Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  In the strained silence of the car, the steady drumming of the rain began to make Richard sleepy. He turned the radio on to BBC4 and picked up part of the prime minister’s speech. At first they thought it was coming direct from 10 Downing Street, but from the desk thumping and “hear, hears,” it was obviously being reported directly from the House. There were angry questions about failure of intelligence services at home and abroad to predict the Communist breakthrough and the extent of Communist subversion in both NATO and the European Common Market long before the war had broken out. Against this, Labour Parry backbenchers and Liberals were asking for assurances of individual rights — stating that they did not want to see the kind of “racialist-motivated internments” that had taken place in the dominions during the Second World War, most noticeably on the Canadian West Coast.

  “Once again,” the prime minister continued, “in the long but, I might add, often tenuous history of the democracies, democracy’s fatal flaw in times of war is revealed by the opposition members’ well-intentioned but, I daresay, militarily unsound concern.” There was hooting, but the prime minister ignored it. “To be sure, our rights, precious to us, are the foundation stones upon which all our freedoms reside, but now — now it is high time for the honorable member to voice as much concern for national security as for individual rights. Far better—” There was more jeering in the background. “Far better we err on the side of national security than to lose the fight for our very survival — a survival without which individual freedoms cannot flourish — a survival which, if not secured in the face of the dark and titanic forces ranged against us, will plunge all Europe and the United States into a totalitarianism. A totalitarianism so bereft of all the good we have known, so dreadful in its every manifestation, that I submit we have no choice but to marshal all the strength we have, to suspend some of those rights we normally enjoy, to bury all differences we have within the European community — to forget all else but our duty to stand fast — to resist with every fiber in our being.” There was a thundering of desks being pounded.

  “Windbag,” said Rosemary. “He’s getting us ready for a new purge of habeas corpus.”

  “Really, Rose,” objected Richard, wiping condensation from the windshield. “I hardly think ‘purge’ is the appropriate word—”

  “I think it is,” put in Georgina. “Rosey’s quite right. The windbag’s getting ready for another Dunkirk — only this time there’ll be no miracle. The Russians won’t hold back their tanks like Hitler did. He was too stupid to—”

  “The Americans! The Americans!” cut in Richard Spence with some heat. “Do remember, you two, this time we’ve the Americans with us. This time they’ve been in it from the very beginning—”

  “Americans! Really, Daddy.” Georgina leaned forward from the backseat. “With all due respect to your Robert, Rosey, who I’m sure is very capable and—”

  “Daddy!” Rosemary’s tone was so imperious, he started in fright and almost lost control of the Audi as it turned sharply down the hill, past a copse of ancient oaks roaring in the tempest about them.

  “For God’s sake, Rosey!” began Richard. “What’s the—”

  “Stop the car! Please.” She had her hand on the door handle. He pumped the brake, bringing the car to a standstill on the narrow shoulder of the road. Through the noise of wind and rain he thought he could hear another convoy approaching, alarmed at the prospect of the left-hand-drive American trucks bearing down on him, hugging the center line in the storm.

  Rosemary had twisted herself around from the left front passenger’s seat, hand clutching the diagonal seat strap, face flushed, bright with rage as she ordered Georgina out of the car.

  “What?” said Georgina in astonishment.

  “Go on!” yelled Rosemary. “Get out!”

  Richard Spence reached over. “Rosey. Here — hang on, old girl.”

  “Get out!” screamed Rosemary. “You sod!”

  “Rose!” said Richard, utter disbelief on his face. “What on earth—”

  “Has gotten into me?” snapped Rosemary, turning on him. “She has! This—” She was sneering at her younger sister in a way the latter had never seen her do. “This inflated, left-sucking bitch. She’s so consumed by her smart chitchat from LSE — her obligatory anti-Americanism. So caring, aren’t you, Georgina? What was your ridiculous thesis on? London poor as victims of bourgeois values — or some such rubbish?” Rosemary turned back to her father. “Do you realize what your bourgeois money has got you, Father? A nineteen-thirties fellow traveler. She’s so desperate to be ‘in’ with that brittle intellectual crowd up there, she’ll even insult the man I chose to marry.” Now she was turning on Georgina again. “Your type are all the same, Georgina. You love humanity but you hate people.” The tears were rolling down Rosemary’s cheeks. “Who are you to…” she yelled at Georgina, “… a man who might not come back…the only man I’ve ever—” She stopped, scrabbling in her purse for a tissue.

  Richard Spence was so stunned by her outburst that all he could do was look aghast at his two daughters. He didn’t know them.

  “I’m sorry, Rosey,” said Georgina quietly. “I–I shouldn’t have said that about the Americans. I thought you of all people could face facts head on. I merely said we’re being walloped, which we are. I didn’t mean to cast aspersions—”

  “Oh, spare me,” said Rosemary, her face splotchy from crying, trying to unravel tissues from their tight, insufferable little balls, which weren’t in her purse after all but hiding, as usual, in the very depths of her overcoat. “Do spare me the pained reason bit, Georgina. You and your precious ‘feeing facts.’ It might work in most of the provinces, but not down here. I know you too well. When you want to be offensive— which is most of the time — you sheath your venom in ‘facts.’ You’re a bundle of ‘facts’!” Rosemary blew her nose hard.

  Dimly Richard could see a figure running toward them from the direction of St. Anselm’s gate, which he guessed must be still a few hundred yards off, hidden — an onslaught of yellowed maple leaves swirling about the figure approaching the car.

  “Your facts,” Rosemary kept on, “are Gradgrind facts. You’re full of smart leftist theory while your country’s fighting for its life. I suppose you think you’re being all very… individualistic. You’re a child. You parrot your Holy Trinity — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — but you wouldn’t know a decent human being if you saw one. If we lose this war, we’ll be invaded and you’ll get a chance to compare — see your rotten little theories in practice. I thought you would have seen enough after they tore down the Berlin Wall. Oh, it was all going to be sweetness and light — and look what’s happened.”

  Georgina sat back, arms folded defiantly, her smile contemptuous. “Why, Rosemary, I always thought you were proud of your self-control.”

  “You undo me, Georgina.”

  “Obviously,” retorted Georgina.

  Undeterred, Rosemary shot back, “Tell me, why do you hate your country so much? Does that come with the government scholarship?”

  “Don’t be preposterous.”

  “Well, you do, don’t you? You despise England.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “No, Georgina. On second thought, I don’t think you do.”

  The boy, a prefect, was tapping politely on Richard Spence’s window. Richard wound the window down, but Rosemary was either oblivious to the feet or didn’t care.

  “Tell me, Georgina, do you love anything?”

  Richard Spence was trying to listen to the boy, nodding politely, embarrassed beyond measure.

  “Can you say you love your country, Georgina?”

  Georgina was looking out the window now, watching the boy walking away.

  “Well?” pressed Rosemary.

  Suddenly Georgina turned on her sister. “Are you mad? You’re raving!” Georgina looked at her father. “She’s insane!”

  “Do you, Georgina?” asked Rosemary, he
r voice quieter now. “Not England right or wrong or right or left. But England.”

  Georgina sat as far back in her seat as possible, finding Rosemary’s attack of patriotism so sickly sentimental, she felt herself blushing with embarrassment. It was all so utterly ridiculous, yet she felt as if she was about to cry and kept looking outside the car, only slightly aware of it moving, the prefect running ahead and pointing to the left of the commissary — where to park.

  “My God, I’ve never been so—” Richard began, but was unable to finish, so flustered, he forgot to depress the hand brake button and pulled the ratchet right through. “Damn!” He turned angrily to Rosemary. “I don’t pretend to know what’s going on between you and your sister. But if you’re not up to it, I strongly suggest we turn around right this minute and—”

  “I’m all right,” said Rosemary evenly. “I’ll talk to him.” But she didn’t move.

  Richard glanced at Georgina in the rearview mirror. “I think perhaps you ought to stay with—”

  “She can come in,” said Rosemary. “I’m sure young Wilkins could do with some Marx. I imagine attempted suicide’s another bourgeois tool to oppress the masses.”

  “Look here,” said Richard firmly. Georgina sat still, refusing to move. He opened his door and pushed up the umbrella. “Are you coming, Georgina?” The rain was drumming on the umbrella, his brogues straddling a puddle.

  As she got out of the car, Georgina, still visibly shaken by Rosemary’s attack, forgot to lock the door. Rosemary was already shaking her umbrella, the headmaster, a small, stocky man in his late sixties, approaching her from the entrance hall.

  “I think,” Richard told Georgina as Rosemary walked ahead, “she’s been under an awful lot of strain.”

  “She’s terrified,” said Georgina. “I think she’s pregnant.”

  Richard Spence stopped abruptly.

  “She’s with child, Father, and the father is gone. Like our William has gone. And now this Williams—”

  “Wilkins—” corrected Richard, though still in shock at what she had said, his umbrella still up, though they were inside. The prefect politely offered to take it for him.

  “Er — what — oh, yes, yes, of course,” said Richard. He felt utterly lost — the twentieth century and its sexual revolutions and all its other revolutions had passed him by in Surrey. It had taken him twenty years to use the word “period” instead of “that time” in front of his wife, Anne. Everything was falling down about him.

  “Ms. Spence?”

  It was the headmaster greeting Rosemary but in a second making it clear that her father and sister were not exactly welcome. How long, wondered Georgina — how long to wait until she was needed. If only Rosemary knew how much she wanted her love, how much she needed love. And here was Rosemary needed, called for.

  The war was a bitter disappointment for Georgina. It had failed her utterly so far. With the entire planet in conflict, one was supposed to see the relativity of one’s own unimportance — to lose oneself and ergo one’s problems, one’s loneliness absorbed by the larger struggle. In fact, Georgina discovered that one’s problems were only exacerbated. From rationing to unquestioned patriotism, like Rosemary’s, the commonality of everyone’s shared experience only made one’s unorthodox views more private, making one feel even more of an outsider from one’s own family. Rosemary had touched a raw nerve, suggesting Georgina couldn’t give herself to love, only to the love of an idea.

  Now Georgina herself wondered if her flirtation with Marxism was, in reality, nothing more than an act of sublimation on her part, an avoidance of the real problem — that she was afraid of men. So long as her undergraduate enthusiasm had to wrestle with the pressing attack of hitherto totally alien ideas, she didn’t have the time to wrestle, figuratively or otherwise, with sex, with her failure to find a man who would fit her ideal. Someone whose wit was matched by his sexual presence, at once alluring yet not chauvinist, considerate yet not effeminate. An “English and American literature” graduate, down from Oxford, had almost made the grade. In a rare moment, as unexpected as Rosemary’s outburst, Georgina had let her passion override reason. But her tentative, nervous foreplay ceased when, flustered by not knowing some of the terms he was using, but clearly understanding his intent, she panicked, becoming all superior, demanding all but a declaration of her rights from him. To which he, not yet successful in getting her pants off, replied — and now the words rang in her ears — that what she needed was “a feminist with a big cock!”

  “Well, you’re neither!” she had shouted back, slamming the door. Despite her parting shot, which she harbored as one of her snappier ripostes to male chauvinist vulgarity, the adolescence of it all appalled her, only reminding her once again that age was no gauge of maturity. Look at Rosemary’s outburst. But Rosemary was engaged. It had been the final blow. Rosemary, who had always been thought of as the one least likely to marry — lost to a world of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, so shy she might have been permanently lost in the forest of Arden.

  “Would you and Mr. Spence like to wait here?”

  It was the headmaster, diplomatic but making it quite clear that only Rosemary had been requested to come and talk some sense into the boy.

  * * *

  When she entered the commissary room on the second floor, the first tiling Rosemary saw was a lemon-colored screen. For what purpose, seeing there was no one else in the room, Rosemary didn’t know. Inside the screen, his mother, a pretty, dark-haired woman, short, in her mid forties perhaps, mumbled a greeting that expressed both gratitude and resentment, then left Rosemary alone to talk with the boy.

  The boy Rosemary looked down on was not the callow youth of her Shakespeare class. Gone was the smart-alecky sneer of the sixth form clown. It might have been another boy altogether, for though he answered to the physical description the ambulance had given — a youth six feet in height, black curly hair, dark brown eyes — the eyes that were once full of rebellion and trouble were now doelike in their shame.

  He had looked at Rosemary only once — the moment she had opened the door — but then had turned away. Rosemary almost wished for a return of his callow bonhomie of the past months; at least there had been some semblance of courage. Still standing by the bed, she was about to soften her rather formal stance and forced smile in order to ask him why he did it and whether or not she could be of help. But against this was her impulse to tell him off, to scold him for not being brave, whatever his problem was — pray God he wouldn’t tell her — to tell him that other young men, like her brother, like her dead young brother, with God knew what fear all around them, had shown better mettle than he. But either tack seemed pompous and absurd. What did she know of the causes behind his attempted suicide — what did anyone know of anyone else’s inner life anyway, the hidden and secret places, at once banal and terror-ridden, so often given in their public semblance to mistaking magnetic north for true? And what was true anyhow? Even the beginnings of such a concrete event as the war now seemed obscure. Even historians, if they survived, if anyone survived, would only do more to obscure it.

  “Why did you want to see me?” she asked Wilkins. For a second, try as she might, she could not think of his Christian name, or, as Georgina would insist, his first name. He had only ever been Wilkins. G, she thought — Gerald?

  He was still staring ahead, his eyes avoiding hers, his voice that of a whipped puppy. “I don’t know, miss,” he replied.

  She didn’t know what to say other than to tell him the headmaster gave her the impression he wanted to see her. He sneezed, and when he reached from under the sheet for a tissue, she saw his bandaged wrists. It surprised her. For some reason she had expected him to have tried it with pills— that was usually the way these days. Might well have been pills that caused it in the first place. Her anger with the boy was difficult for her to contain. She knew it unworthy of her, but here was this callow youth slashing his wrists for attention when young men like William had will
ingly suffered the slings and arrows of the worst fortune there was — yet was it their worst or their best? He looked a bit like William. She wondered how Robert’s sister, Lana, had talked to William. Had she been so cold? Of course not, but then, William had fought bravely. Though even that, she didn’t know for certain. It struck her with some force that she knew very little, in feet, about how William had been wounded and even less about the circumstances of his time aboard the hospital ship-only that Robert’s sister had somehow given him the gift of love. God forgive me, thought Rosemary, but she wasn’t up to God’s love for Wilkins.

  “I wanted to—” he began, then stopped.

  “Yes—” she encouraged him.

  “It’s my father.”

  “Yes?” Quickly Rosemary tried to recall the student record sheet. She remembered two parents were listed: father had something to do with marine insurance. Lloyds? No— St. Anselm’s, though respectable enough, was a little too middle-middle-class for Lloyds.

  Wilkins pulled another tissue from the box, wincing as he did so. Then another and another.

  “Waste not, want not,” she said, parroting one of the Department of Supply posters. Paper was especially scarce, England no longer having any timber for felling. Good Lord, she was as bad as that poor old Professor Whatsit, and his going on about not wasting electric current: hand in your hair dryers.

  “What about him?” she asked Wilkins, then added, more gravely, “Your father, I mean?”