by Rosie Thomas
‘Get in the boozer with us Saturday night and we’ll find yer a tart,’ one of the others roared. ‘We’ll lose yer cherry for yer, won’t we, lads? Just as long as we can watch, mind.’
Felix had nothing to contribute. He was popular enough for no one to rib him about it, any more than they would have done about the colour of his skin, except to joke mildly about it, but one evening around the Blanco tins someone asked him, ‘You got a girl, Lemoine? Must have, a looker like you.’
‘Bet they get their knickers off and wave them at you, don’t they? All those old wives’ tales about what your lot can offer …’
‘There’s a girl, yes,’ Felix said, to cut off the flow.
‘What’s her name, then?’
‘Julia.’
Sitting beside him on the sofa, watching the incandescent crimson of the gas fire, Julia laughed.
‘I should have sent a photograph for your locker.’
‘One of Miss Matilda in full regalia would have been more impressive.’
The worst, the very worst social crime that stalked the barrack-rooms was to be queer. It was the most pointed accusation, the direst insult in the soldiers’ extensive repertoire of abuse. ‘Fucking queer’ was the last epithet in a confrontation before the fighting broke out.
Felix heard it all. He also knew that most of his colleagues adopted their attitudes of swaggering potency more from fear of being thought effeminate than from real sexuality. There was rumoured to be enough bromide in the NAAFI tea to dampen any genuine ardour. He thought, with relieved amusement, that he certainly felt none himself.
Amongst the regular NCOs there was a stores corporal referred to by everyone as Maisie. Maisie was very slightly camp, but he also had a sharp enough tongue and enough authority for the nickname only ever to be used out of his earshot. Felix had looked at Maisie once or twice, but only for long enough to speculate on how the corporal managed to exist in this society if he really was queer. He was an ungainly little man with a red, lumpy face and hair cut so short that it shadowed his skull with colourless bristles.
One Saturday evening Felix was in the ablutions, shaving.
On Saturday nights almost every soldier had an off-barracks pass and the camp emptied itself for several hours. Felix preferred to stay put. Solitude was a rare luxury in the overcrowded huts and he used the little, precious time to read or to draw. On this Saturday he had cadged a tin of boiling water from the mess and carried it over to the ablutions. The water there was almost always tepid or cold, and tonight he was looking forward to the comfortable ritual of a peaceful shave. He was whistling softly as he rubbed the soap into a lather over his cheeks. Water hissed and dripped in the overhead pipes and the steam from his can of hot water clouded the dim fragment of mirror, He rubbed it clear with his wrist, and reflected over his shoulder he saw Maisie. The corporal was standing in the doorway. As Felix watched him he closed the door quietly and looked up and down the length of the ablutions room. The doors of all the cubicles stood open, and there was silence except for the amplified dripping of water. He came across and stood at the next basin, looking at Felix’s soapy face in the mirror.
‘Best bloody time of the week, eh?’ Maisie chuckled.
Felix nodded and deliberately carved the first path through the white foam with his razor.
Then Maisie reached out and put his hand on Felix’s backside.
It was a gesture so completely natural and direct that Felix almost responded to it. He put his razor down and it clanked awkwardly against the tin basin. He looked into Maisie’s eyes in the mirror. Their expression was imploring, shaded with defiance. The man’s hand moved appreciatively, cupping Felix’s buttock under the thick khaki. Felix looked down. He knew every crack and pockmark in the brick floor. He had scrubbed each brick, his shadow lengthened by the naked bulbs overhead as he worked, ready for inspections. He followed one particular crack that ran right across the floor to the urinals. As his eyes reached the wall, without warning, fear spilled and washed all through his body. It gripped and twisted in the pit of his stomach and it cut off the breath in his chest. He tore the towel from round his neck and rubbed the soap off his face. As he reached the door he heard Maisie say coldly, ‘Who are you trying to fool? It’s as plain as the nose on your fucking face, laddie.’
Felix didn’t look round.
He reached his own section of the hut and sat down on his bed. He rubbed his face mechanically with the towel. He was thinking, Is it so obvious, then?
And as he grappled with the question he realised that for the first time, in full consciousness, he was admitting the whole truth to himself.
Felix sat on his bed for a long time, unmoving. He knew that Maisie wouldn’t come looking for him here. When his thoughts were orderly again and the fear had gone, Felix was left with a last, unwelcome realisation. The red-faced corporal’s touch had aroused him physically. Felix stood up. He went quickly across to the recreation block and into the washroom there. He locked himself into one of the stalls and dealt with himself, using short, vicious strokes.
Afterwards, he went into the recreation hall and found a group of men who were confined to barracks, playing cards. They greeted him cheerfully, and Felix sat down to join in the game.
Maisie didn’t single Felix out again, but whenever he saw the corporal he asked himself the silent question: Is it so obvious?
By the second half of their sixteen-week basic training programme, Felix and the rest of his intake were more skilled at getting through the work assigned to them, and the NCOs’ withering attention had passed to the new recruits coming up behind them. There was more time for off-duty pursuits, and the possibility of friendships outside the immediate barrack-room circle.
Felix met David Mander because they both used a little box in the recreation block officially known as the hobbies room, although it contained no hobbies equipment except for a crumbling dartboard fixed to one wall. The light in the room was good because it had windows all down one side, and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons Felix used to sit and draw at a metal table. In camp he mostly drew London scenes, from memory, filling them with obsessive detail. He drew Berwick Street market and Shaftesbury Avenue, and the square shaded by plane trees with the windows of the flat showing over the tops of the trees. Drawing the places seemed to bring him closer to being there.
In the swarming world of the camp Felix had never even seen Mander before. He was just a silent figure at a table at the other side of the room, someone who made accurate but uninteresting models of famous buildings out of scraps of balsawood. They began to nod to each other, and one afternoon Mander strolled over and stared at Felix’s drawing.
‘That’s very good,’ he said, sounding surprised. He had a drawling, affected voice that sounded almost shocking after the rough obscenities of the other conscripts. Felix glanced at him, irritated. Mander had black hair and a red mouth. ‘Better than that rubbish, anyway,’ he added, nodding at his own model.
‘Why do you do it?’ Felix asked. Mander grinned, showing his teeth. He looked pleased with himself.
‘I started doing it at school. Important to have something to concentrate on besides rugger. Model-making was the least taxing option. But it’s curiously compulsive, you know. I’ll probably be doing it into my dotage. God, what a prospect.’
He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered over to the window. The Saturday afternoon inter-unit football matches were in progress.
‘Look at ’em all,’ Mander sighed. ‘Mud and blood. Shall we go across and get a cup of tea?’
Felix closed up his sketch-pad. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, without enthusiasm.
That afternoon he learned that David Mander was a public school boy from Highgate in north London. His mother was a doctor and his father was a criminal barrister. Their son was a clever and precocious only child. Felix hadn’t intended to like him, but the company of someone as sophisticated and subtle-minded as David was an undeniable pleasure after the
four-letter interests of his own squad.
‘Going for a pint tonight?’ David asked casually.
‘Could do,’ Felix responded.
They fell into the habit, after the first evening, of spending their off-duty hours together. They talked about books and films and music, about their own lives and about London. It was glaringly obvious to Felix that they never talked about girls, and the common-currency topic of sex was never raised. It was equally obvious that neither of them ever commented, either, on their lack of interest in everyone else’s obsession.
May turned into June, and they were in the last month of their basic training. The north-country evenings were long and light, and it was a pleasure instead of a routine punishment to be outside. The shaggy majesty of the Yorkshire moorlands and the milky sweetness of the air were a revelation to Felix, brought up a city child. David’s parents had a weekend cottage in Suffolk.
David announced that he was saving his pay for the leave that came at the end of basic training, so instead of going to pubs they took buses up on to the moors and walked, following the Ordnance Survey maps borrowed from the barracks library.
One evening they came down a long hill to a stone bridge over a stream. Felix took off his pack and they leaned over the stone parapet. Brown water curled and slid underneath them, the ripple of it making the only sound. There was a stone barn on the other side of the stream. As they watched, the sun slid behind it, a coppery disc flattened by the black line of the roof, and then a semicircle, then no more than a flare of gold. The shadow of the barn turned violet and Felix was thinking, If I could paint that. He turned to look at David and saw his red mouth. David opened his mouth, perhaps to say something, and a tiny glint of light caught on the moist lining. Instantly Felix felt his otherness. It seemed magical that a separate, moving, breathing individual was here in the faint purple dusk. It was the most perfectly erotic moment he had ever experienced.
David was frozen into stillness. It was Felix who put his hand out. He curled it around the nape of David’s neck and felt the stubble of cropped hair under his fingers. Somewhere, no more than a flicker over their heads, a hat rose and fell like a black leaf. Felix bent his head to David’s. They kissed, and Felix tasted the conjunction of coarseness and softness, dissolving moisture, familiarity and perfect difference. David’s face against his own and his tongue, searching Felix out. Felix lifted his head and groaned. It came from his heart and his bowels, a sound he had never thought that he could make.
It was David who said, ‘Let’s go into the barn.’
He unlatched the door and it opened without protest. It was grey inside the barn, with twilight and a thick ruff of dust. But against one raw stone wall there was a heap of hay, left over from the winter feeding of the moorland sheep. David and Felix lay down in the hay.
It was dark outside when Felix groaned again, and he called out too, shouting David’s name. David put his hands over his mouth, silencing him. There might have been ears in the darkness.
Afterwards, in an odd silence, they brushed the hay from their clothes and hair. They dressed themselves and went out, glancing up at the first star. They sat on the parapet of the bridge and smoked. Felix was calm, and he felt as invincible as the stars.
David broke the silence. ‘Have you done that before?’ he asked.
Felix remembered that, at the beginning, he had been sure that he wouldn’t like him. He didn’t know what he felt now, except relief, like a wide, flat sea. ‘No,’ Felix said. ‘Maisie tried it on, once, in the ablutions. I ran away.’ David laughed. ‘Have you?’
‘At school,’ David answered slowly. ‘Everyone did. But I had the impression I was more serious than most of them. I fell in love, with captains of the Eleven and with angelic, dirty little boys. But not like that. Not like what we’ve just done.’
Don’t fall in love with me, Felix silently warned him. Aloud, he said, ‘I wondered, when Maisie tried it, how obvious I seemed to him. I didn’t even really know. Bloody stupid, isn’t it?’
David looked at him, his heavy-lidded eyes wide open.
‘As obvious as I was to you.’
That was the only answer he would get, Felix understood. It was invisible, and yet as clear as the features of his face. He looked at his watch.
‘Christ. We’re going to be late back.’
They threw their cigarette ends away. Felix always remembered that they made two crimson arcs before they fell into the water. They half ran down over the next fold of moorland to the main road. They thumbed a ride from a farmer in a pick-up, who obligingly made a detour and dropped them at the camp gates with time to spare.
A week later, David Mander was notified that he had been selected as a potential officer. After basic training he and the other POs would enter a special course, and if he passed he would progress to a War Office Selection Board. Successful candidates passed on to the officer training school at Eaton Hall.
Felix, with most of the rest of his squad, was bound for the Royal Tank Regiment. David was moved out of the squaddies’ barracks into more comfortable accommodation with the rest of the intake’s officer material. His air of being pleased with himself intensified, but he also seemed embarrassed by the divide that had opened between Felix and himself.
‘You’d make a bloody sight better officer than me,’ he remarked.
Felix didn’t bother to disagree. ‘But you don’t see many black officers in the British Army, old boy, do you?’
David chewed one corner of his full lip. ‘Do you mind that?’
Felix laughed. ‘I couldn’t care less.’
It was the truth. He had no desire to be an officer, whereas David clearly did. He had no feeling for the army except a desire to survive it, and he thought that survival would probably be easier in the undemanding company of his barrack-room mates.
Abruptly David said, ‘I thought I’d use my leave for a few days’ camping and fishing in Scotland. D’you want to come?’
Felix thought about it. He had planned to go back to London, to the flat, because he had nothing else to do. Back to Julia and Mattie. Suddenly the memory of their clannish femaleness seemed thoroughly alien. He didn’t want to go there, not yet. ‘Thank you,’ he said to David.
They took David’s pup tent and a few clothes in rucksacks, and hitchhiked to the west of Scotland. It was the beginning of July and every day was cloudless and still. Felix lay in a boat and watched David fishing, or they sat on empty beaches and looked at the sea, or walked for miles through the heather. They ate in pubs, or Felix fried fish on the Primus or a driftwood fire. And at night they lay together under the green ridge of the tent.
At the end of ten days Felix felt the same calmness and strength that he had experienced outside the barn on the moors. He was grateful to David for having made him a present of it. No more than that. They were separate, after all. David was so sure that he was following the right path; Felix was certain of nothing except, now, himself.
When the end of their holiday came David went to officer training school and Felix returned to his unit. They didn’t see one another again but Felix thought of him, sometimes, when a movement of someone’s head or the way a hand gestured touched the same chord that David had sounded on the bridge over the Yorkshire stream.
Some of this, the bones of it, Felix told Julia while she sat watching the fire and the light faded beyond the window.
‘And now?’ Julia asked.
‘I have to find myself a job, of course. Begin a real life.’ Felix was laughing but Julia stared at him. The idea came to her fully formed, as obvious and immediate as all the best ideas. ‘You’ll have to come and work for George.’
One of the young men had left just before Christmas, under a mysterious cloud. Felix had languages, he had his experience from Mr Mogridge’s friend, and he had all the aptitude. In every direction. He would suit George Tressider perfectly. For Julia it was one of those rare flashes of insight in which other people’s paths seem clearly se
t out, smooth and comfortable for them to follow.
If only, she thought, forlornly and selfishly, if only it was as easy for me.
‘We’ll see.’ Felix responded to her suggestion with what seemed to Julia to be infuriating negligence.
In fact Felix was looking at her, seeing the sharpened angles of her face. Julia had grown up, and she was more beautiful than she had been, but she was unhappy. Yet she had listened to his own confession, accepting it, somehow understanding that she was offering Jessie’s acceptance as well as her own. She was sensitive, as well as generous.
Felix put his arm round her shoulder and she rested her face gratefully against his. She felt fragile, and soft. That was all.
‘I love you,’ Felix said.
Julia nodded. She was suddenly afraid that she might cry, and she was trying not to let herself cry these days.
‘Is it still Josh?’ he asked.
She nodded again.
Felix held on to her, wondering how to make her see differently. ‘Do you know that I was in love with him too?’
She jerked around to look at him then, full in the eye, and he glimpsed fury and disgust in her face. There was a second’s silence, and then she began to laugh. It wasn’t comfortable laughter, but it was something.
‘I survived it,’ he told her lightly. ‘And so can you. Don’t carry a candle for him for ever. There are all kinds of other people. There’s Bliss …’
Julia cut him short there. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ His hands were still on her shoulders. She looked down at them, frowning a little as if she was wondering how they had come there. Gently he let go of her. They were friends, but there were still defences.
‘So what will you do?’ he persisted.