother to take tales back. Why,’ he said, voicing a common grievance, ‘they won’t even give us the same training as they get when they join, in case we become more efficient than they are, and so rob them of their jobs. It’s a farce.’ But he was wrong. There were already men who, for no apparent advantage, were more than willing to talk.
Only that morning old Piper, who had volunteered to whitewash the ceiling in what was to be the Trants’ bedroom, by which he hoped to touch Trant for half a dollar, took that opportunity.
‘I been wondering if I might make so bold, sir,’ he said, ‘as to put a question? Now in a certain substation there’s a woman that works there, I could give the name, but no names, no pack drill, no nothing, now this ’ere woman’s a married woman if you get my meanin’, an’ she’s in trouble with ’er married daughter, same as can ’appen any place. ’Er son-in-law’s no manner of good. Now a certain sub officer ’as been told by ’er all the roundabouts of it, as the sayin’ is, but ’e’s taken no notice, though the trouble’s in ’er ’ead like the toothache. Till she goes, just like that, off to see ’im, the son-in-law I’ve mentioned, an’ what does the sub officer do, why ’e straightaway seeks to send ’er up adrift. What’s ’er position, sir, what I’m gettin’ at is, ’ow does she stand in circumstances like I’m referrin’ to?’
‘What’s the officer in charge at the substation done about ’er?’
‘Nothin’, like I told you, sir.’
‘But there’s a return made to us up ’ere every morning of ’ow many’s on duty.’
‘Ah, now I’m getting you. This ’ere return you speak about, I ’appened to catch sight of it on the two mornin’s.’ In this way he betrayed that he was speaking of his own substation. ‘The first said she was on duty and the second one, that would be the next that was sent on the morrer, gives her as absent without leaf.’
‘Well, there’s rules and regulations in every job. You’re an old army man, is that right? Well, you’ve seen the King’s Regulations?’ ‘To be sure the King’s Regulations,’ said Piper. ‘We’ve got nothing so complicated in the Brigade,’ said Mr Trant, ‘but, by God, you men ought to make yourselves acquainted with what there is, and these sub officers should ’ave them off by ’eart. It’s their living, it’s not as if they was playin’ at it like so many of your posh Auxiliaries.’ Oh, oh, Piper cried out beneath his breath, posh is what you are now, then, you old bastard, doing ’is dirty ceiling what’ll take four hours for ’alf a bloody dollar if you’re lucky. ‘That is their livin’,’ he echoed aloud, servile. Trant walked off.
In substations the men had no work given them after fourteen hundred hours. One of the reasons which led Piper to volunteer to carry out decorating for the District Officer was that, accustomed in peacetime to an eight-hour day when he was not unemployed, in wartime he could not stand the idleness with which Englishmen begin hostilities. Now they were settled in their new quarters they had nothing to do. The idea was that they were to be kept fresh for the night raid which never came. At the same time they were forbidden to get their heads down, to go to sleep, before twenty-two hundred hours. Not everyone could afford to play cards. There were many who would not read. Thus each afternoon was ripe for gossip and crawling to the fireman and sub officer, ripe because these two men had almost unlimited power to make an individual’s life comfortable or otherwise in these small substations.
That very afternoon there was a man closeted with Pye.
‘Yes, I reckon it’s quite a romance,’ he was saying of Hilly and Richard. ‘They’re meeting tonight on their leave day.’
‘Champagne, jazz and all the rest of it, eh,’ said Pye, the hypocrite. ‘Champagne pressed out of the skin of the grape by the feet of starving peasant women, boy. Drunk to the accompaniment of music made by tubercular niggers tempted away from the climate their bodies is acclimatised to by luxury wages. It’s a knockout.’
‘It certainly is.’
‘And yet if we ’ad the money,’ he said, ‘we’d do just the very same. It’s ’uman nature, but saying as much is not to make out that it should be allowed, it shouldn’t, it ought to be stopped. Yet I don’t blame ’er, I don’t blame any woman. If she can get ’im to spend some of the dough ’e won’t ’ave much longer, when we get this new world they say we’re fighting for,’ he sneered, ‘then I say let ’er.’
‘Roe’s a dopey bastard, though.’
‘You’ve said it, mate. A dopey bastard’s correct. Why, d’you know what ’e did the other morning? You wouldn’t ’ardly credit the thing unless you knew ’im. It can’t be three days since I read out that order about not smoking before thirteen hundred hours. You was there. Well, I go to put the bells down for a drill the following morning, and there’s Savoury, one of the ruling class, so called, riding the front of the taxi as number one with a fag on. I shouts to ’im, ’put that fag out.’ What does ’e do? The miserable so an’ so stubs it on the coachwork, it was the tool box actually which ’ad been simonized up the day previous. Now what can you make of men like that?’
Later, Roe squashed his cigarette out on a large china fig leaf. It was warm in the half dark of the club he had taken Hilly on to, lights were low from table lamps with violet shades, d
ark palm leaves canopied each girl’s bare, sapphire gleaming head; naked, fat round shoulders were chalk white; the blues negroes played were to foreigners in a foreign land of the still farther south which, with simplicity, became everyone’s longing in this soft evening aching room; bottles on tables held stifling moonlight from that south; cares melted; still they sang, played in the band, or one played alone, or it was all piano and drum while couples danced no longer in farewell but, on the part of young beautiful ladies, with the assurance that there were weeks and even months of more nights still to live, and chew, and love not very much, before it might be they would have to be dug out of the heaped ruins.
He told her the light reminded him of that first guard he had done, when, coming back with Shiner, they found cockroaches being raced before an audience drenched in deep light from a gentian bulb. Now, with excitement, so that his throat was constricted because of her nearness, fat, soft, and soft eyed, with sea flower fingered hands, and to bring the talk round to the two of them, he asked what gossip she had in return for Christopher’s story. He expected she would refuse. At first he was surprised, then, for a little, disappointed, when she began at once on a tale of Pye.
She had been wafted off, was enchanted not entirely by all she had had to drink and which was released inside her in a glow of earth chilled above a river at the noisy night harvest of vines, not altogether by this music, which, literally, was her honey, her feeling’s tongue, but as much by sweet comfort, and the compulsion she felt here to gentleness that was put on her by these couples, by the blues, by wine, and now by this murmuring, night haunted, softness shared. Thus, not caring, neither did she notice if she spoke the truth, she began to tell. She told so as to bring in, most particularly, everything ever so closely back to their two selves.
‘Well, darling, it’s like this. Oh isn’t what they are playing a wonderful number? You were very naughty when you introduced Peewee to those two harpies. The thing is, he’s not ready yet for things like that. I suppose if I really tell you you’ll think the oddest things about me.’ At this point she gulped some more champagne. ‘Oh, I think this is a divine place,’ she broke off.