Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  The churches were still going at it hammer and tongs from the pulpit and in the columns of the Post, appealing to us to ‘fight the good fight’ and ‘never to sheathe the sword until we had conquered the anti-Christ’, and various other exhortations that seemed to us not only naïve but downright stupid.

  ‘Pity they can’t come with us when we go,’ Spring commented. ‘Then they could have a shot at it first-hand.’

  We got rather drunk in the Blueberry. The rumour had got around that we were shortly to go overseas – I suspect Spring himself started it because he was always short of money – and people rallied round, only too anxious to drown us with drink.

  During the course of the evening we picked up a blonde woman from somewhere. She was a little tight and put her arms round my shoulders and tried to make me drink gin from her glass. She had a look on her face that I was too old not to understand.

  There was a piano in a corner of the room and a man in his shirt-sleeves was hammering out ragtime. The woman leaned on me and told me some rigmarole about her husband being an officer in France and that she’d taken a job to keep her spirits up. I didn’t believe her. She looked to me like a plain, ordinary, common-or-garden tart, but the story about the officer-husband gave a hint of gentility and loneliness that she probably thought was rather fetching.

  ‘People would have frowned at me for being in here once,’ she said. ‘But times are different now. Everybody’s broader-minded.’ Was I broad-minded, she asked. I said I was.

  ‘You look as though you would be,’ she said. ‘Some people sneer at me for coming in here. I don’t belong here, you know. I’m not the type who normally goes in pubs. But a woman gets lonely. Do you get lonely?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘Only in crowded bars.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s clever. You look as though you’re clever. You’ve got the look of a man with a brain.’

  She stood back and stared at me. Spring joined her and they examined me from top to bottom. They both seemed barmy.

  ‘It’s those eyes,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Spring pointed out. ‘Have you seen his feet? Especially in ammunition boots.’

  She pushed him away irritably and came closer. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s those eyes. That’s what gets me about you. And those black eyebrows. You look like a soldier who fights. You look like a soldier who suffers. You have the look tonight of a hero, a lover.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, wishing she’d go away. ‘It’s just my normal look.’

  ‘I’d like to know you better. What’s your name?’

  ‘Charlie Chaplin.’

  ‘Please,’ she said earnestly, ‘no kidding. This is serious. Your real name?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.’

  ‘That’s better. I like Henry. Do they call you Henry or Wadsworth?’

  ‘Wadsworth.’

  ‘The French always use the second name. I prefer Henry. Harry Longfellow. I like that. Was your mother French, by any chance? You have a French look about you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She was an Eskimo.’

  She looked startled and Spring joined in. ‘She came over for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee,’ he said, ‘and never went back.’

  ‘Well!’ The blonde woman eyed me appreciatively. ‘I bet you could make a woman well content.’

  ‘Have a drink,’ I said, to change the subject.

  ‘Thanks, I will. As a matter of fact, I was looking for someone to see me home. Those two sergeants over there are trying to pick me up.’

  She indicated a couple of elderly three-stripers whose only interest in life seemed to be in sinking as much beer as they could manage. The table was already full of empty glasses.

  ‘What, those two?’ I said.

  ‘Those are the ones.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Let’s go over and fight them. Let’s have it out with them here and now.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ She put her hand on my arm quickly and held me back. ‘I don’t want trouble.’ She tried to kiss me and I could smell the gin on her breath, then the landlord leaned over the counter and said: ‘Hey, Daisy. Less of that.’

  ‘He’s a Frenchman,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Spring said, grinning all over his face.

  ‘Don’t you kid yourself.’ The landlord laughed. ‘He’s a Tyke like me and you and everybody else in here. He used to work on the Post.’

  She turned to me, her eyes flashing angrily. ‘Do you mean you’re not French?’ she accused.

  ‘I never said I was French. You said that!’

  ‘And your name. It’s not Longfellow?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘You’ve a nerve, sonny. What is it then?’

  ‘Frank Mason,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t like that name,’ she decided, beginning to lose interest herself now.

  ‘I don’t like it very much myself,’ I said.

  We hadn’t been long rid of her when Spring tried to pick a fight with a Grenadier, then, when I stopped him, one with me. By the time the pubs closed he was in a gloomy mood. The city seemed morose and dreary too, now, though there were still a lot of people in the darkened streets, mostly soldiers trying hard to be gay and noisy with nothing to be gay and noisy about.

  ‘You want London for fun,’ Spring said heavily. ‘Always somewhere to go and plenty of girls. Booze any old time, if you know what’s what, and always a show somewhere. Even the public lavatories are locked at eleven o’clock round here.’

  In disgust we found a Y.M.C.A. hostel and hired beds for the night, narrow cots in a lysol-smelling room where there were half a dozen other soldiers sleeping off their liquor. The next morning Spring rose with a headache, and announced that he thought he’d go and look up a girlfriend of his who was appearing in a show at Birmingham.

  ‘She’s not much,’ he said. ‘But she’ll do. Pity she’s a bit on the thin side. Bit like a bagpipe. Flat at the top and sharp at the bottom. But beggars can’t be choosers.’

  I saw him off at the station.

  ‘Sure you won’t come?’ he asked. ‘My friend’s got a friend who’s a chummy little piece. I can vouch for that.’

  ‘How chummy?’

  He grinned. ‘Well, I’ve shared the same digs with her and I know what goes on after the witching hour chimes.’

  ‘Thanks all the same.’

  I walked back into the city, very conscious that a fair proportion of my five days’ leave had already gone and I hadn’t much to show for it but boredom. Everyone I’d known seemed to have disappeared into the forces and the pubs seemed full of strange faces.

  I called on Mrs Julius the following day to say I was sorry about Willie but I found the place locked up. From next door, I was told that she was on munitions work and was thinking of marrying again.

  ‘A blacksmith,’ I was told. ‘Not likely to get into the Army. That’s why she picked him, between you and me.’

  I said I thought it was a very good idea and, taking my leave, got on a bus to Blackmires, which had to pass through Parkland where the Haddos lived. It was an old hankering to be around familiar places that I’d enjoyed, I knew – to see Helen perhaps, if only from a distance – though I kept telling myself all the time it was just because I wanted to have a look at the moors again and visit the Four Merry Lads.

  But Blackmires was full of surly strangers from Northumberland, who’d just joined up and were already regretting it, and the Four Merry Lads was full of people who looked like war-workers out for a day trip.

  ‘You on leave again?’ the landlord said.

  By the next day I was desperate. I’d looked forward so much to leave, but the bottom seemed to have fallen out of it on the station within a few minutes of arriving. It had seemed like treachery then. I’d thought that night after the Lusitania riot that Helen and I had drawn closer together, but it hadn’t stopped her writing to Frank. Then I realised she’d probably written be
cause he’d happened to be last on the scene, when I was languishing in detention. It was just one of those things. It had always seemed to be a toss-up between us, and it had just happened that Frank was there when I wasn’t, and that must have been what had finally tipped the scales. Battles were being won and lost all over Europe simply because someone happened to be there and someone else happened not to be. Who was I to complain?

  I was in pretty low spirits when I went back to the YMCA at tea-time for a wash, but my heart leapt at once when they told me there was a letter for me. I had no one in the world who was likely to write letters to me, and I immediately thought of Helen and all sorts of optimistic thoughts about her crossed my mind.

  But the letter was from Locky. It was short, sharp and surprising. It was written in the journalistic hand we always employed in the office, all the words strung together and made briefer by the occasional strokes of shorthand that everyone recognised.

  Where’ve you been, you damned fool? it said. Come and see us. Party tonight. It’s Helen’s birthday, and I’ve got myself married. Molly Miles from the photographic library. Remember her?

  I found myself beaming at the thought of Locky married. To me, Locky was a bit like the dream friend lonely people invent for themselves. He was casual, kind and accomplished. He never made demands on me and to a certain extent had widened my knowledge. He had dry sardonic ideas about things and was a dedicated journalist who’d probably taught me my job. He seemed indifferent to other people’s opinions and wandered through life with a slightly bored good-humoured manner, with his wry crooked smile and withdrawn look. He disliked the Army, I knew, but he’d accepted it as his duty, and he probably grumbled far less than some of the people who’d taken to the life like ducks to water. He was that rare product, the completely unruffled, completely adaptable, completely untouchable man.

  I tried to remember all I knew about Molly Miles, but all I could recall was seeing her dance the Bunny-Hug with Mason in the photographic libary, though I imagined there must be more to her than I’d ever noticed for Locky to love her.

  Then I read the letter again and, thinking of Helen, began to wish they hadn’t asked me – not just now – and in the same breath to wonder what I could buy her for a birthday present. As the shops were shut, there wasn’t much choice and in the end I bought a tin of toffees. Then I went round to Henny Cuthbert’s and he managed to get hold of a silver toast rack for Locky from a man he knew in the trade.

  I tried to spruce up a bit, but only managed to feel clumsy in those damn’ great ammunition boots I was wearing. For a long time I stood by the bus stop, then when the bus arrived to take me to Parkland I decided to catch the next, thinking I’d be too early. I called at the office to kill time but there was a frightening array of new faces. There was nothing left of me there now, no sign that I’d ever spent the greater part of my days there. It was as though I’d climbed out of it and it had healed over the hole I’d made. I stayed long enough to say ‘hello’ to the few I knew, then I fled at full speed back to the bus stop just in time to see the bus disappear.

  I waited half an hour in a fret of anxiety but when the bus came, and I climbed aboard, it seemed to wait an unconscionable time before it finally left five minutes late. It seemed to crawl up the hill, pausing far too long at each stop, while I gnawed at my nails and fidgeted with impatience.

  ‘You in a hurry?’ the conductress asked curiously from her platform at the back.

  ‘A bit,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you can hang on a bit longer, we’ll try and get you there. If you don’t stop going at those fingers of yours, you’ll be up to your elbows before you notice.’

  The bus seemed to be full of old ladies who couldn’t move very fast and who had large parcels or a lot of children to delay it at every stop. When it finally reached Parkland, I almost ran towards the Haddos’. Outside the house there was a big Morris with a brass bonnet that I recognised as Frank Mason’s father’s, and it had an ominous look about it to me.

  As I reached the door, I heard Mason laughing and Helen’s voice saying between her laughter: ‘Stop it, Frank. Don’t be an idiot.’

  Then the door opened and Locky appeared with a glass in his hand, and pulled me inside.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said. ‘Just hanging around, that’s all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come and see us? Have you been at those awful digs of yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’ve you been then?’

  ‘I stayed at a hostel.’

  ‘More fool you. You could have stayed here if I’d thought. It never crossed my mind. I expect you’ve had an awful leave, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’ve had a good time.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You’ve got a face like an early Christian martyr. Have you really had a good time?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  Locky grinned. ‘I went in the Blueberry,’ he said. ‘They told me where you were. I’ve been looking all over the place for you. Come in and meet my wife.’

  As I hung up my cap and belt, Molly Miles appeared in the hall with a tray of sandwiches and drinks, and Locky put his arm round her and pulled her forward.

  ‘Hello, Fen,’ she said shyly, and somehow she looked quite different from the girl I’d remembered dodging Mason round the files.

  I thrust the toast rack at her. ‘Hello, Molly,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’

  She seemed to have grown up suddenly and I sensed it was being married to Locky that had done the trick.

  ‘Did it two days ago,’ Locky said. ‘Special licence. “Exigencies of the service.”’

  Then Helen appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were bright and her smile was wide.

  ‘Fen!’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  She was dressed in a simple green dress and there was a strand of hair falling over her nose that she kept blowing away. Seeing her eyes and that small sharp face again made me start kicking myself for a fool and wondering why on earth I hadn’t just ignored Frank and taken a chance. But as she pecked my cheek I was aware of a subtle difference in her. She seemed to have grown up since I’d last seen her and I had a curious feeling of being an intruder as though, if I’d met her on her own, I’d have had to get to know her all over again. She was a stranger suddenly whose poise was a little disconcerting, and I decided after all that Frank could not have been lying. Somehow, she seemed to go with Frank.

  ‘Thought I’d come to say goodbye,’ I said awkwardly. I pushed the toffees into her hand. ‘Happy birthday, Helen.’

  Mason appeared behind her and put his hands on her waist, confidently. He looked big and handsome and sure of her. He’d got civilian shoes on, I noticed, and they had the effect of making my boots seem a yard long and a foot wide. He grinned immediately at me.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ he said, as though the house were his and not Helen’s. ‘Come on in.’

  The place was full of young people, some of them officers whom Locky’s family knew, and there was one young man sitting in a green leather armchair whom I loathed even more than Mason for his noisy attention to Helen.

  He played the fool a lot and kept putting on an act that made everyone laugh and, because I was congenitally incapable of playing the fool in front of strangers, I disliked him all the more. Scarlet, sweating and stonily shy, I talked to a few of the girls, who didn’t seem to have much to say, and we toasted the bride; then all the girls and the few civilians toasted those of us who were soldiers. Finally, when the party began to break up and people seemed to be going, Helen found her way to my side.

  ‘I’m glad you came, Fen,’ she said gravely. ‘I’d have hated it if you hadn’t.’ And my evening was made.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so busy,’ she went on. ‘But we just had to celebrate Locky’s wedding. It was a little unexpected.’

  ‘I didn’t even know he’d ever noticed Molly,’ I said. �
��I never saw him with her.’

  ‘Locky’s a dark horse.’

  ‘That’s what Frank says.’

  She paused. ‘Frank’s been round here a lot this week, Fen,’ she said quietly.

  This is it, I thought. She’s trying to break it gently. I felt feverish and absurd in those vast boots I wore that made me look like a labourer. ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘He told me a lot about you.’

  Treachery, I thought. Treachery! Just like Frank. Going behind my back.

  ‘Frank seems to think a lot about you, Fen.’

  That’s it, I thought bitterly. Frank all over. Butter me up while he runs me down. It was an old dodge. ‘He’s a fine chap but…’ Someone started the gramophone and swung the horn round and it started blasting in my ear, scratchy and crackling, ‘If you were the only girl in the world…’

  I began to feel resentful, and envious of all the others, whose parents were still alive and who’d been brought up in the middle of a family, admired, respected and taking their due measure of affection. Their lives had been simpler and, not being engrossed in keeping their heads above water, they’d had the time to learn how to be gracious and charming and at ease.

  Helen was staring curiously at me and I felt clumsy again, still loving her but unaware of any means that was now left open to me to tell her so.

  ‘He said the sergeant-major had a high opinion of you, too,’ she pointed out.

  ‘It’s news to me,’ I said.

  I looked at her small pointed face and unreasonably began to hate Frank. When I’d arrived I’d been happy – nervous perhaps, because living in digs all my life I’d not been in the habit of attending parties – but content at the thought that the Haddos, people I loved very much, should think of asking me. Two hours later, after seeing Frank hanging round Helen all evening, I’d become a fugitive, wishing I could get away and leave them to it.

  I’d better put her out of my life, I thought wildly. Forget her, and get back to the war. Get back to Bold with his snarling sarcasm. That was something I could understand. That was something within my reach. Women I’d never understand, I felt. Army life was simple and uncomplicated, a never-ending feud between Bold and myself. Civilian life with people like Helen around was difficult, sad and worrying.