by Francis King
‘Oh, you’ll have to pay more than that for them in these days of inflation.’
‘Something’s worrying you. Tell me.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘No. Do tell me. It may help. Or perhaps I can help.’
He spoke so gently and his sympathy was so manifest, his plain, irregular features expressing only the desire somehow to come to her aid, that she began to tell him not merely about Klaus, for whom her anxiety was still uppermost in her mind, but also, eventually, about Thomas. Then she broke off. ‘What has come over me? I’m telling you things I’ve been reluctant to admit even to myself.’
‘I’m flattered. And glad.’
‘Perhaps the whole thing rather shocks you?’
‘Shocks me? What does shock me is that you’ve put that question. Why should I be shocked?’
‘Well, you were one of their prisoners, weren’t you?’
‘Yes. And it wasn’t much of a picnic. I must admit that. But,’ – he put out a hand and began to fidget with the cruet stand between them – ‘after knowing so well what that sort of life can do to a chap, I’d hate to condemn even a Jerry to it. Because, you know, from my own experience at least, the real fun begins not while you’re a prisoner but when it all ought to be behind you. Through the days of confinement something keeps you going – don’t ask me what. But when you come out, you suddenly realise just how exhausted – not merely mentally but physically – you are.’ He halted, and then pushed on. ‘You know, sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever get back to normal.’
‘Oh, you’ve got back to it already.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s like being in hospital for a major operation. Your body braces itself for the ordeal, and later you appear to have got through it unscathed. But then you go home and your convalescence starts. And you realise how weak and listless – and desperate – you really are.’
She gazed at him, at a loss what to say.
He shifted, then picked up his glass of draft cider and gulped at it. I can’t pretend to be able to advise. But this – for what it is worth – is what I think. It may seem tough to you, but I have to tell it as I see it. If you do at last get married – if that does somehow happen – then don’t imagine that’ll be an end of your problems. It won’t. There’ll be other problems – perhaps even worse ones.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not trying to discourage you, far from it. But, unlike Gower, this is something I do know far more about than most people. Of course, if he has you waiting for him, through thick and thin, then that’ll be more than half the battle. But even so …’
‘You’re finding it difficult now, aren’t you?’
He rested his short, nicotine-stained fingers on the edge of the tablecloth and stared down at them. Then he looked up. ‘Yep. I don’t know why it is. When they amputated the leg, I sometimes think that they also amputated some essential part of me up here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘But then, perhaps it all has nothing whatever to do with the war. Perhaps the war has become merely a convenient excuse for me. I suppose I was always a bit of a drifter. And the fact that my father was a successful insurance agent made the drifting easy and comfortable for me. I can’t stick to things. I just give up.’ He grinned. ‘This essay now. I came back from London with the intention of doing it. But I know now that I won’t. Tomorrow I’ll get out all the books, perhaps I’ll even work on them for an hour or two. Then … I’ll decide I want a drink – oh, just to oil the works, you understand. So I’ll pop over to the boozer – the Lamb and Flag or whatever takes my fancy – and I’ll meet some of the chaps and we’ll have a ploughman’s together – and talk – and talk. And then I may even take two or three of them for an airing in Poppet. And the essay? Another tutorial will be a washout on Monday morning.’
‘But how long can that go on? Won’t the college eventually make a row?’
‘Of course. Eventually. The Warden, my tutor, the dean – they’re all very understanding. I’m an ex-serviceman, a former POW – that makes a difference. They feel guilty that I was going through all that while they were – most of them – reading and writing about Gower or doing whatever other civvy jobs their reserved occupations or their asthma or varicose veins allowed them to pursue.’
She was surprised, even shocked by the bitterness with which he spoke the last sentence.
He went on: ‘I think the Warden – Bowra – must have taken some sort of shine to me, God knows why. He’s not generally regarded as a kindly or tolerant sort of chap. But with me he puts up with so much.’
‘Michael knows him well. He says he would betray even a close friend for a joke.’
‘Well, at least the jokes are good. When he eventually kicks me out, no doubt there will be a joke to explain why he has done so. Anyway – sooner or later, probably sooner, he will make that decision. But as things are at present,’ – he laughed gleefully – ‘they’ve decided in their infinite wisdom that I must see an elderly female trick cyclist somewhere in the remotest arctic wastes of Headington. That must mean that they really are near the end of their patience.’
‘And then? After you leave?’
‘Oh, lord knows. Why think about it? I’d rather like to become the sort of hermit that used to be so common in the eighteenth century. For an aristo to keep a pet hermit then was an even classier act than having a black pageboy or a baboon. Some hugely wealthy and cultivated landowner would provide me with a hovel with all mod cons and some scraps from the kitchen. No responsibility, no brainwork, no work of any kind in fact – and, best of all, no need to see anyone I didn’t wish to see … It’s weird. You know, before the war, I was tremendously ambitious. I was as crazy about earning money, lots and lots of it, as my dear old dad. And now – I just couldn’t care less.’
‘You must learn to care again.’
In his shabby Harris tweed jacket, its cuffs and elbows patched with leather, his grey RAF shirt and his grubby, creaseless flannels, so that, even when he stood up, she could see his thick, grey woollen socks, he had, from that first sight of him sprawled on the sofa earlier that evening, struck Christine as a pathetic figure. Now, with his searing frankness about his own inadequacies, he had intensified that impression.
‘I must, must take a good pull on myself he said at last. ‘But I’ve tried often enough. No success. There was once a girl – before the one I’ve already told you about. Waited all the time I was a prisoner, wrote every week. When I came back she at once noticed the change. Told me so. I promised to buckle down to things, work hard, give her the things she wanted. Somehow all those resolutions came to damn all. I drifted up to Oxford and she decided I no longer cared for her. Perhaps she was right? Who knows? Anyway the whole thing fizzled out. She’s now married to a man at least twenty years older and the two of them run a small bed and breakfast in Torquay. Perhaps she sometimes now wonders if she ought not to have stuck with me? I doubt it.’ He lumbered to his feet. ‘Some coffee?’
‘Lovely’
He gave the order through the hatch and then returned, swaying between the tables as though it were now he, and not she, who was tipsy
‘Tell me. Be frank. If you were given the chance – if he wanted it and it was possible – would you marry this chap?’
‘Of course.’ She spoke without hesitation. ‘What else? I love him very much.’
‘Good for you!’ Suddenly he had emerged from his mood of mournful introspection. ‘Oh, I like your guts, I really do. You know, Ben once said that about you – he liked your guts.’
‘I wonder what he’d say about Thomas.’
‘‘‘ Good luck” – I hope.’
‘These last few days I’ve kept thinking – am I letting him down? After all – he was killed fighting against them.’
‘There I can’t help you, I’m afraid. I’ve not an atom of feeling about the dead – apart of course from a sadness that they’ve vanished. They’re dead – so what? We’re alive. One’s loyalties to the living are complicated enough with
out worrying about our loyalties to the dead. Does that sound callous? I suppose I had to make myself think like that during those years when friends – many even younger than myself – kept getting picked off.’
He got up, crossed to the wireless at the other end of the room, and twiddled with its knobs. The old man who had been dribbling peacefully in his sleep in the farthest corner – a tobacco-stained stream has coursed down his chin and then left slug trails on his waistcoat – stirred, grunted and sat up. The whole of the lower half of his face was covered in short, whitish bristles. He scowled first at the wireless and then at Christine and Bill. Eventually, having picked up his tankard, he limped through to the public bar.
‘Oh, what a shame! We’ve turned him out.’
‘Does it matter? Let’s dance.’
‘Here?’
‘Why not? I can push these tables to one side. I want to show you how much I’ve improved. I’ve been taking lessons.’
‘Not at the Oxford School of Dancing?’
‘Yes. How did you guess?’
‘From Miss Bollinger?’
‘From Miss Bollinger. A real bottle of fizz. None other.’
She laughed and began to tell him about meeting with her at one of Michael’s tea parties.
‘I’m very grateful to Miss Bollinger,’ he said, as they now began to move around the deserted room. ‘I’ve learned a lot from her. Don’t you think so?’
‘You certainly have. Last time you held me as though I were a time bomb.’
‘If you’d been Miss Bollinger, you’d have said ‘‘Tighter, duckie” – as she did at my first lesson. Now I’m often her duckie – or ducks.’
Next time that they passed the wide, uncurtained window, they stopped, as if by mutual consent, to peer out into the night. On the terrace, a tarpaulin covering some stacked chairs and tables was luminous with frost. The lawn, on which in summer teas were served, glimmered empty under a sky crowded with stars. Beyond it, there was a constant flash and sparkle from the swollen river as the wind ruffled it.
They drifted on again: towards the fire, the untidy, casual remnants of their meal, the boom and buzz of voices and the clink of glasses through the open hatch; towards things safe and familiar after that desolate view beyond the window. They were now dancing close, without saying a word. Anyone who saw them might think that they were lovers.
Suddenly she experienced a flare of resentment that this man who held her so closely, with such a palpable tenderness, was not that other man who had never once held her in any way whatever. At that she had to resist the temptation to push him away from her, to leave the warm, shabby, comfortable room, and to go out, alone, through the French windows into the dark and cold.
He was saying something.
‘What? I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.’
‘I said, I can’t help envying that German. He’s a damned lucky chap.’
Chapter Eleven
Michael had been wonderful. Thomas had nothing but praise for the way in which he had handled the whole situation. Klaus had left the camp that morning, no one knew for what hospital. Poor Klaus! He could not understand all the fuss.
‘What do you think is the matter with him?’
‘Michael’s sure that it must be tuberculosis. He says it’s criminal that they didn’t notice sooner. Perhaps he has given it to others.’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps to me. He was always coughing over me.’
‘Oh, God, I hope not!’
He crossed to the window and peered out, tapping with the fingers of his left hand on the frosty glass. ‘I ought to have realised that he was so ill.’
‘But he himself didn’t realise it!’
‘I know I was not in the same hut, but yet … I was his friend. I heard him cough, I knew he was often in pain, and I did nothing, nothing at all. It was an Englishman who did something.’
Moved by the desolation of his guilt, Christine went across to him and put an arm round his shoulder. ‘Oh, Thomas, it’s absurd to blame yourself. If anyone is to blame, it’s Klaus himself. That’s obvious.’
He swung round in anger. ‘Do you blame your dog if he is ill, terribly ill, and you don’t notice?’ Once again he turned to stare out of the window. He shrugged. ‘But maybe – maybe you are right. In the camp every man must fight for himself. That is how it is. Each day – a battle.’ He turned. ‘Well … Do we go to Blenheim?’
‘Its just as you wish. If you’d rather not …’
‘No, no!’ He picked up the soft, brown trilby that Michael had lent him and put it on before the mirror. ‘I’m not used to such a hat. I think that I look funny perhaps?’ He turned to show himself to her, hand to brim.
‘Well, yes … Perhaps just a little. Pull it more over one eye. Like this!’ She went over and showed him what she meant. As she did so, she felt an almost irresistible impulse to slip her hand down from the brim along the smooth surface of his temple and his cheek. She broke away. ‘Where did I put my coat?’
The gloom in which their talk of Klaus had enveloped them remained throughout the bus ride to Woodstock, keeping them silent. In any case, Thomas preferred not to make himself conspicuous by talking in an accent so obviously German. Michael’s clothes, which had seemed so grotesque on Klaus, fitted him well. True, his shoulders were a little too broad and he had to wear the trousers low on his hips, but otherwise it would be hard to guess that the suit had not been tailored expressly for him. He looked like any ex-service undergraduate, and if from time to time people glanced at him, it was not because they suspected him of being an impostor, but merely because of his good looks.
When they reached Blenheim the sun was already foundering. Momentarily, the windows of the palace caught its oblique rays and brimmed with fire, each becoming a peephole into the conflagration, so that it seemed as if, even while they watched, the flames would burst through, the roof would collapse, and the whole great edifice would tumble, subside and then disintegrate into a million particles of light. But in a few seconds all was over. The sun descended into mist; the fire ebbed; the windows were once more windows. Everything was bare, moist and chill.
All that day it had been thawing, so that, as they tramped through the solitary park, the slush wet their feet and the trees wet their clothes. Noises of invisible dripping were all around them. Far off, they could hear a roar of water descending into Capability Brown’s artificial lake. Yet, for all its dampness, dimness and melancholy, the place retained its beauty. The dying light, the lake, stretching out into the mist, the wavering, barely perceptible outlines of the trees and, beyond, the fantastic outline of the palace – all these things, despite the evanescence of their presences, combined to make an overwhelming impression on them, so that their sadness over Klaus seemed all at once to have taken on an external form, desolate and yet also strangely comforting.
As they stopped to gaze at the bridge, Christine edged closer to Thomas and slipped an arm through his. But to this gesture he made neither repudiation nor response. When they walked on, her arm remained where she had placed it.
He was speaking now about the scenery around his home. But Christine had ceased to listen. There were so many other things that she must somehow get to discuss with him. But how would she dare? And, having dared, what would she gain from it? This was the man, of all men, for whom she would be willing to sacrifice herself not once but a thousand times; but – yes, she was certain of it – he would never want or allow that. Oh, how she wished that she could be rid of her obsession, manifested as much in her constant longing to clutch his arm, to stroke his hair or to run a hand down a cheek or across his forehead, as in her desperate waiting for each weekend that would bring him back to her for a few brief hours.
How it then happened she did not know. Sometimes, thinking about it later, she decided that she must have willed it to happen. But was it possible to simulate a fall so neatly? – the foot touching the ice, slipping, the hand flung out, the whirl around, each intricate movement timed as precisely as
June’s in a ballet, until his arm came across to save her.
Then they were clutching each other, her face first against his coat and then raised questingly upwards to his. She could hear him mutter something in German, incomprehensible to her.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m asking myself – why am I so lucky?’
His saliva tasted bitter as his mouth closed on hers, but strangely that did not disgust her. She only felt a deep pang of pity for him, knowing about the wretched diet on which the prisoners subsisted.
‘Is that right?’ he asked
‘Is what right?’
‘For me to love you. What future for us?’
‘Oh, don’t talk about the future!’
‘But some time we must talk about the future!’
‘But not now.’
‘Oh, Christine, you must understand that I am –’
‘No, not now. Not now.’
She put a hand over his lips. Then, removing it, she again sought his mouth with her own, once more tasting the saliva that seemed to have in it all the accumulated bitterness of his captivity.
‘I live only for the present.’ She slipped an arm through his. ‘You must learn to do the same. Only for the present.’
‘Only for the present?’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘ I will try.’
He said the last three words on a note of weariness that made her feel anxious and ashamed.
‘This way?’ He pointed. Arm in arm, so close that sometimes they stumbled over each other, they had neither of them heeded in which direction they were walking. Now they had lost themselves. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘But surely the village is over there?’ Christine pointed to the left.
‘No. This way, I think.’
She laughed. ‘Does it matter anyway?’
‘A little. You forget – we must catch the bus. And I must be back at the camp in time.’