The Protagonists

by James Barlow

  As long as the police merely suspect assault they’ll confine their searches to madmen and vagrants. This will make it very difficult for them, because with assault of that kind it is, obviously, a person not previously known to the victim. I wonder what led them to this early conclusion? The untidiness, I suppose. Things were scattered about as if we had been fighting … When they get tired of looking for madmen, the police will start to dig out Olwen’s male acquaintances. I don’t think there were many before me, and certainly none at the same time. Which is a pity, for it would complicate things. However, because I intended to possess Olwen and then depart without leaving any forwarding address, what information I gave her was largely false. The one dangerous thing she had was the name of my employers. She threatened to see Bushell, my district manager. Bushell is an old friend from R.A.F. days, but because of the age of his friendship he knows bits about my past. The friendship has not included recent years, thank goodness, but a word from Olwen would have meant trouble.

  It took a long time to force Olwen to succumb. She was determined to marry me, and in the end that was the line I had to take. She held out for about six weeks, until the beginning of May. Perhaps, being practical as women are, she had been waiting for the warmer weather! For we had nowhere we could meet. She lived in one room with another girl – Hazel, I believe her name was. Hazel, a bus conductress, never encountered me; nor did Olwen’s landlady. We could only meet on the Tuesday afternoons anyway because Olwen had to work all day on the Saturdays. We did manage a few Sunday afternoon meetings, but not often, because that was when I had to see Evelyn. I told Olwen that my landlady had a habit of opening handwritten letters. Therefore, when she wrote to me it was in typed, addressed envelopes I provided, and the letters came to the Company’s office. There was always the risk that someone, not noticing my district number on the letter, might have opened it, but it was a risk that had to be taken. She wrote three mushy letters which I’ve destroyed (they weren’t worth keeping: too sentimental – I’d sooner retain the photo). I only wrote one letter to her – there was no need to write at all really, but she was determined to have one, and it helped in the seduction. I had the sense to leave out my address, and my signature was merely ‘R’. That hardly seems to damn me, but with the knowledge of what sort of a person (i.e. a traveller) killed Olwen, and what sort of a car he had (i.e. a red sports), it would have been easy enough for the police to show the handwriting in the newspapers and ask for information. If Olwen had left that letter at home, if in fact she had not treasured it so much that she carried it everywhere with her, then I might not have got it back and might well have been under interrogation by this Maddocks.

  We both became very fond of each other – admittedly for different reasons – and that in itself induces a slight carelessness in the so-called moral code. She was completely infatuated by me, and easily overawed by good hotels, first nights at the theatre, dances, gifts of clothes, my conversation … She was quite satisfied that her kisses were an equal bargain; that in return she had only to talk about our love, and if our love became a little giddy, then to give brief lectures about God – she was satisfied and certain that I was. The appetite of her healthy body would only show itself via her mouth in her ferocious kisses. I could feel her whole person aching in tension as she clung to me. Sometimes I pleaded that I might know the smoothness of her shoulders and arms and breasts: nothing beyond that, I assured her: I must be loyal to my wife even if she wasn’t really a wife any more: I would, with Olwen, wait the twelve months and more until Evelyn’s death allowed us to be married. Only we should have to wait months beyond for respectability’s sake. Did she think the mere touch of my hands would be much more than the embraces we already indulged in? Unfortunately, she did! I waited and sweated for the day when she’d find it unbearable and would be able to explain the touches to the God she was always bringing into the car. In the end I had to mention marriage more directly. I’d hinted at it quite a lot, and once it came out into the open Olwen was able to abandon everything – her parents, her job, her ethics, her God – everything went overboard for romance. She suddenly found herself able to lie and be hypocritical before her friends and parents and inside her church just as easily as anybody else; so easily that she might have been accustomed to it, at the very least waiting to do it for love; and she scarcely mentioned Evelyn’s name once she’d appropriated her possession. In short, she began to enjoy herself.

  On one of the last Tuesdays in April, my car being out of order, we made the first of our two visits to this Almond Vale place. In the compartment of the train some country people stared at us and smiled: I suppose we did look like two lovers: in her shyness Olwen sat rigidly, not touching my hands, pointing out of the window at the different types of trees and soil and the patterns of ploughing. Similarly, as we walked about the quiet pavements of Almond Vale, she named the plants and trees which were beginning to pullulate. She had the quality of gentility and it was impossible not to be affected by it: the sad, wise face and the lissom, untouched body contradicted each other.

  I remember Almond Vale that day: a pleasant little town, pink with almond blossom. Baskets of flowers hung on the lamp-posts, the local gentry walked about with thoroughbred dogs or hovered outside bookshops. A band played in a park some way off; nearer there was the hiss of water from a fountain; on the river people propelled punts lazily, and there was a small steamer that tooted up- and down-stream every half hour. Not being yet holiday time, it was very quiet – sufficiently so to make us conspicuous; but then, nobody is going to remember as far back as April. The weather was lazy, too, warm and still, so we decided to go on the river.

  Olwen trailed her hand through the water and smiled sheepishly while I rowed about three miles downstream. When we were quite clear of other people, and screened by bushes and weeping willows, I pulled towards an island, ostensibly to pause.

  I sat by her side and shared a few chocolates with her. Then in the warmth of the sun and half covered by raincoats we lay in each other’s embrace, not talking very much, so drowsy that we could have slept. I looked at her hair and the smooth perfection of her face, her closed eyes and her white throat. My hand rested on her stomach; down beyond the throat, inside the blouse, I could see the beginnings of her large breasts. Sagging to the side to which she leaned, they rose gently at each breath, and, wanting her unbearably, I thought: We cannot enjoy the natural fruition of our sentimental love because of the words in a book. Nobody has seen this God who was between us; it’s all words and print and is disputed by science and other religions. I leaned her head back and kissed her on the mouth as it opened in surprise. ‘Olwen,’ I said, ‘it’s unbearable to love you so much.’

  ‘Am I stopping you loving me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said simply.

  She knew that I meant physical love and smiled with the pleasure of being wanted; not aroused herself, she didn’t really comprehend what I endured. ‘We must wait,’ she said. ‘You won’t lose me.’

  ‘When we get married,’ I said, ‘will you make up for the years we didn’t know each other?’

  She said, ‘Darling,’ embraced me, and for the time being that was the end of that.

  On the train back the compartment was empty. It was a first-class compartment without corridors. I’d brought a flask of sherry, not only because we both liked it, but to coke her up. We drank some of the sherry, sat on the seats, and finding them awkward, eventually had to sprawl. It was an all-stations train and each quarter of an hour, at every stop, Olwen went to the window and looked along the platform, not wishing our privacy intruded upon any more than I did. Dusk soon came and after my direct mention of marriage she was eager to talk about it close to me. When we were both out of breath, and she was making faint protests, ‘My hair’s an awful mess,’ I said, ‘Never mind your hair – it’s dark now, anyway. Do you really love me?’

  ‘More tha
n anything,’ she said.

  ‘Will you always, I wonder?’

  ‘Why should you doubt it?’

  I did not explain my doubts, which were invented to make her prove her love. Instead I said, ‘What wonderful things we could do.’

  ‘When, darling, when do you mean?’

  ‘After we’re married.’

  ‘Oh, God, Roy,’ she whispered – she even mouthed her endearments in His name. ‘Then you meant it. Oh, yes, we’ll be wonderful. There won’t be anybody quite like us.’

  ‘I’m sure now,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d ever doubted,’ Olwen said. ‘Was it because I’d never –’

  She was about to plunge into one of those long, feminine analyses, but I smothered it. Coming away from her, my hand ‘caught’ in her blouse in an apparent accident for which neither of us could be held responsible. The five buttons – glass or pearl or whatever they were: I forget now – jumped open without any suggestion of force; the whole movement seemed a natural continuation of the smothering kiss, and could be enjoyed because it had not been sought. I kissed again and my hands explored. Her one hand made a gesture of resistance, which I overruled, and then she was lost with me in waves of pleasure. ‘Oh, God,’ Olwen pleaded, ‘can’t I have both of you?’ Her agony was obvious; she trembled terribly, her whole body shivered and her breath came quickly. It was the moment when she passed from her world to mine. The tactile love was an unbearable delight: I was lost to time and place: I had won, and when she gasped, ‘Not now, Roy,’ I knew she meant because there was not time. The train began to slow, and, getting to her feet, Olwen fastened her clothes quickly and then combed her hair. And sure enough some fool of a man climbed in at the next station, and since we were late and there was nowhere to go on arrival, the victory was not consummated for another week.

  On the following Tuesday the weather was again fine, and my car being in order I took her for a picnic. I took a lot of stuff: strawberries and cakes and flasks of tea: I have a certain talent for that kind of thing.

  I was by no means certain that she would come. There was that look of agony in her eyes when she did. She knew she could not retreat from the tactile love: we could only advance farther into love. Olwen put up a pretence of resisting, of course, and when it had been overcome – when we had again reached tactile love she cried, ‘Oh, Roy, Roy, it can’t be wrong, can it, if we’re going to be married?’ Her voice was full of conscience, and later, when it was all over and I lay there, able to think in detachment that it would be a long time before I was satiated, she was so quiet and still that I wondered if she was ill. Then I saw that tears were trickling silently down her face; they had reached her ear on one side. In tenderness and gratitude – she had overcome a lot for me – I stroked her hair and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, my dearest.’

  ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why are you crying?’

  ‘Because I love you.’

  (Later.) It would be tedious to catalogue either the women I’ve known, the technique of dealing with them, or their self-deception and protestations. Many were willing and therefore unworthy victims; there are not so many Olwens in the world. Yet there is a curious parallel between Olwen and another woman I once knew. It was a long time ago, but I shall never forget her. How could I? She was intelligent, complicated, religious, extraordinarily beautiful, she was married, and she, too, is dead. Any fool can pick up the easy stuff: the waitresses and bus conductresses and Service girls; but Myrel had been a model: her photograph could be found now in the back numbers of the glossy female magazines.

  I wouldn’t have met her if I had done well at school, and I would have been a better scholar if it hadn’t been for Ruby. Ruby was the first one of all. At school – I experienced the distresses of puberty at Birlchester High – I was something of a stinker. I admit it. I was a big, bumptious, spotted, conceited youth. Before I thought about girls, I used to take the mickey out of the other boys with my pal, a horrible youth called Moore. I remember well working all the complexes and repressions out of my system with Moore: knocking the pansy kids about at the back of the boys’ bogs, prodding them in class with compass points, crowding them off their bicycles into the gutters and, most startling of all, forcing them to enter toyshops to steal. I was never popular, of course, being even then too individual. My only popularity was one term during which I affected a stammer during Scripture lessons. It was a part of each lesson that a boy or girl should read the passages aloud. When my turn came I used to stammer. When the old master shouted, ‘Stop laughing! The boy can’t help his impediment,’ the laughter increased to uproar.

  In my teens I grew beyond all this and began to think about girls. Soon after I went out with my first one I asked to see what she wore under her tunic, and I had to twist her arms off before she’d show me. Some of my cousins – they haven’t spoken to me for years! – used to find my games disconcerting too. I had to smash their toys or pour scorn on their childishness until they wept; even then they resisted – and quite rightly so in the face of my awful technique! I used to watch the girls doing physical training in the school hall, but I never could persuade one to do anything. They were too young and too close to discipline to feel the urge.

  Ruby came to our place as a maid during my last term at school. She was an attractive guttersnipe, brought up on margarine and chips, who soon noticed that I stared at the bulges which wobbled under her apron and at her black silk legginess as she climbed the stairs. She was a dirty little thing, and would go straight from love-making in the bushes of a park to the nearest pub or fish and chip shop. In her crudity she taught me without inhibitions the things it would have taken years to learn within the refined, apologetic petting of my own middle class. I went with her on her night off every week that summer, sometimes on the Sunday as well. I used to copy my homework frantically in the school quadrangle next morning. My parents never made any association between the fact that on the one night each week Ruby went out I used to say, ‘I’ve finished my homework early today. Can I go out?’ My mother used to say, ‘Yes. Some fresh air will do you good. I think it’s wicked the way these schools expect pupils to stay indoors hour after hour on summer evenings.’

  When I sat for the School Certificate examinations I found everything so difficult that a kind of hopeless apathy took hold of me. It did me some small good, at least preventing me from being nervous. Other kids, who had worked hard for months, now panicked, felt sick and did not do as well as they might.

  I prepared the ground for failure. ‘They were stiff exams this year,’ I said to my mother. ‘Honestly, I doubt if a quarter of the chaps will pass.’

  She didn’t take the hint because, of course, she didn’t want to. ‘You’ll pass,’ she said. ‘I know you. You’re a clever boy. Your father doesn’t think so, but I realize that you’re different from other boys.’ I said, ‘You’re a special kind of mother,’ and in my embrace I could feel her heart thudding in pleasure as heavy as Ruby’s had done.

  When failure arrived in an envelope at the breakfast table it didn’t leave me with much to say. ‘Moore failed too,’ I commented. ‘Honestly, if he failed they must have been the worst exams for years.’ My old man, sitting at the table glowering at The Times (Hitler spoke and his digestion was ruined), lowered the paper and said in his usual voice of gloom, ‘You have to have a School Certificate to get into my office, Roy. You’d better start looking for a job.’ His ‘you’ was plural.

  My mother said nothing. She’d built my reputation so high that for once she didn’t even attempt to have her own way with the old man. About once in a decade he gets courageous and obstinate, and this was one of those occasions.

  We found a suitable j
ob in a travel agency – a ‘shipping office’, my mother called it and sure enough there was a scale model of a passenger liner in the window. Apart from an occasional panic when I had to appeal to the more approachable of the senior Clerks, I found the work quite interesting: one met adult members of the public and, of course, there was no homework.

  In the office I made a friend with mutual tastes. This was Blake, slightly older than myself, as blond as I was dark, the randiest thing on wheels. Knocking around with Blake opened my eyes about girls; I discovered that the possession of a car proves a great help in a seduction. Better-class girls were prepared to do all that Ruby had done, and so the time came to dump her. A few suggestions to my mother and within a week we had no maid in the house. Blake was reckless – he died in air combat in 1941. Together we went swimming; to the speedways; to air displays; to motor races; to dances; and everywhere found girls eager to come with us and provide excitement on the way back. (I wonder what happened to these sort of girls. Did they go into the Services when war came? Do they sit by the fire now with children and watch the television? I can scarcely recall a single name, and in all my journeys nowadays I never see one of those half-remembered faces.) Our Saturday night’s pub-crawl almost invariably ended with two girls picked up at a dance or in a bar and taken in Blake’s indispensable small car to what amounted to the nearest field. As I grew out of the spots and bumptiousness I noticed that when we picked up two who were together the prettier always made for me. Blake became a little jealous. On the back seats one night the girl I’d picked was resisting too vociferously and I literally threw her out. She was too drunk to be hurt, but Blake didn’t like it. He said, ‘One of these days some girl is going to cause you trouble.’ It didn’t seem unlikely so I parried, ‘Or I’m going to get her into trouble.’ But when I did he didn’t hear all about it because he had entered the R.A.F.