by Francis King
Chapter Six
From that evening until the following Sunday, when she was next to meet Thomas, Christine found it impossible to concentrate on her work, her music or any other of her interests. Naturally sociable, she had many friends both in and outside the university, but she had lost all desire to see them, so that when any of them telephoned to suggest a meeting, she made some excuse, no matter how implausible. So extreme was her restlessness that many hours of her day were spent in merely wandering the streets. She would enter bookshops and buy nothing, play over records in gramophone shops only to leave empty-handed, and drink tea or coffee alone in one after another of the innumerable cafés where she would once sit talking the afternoon away with what she called her ‘ gang’. Her life had become one of dragging impatience for her next meeting with this man whom – and of whom – she knew so little. But what after that? She was not even sure that he cared for her. And if he did? From such questions her mind would swerve away, retreating once more into the world of obsessive fantasy and unassuaged longing in which she now spent so much of her time. Her love for Ben had been no less powerful; but, serene, patient and level-headed, it had produced none of the same disorientating frenzy.
Once, on one of her long, aimless journeyings, she was surprised to see Horst leaning forward, hands in pockets, to gaze into one of Blackwells windows. She almost veered across the road away from him; but then the hope of hearing some news of Thomas made her halt in her tracks and say hello.
He turned, stared at her, and then merely uttered, ‘You?’
‘Yes. Me. Aren’t you working today?’
He shook his head. ‘I have had flu.’ His bony face was drained of all colour. He was not wearing gloves and, as he took his hands out of his pockets, she noticed the chilblains that had made them swollen and raw.
Involuntarily she exclaimed, ‘Your hands!’ pointing at them.
‘Yes.’ He looked down, as though he too were seeing them for the first time. He frowned. ‘Unfortunately one of my comrades must have borrowed my gloves. For German prisoners the word ‘‘borrow” has a different meaning than for you. Their ‘‘borrow” means ‘‘steal’’. Your Michael often gives Thomas gloves. Very generous. Always they are soon borrowed.’
‘If you’d like to come back with me, I can give you a pair.’
‘You are a very kind lady. But I am afraid that someone might borrow them too. Then – you never see them again!’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. Do please let me give them to you.’
But he said nothing more. He might not have heard her. He turned back to gaze into the shop window in the same rigid stance and with the same intensity of concentration as at her first sighting of him.
She persisted: ‘Oughtn’t you to be in bed?’
‘Tomorrow I start work again. That is what the doctor has decided. I have not been seriously ill. He has said that. And of course an English doctor must be right,’ he added with obvious sarcasm, turning once again to face her.
‘And how is Thomas doing?’
‘He too has chilblains. But he has gloves. For the moment – until some comrade borrows them. Then I think that Michael must give him another pair. On Saturday he will receive six shillings for his work.’
‘That’s awfully little.’
‘Yes. Awfully little.’ He seemed to be imitating her, but she could not be sure.
Yet again surprising herself, she persisted: ‘Is he very tired in the evenings?’
‘Yes. And in the mornings too. He is not used to getting up at five o’clock.’
As he looked at her in the dimming afternoon – occasional passers-by no doubt wondering what two people so different could have to discuss – Christine at last grasped the extent of his contempt and dislike. But why? What had she done to earn it?
‘Thomas tells me he will see you on Sunday. I will send the book with him – the Renaissance Italy.’ Now that her one desire was to hurry off, he seemed to be determined to prolong their conversation. ‘I am glad that Thomas can now play on a good piano. That is very useful for him. He is lucky to have found some English friends.’
‘He’s a good musician. One realises that at once.’
‘Yes, he is one of the lucky ones,’ Horst continued, ignoring her interruption. One of his chilblains had begun to ooze blood and, head lowered, he had started to bind it round with a khaki handkerchief pulled from his trouser pocket. ‘Those that have something to offer – it is okay for them.’
The insidiously hostile tone all at once made her lose her temper. ‘That’s not really fair. My cousin often entertains German prisoners who have little or nothing to offer. What about Klaus?’
‘Klaus?’ He smiled slowly. ‘ I think that your cousin thinks that Klaus has much to offer.’ He gazed into her eyes. ‘ May I say this? I am not impolite? You have beautiful eyes. Large. Dark. Mysterious. Eager’. He gave the last word a vicious emphasis. She thought later that it was if someone had stooped to pet a cat and had then suddenly kicked it.
She took a step away from him. ‘I must go.’
He shrugged. ‘ So – it is goodbye, Miss Holliday.’
She made no reply.
As she walked away an impulse, similar to the one when last she had seen him with Thomas, made her glance back. Erect, rigid and motionless beside the Blackwell’s window, he was staring fixedly in her direction.
Chapter Seven
The next afternoon Christine had her tutorial. All that week she had been battling with some Housman verses, as though to smash open a door locked and bolted against her. She brooded over them late into the night, laboriously substituting one phrase for another that then struck her as even less felicitous. Eventually this joyless chivvying filled her with rage. She had mysteriously lost that capacity for total absorption that had once marked her out as a certain first.
She was prepared for Mrs Dunne’s verdict. ‘Well, this is a perfectly acceptable beta plus. But it’s nothing like your usual work. No distinction. It’s marginally better than last week – that’s about all that can be said in favour of it.’ Leaning across her desk, hands clasped, she scrutinised Christine, much as a doctor might in attempting the diagnosis of a sufferer from a bizarre and puzzling syndrome. ‘What’s come over you?’
Christine, her gaze fixed on the photograph of the amiably sheep-like face of a former principal of the college that stood in a silver frame on the desk, did not answer.
‘What’s come over you?’ The repetition of the question now had an exasperated edge.
‘Nothing.’
‘What about your health?’
‘That’s fine, thank you.’ Still she did not meet her interlocutor’s gaze.
‘Something worrying you?’
‘No, Mrs Dunne. Nothing at all. Thank you.’
Mrs Dunne shook her head and sighed. ‘Well … I suppose even the best of us have our off days. But I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed. I never expected you to fail me two times running.’
It was then that Christine realised that she no longer cared whether she failed this bulky, dowdy woman with a shiny face and fox-coloured hair or not: something had released her from that bondage of almost two years. Mrs Dunne, a shrewd woman, at once sensed this radical change of attitude, so that, as Christine was about to leave the room, she called out: ‘Don’t lose interest, Christine! It might be fatal just at this moment – so soon before your Schools.’ She opened the silver cigarette box before her and took out a Gitane. With stubby, nicotine-stained fingers she lit it and expelled the smoke through distended nostrils. ‘I know one gets restless. I certainly did when I was your age. I even sometimes get restless now and wonder what the hell I’m doing wasting my life! Still … It’s a pity for you to kick over the traces at this precise moment, when a little patience may make all the difference between a distinguished academic career and drudgery as a mistress in some second rate girls’ school.’ She nodded briskly in dismissal. ‘All right. That’ll do for no
w.’
As she walked home Christine wished that she had had the courage to reply: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong, Mrs Dunne. I have absolutely no desire for an academic career, distinguished or undistinguished. I can think of nothing more tedious.’ That was now the truth. But, instead of saying that, she had merely murmured, ‘Thank you, Mrs Dunne,’ and left the room.
Chapter Eight
Just before Thomas was due, Christine mounted to her bedroom and changed her dress, sat before the mirror examining her face, ran a comb over and over again through her hair, touched up her lips, and fingered the three strands of pearls, a twenty-first birthday present from her father, that she had just fastened round her neck. How cheap and silly all this was – as if he were to be coaxed into loving her by the artifice of clothes, make-up and jewellery! Suddenly she felt disgusted with herself. She hurried back to her sitting room, sat down at the piano, and began to practise a Chopin prelude. The notes blurred as she held down the sostenuto pedal for seconds on end; then, no less impulsively, she broke off, jumped up and slammed down the lid.
‘I have brought you this.’ He held out a garden pot from which bristled a small cactus. ‘I wished to bring you some flowers but at this time of year that’s difficult.’
By ‘difficult’ she knew that he meant expensive. Even that rose bought for the ball had cost as much as a glass of sherry at White’s. ‘Oh, a cactus is much more interesting – and lasts much longer. You shouldn’t have bothered, really you shouldn’t.’
‘I must tell you the truth. Someone had thrown it away. I found it outside a café with the rubbish. Sorry.’
‘A lucky find. And a beautiful one. Thank you so much.’ In fact the cactus, looking like a half-blown green balloon covered with vicious, white-tipped spikes, struck her as peculiarly unattractive.
It was clear that he was excited about something but – typically, she was later to realise – he did not at once reveal what it was. In the midst of a desultory conversation, he scrabbled in the breast pocket of his tunic and eventually drew out a soiled and crumpled sheet of paper. He held it out to her. ‘I wish to show you this. You told me to write some music. I’ve obeyed you. See!’
‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’
As he deliberately unfolded the sheet, from time to time putting it on his knee and then ironing it with a hand, she jumped up to peer over his shoulder at the confusion of notes stabbed in on lines obviously drawn without a ruler. She was now very close to him. She had only to lower her face or move a hand for another six inches or so for them to be touching each other, as they had already so often touched each other in her imagination.
‘Difficult for you to read.’ He spoke in his normal voice, with no hint of arousal at their close proximity. ‘I didn’t have time to make a good copy. Today is the day I wash my clothes and I must do that first.’
‘Try it on the piano.’
‘I must explain. It’s a setting for four singers of verses from the psalms. The Bible – you know?’ He began to prop the sheet on the piano stand. It slipped off and both of them stooped to retrieve it. It was Christine who reached it first.
‘Which psalm?’
‘Ah – let me remember! Yes. 337.’ He began to quote the verses in German, until she interrupted him.
‘You forget. I don’t know any German – or hardly any. I have a Bible somewhere over here. I’m afraid I don’t often look at it.’ She crossed to a bookshelf. ‘ Yes, here it is.’ She began to turn the flimsy pages, tongue between teeth. Then she read out: ‘‘‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes, we wept, when we remembered Sion.” Is that it?’
‘Yes. Only the first four first verses.’
‘As far as ‘‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”’
He nodded.
‘Play it for me.’
‘So far I’ve only tried it on the camp piano. Terrible piano, always lots of noise in that room – ‘‘recreation room” they call it. And little time. You really wish me to try?’
‘Yes, please.’
At the end he swung round on the stool. ‘Well?’
She was silent. He turned away from her, head bowed, as though expecting an adverse verdict.
‘It’s good.’
Swinging round on the stool, legs extended, he gave a radiant smile. ‘Truly?’
‘Truly. I was moved. Those verses always move me. But they’ve never moved me so much as now.’
‘Now I must try to find a quartet at the camp to sing it for me.’ He closed the piano lid, folded the sheet of music and put it back in the breast pocket of his tunic.
‘Don’t you want to practise?’
‘What about you? I don’t want to disturb you.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I have some knitting I must finish. But perhaps it worries you to have someone in the room? I can always go and sit with Margaret or go up to my bedroom.’
‘No, no.’ He crossed over to her chair and fingered the half-completed sock that she had just produced from her knitting bag. ‘You’re an expert! So even.’ He smiled. ‘For your young man?’
‘No. For my father. He doesn’t like bought socks. My mother used to knit his socks for him, now I have to do that. I have no young man.’ On an impulse she then added: ‘He’s dead. Shot down over Dresden.’
‘Ah!’ Then he muttered ‘I’m sorry, very sorry.’
As she returned to the knitting, the ball of wool fell off her lap and rolled across the floor to his feet. ‘Damn!’ she exclaimed. He stooped, picked it up and handed it to her. In silence he returned to the piano, drew out the stool and began to practise some of the tediously repetitive exercises that had deterred her from becoming the outstanding player that she might otherwise have been. As he played, totally absorbed in his task, her eyes constantly strayed from her knitting to his hunched back and half-averted face. Although both the windows were closed and the fire had spluttered into life at ten o’clock that morning, she unaccountably felt one shiver and then another shake her body. Soon she had dropped a stitch. Abandoning all pretence of working on the sock, she put it down on her lap and gazed now at the flickering radiants, now at the back of his head, and now at the reflection of his hands in the piano lid.
Eventually, overcome by restlessness, she got up and crossed to the nearer window. From there, leaning against its ledge, she could see three-quarters of his face: the high cheekbones, their pristine gleam betraying that they had been shaved just before he had set out on his visit; the slightly too prominent chin; and the brown hair dipping in an untidy lock across his forehead. Would he become conscious of her scrutiny? Would he look round?’ She had always believed that people looked round if one stared hard enough and long enough at the backs of their heads. For many minutes, one hand clutching the dusty rep curtain and her spine pressed against the unyielding ledge of the window, she stood there, willing him to do so. But there was no response. His lips were moving as he counted to himself: ‘One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.’ His forehead was tensed in self-exacting concentration. She looked down and watched the cumbrous army boot pressing on the pedal. All at once she was noticing trivial details that would remain extraordinarily vivid in her memory for many days to come: the way his long-sleeved khaki pullover was frayed at the wrists; the grease stain on the collar of his battledress blouse; perceptible lines of stubble below his chin and one ear, which, in contrast to the shiny smoothness of his cheeks, must have escaped his razor.
Outside, huge flakes of snow were whirling down like confetti in the boisterous wind. Prematurely it was growing dark. Christine noticed how Thomas had to screw up his eyes to read the music set out before him. She crossed over to the standard lamp and switched it on. At her touch, the green parchment shade tilted sideways, as it now so often did. She made no attempt to right it.
‘Thank you.’ He did not look up.
She meant nothing to him. She felt certain of it now. Being kind and sentimental – as she had r
ead those verses from the psalms, had she not felt a sudden ache in her throat, as though something pebble-like were lodged there? – she had felt sorry for him, and for that he had been grateful. Among so much indifference and even hostility, her interest and sympathy must have been welcome to him. Besides, he could use her piano and, as he had told her during his last visit, music was now all that he had to care about. Yes, yes, he was grateful to her – as one would be grateful to someone who pulled one out of an icy river in which one was slowly drowning; but it was not hard to buy the gratitude of those poor wretches: a cup of tea, a slice of cake, the loan of a book, even a friendly word would do the trick. She had his gratitude and the friendship that followed it, of course she did. But love? No. Certainly no.
Once she had reached that bitter conclusion, she went back to her knitting. Finding that she had failed to follow the elaborate Shetland Island pattern correctly, she began, with exasperated perseverance, to unravel it. Now that, in her own mind, there could be no doubt, she accepted the situation with a pain that was not merely a relief but almost a pleasure. Perhaps it was better that he did not reciprocate her love since, if he did, what possible hope could there be for them? But having accepted this consolation, she then at once thrust it away from her. Better to make the descent with him over the cliff’s edge than to turn back to the cosy world that offered her a place next to Mrs Dunne on the Somerville staff, an increasingly ‘distinguished’ career, and marriage to one of the undergraduates who might even now be asking himself why he had not seen Christine for such an age.
She crossed over to the mantelpiece for a cigarette and remained leaning against it. Having blown out a smoke-ring, she extended a hand and ran a forefinger up and down the cactus. The contact with its resilient green flesh was faintly nauseating. ‘Damn!’ One of the spikes had lodged itself in her forefinger. At the exclamation Thomas looked round; then, seeing what had happened, he rushed over.