She made a strangled, half-choking noise in her throat. Her face, which had flared at him a moment before, seemed to crumple, to disintegrate. She wiped her cheeks and her nose with the back of her hand. She caught Wexton’s eye. She half-laughed, half-cried again. Wexton handed her a handkerchief. Jane blew her nose.
“I’m sorry.” She took a noisy breath. “I must go back. I don’t know why I began upon that. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. I’d never said it before, you see. I’m tired. I was on duty all night. I expect it’s that.”
“I don’t mind. No—keep the handkerchief.” Wexton looked as if he were trying to decide something. He fumbled about with the flashlight. He shifted from one large foot to the other. “Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?” He waved his hand in the direction of the café where the accordion played. He smiled. “You don’t have to be back yet. Come on.”
They went into the café. They sat at a small round table by a steamy window. It was very hot. Wexton eyed the fat-bellied coke stove in the corner. In a cautious way he removed the greatcoat and one of the mufflers.
Wexton ordered two large hot chocolates. Jane concentrated on stirring hers. She stared at the table top. She knew that her face was blotchy and red. She could not quite believe she had said all those things. The warmth, Wexton’s silence, the steam on the windows; she found that she was glad she had.
“I’m seeing Boy tonight,” she said at last.
“Oh, really? You must bring him here.” Wexton seemed abstracted. He was drawing in the steam on the windowpane. He drew first a bird, then a man, then a boat.
“I was writing about love.” He made the announcement in a sudden rush. “When I saw you. It wasn’t any good. It never is. I try. The words won’t come right.”
He pulled the notebook out of his pocket. He opened it at the page full of words and crossings-out. He tore out the page, scrunched it up in his hand, rose, crossed to the fat-bellied coke stove, lifted its lid, and stuffed the page inside. He returned to his seat. Jane put down her spoon. She was, she thought, being tested.
“About love?” she said in a high, careful voice. “You said the poem was about Steenie.”
“That’s right. I love Steenie.”
Wexton put his elbows on the table and his melancholy chin on his hands. He looked at her.
“Did you know?”
“Not until now. No.”
“I thought you might have realized.” This, Jane knew at once, was a palpable untruth. He had never thought any such thing.
“In London. It always seemed very obvious to me. I thought everyone would know. Then I came out here. I thought I might understand it if I went away. I’ve been in love before, but never quite as badly. It hurt. I thought if I came here, it might stop. It hasn’t, of course. It’s worse, if anything. I try to write about it, and I can’t. I try to write about the war, and I can’t. The more I look, the less I understand.” He came to an abrupt halt and blinked.
“Oh,” he said, as if this had just occurred to him. “I’ve shocked you.”
Jane looked down at her hands. Her face was on fire. The blush ran down her back. Yes, all right—Wexton was correct, she was shocked. But it was 1916; Jane was then twenty-eight. She had not been told the physical facts of life until she was eighteen. She had not known of the possibility of homosexual love until she was well into her twenties, when it was spoken of in terms of unnatural desires and even more unnatural acts. Sex, for Jane, was textbooks, read standing up in a hospital library, quickly replaced on the shelf. It was diagrammatic, yet furtive. In short, she was both innocent and prejudiced. So she blushed. Her hands made nervous crablike snatches at her cup.
However, she also knew she was being challenged. This announcement of Wexton’s was deliberate. He perhaps returned the compliment she had paid him, and bared his heart. She could perhaps pretend to misunderstand, to assume he spoke of the kind of male friendship her dead brother had hymned, although she knew he did not. She could, she supposed, simply rise to her feet and leave the café. If she did so, she knew Wexton would not follow her. She doubted she would see him again.
She frowned. Diagrams danced up and down in her mind. She tried to relate the diagrams to Steenie and Wexton; she tried to imagine a man embracing another man. She risked looking Wexton in the eyes. He was waiting.
“Does Steenie love you?” The question was like a hiccup. It popped out before she could think. Wexton considered.
“He says that he does. I think it’s true—in his way. For a while.”
“It won’t last, you mean?”
“No, I don’t expect it to last.”
“Does he write?”
“He used to write every day. Now he writes … less.”
“Do you still love him—as much as before?”
“More, I think. It isn’t rational. I know what Steenie’s like, but I still … It grows. You can’t stop it. Absence, I guess.”
“And you don’t … that is, you don’t ever fall in love with women?”
“No.” He paused a polite fraction. “Do you?”
There was a small silence. Jane’s skin felt like glass. She could feel the blood rushing in to stain the glass a second time. She averted her eyes from Wexton’s face, to look at the café. She saw it as a fixed, static place, inert as a photograph. Small round tables: two elderly Frenchmen, in blue working overalls and berets, playing dominoes. The cure of the town, who sometimes came to the hospital to administer the last rites; he recognized her; he lifted his glass to her. Jane felt a sense of sudden elation. Wexton tutored her, and her mind was quick. There were a few jagged shards of the old morality left, and if she could just crush them under her heel, grind them into well-deserved dust … She leaned across the table.
“Wexton …”
“Yes?”
“I’m not shocked. I was. But—it’s stopped.”
Wexton was drawing in the steam of the window again. He drew another figure, and another boat. He placed the figure inside the boat and added some sea beneath: three wavy lines. He did not seem surprised by what she said. He rearranged his mufflers; he hauled at the greatcoat; he drew back Jane’s chair. They went outside. They walked back toward the hospital, arm in arm, at a brisk pace.
“You’re back on duty at midnight.”
They had come to a halt outside the hospital. Wexton’s remark was not a question but a statement.
“You’re on the ambulance run to the station,” Wexton said.
“Am I? I thought—”
“You’re assigned to my ambulance.”
“Yours?”
“I fixed it.”
“You fixed it?” Jane stared at him. “When did you do that?”
“This morning.”
“How?”
“I bribed one of the other nurses. She swapped.”
“You bribed her?”
“Yes. With a Hershey bar. I got a food parcel yesterday from home.” He smiled. “It’s thirty kilometers there, and thirty back. I thought we could talk. Besides, I had a hunch.”
“A hunch?”
“I thought I would probably like you. I expected us to be friends.”
Wexton wound one of the mufflers tighter around his neck. From one of his pockets he produced a woolly hat, which he pulled on. It was one of the most absurd hats Jane had ever seen: a balaclava with a bobble on top.
He lifted his hand in parting. He turned and shambled off in the direction of his hostel. He whistled in a tuneless but cheerful way. Jane watched him: Halfway down the street the battery of the flashlight decided to perform. The light came back on. Wexton gave a small but audible cheer.
“How was Boy? Did you try the omelette? Damn!”
Wexton swerved. This was not an easy journey. These were the reasons: The ambulance Wexton drove had solid tires, which would not grip; the road between Saint-Hilaire and the station inland was a minor one, intended for farm horses and carts, not the heavy traffic of hospital and military vehicles. It
was December, and for the past two weeks there had been constant rain; the surface of the road was wet mud, across which the ambulance skeetered and slithered. In the mud were deep tracks in which it was sometimes possible to steer, so the ambulance trundled along like a train on rails. Occasionally these tracks led to deeper potholes filled with water and softer mud, where other vehicles had bogged down. It was difficult to avoid these; Wexton’s ambulance was at the front of a convoy, and they drove without lights.
The authorities had decreed that the carbide lamps could be lit only for one small section of the road, when they were ten kilometers from Saint-Hilaire. They must be extinguished again ten kilometers before the station. This was because of German air attacks—of which, so far, there had been only one, some two months previously, when a German biplane had dropped explosives in the area of the road, missing it by half a mile. Wexton did not have great respect for biplanes or the authorities. He stopped the ambulance, climbed down and lit the carbides when they were five kilometers out. Jane climbed down to help him, and sank up to her calves in mud. It was raining again; the wind had strengthened. It took ten matches to persuade the carbides to light; once lit, they were unreliable. They illumined an area of ground for about five feet ahead, making the surrounding darkness a deeper black.
In the back of the ambulance, under a tarpaulin roof, was a group of Red Cross nurses from Lancashire, who sang as they slithered and bucketed. They were sheltered from the rain; Jane and Wexton were not. The front of the ambulance was unroofed; the windshield was low; the wipers tended to jam; mud sprayed. Jane was wearing two sets of woolen underclothes, three cardigans over her dress, a jacket, a coat, two scarves, two pairs of mittens. She was stiff with cold.
Wexton drove with erratic skill. He cursed a lot. He cursed the mud, the jammed wipers, the carbide lights, the potholes, the skid-marks.
When the Lancashire nurses sang “Tipperary,” Wexton joined in, in a ringing baritone. The ambulance hit a rut. Wexton performed a skillful maneuver which was midway between a glide and a lurch. Somewhere in the middle of their journey he gave Jane her first cigarette, which made her cough. Farther on, he described Virginia. Farther on still, he discussed a book called Buddenbrooks. Another kilometer and he confided he was learning to knit. One kilometer more and they were discussing trains, for which Wexton had a passion. They bounced about in a companionable way from books to recipes, from his family (Wexton was one of eight) to hers (Jane had had only the one brother).
Jane enjoyed this. Yes, she was stiff with cold; every bone in her body ached from the jolting of the wheels. Her wet hair felt as if it froze to her face. Her throat was raw from the smoke of the cigarette. Nevertheless, she enjoyed it. She felt as if Wexton took her up in a balloon, fueled with his own unflagging benevolence, and showed her a world crammed with incident. Anything was possible!
One kilometer more—the station was approaching—and Wexton sang an American song. One kilometer after that, and, without warning, he switched to her meeting with Boy.
“Yes. We had the omelette,” she replied at last.
Then, because Wexton did not prompt, and she liked that in him, she told him what had happened.
Since she had last seen him, Boy had been promoted. He had begun the war with the rank of lieutenant; by the time she broke off their engagement, he was a captain. Now, he was a major. Such rapid promotion was not unusual. The life expectancy of a Guards’ officer at that point in the war was six months; men were in short supply. If the war went on this way, Boy said with an odd smile when she congratulated him on his promotion, he would end up a brigadier at the very least.
“Who knows?” He smiled a blank smile. “Even a general.”
Jane did not believe this. She knew Boy did not believe it either. He made her sadder when he tried to make jokes. They sat at the same table she had occupied earlier in the evening with Wexton. As Wexton had advised, they ate the potato omelette.
Boy ate only half of it. He ordered a roasted chicken, took one bite, then set down his fork. He drank—Jane counted—one and a half bottles of wine.
Jane tried. She knew that during the previous two weeks Boy had been manning a dugout forward of the front-line trenches, in No Man’s Land, under fire from a German machine-gun pillbox. The gun was eventually captured. She did not know the details. She did not know, for instance, that Boy would subsequently receive the Military Cross for this episode; she did not know that of the twenty men in his platoon, only three returned; she did not know that at one point Boy had been in the dugout, in four feet of water, under constant fire for a continuous period of fifty-six hours. She would not ask for details; you did not ask men who had been to Golgotha to describe the topography there.
She had not expected this conversation to flow, and it did not. It lurched. It jammed. It was punctuated by silences that embarrassed them both, silences that would end when they both began on precipitate speech at the same moment.
They discussed Boy’s father’s health, his mother’s, Freddie’s ambulance work, Steenie’s forthcoming exhibition of paintings, and the astonishing news of Constance’s engagement to Sir Montague Stern. Jane saw these events across a divide; once they might have seemed momentous; now they seemed petty.
Perhaps they seemed so to Boy also, for he spoke of them in a distanced way. He blinked. His hands described small jerky movements in the air. He looked deaf, and unhappy.
It was when, in some despair, Jane turned to the subject of photography that she knew something was seriously wrong. The moment she mentioned cameras, Boy’s face took on a mulish expression.
“I’ve got rid of the Adams Videx.”
“Got rid of it, Boy? You mean you sold it?”
“I smashed it up. I shan’t take photographs again. I burned all the photographs I took in France. I broke the plates. When I go home”—he took a large swallow of wine—“I shall destroy all my photographs there as well. I hate photographs. They tell lies. Do you know the only thing worth photographing? A stick in the sun. A stick and its shadow. Yes. I suppose I wouldn’t mind photographing that.”
Jane was very shocked. To hear Boy denounce photography was like hearing a lifelong Catholic renounce his faith: It was a blasphemy. She looked at him more closely.
The war had altered his face; the war had improved his face. There was no sign of trench pallor. If you ignored the expression in the eyes, Boy looked as if he had just returned from an invigorating holiday—a spell by the sea, perhaps. His skin was wind-tanned; the rounded childish contours of his face, which had always made him seem younger than he was, were hardening into something older and more rigorous.
War was making Boy into a handsome man—there was an irony. Yet the anxiety in his eyes denied the new authority in his features. Boy looked like an actor who had forgotten his lines.
There was something Boy intended to say. First, though, it seemed he had to wind himself up. When he had finished the wine, he seemed to decide he was wound: levers and hairsprings. Boy cleared his throat. He shook his head to dislodge the imaginary water. He gazed at the condensation upon the window, through which Wexton’s drawings of men and boats were still visible. He turned his head a little to the left and addressed a potted palm. He had come here, he said, to discuss Constance.
He began in a general way. He became fluent, as if this part of his performance had been well rehearsed. He explained at some length that most people (he included Jane) did not understand Constance, whereas he did. He said that what one had to remember was that Constance was still a child; she was vulnerable.
Jane did not agree. She considered Constance’s engagement a disgraceful betrayal of Maud. This, she did not say; Boy gave her no chance. He was clearly not interested in Jane’s opinion. The clockwork was in motion; once begun, Boy seemed unable to stop.
“This marriage of Constance’s,” he said, very distinctly, “this marriage must be stopped.” There was then a great deal more. Boy said his father’s behavior was inexp
licable—permission to marry should have been refused. He said he found Maud’s behavior inexplicable, also Stern’s, Freddie’s, Steenie’s—even his mother’s. Everyone’s behavior was inexplicable, it seemed, except that of Constance. Constance’s behavior Boy could explain. It was, he told the potted palm, a cry for help.
At this point in his speech Boy seemed to have reached some obstacle. He began to stammer, and the stammer was far worse than it had ever been. Boy’s tongue stuck on the letter C. This caused him some anguish; it made it very difficult to pronounce Constance’s name.
Having told the potted palm that Constance wanted help, Boy turned his anxious eyes back to Jane. He then explained the last thing, the thing that had brought him here that night, before he returned to England. Although he and Jane were no longer engaged, he had felt it correct that she should be the first to know his intentions. He intended to return to England. There, he would stop this marriage. That was the first thing. Then he would propose marriage to Constance himself.
“She must have been expecting it, you see.” Boy leaned across the table. “She must have expected it as soon as I ended the engagement to you. When I did not ask, she did this. Do you understand?” He spread his hands and gave Jane a smile of great sweetness. “A cry for help. She knows that I love her, of course.”
Jane began on this story to Wexton as they approached the railway station, where they would meet a train bearing the wounded from the field hospitals. The train was late, and they stood on the cold, black platform, side by side, shivering.
The story upset her. She found it difficult to recount in a coherent way, and kept rushing back and forth between the scene in the café and other scenes in the past. Gaps had opened up in a narrative Jane had presumed seamless, and these gaps worried her. She made little darts and rushes at them. She saw that she had never understood Boy, whom she had always thought so simple and straightforward. There was a Boy in this story she did not know. Suddenly the past jostled with questions. She blamed herself. She had been blind. Obsessed with her own feelings for Acland, it had never occurred to her that Boy, too, might have a secret life.
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