The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

  In spite of the quick despatch of the salmon sandwiches, Dolly had felt pleased with her first try-out of having strangers to tea. The only time Bonnie had ever seen such a spread was at Christmas. ‘Because it’s there, doesn’t mean you can take it all,’ Marie warned beforehand. ‘Don’t go mad: choose cake or fruit, but not both.’

  The four soldiers seemed to have about them an air of explosive vitality that was meat-fed and sugared. At first there was a polite awkwardness when Sam was effusive in his welcome and Dolly, Marie and Paula showed excessive politeness.

  The young men had been made freshly aware by their sergeant of their delicate situation as a visiting army ‘…not invading, not conquering… but a visiting army.

  ‘The British have been at war for some time: it didn’t start for them at Pearl Harbor. You might not like it, but some of them think we should have come in before we did. These people are short of things like sugar, so their food might be kinda unappetizing, but you eat the goddam lot and enjoy it.

  ‘An’ you wanna take a good look at the section on Language. Bum’s a butt, and a rubber’s an eraser – they call rubbers johnnies – and don’t nobody ask me why. And carry the goddam things. Don’t talk about’m, don’t even think of need’n them, keep off the women. I’ll have the goddam balls off any sonofabitch touches local ass.’

  The soldiers had enough to think about in their capacity as ambassadors to worry about the correct terms for a rubber. They worked at not being unmannerly by refusing the food, consequently they accepted generously of everything and, to their surprise, found it not half bad and not so different from what their own mothers might have made. They kept saying how real good it all was and refilled their plates.

  ‘I don’t reckon that camp feeds them properly,’ Dolly said later.

  Strangers from abroad, coming like that, made it one of the most important occasions in the Partridge family’s history, and in the neighbourhood generally. Many of their neighbours went by, glancing or craning to see if it was true that there were Yankee soldiers at Number 24. Marie, Paula and Dolly had dressed themselves up, and as they both had a bit of money to spend on themselves these days, had had hair-dos – Paula’s brown riot of curls showing through the mesh of a red snood and Marie’s silken fairness tied in a large velvet bow.

  Neither of them had seen their husbands for a long time, for both Charlie and Robbo were now in Africa – Charlie in the north, and Robbo in the east. The Americans, ambassadors for their country and especially for their own states, tried to keep lechery from their eyes, but Paula, whose legs went right up and didn’t stop till they reached her neat little ass, moved like a chorus girl, and Marie was as curvaceous as a movie queen – it was not easy for the young men when they discovered that an old English park-keeper had such unexpected women in his family.

  Sam, who seldom talked about his war, soon found himself with an audience who were keen to hear about it. They called him Sir.

  Dolly, enjoying having sweet-smelling young men round her table again, wondered at the craziness that sent Charlie and Robbo to Africa and Harry to train in God-knew-what secret place, and replaced them with boys taken from their own mothers in faraway places with names like Talahassie or Mobile.

  Over the food, the formality began to ease. Fascinated at Sam doing his one-handed roll-up after tea, the ice was finally broken by a square young man called Studely but known as Studs.

  ‘Say man,’ said Studs. ‘Ah never seen that one-hand roll done outside a movie. Could you teach me? Say, Ah hope Ah’m not out of turn, Sir, but would you care to smoke a Camel?’

  Bonnie giggled, and kept giggling until first Marie and then Paula was set off.

  Sam hung the dartboard on the yard wall, and in two teams they played until the sun went down, when the Yanks left, having thanked Dolly profusely with renewed praises for her baking, left Sam with an entire carton of Camels, Bonnie with a box of wide-eyed candy-bars, and Miz Paula and Miz Ma-ree an invitation from their Commanding Officer to a camp dance.

  1989

  Georgia Giacopazzi thought that the last leg of the long flight was always worse than the rest. A man seated across the gangway, wearing expensive aftershave and gold jewellery, tried to chat her up. He was an American and he set her off remembering the first time she had met one in real life. Nineteen forty-two, just after Hugh had gone off with Floozie.

  Mrs Giacopazzi guessed that her seat partner dined out on any name he collected. He didn’t come on to her. He was in his late forties, the wrong age to find well-known women anything other than interesting items. She could recognize those men who were stimulated by gossip column legends. Giacopazzi’s serious chatters-up were either under thirty, or over fifty and not given to scent and talcum. The men of forty or fifty were too insecure, too busy spreading their thinning hair and shoring up a fading macho image to think sexually of women older than themselves.

  She did her PR duty with this one, then she allowed her eyes to close so that he would think she slept. At some convention, he could say ha-ha that he had slept with the Giacopazzi woman, and that her chin sagged and she had wrinkles that didn’t show in publicity shots… and Christ, how the woman snored.

  She drifted back into her favourite project. If the mini-series was going to be made of Eye of the Storm, then it was crucial that they got Nick right. She knew who she would like. Ever since she had seen him in the Butch Cassidy film and then when she had met him for real a couple of years back. Of course they weren’t likely to get him, but he had had exactly that same unaffected sexuality as Nick. Of course he was more handsome than Nick, but the kind of production they were likely to want to make of Eye was sure to be internationally glitzy. It was more important to get Eye of the Storm right than any of the earlier films. If Ukay-Ozzi Pictures made the series, they would never put the Nick character in an unglamorous AFS uniform.

  That period when Hugh went overseas and Nick was in Liverpool was the longest part of the war. Nick wrote regularly, on each neat page she had been able to hear his voice. His voice angry at the living conditions of Liverpool people, his intelligent voice coming through in his forecast of a changed post-war Britain, and his voice tender with love and passion for Georgia Kennedy.

  Nearly fifty years ago now, yet she still remembered how much she had longed for him, so that every love-song on the wireless about separated couples seemed directed at herself and Nick.

  ‘The very thought of you, and I forget to do,

  The little or-din-ary things that ev’ryone ought to do…

  I see your face in ev’ry flower, your eyes in stars above,

  It’s just the thought of you, the very thought of you, my Love.’

  The man with the gold jewellery glanced sideways at the old woman humming quietly to herself.

  Nick had received two bravery awards for going into explosive or dangerous situations. When it had come to writing the scene in the book about how he had tackled the burning farm, she had seemed to have total recall, and she had awakened many times since with the smell of burning straw in her nostrils.

  I wish Mary Wiltshire was still alive, I should have liked to know what she thought when she saw me and Nick going about together.

  Once, before Hugh had come home on the awful embarkation leave, Nick had come back to Markham with seven days off. They had gone out together every day. A goodnight kiss, and that had been all. Ages before, he had said that in time she would fall to him like a ripe medlar. Before Hugh’s leave, it had seemed that that time might be near, but she had been faithful to her vows to Hugh.

  Lord, how naïve I was. She still had the letter Hugh had written to her after he got back on the XJ-R6 station, could remember the words, they were stuck in her memory. ‘I did not imagine that you’d be so upset. I had heard the gossip that you had been seen playing tennis with Crockford. When you said that he was doing the garden, I felt a lot easier in my conscience. I thought you were having a fling with your old flame and we could call it Lo
ve-All.’

  Oh… too long ago… too long a-go.

  Yet, the knowledge that she had not been able to see him for what he was when she married him still rankled. For she considered herself something of a judge of character who was seldom wrong in her first impression of people and who saw through her fictional characters as soon as they hit the page.

  At least it had rankled until a few days ago when she had seen them. What nothings they were. Rich, idle, boring, selfish nothings. She pictured it now: Hugh lying there served by houseboys in white uniforms and red sashes wearing gloves to serve at table; maids in caps and aprons; gardeners in khaki work-clothes and leather kneecaps, keeping the swimming-pool immaculate and the lawns bright green… Old Hugh, his white Clark Gable singed yellow from thousands of cigarettes. Old Hugh with dewlaps sitting staring or lying abed half paralysed and pathetically ga-ga. And Floozie… walnut-skinned and juiceless, her sexy legs shrivelled to sticks. With children who talked of nothing but the state of the rand against the dollar, and the unreliability and ingratitude of servants… only the girl of all of them had been worth expending any effort on – at least she was whilst she was going through a liberal, protesting phase. Let’s hope it’s more than a phase.

  God what awful, useless lives, living off the tobacco crops which other people grew for them. They had never planted or harvested anything – except the money.

  Georgia Giacopazzi thought of the fields and meadows surrounding her own home. Good growing land in a fertile valley. On acres where the earth had once been impoverished, they had brought it back into good heart themselves. She smiled faintly, and clutched her thighs at the imagined feel of the great old-fashioned tractor seat vibrating as she drew the chains across a rutted field; then the live smell as their boots crushed clods when they inspected the new grass and clover; then the years of growing crops. Although she loved to be in the throes of writing, she worked quickly because she could hardly wait to get out to do something in the fields or milking-parlour.

  But… in the beginning it had been the novels that paid for it all. And then the meadows and fields and animals began to pay for themselves.

  Her mind again drifted back to Hugh as it had occasionally over the years. It is a recurring theme in many of her novels, the puzzle of a man approaching middle age who marries a young girl and who, once they are married, tires of her and leaves her unfulfilled and takes an equally young mistress. She felt in her briefcase for a pencil and her notes for Goodnight, Broadway Baby! – the novel she had talked over with her editor before leaving for Jo’burg.

  Reading it again, it sounded crass. Perhaps I’m dried up… written out now that I’ve done Eye, now that I’ve seen Hugh. Perhaps it’s all done with. Well, that would be a relief. Wouldn’t it? Forty years of being addicted to fictitious lives, fictitious people, and never feeling free for long enough to enjoy her other life. Would it be a relief not to feel compelled to keep saying something?

  The aftershave man perked up. ‘Another bestseller coming on?’

  Georgia Giacopazzi smiled at him and winked conspiratorially.

  ‘Do you take your characters from life?’

  ‘Very often.’

  From now on he would be sure to read the new Giacopazzi paperback – hoping to find himself in it, recognizing himself not as the foolish, perfumed, middle-aged character with his hair parted too low, but as the absolute and utter shit that the young heroine fell for. Her male readers usually quite liked the Hugh character – or Chris, or whoever was the current utter cad who dropped his wife and went off with a rich society bird.

  1942

  It was not until the evening of the day after the changed Hugh had gone, and Georgia was walking homewards in Dolly Partridge’s company, that she had anyone she could tell about what had happened.

  ‘I tell you, Dolly, I was… I was absolutely speechless.’ Her voice was tight with emotion. ‘I mean, I had been keeping my end up ever since he came home, down at the Club. I cooked us a couple of nice meals, took him breakfast in bed, mended his socks. I thought he was enjoying being back at his own fireside and that he would have a nice memory of home. He said, She’s a society girl. The way he said it… it was as though that was a perfectly reasonable explanation for leaving your wife.’

  Dolly felt sorry for the young woman. She must have felt humiliated enough that time when she had watched him at the Lyceum doing that mucking about with the girlfriend. Her pride might not have been quite so wounded if she’d been able to tackle him about it; got on her high horse and had a row, chucked him out even. But for him to be so brass-faced. ‘Sounds to me as though you could be well rid of him.’

  ‘It doesn’t alter the fact that I’ve been ditched by my husband.’

  ‘You don’t want to go about saying things like that, it will only make you feel worse. In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, you won’t go about saying anything at all. You know what Markham’s like for a bit of gossip like this.’

  If she had been a girl from off the Council Estate, or was one of Paula’s friends, Dolly would have said for her to come round for a cup of tea; but they only had the one room, and Sam would be there.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘do you feel like a trip out to Southampton this evening? Gone with the Wind is on. You’re welcome to come. I mean… You know… if you wanted to get out this evening.’

  ‘Oh Dolly, could I? Could I really? I’d love to see it.’

  As Dolly said to Paula, ‘She seemed that pleased, you’d have thought she never went anywhere.’

  ‘Well, if what you say is true and she hasn’t got any friends except the lot that hangs out round the tennis court, it isn’t surprising she’d enjoy going to the pictures with somebody nice like you.’

  Dolly blushed, she wasn’t used to that sort of compliment, even from her own daughter. Especially from her own daughter, but then Paula had changed a lot in the last year or two, had got a lot more open. She was getting about a bit these days. But there, she’s a grown woman – none of my affair.

  * * *

  It was the week following that Georgia answered her office telephone to a speaker whose voice she couldn’t quite place.

  The voice was masculine, the tone amused. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I’m devastated. After that afternoon at the Lyceum, I thought that you’d never forget.’

  ‘Goodness! It’s Harry, isn’t it? Harry Partridge. Of course I recognize you.’

  He had a lovely warm laugh. ‘Listen, Georgia, could you get a message to my Mum? I’ve got an unexpected bit of leave. Do you think that you could tell her I’ll be home tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course, at once. She will be excited. She thinks the sun shines out of you.’

  ‘I know. And what about you, don’t I make the sun shine for you?’ That laugh again.

  Flirting down the telephone seemed safe. ‘Sergeant Partridge, I’m a respectable married woman.’

  ‘I know that, but I rather thought that you were more my kind of woman. Will you come out with me? No strings. Just good friends.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Now. My three minutes is almost up. Please? Can you get off on Friday afternoon? Have you got any slacks?’

  She laughed, ‘No, I can’t get off, and what have slacks to do with anything?’

  ‘Have you? What colour – let me guess, red.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Red slacks would suit your neat bottom.’

  ‘You’ll get cut off before your three minutes is up if the operator hears you.’

  ‘Right, in jumper, slacks and scarf then, at twelve o’clock, Saturday. And tell Mum I wouldn’t mind a pond pudding if she can manage it.’

  ‘Pond pudding? You’ll be lucky-don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  ‘Mum will do it – she loves me.’

  The operator cut in. ‘Your three minutes is up, caller.’ Harry rang off making kissing sounds.

  * * *

  He turned up on the August afte
rnoon wearing a leather airman’s jacket, and goggles pushed up on his blond hair. He looked extremely dashing and handsome.

  ‘Come on. Tie up your pretty hair. I’ve borrowed my mate’s Vincent. Isn’t she a beauty?’

  Georgia, laughing, clasped a hand over her mouth at the thought of it. ‘A motor bike! I’ve never been on one. I should be afraid of tipping off.’

  ‘It’s easy. You just sit on, hold on to me and let yourself go with the bike.’

  Ever since Hugh had gone, she had been in a state of mind which alternated between wishing never to set eyes on him again, at the same time as wanting him to walk in through the door so that she could scream and throw things at him. Wishing too that she hadn’t been such a fool, but had made love with Nick who was worth a thousand of Hugh. Heaven knew, she had longed to. Recently she had seemed to think of little else but a love scene with Nick – lust scene.

  Just at that moment, a date with a good-looking, amusing man like Harry Partridge was exactly what Georgia needed to cheer her up. Oddly enough, it was because of his reputation as a lady-killer that she felt he was just the antidote for Hugh. Not that she would ever be seduced by his type, but because he knew how to make women feel good, feel special.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere out of Markham.’

  ‘The sea?’

  ‘Can we really? It’s ages… absolutely wizard!’

  The ride was exhilarating: he drove fast and skilfully. She held on round his waist and, as soon as they had roared up the hill out of Markham and out along the Bournemouth road, she got the hang of letting her body go with the movement of the machine. From time to time he shouted something back over his shoulder, but she could not hear what it was. Speeding, they went through the New Forest, past villages, past clusters of tents where soldiers whistled, over the heather-packed moorland. Suddenly she saw the bright line of the sea.