by Francis King
A brief shiver passed through his body. He put out a hand and rested it on her left breast. His forefinger circled the nipple. All at once that illusion of beach, sun and sea was obliterated. She groaned. Involuntarily her lips moved towards his and his towards hers.
At the end: ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ he whispered, one conspirator to the other. She stopped any further utterance by once more pressing her lips against his.
Much later, as they lay half-asleep and still naked in each other’s arms, a knock aroused them. Christine jerked up. ‘Oh, lord, I forgot to lock the door!’ Thomas leapt off the bed and began to pull on his trousers. She drew sheet and blankets up to her chin. She shouted: ‘Wait a moment! Wait!’ Thomas was buttoning up his fly. His feet were only in their socks.
The door handle turned. ‘Oh, gosh! I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ It was Peter, staring at them with a mixture of shock and disbelief. He made an attempt to show neither of these emotions. He even forced a placatory smile. ‘Margaret didn’t tell me … I brought you some flowers before lunch but she then said you weren’t well enough to see anyone. I thought that by now the migraine would have …’ It was the first time that Christine had seen him fazed by anything. ‘I hope you’ll be better soon.’
Christine steadied her voice and attempted to present the incident as a perfectly normal one. ‘I was just about to get up. Won’t you wait for a cup of tea? If you and Thomas would like to go down to the sitting room I’ll get myself ready and join you in a moment. You know Thomas, don’t you? From the night of the ball? He’s just dropped in.’ Even while, a hand still clutching the bedclothes up to her chin, she was babbling all this, she realised its absurdity. With an effort, she swallowed the laughter that was now beginning to well up in her throat.
Thomas was reaching down to pick his shirt off the floor.
Peter backed towards the door. ‘Well … As a matter of fact, I’ve got to meet someone. I’m in Oxford for the whole of the weekend, so perhaps – some time tomorrow? Some time tomorrow? he repeated, having received no response. ‘Goodbye, Christine. Sorry about …’ He ignored Thomas. Having placed the flowers on the dressing table, he hurried through the door and then pulled it decisively shut behind him.
Now at last Christine could laugh. She did so for several seconds while Thomas, stricken, stared at her. Then he exclaimed: ‘Oh, Christine! This is terrible! See what I’ve caused you.’
‘What does it matter? Who cares? Anyway, he’s unlikely to talk. He learned a lot of things at Oxford but – unlike Michael – never how to gossip.’
‘But he must have realised …’
‘Of course he realised. One would hardly expect to find a German POW in a girl’s bedroom in only his trousers, while she was lying in the bed with the sheet pulled up to her chin. Forget about it!’
‘How can I forget?’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not worried. I don’t care a damn.’
Before going to bed, Christine and Margaret sat silent at the scratched, wobbly kitchen table, their mugs of cocoa between them.
Christine mused: all that had happened had been such an extraordinary mix of tragedy, passion and absurdity.
Then, suddenly, like a violent gust of wind, the thought hit her: We made love over a corpse.
Chapter Sixteen
That terrible winter was at last drawing to a close. So was the term.
Already Bill had tried to put his plan of escape into effect. On the eve of his exam, he came to say goodbye to Christine, left a number of his more valuable possessions with her, and drove off into a night as obscure as his own future. Goodbye, Oxford, a long goodbye! But on Headington Hill Poppet had broken down and Bill, having cursed, attempted to mend her and watched someone from the RAC attempting to mend her, at last got a lift in a lorry back to Wadham, where he spent the night. His impetus had been stemmed; and though he failed to appear at the Examination Schools the following morning, and though he talked of a new departure – to France, Italy, Egypt – in Oxford he then remained. Having soon been asked to vacate his college room, he had rented a squalid bedsitter in Jericho, emerging from it every morning at eight-thirty to sell books at Blackwell’s. Was he happy? Christine asked. Grinning he replied: ‘Well, at least I’m living in the same town as you.’
Michael was preparing for a British Council lecture tour. ‘ I’ve never much liked the idea of Sweden. But it’ll be wonderful to enjoy all that comfort, plenty and efficiency. So unlike dear old Blighty!’ Then he asked: ‘ Shall you stay in Oxford?’
‘I don’t know.’ Christine and her father were still arguing as to whether she should spend her vacation in Oxford or at home.
‘If you are going to be here, I wonder if you would do something for me?’
‘That depends what it is.’ But already she knew.
‘It’s my little family – the Germans. I’ll be away for three weeks and that may make them feel rather lost. Do you think you could possibly have them in to tea on a Saturday or a Sunday? Not all of them of course, just two or three – Ludwig, say, and a nice boy called Werner, who’s been coming recently. It seems awful to abandon them. I’m planning to send them parcels from Sweden. That would help to tide them over, wouldn’t it?’
‘You’re so kind, Michael.’ She meant it. ‘Yes, of course I’ll have a little party for them – if I’m not back at home in Wimbledon. By the way, it’s interesting that you should refer to them as your ‘‘little family’’. When I’m with any of them – even with Thomas – I feel as if I were a parent with a child, whom one must simultaneously guide, cherish and console. I get the feeling that the parental role is not merely one that unconsciously adopts oneself. It’s one that they themselves want one to adopt.’
‘Strange. I was thinking that myself while I was shaving. No wonder I cut myself!’ He put a forefinger to a small plaster on his chin. ‘With so many prisoners dependent on me, I’ve become another old woman who lives in a shoe.’
‘Not all that old. And the shoe is a remarkably roomy and beautiful one. They’re lucky in that. And so are you.’
The next day Christine had her last tutorial of the term.
Mrs Dunne took a square of chamois leather out of her desk drawer and began to wipe her glasses on it. ‘It hasn’t been a good term for you, has it?’ Without their glasses, the eyes fixed on Christine looked surprisingly small and weak. She sighed. ‘You know, you’ve been a great disappointment to me, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Clearly other things have been occupying your mind. I’m not going to ask you – or try to guess – what they are. But I sincerely hope that by next term you’ll have passed through this – this crisis – or diversion – whatever it is, and be able once again to get back into your stride. It’s rather tragic to see potentialities like yours squandered without a thought.’
‘That was not what I intended, Mrs Dunne.’
‘Well, you’re the best judge of that.’ The voice was cutting. Mrs Dunne replaced the glasses across the broad, fleshy bridge of her nose. She leaned forward. ‘I do wish you weren’t so buttoned up.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Uncommunicative. So many of you girls seem to be the same these days. Good heavens, it’s much better to speak out if something’s on your mind. After all, that’s one of the things I’m here for.’
Later Christine realised Mrs Dunne had been making a genuine attempt to establish some sort of communication between them. But it had come too late; and the manner of it had been too clumsy.
‘Well, I hope you have a good vacation.’
‘The same to you, Mrs Dunne.’
That afternoon Margaret and Christine walked back home through an early spring afternoon that had all the evanescent, end-of-chapter radiance of an autumn one. Margaret was in a state of exaltation. She kept running ahead of Christine, eventually to stop, breathless, for her to catch up; her plump cheeks were flushed; her small, hooded eyes shone. ‘Oh, I feel quite mad
today,’ she exclaimed more than once. In her excess of high spirits, she totally failed to notice Christine’s depression.
Margaret’s mood was so euphoric because she had succeeded in securing a vacation job that would keep her away from the Birmingham chemist’s shop owned by her elderly, widower father. She was to look after an epileptic child in a country mansion, owned by a rich industrialist, not far from Leeds. Slipping her arm through Christine’s and trying to drag her into a run, she explained: ‘I’m to have a bedroom and a sitting room – all to myself, just imagine. And all meals with the family’. She gave a brief, whinnying laugh. ‘Oh, it’s going to be super. And apparently the little girl – Mavis – is perfectly normal but for her health problem. I imagine I’ll get used to that after the first two or three attacks. What do you think? I’m not at all squeamish, as you know. Oh, and there’s a large, formal garden, a paddock with two horses, and some beehives. I’m actually terrified of bees, but never mind. Oh, Chrissie, don’t you think I’m lucky?’
‘Yes, that’s wonderful.’ Although Margaret had never revealed anything about her home life, Christine had long ago decided that it was even more unsatisfactory than her own.
As soon as they had re-entered the house, Margaret cried out: ‘Now how about some tea?’ and, without waiting for an answer, rushed up the stairs. Christine walked into her sitting room, sat down at her desk, and once again attempted to answer a letter from her father. Even the thought of having to do so made her feel exhausted. He had written, not for the first time, to ask about her plans for the vacation. She crossed to the window with the two stiff, white sheets of paper, each dye stamped ‘United Forces Club’, and began once more to read them. Poor Father! Even when he wished to be affectionate, what he finally produced read like a business letter. Nonetheless, under the formal, stereotyped phrases, she detected his chagrin at her pretext that she must spend the vacation in Oxford to work. Through a maze of hints and circumlocutions, at first no less difficult to decipher than his scratchy handwriting, he made it clear that he had not been taken in. After all, he pointed out, library facilities in London were at least as good as those in Oxford.
Christine threw the letter down on to the desk, putting off for another day the decision that she must sooner or later make. She looked out of the window. Below her in the street, two German prisoners – evidently posted sick, since this was a Friday, a workday for them– were wandering round the square at an aimlessly dragging pace. One of them picked up a short stick, which he then rattled against the area railings. On an impulse Christine threw up the window.
‘Would you like to come up for some tea?’
They both craned up, startled and uncomprehending.
‘Tea! Tea!’ She mimed, lifting a cup to her mouth, little finger daintily extended, and then beckoned.
At that they grinned up and nodded. They were men in their mid-forties, with grey, creased faces and the sturdy, squat, slightly bow-legged physique of manual labourers. Neither of them could speak a word of English. Again with signs, Christine indicated that she would come down to open the door. As she was rushing out to do this, she all but bumped into Margaret with the tea tray. ‘Oh, Chrissie!’ Margaret exclaimed when Christine hurriedly revealed the invitation. ‘We don’t know a single thing about them. And in any case,’ – she indicated the tray with a bob of her head – ‘there are only three cakes.’
Not answering, Christine began to hurry down the stairs. Margaret shouted after her: ‘I don’t mind going without, I’d just as soon have some bread and butter.’ Again Christine did not answer.
After tea – at which the two women divided one of the three cakes between them and gave the other two to the men – they all sat down on the floor before the fire and embarked on a jigsaw puzzle, since any sort of conversation was clearly out of the question. Margaret and the Germans giggled incessantly as they attempted to force together pieces that obviously did not fit. Christine grew increasingly bored and restless. At one point the larger and jollier of the men demonstrated a trick. He had a wound, like a deep dent, below his left eye. He pointed to it, grinning, and inhaled vigorously from a cigarette that Christine had just given to him. Two or three seconds later a puff of the smoke wreathed up, alarmingly, out of the hole. This was followed by a tear, which slowly trickled down his cheek until he raised the back of a hand to wipe it away. The whole display struck Christine as being not merely grotesque but repellent; but he was clearly immensely proud of it, repeating it again and then again.
‘I think that they enjoyed that, don’t you?’ Margaret said after their departure. ‘ It was really rather fun.’
‘Yes. Up to a point. But I could have done without the eye trick.’ For Christine it had not been fun. A constantly intensifying depression had begun to descend on her. Perhaps its cause was the recent tutorial or the letter from her father; perhaps the autumnal melancholy of the March evening light; perhaps no more than the bizarre recollection of that tear coursing down the German’s grinning face.
Margaret having left with the tray, Christine sat down at her desk and pulled a sheet of paper towards her. She dipped her pen in the inkwell ‘My dear Father …’ She pushed that sheet aside and began another. ‘Thomas, my dearest …’ For the first time that day she felt completely happy as her pen hurried on and on.
Christine stayed in Oxford for a further five days. Then, after yet more letters, one even threatening to cut off her allowance, had rained down on her, she decided that, yes, she would have to obey her father and go home for at least a long weekend, leaving both Oxford and Thomas. That night she lay sleepless as she tried to prepare herself for her reluctant return to the melancholy, dilapidated Wimbledon house, hung with frayed rep curtains and massive Victorian and Edwardian pictures in battered gilt frames, and choked with tarnished sporting trophies won by her father in games of squash and rackets. Through this mock-Elizabethan pile, her father and her aunt, both now suffering from the deafness of old age, pursued each other from one cold, cavernous room to another, waging a constant war of mutual recrimination. Only the third floor, now abandoned to a staff of cook and housemaid, and the attic floor were free from their presences. Here neither of them penetrated, unless it were for an ascent to turn out a cabin-trunk, a wicker basket or a wardrobe – expeditions from which they would all too often return breathless and full of indignation against some innocent former servant who, their failing memories had persuaded them, had ‘ pinched’ something in fact long ago mislaid, sold or junked.
‘You will write every day?’
Christine and Thomas were in Fuller’s, having their last Sunday tea together, away from Margaret. Thomas was wearing some of the clothes that Michael had left behind for any of the prisoners who wished to make use of them.
‘If I can. We work very late. I become tired.’
As so often, his melancholy resignation simultaneously touched and exasperated her. ‘Yes, I know, I know.’ At once she regretted her irritable tone. ‘Anyway I’ll write to you – every day – even if you’re unable to answer.’ As a perfunctory act of contrition for speaking as she had, she put out her hand and placed it over his, where it rested on the edge of the table. ‘I’ll try to get back just as soon as I can. Everything seems to be going wrong at home. Father and Aunt Eva hardly on speaking terms, not enough coke to run the boiler all day, the cook giving notice and then changing her mind. These crises always seem to blow up at the start of a vacation. I think they must plan them in order to force me to come home.’ There were shoppers queuing for tables. As a harassed waitress swept past Thomas with a laden tray, she halted to ask: ‘Ready for the bill, sir?’
Thomas looked up at her, startled.
‘Let me have it,’ Christine told the waitress.
Thomas’s face was reddening. ‘I am a man who cannot pay for his own cake and coffee – never mind his girlfriend’s.’
‘Oh, don’t keep returning to that! I’m happy to pay for you. You know that. Sometimes you drive me
crazy.’
After she had paid the waitress, Christine drew out two ten-shilling notes from her bag and pushed them across the table. ‘These may come in useful while I’m away. I don’t like to think of you short of money.’
‘No, no!’
‘Please.’ Obstinately he shook his head. ‘It’ll make me happy.’
Again he shook his head, this time leaning back in his narrow gilt chair, as though to distance himself from the two crumpled notes lying between them.
‘Come on, Thomas! There may be an emergency.’
Frowning, he sighed. Reluctantly he began to smooth out the two notes. Watched anxiously by her, he took up one, and then the other. After a second or two, he put both into the breast pocket of Michael’s Savile Row jacket.
At Balliol, he changed back into his uniform and she then again walked with him up to the camp. Everything had altered. Instead of the former snow or rain, there was now a clear sky, with no more than a hint of frost to suggest that this was still early March. The once desolate strip of wasteland that they had to traverse looked surprisingly green; and the girls, previously so often cowed and morose as an icy wind battered them, now giggled and squawked even more loudly on the arms of their Germans.
Although she would not be seeing Thomas for some time, Christine was happy and even exhilarated until the moment when they turned off the main path and began to mount the steep track that led up to the camp. Then, for some reason that later, brooding alone on it, she was still unable to fathom, an overwhelming panic struck her. She halted, turned to him and threw her arms around him. She closed her eyes. Tighter and tighter she clung to him.
‘Christine! What is it? Come on! Tell me!’ His astonishment at her behaviour was turning to anger.
‘I – I feel so frightened,’ she whispered.
‘Why? What has frightened you?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I can’t bear to say goodbye.’