The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  As the daughter of a solicitor and a secretary-turned-housewife, I felt I was barely tolerated in Oxford. And by that I mean I could barely tolerate my own sense of inadequacy. I wanted to walk through the streets with the swagger that only years of breeding and, if I’m honest, an appendage between the legs could confer. All of us women students were still, to some degree, out of place among the hallowed halls of learning but within our own group, we also built walls.

  “Could you please turn up the wireless?”

  It was the young man, speaking to the waitress.

  My fake-mother smiled and leaned up to the shelf above the counter to twist the dial. Sombre male tones filled the room. Chamberlain was back from his meeting with Hitler and had been greeted by cheering crowds at Heston airport, we were told. The young man rose from his seat and went to the counter, the better to make out Chamberlain’s words over the scritch and scratch of the broadcast.

  “We are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.”

  I thought I heard a stifled groan. I dared to look at the young man directly. At that moment, before I even knew his name, I found something heartbreaking in his stance; the way his head was tilted down, gazing at the wooden counter the better to concentrate on the words squeaking out of the wireless. I felt as though I was looking at one of the beautiful doomed ‘lads’ who peopled my treasured Great War poems; a perfectly tragic symbol of youthful sacrifice.

  Despite Chamberlain’s protestations, there was no doubt in my mind that we were heading for war. I never believed for a single second that a piece of paper could make any difference to a man like Hitler, a man Churchill described later as a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe”. As I listened to the wireless report, I wondered if the rapturous reception the prime minister had received when he returned with that flimsy paper flag was less relief and more a kind of mass hysteria, a fake joy from people who knew this was their last hurrah for a very long time. The last deception they would be able to permit themselves.

  Chamberlain was speaking again: “We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

  Robert looked up and I caught his eye.

  “Do you believe that?” he asked, unfolding his long body elegantly and walking over to my table.

  “I’d like to,” I said. “But I’m not sure that the people’s desires have very much to do with things at this stage.”

  He smiled broadly, sat down in the free chair and extended his hand.

  “Robert Stirling. May I join you? Very forward of me, I know, but these are exceptional times and if the threat of war has any upside for cannon fodder like myself, it must be gifting one the temerity to approach a beautiful woman.”

  He was quite the charmer, Diane. We lost sight of that later. “You are fresh, aren’t you?” I replied. “But does that mean you don’t believe our good man Chamberlain’s words?”

  “I believe he believes them, which is something, I suppose. But I can’t say the same for Herr Hitler. From all I’ve read, he wants to expand and expand he will. You know, he fought in the Great War and some say that’s what’s driving him. But what about you? What do you think?”

  He leaned in and fixed those clear eyes on my face. His intensity took my breath away so that I had to bow my head to break the spell. I traced a pattern on the red tablecloth with my finger. I felt ridiculous but it was not an unpleasant sensation.

  “Oh, I’m sure I don’t know,” I said, my touchy shyness returning.

  “Somehow I don’t believe that for a second,” he said and when I looked up, he was smiling again.

  “You never told me your name.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t,” I said but I immediately regretted my archness. Of course, I wanted to tell him my name.

  “Lina Rose,” I said quickly. “And please don’t say it’s beautiful because I’ve heard it all before.”

  “Very well, I won’t,” he said. “It’s a stinker of a name. I can’t imagine what your parents were thinking. I shall just call you Gertrude.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in that near-deserted café as the clouds gathered outside and the rain came down again. My initial assessment was, of course, entirely wrong. He was studying law at Corpus Christi. He was from Suffolk, his father had been a doctor but had died from a heart attack in 1936. His mother’s family were in the steel industry and had done well from the Great War.

  “It might not have been great for everyone but it was wonderful for the Pritchards,” he said. “I owe my place here to the war. What do you think about that? Silver lining or ultimate irony, given what’s about to happen? Finally able to afford Oxford but I’ll most likely have to fight instead. If only to expunge our family’s guilt.”

  His tone was light but there was something forced about his thin smile.

  “I think you’d have to ask someone who’s been through war, maybe someone like Edward Thomas,” I said, nodding at my book. “He would be a valid arbiter, don’t you think?”

  Robert nodded and intoned:

  “This is no case of petty right or wrong

  That politicians or philosophers

  Can judge.”

  “Indeed,” I said sharply to cover my surprise and my urge to giggle at his ridiculous arms akimbo pose and ostentatiously sombre tone. I should not have been surprised. We were all steeped in war poetry then. But I had not expected this tall, worldly student to quote Thomas with such ease. That was the first of many epiphanies during my relationship with your father, Diane.

  He was clearly delighted to have caught me off-guard.

  “Things are not always what they seem, Gertrude. You’d think we’d all know that by now.”

  I realised he was holding my hand. My fingers curled around his and that was it.

  CHAPTER 8

  For the next year, Robert and I took a break from the world, floating above the ground in our own little bubble. It wasn’t that we were stupid, although I do now shake my head at our guileless, simplistic faith in love. We knew what was coming – everyone did by late 1938 – but we made a conscious decision not to engage with this knowledge. Our universe-of-two was all we needed and vastly superior to the fear-ridden world around us where, like crockery on a sinking ship’s top table, everyone was sliding towards the abyss. The newspapers were full of doom: there was the seizure of Prague in March, the distribution of gas masks, including tiny masks for babies, the delivery of free air raid shelters to quizzical families on narrow London streets, the mass production of boots and uniforms for men to die in and talk that thousands of pets would have to be slaughtered to prepare for the expected bombing of London. Pamphlets were dropped into letterboxes telling people how to evacuate their children, how to erect Anderson shelters correctly so they didn’t flood and how to put up blackout material and secure their windows with brown tape. Butlins was offering ‘crisis cures’ to help people forget the mounting tension. But we didn’t need to go away to find escape.

  We didn’t have time for a traditionally tentative courtship. There was a breathlessness to life then; it was as if we were all, always, rushing for the last train. It was exhausting but since I am being totally honest here, it was also exhilarating. We were young and youth has a ridiculous ability to conflate danger and delight. We were also in love and, as they say, love is blind. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say our love was wilfully short-sighted.

  We spent as much time as we could together, meeting at least once every day. If you had asked 19-year-old Lina what was going on, she would have grabbed your hands in her hot ones, bent towards you as if sharing an earth-shattering secret, and whispered: “It’s love at first sight, Diane. We were made for each other. I cannot imagine life without him. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Then, she would have hugged you to her and you would have felt the exqui
site pulse of her happiness vibrating through her shoulders, down her back and into her arms. She was charming and happy and I do miss her sometimes. Though I would have to tell her, be careful what you wish for, my dear.

  We couldn’t live together, of course, but we managed to spend many nights wrapped in each other’s arms. After suffering some nasty scratches and colourful bruises, Robert became adept at scaling the trellis outside my dorm and slipping into the corridor through a window that I left ajar. There was an empty room at the end of the hall where I had concealed sheets and a thin blanket. We would lie on the damp floor surrounded by the detritus of student life – battered trunks, a broken bicycle, a violin case and slack-stringed tennis rackets. We called it our Shangri-La. If that room still exists, our strangled cries and soft sighs must still be floating in the musty air and echoing behind the walls. Even today, with everything I know, I sometimes feel the most sorrowful yearning when I remember those pitch-black, sweat-filled nights, when I no longer knew where I ended and Robert began.

  Robert had his own tiny room in a boarding house near the Grove. His landlady, Mrs Danton, was a plump, fierce widower, who took a shine to me after an animated conversation about poetry. It turned out she “dabbled in verse”. I read some of her poems, lyrical nothings full of suns setting on lost loves with an undertone of moralism. I pretended to like them and perhaps I even did back then and in turn Mrs Danton made herself scarce when I crept downstairs in the mornings. She always left the side door to the lane on the latch. I believe she was both deliciously titillated by my scandalous ways and simultaneously breathlessly hoping for my downfall. What a poem she would write then! Oh there would be stanzas depicting sensual joy in flower-studded fields but then the thunderous storm of retribution would pass overhead and smite the sinners. She was not a bad woman; we all enjoy a dramatic downfall.

  For several months, I held back from telling Charlotte and Henry about Robert. I wanted to keep him all to myself, as though only isolation from the rest of the world could ensure our love would thrive. But, of course, they had to meet and one damp February day, we had tea and cakes together in the teahouse where we first met. Robert was at his charming best and although Henry did not say much, his eyes were soft as he looked on the younger man. Soft and sad, as they always were. Charlotte clearly adored him, although I do not think she understood the depth of my feelings. She would have been much more concerned if she had.

  The end of this blissful era came in late May 1939. It was just after 6am as I scampered barefoot along the lane beside Mrs Danton’s house. The sky was beginning to pale, silvering the cobblestones and the rooftops like spilt mercury. As I reached the main road, I slipped on my shoes and tiptoed along, glancing nervously up at the houses across the street. It might be hard to believe now but back then I did actually care what people thought. As a woman, albeit an ostensibly emancipated and educated one, you couldn’t afford not to care in 1930s Britain. The Great War had eroded some of the barricades erected around the fairer sex and what was to come would continue the attrition, but the image of the fallen woman has proved remarkably immune to most modernising influences. She lingers to this day – look at Princess Diana, the judgments and the almost indecent glee at the breakup of her marriage. We are all Eves and the world will never let us forget our original sin.

  I ran along the street, my body still buzzing from our morning lovemaking. I am not going to go into details – no one wants that from their parents, no matter how lyrically described – but every nerve-end in my body was tingling. I adored sex with Robert. It sounds like a silly thing to say but I do not believe it is always a given in marriage, or indeed in love affairs.

  Of course, I was dreadful at it at first. There was no Cosmopolitan to tell you what to do in those days and, to be honest, most men did not know very much either. I’d had a few affairs before Oxford but no one we need to bother ourselves with here. Spotty youths fumbling with my bra behind haystacks while crows cawed their sympathy above me and magpies cackled at our clumsiness. At that time, many women still had no idea what an orgasm was. Sex was purely functional for most. There were other voices but they were most definitely in the social wilderness. We did not really expect a great deal of pleasure. Our romantic notions, fuelled by the clean-cut movies and our trashy novels, were so otherworldly that sex often seemed too crude to consider seriously.

  I know now that Robert was unusually thoughtful and generous. We never talked about it – one wouldn’t have dreamed of such indelicacy – but I have since wondered where he learned to do the things he did. It saddens me deeply that I will never know. Not because I am, or indeed was, jealous, but because I wish I had known more about my husband. We never got to the comfortable phase of marriage where such riddles might have been unravelled gently over a late-night glass of wine. But perhaps that is as it should be. The modern mania for total transparency is overrated.

  Secrets, even and perhaps especially between lovers, are no bad thing. One should always retain some distance.

  I remember my first orgasm as I remember your birth, Diane. I knew then that everything about me had changed. The knowledge was as sharp and monumental as the waves of pleasure rushing from some hitherto unknown core. It was as though I had discovered a third eye that could see everything in brighter, prismatic detail.

  That May morning, I could still feel that exquisite tension between my legs as I ran along the edge of the park, rushing to get back to my dorm to wash and prepare for my lectures. It had rained overnight and the faint perfume of budding flowers and trees wafted over the silent backstreets. It would be years before I would notice those delicate scents again. I must have closed my mind to all sweet fragrances during the war years. Or maybe they just weren’t there. All I remember are the gagging odours of damp shelters and sweating bodies, clouds of dust and the stomach-turning, ferrous smell of the dead. But there must have been flowers, of course. Nature gives not a jot for our crises. Flowers did grow and I must have seen them. I just couldn’t smell them any more.

  That morning, I felt ridiculously happy and carefree. A blackbird was trilling in a bush near the road. I spied a flock of geese flying in a V-shape above me, their wings swishing a soft lullaby above the sleeping town. I noticed raindrops like tears on crimson roses in the front garden of one of the terraced houses. I was tingling with awareness, humming with a sensuous appreciation for the quick of life. As I walked along Holywell Street, I passed a newspaper kiosk and was pulled up short by a headline: Military Training Act becomes law. I stood there like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Just like that, my incandescent vigour was gone. That is what war does, Diane. It cuts our strings.

  I knew Robert would enlist even though he was entitled to an exemption as a student. When the bill was proposed in April, he had brought it up as we lay in his bed, even though we usually avoided discussing Britain’s slow drift to another war. His reasoning was bleakly practical: if war came, all men would eventually be called up so he might as well maintain some control, volunteer early, get whatever training was on offer and prepare himself as best he could.

  “I have even more reason now to take my Fate into my own hands,” he said, running his finger up and down the hollow between my breasts. “I have to survive for you. For us. Whatever about the rest, we are worth fighting and living for.”

  It pains me to admit it but when he spoke those sombre words, I smiled, wrapping my legs even tighter around him. I was enchanted by the romance of his declaration. I did not, or would not, understand what the words meant, what he must be feeling as he said them. This is how we fail to hear each other, even when we are listening, eyes locked on a loved one’s face.

  I took a copy of the Times, my hands shaking as I fumbled for coins. This was the end of our idyll. An end foreshadowed but no less painful for that. I was terrified by what I knew and what I could not yet know. I had seen what a war could do but what would this war do to us?

  Robert decided to enlist at the employmen
t office in Felixstowe where his mother still lived and so a week later, we put his trunk in the back seat of his black Morris Minor and set off on the journey to the seaside town where I would meet his mother and then, most probably, say goodbye to the man I loved. We did not make a fuss over the departure from Mrs Danton’s but we both knew our Oxford era was over. Mrs Danton pulled Robert to her, wishing him luck as if that was the only thing that could help him, as if the luck she wished for would somehow prove more potent than all the other luck being invoked across the country.

  “I never had a son to send to war and Mr Danton passed on in 1913, Lord have mercy on him,” she said, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbing her eyes.

  “I always thought that was a mercy. He would not have understood the Great War. Such a gentle man. I declare I am beside myself just thinking about all you young men and what you will endure. I am sure there must be no other way but it does make you wonder.”

  Robert took her hands in his and beamed down at her.

  “Mrs Danton, you mustn’t worry. There is nothing people like you and me can do now except try to get through what is coming. Each generation must pay its dues. Our time is now. That’s all it is. It isn’t more complicated than that. And by all accounts, we have some truly modern weapons now like bigger tanks and faster fighter planes and enormous guns. It won’t be like the last time. Maybe it will be more civilised, in some ways.”