The Protagonists

by James Barlow

  ‘Names always fit, don’t they?’ I said. ‘But not now. Not now … Why aren’t you married, Miss Hughes?’

  She said quickly, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You see,’ I said, ‘I felt exactly the same about you: that you were the sort of person who would be.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, trotting out her story. ‘I was a nurse and the boy I was in love with died. I couldn’t stomach nursing after that and, because of my hair, obtained a job in a hair-dressing establishment quite easily.’

  I was amused at that dump being called an establishment, but said, ‘I’m sure you did. Your hair is the most perfect shade of auburn I have ever seen.’

  Her face coloured auburn, too, at this, but she said, demurely enough, ‘I shall have to return to work now. It must be near two o’clock.’

  Outside the boozer I said, using all the charm indigestion allowed me, ‘I have enjoyed your company … It’s years since I talked to a girl so pleasant.’

  ‘It was a very enjoyable lunch,’ Olwen said. ‘Thank you very much. I hope I shall come here again.’

  ‘I’d like to bring you,’ I said, seizing the hint. ‘Do you have a half day?’

  ‘On Tuesdays,’ she said.

  ‘Then may I meet you next Tuesday?’ I said. ‘Perhaps after luncheon we could drive somewhere or go dancing.’

  ‘I’d like that very much.’

  ‘Will you do me a favour?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Will you grant me the pleasure of being called Roy?’

  ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘And you must call me Olwen.’

  On the following Tuesday at one o’clock I met her for the second time. To do so meant commencing work earlier, moving round more quickly and shortening my conversations; but that’s not difficult and I’ve done it for other women. I cover the county of Middleshire, including the city of Birlchester, and I’ve been at it for so long that it’s largely automatic: a question of collecting the orders.

  Olwen was dressed very simply in a bottle-green costume that contrasted well with the auburn hair. Her blouse was paler green – she died in another, similar one. She was quite startling in her beauty; not especially sensual in her face, but certainly in her body and legs and the awkward, shy way she moved.

  I began straight away to relieve her conscience. ‘I’m so glad you came, Olwen,’ I said – inserting the ‘Olwen’ to remind her of her permission to use it: I didn’t intend losing the ground I’d gained. ‘I was afraid once again that you might not.’

  She was surprisingly agreeable about it. ‘I know how you feel,’ she said, securely convinced that she did. ‘Let’s not keep apologizing because we met in a shop.’

  This time she had two sherries before the lunch and in consequence lost some of her seriousness. We were quite conversational until I felt that perhaps, after all, it might be the usual walkover. Then in her own way she started to probe with questions and I knew I had to guard my answers. ‘Listen, Roy,’ she said – she was willing to call me Roy. ‘I’ve been playing a guessing game during the last week. Tell me if I guessed correctly. You’re over thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-five,’ I said.

  ‘You were a naval officer in the war?’

  ‘Almost right,’ I said. ‘I was in the R.A.F. at Little Over.’

  ‘Wasn’t that a bomber station?’ she said. ‘The one from where they set out to drop mines in the Kiel Canal?’

  I blushed modestly, and she gave a little gasp. ‘You mean you went with them?’

  It seemed time to gaze into space: into the distant, historical past: beyond the bottles and the bar to the roar of Merlin engines on that well-known raid. I was a pilot at the famous Little Over for a time. On that Kiel day I saw the way casualties were going and afterwards wangled my way out of operations on to training. However, women like the modest admissions of a few heroisms, and Olwen, regarding my silence as confirmation of all sorts of other heroisms, said, ‘I read about it at school.’

  ‘All over now, Olwen.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said.

  ‘I’m pleased that you are.’

  She reddened a bit. ‘Then I guessed that you’d had a good education – one that included Oxford or Cambridge …’

  ‘Oxford,’ I said untruthfully, catering to her sense of snobbery. She could not be bothered with education herself, or the arts and politics, but expected to marry someone who had. Oh, Olwen, you were just the same as the others, really! A typical British woman! You didn’t know what went on in the world, yet you had the impertinence to expect it to behave on your terms! I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you, too, Olwen, during the last few days – thinking too much about you …’ She blushed in delight, although it would have been a shock if she’d known the content of those thoughts! I pressed on: ‘I saw the doctor on Sunday. He says it will be a merciful release, and that it may come in less than twelve months.’

  ‘Poor Evelyn,’ said Olwen.

  We looked at each other and I could see she didn’t give a damn about Evelyn. As long as her own conscience was in the clear, Evelyn could be in pain or mad or dead …’

  ‘What have you been guessing?’ Olwen asked.

  ‘That you’re about twenty-one or two.’ I really thought she was.

  ‘Nearly twenty-six,’ she admitted.

  ‘You carry your old age well,’ I said. She laughed, her lips moving into a sensuous crescent, and said eagerly, ‘Go on!’

  ‘I deduced that your parents had a bad time in the war; and therefore you send money home to help your mother.’

  ‘Something like that,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve been fond of several people,’ I said, looking into the large blue eyes, ‘but never in love passionately.’

  She liked it; I could see that. Perhaps she’d never had a line shot at her before. Perhaps all the men who’d been with her previously had been awed by that red beauty into silence and obedience. ‘I don’t think that’s any business of yours,’ she said, but added to soften the impertinence, ‘not yet.’

  It was pouring with rain when we left the Dragon, and we decided to go to the flicks. We sat through some ghastly film about the war; the hero sacrificing himself for some obscure cause, probably to do with chewing-gum. I held Olwen’s hand for a short while, squeezed it and had the squeeze returned. She filled her lovely body with chocolates as fast as I could provide them. After the film we went to some Tudor café and loafed about over tea. Olwen discussed the film and I had to tell her a few things about real war. ‘You seem to have done everything,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve never kissed a red-haired girl.’

  She blushed scarlet in delight, unaware of the thought I’d really had. ‘You should write a book,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t believe in boasting about the war,’ I said, and this pleased her too. ‘War’s ugly and shouldn’t be dramatized into any form of art or emotionalism which could further its existence …’ She did not seem to know what I was talking about, so I went on, ‘Where shall we go this evening? Dancing or a ride in my car?’

  For all her demureness, Olwen wished to proceed with the squeezing without wasting time and energy dancing. She said, ‘I’d like to go for a drive.’

  I suggested a ride out into the country and dinner at the Castle in Brownhill. It’s a perfect place to take a woman, although I’ve only been with one or two. Only people with cars can reach it – which excluded the risk of any of Olwen’s friends. I suppose a few country yokels go in the bars, but the dining-room is for people like us, who want a private alcove.

  Olwen said, ‘Is this where you used to bring Evelyn?’

  ‘No,’ I explained. ‘I’ve merely had lunch here sometimes … Don’t make it too difficult for us to associate at all, Olwen.�
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  ‘Don’t be unhappy,’ Olwen said, touching my hand. ‘If we’ve twelve months to wait we might as well pass them without unhappiness.’

  ‘You mean–?’

  ‘I mean that I like you,’ she said.

  It could only mean that she loved me – women don’t like men – and I was tremendously pleased. I even became too confident. After the meal and some sherry – not enough to coke her up, unfortunately – we carried on driving. By now it was dark and there was no point in the movement. I turned into a lane, doused the lights and said, ‘Let’s talk. Cigarette?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Olwen said, her voice uneven in nervousness.

  She was in such a hurry to be kissed that she couldn’t pause to have a smoke! She was too nervous to talk much in the silence, so I commenced to kiss, slowly at first and with whispers. Olwen closed her eyes and lapped it up. Her face was hot and she moved about restlessly at the beginning, no doubt bothered because she was with a married man. But my whispers explained all that away satisfactorily – kisses did not harm, we were friends, my wife was not really alive … Olwen had a large mouth, firmer than it looked, which was a frenetic ache to kiss. ‘Don’t make me too happy, Roy,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve got to endure for twelve months.’ She wants it, I thought; the large, healthy body is itself screaming for satisfaction. She was limp across me in the confined space, so abandoned that I was certain she wanted me; if my one available hand could find its way beneath the silk I would soon make her body sick with need. But it was trapped by her weight on top of it. ‘You’re so good,’ I whispered, ‘but too beautiful to remain unloved … You must behave for the both of us.’ We were both thoroughly excited now; no previous woman had been able to draw away from such a proximity to ecstasy; my one hand, now free, had wandered quite a way up; and then the fool remembered her parents and her God and that it was marriage she must hold out for. She wriggled about, protested, ‘No, no,’ and at last resumed the demure role: ‘Please, please!’ and then the excuse: ‘The seat’s hurting me.’ There is no second wave in an attack like that, and I knew that it was all over for that one day.

  I resumed my own role, releasing her at once. It was true that she was lowered across the metal seats, but nothing was hurting her. However, although I could have ignored her plea, I did things her way because I enjoy the game for itself as well as the final result. I don’t plead with women: they surrender and plead with me. I will have a lot of fun with you, I thought in anger, before I laugh in your face and dump you.

  ‘I’ve torn my stockings on your gears,’ she complained.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you some more.’

  ‘Will you?’ Olwen said. ‘I’d be grateful. Size ten.’

  She was quite perky because she’d had her own way, full of confidence because she believed she could control me, and happy because we really had had a good time. I’d whispered the usual line, and her body had listened in excitement without putting any weight on her conscience. I didn’t mind. I’d enjoyed it too. If they want to play the game slowly, I can do it like that. They won’t talk me into marriage in that fashion. I knew it was the last battle that counted, in love as well as war.

  Chapter Two

  July 28th. After writing for over two hours last night I went to the tennis club for the first time in six weeks. It was too late to begin playing, of course, but there was an amusing crowd at the bar. It included a girl of about nineteen, all chest and bottom, anxious to be admired by a man of the world, instead of the usual teenage lout. I shall have to be careful, because a few years ago I had an affair with a married woman there; when she was dumped she talked and her talk reached my wife; that was what caused Evelyn’s breakdown … However, there’s often a bit of jiggery-pokery at the club: drinking and a kiss in the changing-rooms with someone else’s wife: and with patience Brenda – that’s the busty girl – could be the next one. She herself is impatient to be beyond the talking, but I must seem reluctant; I must be dragged into the affair so that, when it ends, her pitiful little brain must not comprehend who was really the victim.

  However, you wish to know about Olwen. There was quite a splash in the local papers today. I’m beginning these words in a perfectly respectable café, a pot of tea in front of me; some old, too-rich, tedious ladies are sitting at other tables. Just then I happened to look up and in the startled, encountered eyes of a young woman, sitting with another young wife and several assorted, well-behaved children, all talking in the usual nasal middle-class unknowing confidence – in her eyes I remarked that doe-like embarrassment and enjoyment that reveals when a woman comprehends she’s being mentally stripped. This one doesn’t mind it. She keeps looking, her friend facing away from me is unaware of the combat of eyes. She thinks I’m making reports or something. Well, in a way I am, but what a shock doe-eyes would have if she could read this. She spoke then to the waitress. In her crystal-clear station-announcer’s voice she said, like part of an elocution lesson, ‘Have you any cakes, please?’ Delicious irony! The two children – hers, I think – are called Angela and Peter.

  It came as quite a shock to see the headline and there, beneath it, as spotted as a Seurat painting, a smiling, uniformed Olwen. I hadn’t a photograph of her, so I cut this out to keep. Perhaps, as the case moves on into lack of solution, the weekly magazines may take an interest and I can obtain some clearer, glossier photographs. Heaven forbid that I should forget the girl! That would be inexcusable! The Birlchester Gazette said EX-NURSE SLAIN. Why ex-nurse, I wonder? Of course, with the Gazette, which concentrates its limited mental powers on to local sport, one can expect anything. Perhaps they weren’t sober. Ah, no, of course, it was the photograph. Where did they get it? From the Chief Constable of Middleshire? And where did he get it? Things are moving. They’ve visited someone who has a photograph of Olwen. Well, why worry? They were bound to do that. Perhaps, on second thoughts, ‘hairdresser’s assistant’ was too long and difficult for the Gazette’s compositors. They completely forgot to put ‘red-head’, which is always good for a profound thought or two. Let me quote their precious style: ‘The Middleshire Police are investigating the death of Olwen Hughes, a twenty-six-years-old ex-nurse, whose body was found on Tuesday evening in a copse on the river bank near Almond Vale. Early this morning (they mean yesterday – it’s Thursday now) police resumed their search of the area, despite pouring rain and occasional thunder. Detective-Inspector Maddocks of the Middleshire County Police, Almond Vale, examined the scene last night at dusk and again early today, this time accompanied by other senior officers. The Chief Constable of Middleshire and a pathologist also visited the scene. The girl’s attire was disarranged and assault must be suspected. The investigations are being continued over a wide area.’

  Doe-eyes is leaving. She has gathered her children, hand-bag, shopping basket and friend into a tidy pattern, left a sixpenny tip, and is now disputing politely with her friend about who shall pay the bill. She took a last quick glance over this way, but blushed into haughtiness when I offered a slight smile. Afraid her friend might see, I suppose. Standing up, she’s not quite so good-looking. The child-bearing has widened her hips a little too much, and it emphasizes that her legs aren’t really long enough. Middle age is about to turn her into the usual dumpiness. She’ll walk home now, talking politely to her friend about nothing, and will, perhaps with the aid of a servant, commence to prepare the evening meal for her husband. He will be a civil servant, well paid, polite, intelligent, perhaps intellectual, probably going bald, a member of a club or two, very serious about his political party, and as dull and lifeless as a cold rice pudding. They will have the children put to bed, rather sweetly, and will perhaps proceed to a concert. Or perhaps they’ll crane forward in their theatre seats, anxious not to miss the dialogue in some adultery play. Doe-eyes (who has never committed adultery) will applaud politely at the end, certain that it was very intelligent and that so
mewhere a significant point was made to cancel out the remainder, which seemed rather naughty. At about eleven doe-eyes and her husband will go to bed, still talking politely, and they may decide to make love. She will manoeuvre him into it, perhaps, for she’s feeling restless today. The light will be out, as it always is, originally because of shyness, but now because she doesn’t wish her husband to see her eagerness. He might be shocked. And when she’s hugging him terribly tightly so that he’s nearly complaining (it was a heavy day at the office; there’s another tomorrow; why not wait for the weekend?) she’ll think about me …

  ‘The investigations are being continued.’ … I’m sure they are. What fun they’ll be having! I know the police. They’re not much cop, if you’ll excuse the pun. The average constable’s on the lookout for a bit of skirt or a put-up, or both. A put-up is a place where he can have a crafty smoke or a cup of tea while on his beat. Providing the put-up is in a ‘strategical position’ (i.e. where he can see out of the window when he raises himself off the chair!), his senior officers don’t mind. The plain-clothes men have almost complete freedom; they play like little boys, thoroughly enjoying themselves. They work their own hours and get boozed up with their ‘clients’. They receive about fifteen quid a week, but some of it is handed on to ‘information received’. In one way and another they have their rake-off from the prostitutes also. Oh, the plain-clothes are competent enough if it’s offences in lavatories and parks, old half-witted lags, street betting or the pros. Same goes for the C.I.D men. The modus operandi tells them which habitual burglar to look for. They take him to the station and back-hand him a few, and there you are. The fool is probably glad to get some good prison food once more. Of course, the police are not daft in the head, and no doubt this Maddocks will try hard. But they rely on habits. In his case he’ll do it in reverse: Which of Miss Hughes’s friends and acquaintances did anything unusual or out of routine on that day? Why? And so on. But none of Olwen’s friends have seen me or my car – the poor fool didn’t want me to see her lodgings because she was ashamed of them. What a comfort that is to me now! The scientists can tell the coppers a lot, but only what kind of thing happened and when. There has to be somebody to give a name before they can use the scientific deductions. Nobody has seen me. And my routine is my own – I’m a traveller and account to no one for my movements.