Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  Acting Captain Cochrane had a considerable liver by the end of the afternoon. The men had been dozy and idle all day. He’d gone round bollocking them right and left. The latrines hadn’t been cleaned, the washbasins were still littered with rusty blades and fag ends when he inspected them after lunch. The cesspool stank and the fatigue party complained that there wasn’t any hot water for them to clean up afterwards. All the plugs for the washbasins were missing, the kit was untidily laid out on the beds, the rifles hadn’t been pulled through since he inspected them last. He was in no mood to be accosted. When he saw Eva waiting for him at the bottom of the lane, he had already had too much.

  She was wearing a plain mackintosh, a loose-fitting Burberry, and a little green hat with turned-up brim like a schoolgirl. Her hands were in her pockets, her eyes on the ground. He knew she’d seen him, but she wasn’t able to look at him approaching. He walked smartly towards her, very military in his swish greatcoat and service cap flat over his eyes. His face looked narrow and sharp under the severe cap, his fair moustache and rather pointed teeth giving him a stoatlike appearance. When he was within a couple of yards, she looked up and her eyes were wide and lambent, looking at him for some sign.

  ‘Well, Eva,’ he said. He coughed and looked at his wristwatch. ‘You got my letter, didn’t you?’

  She stayed looking at him with her pale searching face and her dark transparent eyes. Damn it all, she had a nice face. Was she going to cling? Why did she take things so seriously?

  ‘Well? Say something, Eva.’

  His voice was softer, the least bit softer.

  ‘I got your letter,’ she said. ‘That’s why I came to see you.’

  ‘Well, you know I’m on duty, then?’ he tried it out, not so sure that he wanted to finish it for good just yet.

  ‘That’s what you said,’ she replied.

  He flushed, but she had turned away from him.

  ‘Well?’ he queried, his voice hardening. He wasn’t going to be pried into. If his word wasn’t enough for her, OK chief!

  She looked up again. He noticed she hadn’t powdered herself very carefully; her nose had a thick patch on it.

  ‘Hector,’ she said, putting her hands on the immaculate breast of his greatcoat, ‘Don’t you understand, darling?’

  He was swept with impatience. His success with women was about equal to his ignorance of them. He wasn’t going to have any sob stuff, thank you.

  ‘How the blazes do you expect me to understand?’ he said roughly.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There is something to understand.’

  He quailed under her sudden precision of mood; she knew what she was going to do now; she wasn’t leaning on him, beseeching him with her eyes. She was very quiet and firm. She looked at him and he got scared.

  ‘There’s nothing serious, Eva, is there?’ his fear prompted him.

  ‘It is serious,’ she said.

  ‘Darling,’ he gasped.

  He was horrified of the consequences, infuriated with her for getting into this mess, and, for the first time in his life, even if only for a minute, in love.

  He spoke slowly, stopping to think.

  ‘Can’t you see a doctor, Eva? There are some doctors, you know—’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, still with this ridiculous composure.

  ‘But – but you ought to,’ he said.

  ‘I can do as I choose,’ she replied.

  He said nothing, sensing a hopeless deadlock.

  ‘Eva,’ he said at last.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We could get married at the Registry Office next weekend if you like,’ he said, slowly, never taking his worried eyes off her. She was silent, as if listening to his words again and again in her mind.

  He felt a growing exhilaration, a new and wonderful simplicity in him, like sunlight slowly breaking.

  ‘Shall we?’ he asked, holding his hand out.

  She looked up again. This was always the most active thing she did, disclosing her eyes. Her hands all the time in her Burberry pockets. She was reluctant to answer; there was a sweetness in the possibility, a reflection of his own momentary sincerity. It was what she had come for, to hear him say that; because he had said these words she was happy. She had no sense of tragedy or of shame. She felt indifferent to the future.

  ‘No, we can’t get married,’ she said slowly at the last.

  Something in him was suddenly overpoweringly relieved. He had no sense of a durable daily happiness, of a long companionship in love; but only romantic impulses, like sunlight, and harsher emotions.

  ‘But why not?’ he asked, trembling.

  ‘Because – oh well,’ she mumbled, seeking blindly to bind up her thoughts into the certainty that was still inchoate in her, ‘because you – don’t—’ she turned away, and in profile he saw her lips finish the sentence, ‘—love me.’

  Her courage shamed him into a greater confusion. He flushed and lost his head and was just about to gallop into the breach with protestations of devotion when a four-seater army car swung round the bend and pulled up with a screech and shudder.

  ‘Christ,’ he gasped, this time in a real fluster. ‘Look out.’

  He sprang to the car and saluted.

  The colonel half-opened the door.

  ‘Just coming to see you, Cochrane. Expected to find you in your office, not flirting on the roads.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hop in. Quickly. I want to get back.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The car surged forward.

  Eva watched it go. By herself. She pushed her hair back, rubbing her cheeks, rubbing the cold sweat off her forehead. Heavily she turned and walked slowly along the road.

  The colonel looked into the first Nissen hut.

  ‘These bricks round the fireplace,’ he said. ‘I sent an order to all detachments that they be whitewashed. Why haven’t you done it?’

  ‘No whitewash, sir.’

  ‘Get some. Christ. What are you here for?’

  He picked up a pair of boots from one of the men’s beds.

  ‘These boots. Burnt. Look at the soles. Burnt through. Drying them by the fire. Is this man on a charge?’

  ‘Er, no, sir.’

  ‘Why the hell not? Nation can’t afford to waste boots every time they get wet. Christ. Send him to me tomorrow under escort.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I don’t believe they are burnt, sir. The man has been waiting for a boot exchange for five weeks. He’s worn them out—’

  ‘I tell you they’re burnt. Christ man, you’re not a cobbler, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then talk about something you know.’

  By the time the old man drove off Captain Cochrane was utterly emasculate. He saluted with so pathetic and servile a gesture that the colonel didn’t even return the salute. And so his day ended. The duties of the evening confronted him. Dinner in mess, then dance attendance on the old man’s daughter. Poleworth was the name. Less respectfully, when the subalterns were hidden away in a pub, the name was sometimes garbled to Polecat. She certainly had a pungent odour. Still, hardy men said she was a good sport. She liked to play, they hinted, twisting the yellow ends of their moustaches. Captain Cochrane emptied his whisky flask before deciding on his tactical plan. Marvellous thing, whisky.

  Curly took a walk after drinking his mug of tea and eating a piece of bread and marge and a Lyons’ fruit pie. He didn’t wash or brass up. He wasn’t going to town. He wanted some peace of mind, along the sand dunes running from the harbour to the boarding house promenade where the ferro-concrete seaside resort began. Faintly, as though his tedious preoccupations had taken a musical form, the distant sound of hurdy-gurdy jazz songs blaring in the funfair touched his quietness, accompanying him unobtrusively as he climbed the loose sand. Thinking of the industry of pleasure, he watched the sea, fuming like a thin grey smoke far far out beyond the mudflats, and it seemed as though the purpose of the town had been lost, th
e balance between sea and land ruined, the fundamental element forgotten. Pleasure had broken away from simplicity, the penny-in-the-slot machine had conquered the sea, people had turned their backs and were screaming with laughter. Watching the sea fuming and grey he found himself suddenly investing the solitary person walking slowly and with downcast head across the wet worm-cast mud with all the attributes which humanity, he decided this evening, had rejected. He wanted to speak to this lonely person; it was a woman; heavy she was; heavy with the rejected attributes of humanity; pregnant she must be, and pale with a serious beauty, bearing so much in her.

  Following his fantasy, he walked down from the dunes and across the slimy front towards the girl. He walked quickly, keeping his attenion on her, refusing to allow the usual inhibitions to stop him accosting her.

  Eva felt no particular strangeness at his approach. A little soldier with spectacles and curly hair like a wire brush. It was quite natural. She said good evening. She was glad he had come.

  ‘I was standing on the dunes,’ he said. ‘And there was nobody but you anywhere at all. And so you became important to me, so that I came to ask you something.’

  ‘Don’t ask me anything,’ she said.

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘Will you take me back to the land?’ she said, looking at him, holding her hand out to him uncertainly.

  Her face was as he had imagined it, young and hollow, large hollow-eyed, luminous and vague with distress.

  He took her cold hand and led her back to the firm land, the grass and rocks and walls and telegraph poles and houses. In silence.

  ‘Have you ever tried to die?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘What shall I do now, then?’ she asked again.

  ‘Walk,’ he said. ‘Pick a flower. Hurt your shin against a rock. Keep doing things like that for a bit. Do you like coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, thinking back to the taste of such things. ‘Yes. I like coffee.’

  ‘Shall we go and have some, and some chocolate biscuits, in the Marina?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, very seriously. ‘That would be nice.’

  She looked at the people having coffee and peach melbas and spaghetti on toast at the little green tables, soldiers and girls, commercial men, ponderous wives on holiday with children past their bedtime. The waitresses rustling and slender and deft, rotund and homely – and competent; the warm shaded lights falling on the flowery wallpaper. The strangeness and the fear gradually left her eyes like sugar melting in a lemon glass. She tasted the hot coffee slowly, and its warmth led her to smile.

  ‘Why do you look so serious?’ she asked Curly.

  He looked at her all the time. She could see the gathering of his thoughts in the dark blue eyes magnified and concentrated by the curved lenses of his spectacles.

  ‘Funny, you having blue eyes,’ she said.

  Looking at each other over the wispy coffee steam, each wanted to be confessed in the other, each desired to share a new yet ancient community of interest. Neither of them could think now of how different they were, the one from the other, how insulated by separate compulsions and circumstances.

  ‘I live near here. Shall we go and sit by the fire?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like to,’ he answered…

  ‘It’s only an electric fire,’ she said, as he opened the glass door for her.

  There were two photographs on the mantelpiece of her little bedsitter. Curly noticed they were both men in uniform. Brothers? Or lovers? Also a sewing machine and dresses half finished. A reading lamp and Picture Post and Lilliput and a Sunday Pictorial.

  ‘I haven’t got a shilling for the meter,’ she said.

  He produced one.

  ‘You’re very good,’ she said to him, putting the shilling in the slot, bending down as she spoke. ‘You stopped me committing suicide and now you’ve given me food and money and – and what else?’

  ‘What else?’ he repeated, his sensitive mind crushed by the sledgehammer blow of her casual confession.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, standing up and smoothing her navy skirt down, picking bits of fluff off her knees. ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

  Her sick soul was in her eyes.

  He stayed with her till late in the night, putting another shilling in the meter, going and queuing outside the chip shop for some fish cakes for their supper while she set the little table and boiled the kettle and cut some bread and butter. The reading lamp on the table, and she telling him about dressmaking, and the poverty she was in now there was no material purchasable, and the requirements of her clients, and their sexy confidences. She was recovering herself and he watched her judgement returning gradually as her comments on people and things reached further and further out from the touchstone of herself, radiating like ripples from a stone dropped into a pond. She had no politics or plans, no criteria; except herself, her intuitions and feelings, aversions. He wanted to restore herself to her, so that she could continue living from day to day, thought to thought, with continuity.

  They were talking about the Army; tonight it seemed a remote, unreal topic, a social problem which could be discussed or dropped as they chose. In the same unreal mood she said:

  ‘My husband liked the Army. He’s the one on the right there. He had a good time in France, till suddenly it all happened.’

  Curly crossed to the mantelpiece and looked at the smiling RAC sergeant in his black beret; a powerful, smiling man, confident and untroubled.

  ‘He never bothered about things,’ she said. ‘He liked tanks and so he liked the war. I don’t think he bothered about dying, or being away from me. He just married me one leave, that’s all. He wouldn’t have a baby. It never occurred to him. And now he’s dead. A whole year now he’s been dead. I’ve forgotten nearly everything about him.’

  Curly looked from the second photograph in consternation.

  ‘You know Captain Cochrane?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s been coming here a lot,’ she said. ‘He’s had enough of me now, though.’

  How weary she sounded, telling him all these elemental facts in a flat, indifferent voice.

  ‘I should have thought you’d had enough of him,’ he said. ‘He’s a poor piece of work. You shouldn’t have let him take you in. He’s nothing at all, just cardboard and paste.’

  She smiled, lighting one of his cigarettes.

  ‘Would you have saved me, if you’d known me six weeks ago?’ she said. ‘I met him in the Plaza at a dance, just six weeks ago. Would you have stopped him touching me?’

  ‘Its your own affair,’ he said. ‘If I’d known you I would have.’

  ‘Could you have?’ she teased him. ‘Could you make love as gifted as he did?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so,’ he said. ‘I’m not a cinema fan. Nor am I very enthusiastic about that sort of thing. You know what he used to say? He used to say he had a lot of dirty water on his chest and he knew a woman who would swill it out for him.’

  ‘You’re not preaching to me, anyway,’ she said. ‘You’re hitting hard, aren’t you?’

  ‘I could hit much harder,’ he replied.

  ‘I can’t help it now,’ she said, dejected. ‘He offered to marry me; there’s that to be said for him; only he didn’t mean it.’

  Curly went hot and sticky, as though there were filthy cobwebs all over him. And at once the old despair touched him with its dry unavailing fingers, as when he had tried to get a short leave for Taffy Thomas to see to his wife.

  It was difficult for him to go now. Yet she didn’t want him to stay. She was normal again, and consequently beginning to understand the task that was on her, the mess she had made, the immense fatigue. She turned on the wireless, late dance music, mawkish and sticky. They both stood up.

  ‘Shall I come and see you again?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Unless I go away from here.’

  ‘Where to?’ />
  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Where do you go to have a baby? Are workhouses open for that? Or I’ll go to my sister-in-law. She evacuated to her father’s farm in Borrowdale. I won’t go yet. Not for a few months. Perhaps I won’t go at all.’

  She was only talking round and round.

  On his way downstairs he bumped into somebody, stood against the wall to let him pass, recognised Captain Cochrane, smelt his hot whisky-sweet breath, and hurried out into the black streets and the unhurried stars.

  Anglo-German hostilities, held in abeyance during the daylight, resumed at a later hour than was customary this particular night. The operational orders of the Luftwaffe gave a certain unity to the experiences of Taffy Thomas, Curly Norris, Captain Cochrane and the women with whom they were connected – a unity which would not have existed otherwise. Taffy reached Swansea on a lorry conveying sheep skins from slaughterhouse to warehouse just as the first Jerries droned eastwards along the Gower coast, droned lazily towards the dark sprawling town, and released beautiful leisurely flares into the blackness below. Taffy was hungry and thirsty and broke, not even a fag end in his field dressing pocket. So he didn’t mind a few extra inconveniences such as air raids. Life was like that at present. He wasn’t expecting anything much. He hurried past his habitual pubs, past the milk bar where he had eaten steak and kidney pies on his last leave and been unable to get off the high stool on which he sat, drunk at one in the afternoon and his kid brother just as bad at his side, bloody all right, boy; and, as the first bombs screamed and went off with a sickening shuddering zoomph down the docks way, he turned into his own street and kicked the door with his big ammunition boots. It was about the same time as Curly went into Eva’s flat, and Captain Cochrane bought the Polecat her first gin and lime. Taffy’s missus was in bed on the sofa in the kitchen; she couldn’t get up to let him in, she’d gone too weak. He had to climb the drainpipe to the top bedroom and squeeze through the narrow sash. She knew who it was as soon as he kicked the door with his big boots, so she wasn’t frightened when he came downstairs; only ashamed, ashamed that she was such a poor wife, so useless a vessel for his nights, skinny thighs and wasted breasts and dead urges.