The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

  ‘Look, look!’ she shouted in his ear as she hugged him excitedly. In response, he pressed her arms to him with his elbows, his muscular leather-clad back, firm buttocks between her thighs, and the vibrating and roaring bike elating and reviving her. The only sensation she was aware of was the roaring bike. Markham, Hugh, Wrens with buns, work, her own lusts, and the longing for Nick – all of it was sucked into the slipstream of the roaring motor bike, and lost.

  Bournemouth looked as seedy and neglected as a less prosperous resort, but Georgia was delighted to see it again after so long. ‘We came here on holiday once,’ she shouted at him, and he nodded, pressing her with his elbows again. Many of the beaches along the coast were inaccessible, so he drove on beyond Bournemouth. Then, a few miles out into the country, he turned down a long narrow track, ignoring a notice which said, MINISTRY OF DEFENCE – DANGER – STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE, and on over dunes and hummocks to a wonderful little isolated cove that looked as though it was more likely part of Dorset or Devon than Hampshire.

  After the roaring of the bike and air, Georgia at first heard nothing, then the silence became filled with breaking waves and calling sea-birds.

  ‘There!’ Harry ripped back the fastenings of his jacket, flung off his goggles and twirled Georgia around by her waist. He was such an easy man to be with that she felt that she had known him for years.

  ‘Ah, just breathe that, Missis Kennedy – a bit of fresh air left over from before the war.’

  ‘The whole place seems pre-war. How did you find it? I thought that all this part of the coast was inaccessible.’

  ‘Out of bounds – but not inaccessible if you know where to come.’

  ‘It’s not got mines, has it?’

  ‘No, it’s just a bit of MOD land that they purloined and then probably forgot they had.’

  Leaving the bike against a white-sanded, tussocky bank, they went down to the water’s edge, where Georgia took off her shoes and stood in the clear waves as they flipped on to the pale sand. ‘Oh, it’s marvellously warm. I wish I had brought my swimsuit – I never thought we’d have the chance to swim.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be shy. I promise you nobody will come down here.’ And he began to undress.

  ‘Harry!’ She looked around her. ‘We can’t!’

  ‘Come on, little Church School girl. God won’t strike you down for swimming as naked as He intended that we should. In any case, it’s the only way to really enjoy it.’ He sat down on the dry sand and unlaced his boots. ‘You must have swum in your skin-suit at Princes Meadows – there’s more than a few girls have seen all I’ve got. Don’t tell me the Markham boys haven’t seen yours.’

  ‘I didn’t swim at Princes Meadows. I was a country girl, remember?’

  Quickly, and without embarrassment, he had stripped down to broad sun-brown shoulders and pale buttocks, and was swimming away from the shore.

  ‘Don’t watch then,’ she called after him. He waved acknowledgement and kept swimming. Nothing would have made her walk naked into the sea, so she retained the lacy bra that Leonora admired, and her cotton briefs. When Alice Honeycombe had taught her daughter, always look as good beneath as on top, she had had in mind accidents and hospitals, certainly not being enticed into the waves by a naked Paratrooper.

  ‘It’s wonderful! Marvellous!’ she shouted when she had swum to where he was treading water.

  ‘Isn’t it just? I had forgotten.’

  They splashed and played as they each had done fifteen and more years ago: he in the River Test at Princes Meadow and she in a cool, dark-green pond where there were natterjacks and dabchicks in the reeds. ‘Look, nobody comes here. It was a naturist beach before the war, then the Ministry took it over. We came here once, but it’s useless as training ground. You could swim here every day and nobody would know.’ He sounded so certain that she felt convinced that she was not the first girl he had brought here to swim. ‘You should take it all off and feel how good it is. Here, let me, and I’ll take them back up the beach – you’ll have to let them dry, anyhow.’ Deftly, he unhooked her bra, removed it and held it between his teeth, whilst she wriggled out of her briefs.

  He was right, the sensation of freedom was good, it was as though her shyness was in the lacy and provocative covering, in which she had felt more undressed before him than now.

  She watched him wade through the shallows and up to the motor cycle, where he attached the two garments so that they blew like pennants. She watched him as he strode over the white sand. He was, as were most men for that matter, a smaller man than Nick; pale-skinned beneath the tan, and sturdy. Although Nick’s hair was now totally white the hair on his chest had not gone through the same premature change but remained dark, whereas Harry’s blond fairness was the same all over him. The muscles of his shoulders, arms and legs were very well developed, which she assumed was from his training as a Paratrooper.

  She watched him all the way down to the water. The first grown man she had ever seen totally naked. Where was the immorality in a super body like that? Where was there any sin in their being together like this? She felt free. Clean. Wholesome. Harry Partridge had taught her more about wholesomeness in five minutes than her mother and the hassock and cassock school had done in years.

  She turned to float on her back and, relaxed by the blue sky and the warmth of the afternoon sun, with her hair moving like foxy seaweed, Georgia floated parallel to the shore, allowing the waves to move her gently back and forth. She did not turn when she heard him swimming over-arm towards her.

  He plunged into a rippling wave and came up beside her, salt water darkening his fair hair, glistening on his lashes. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘Mm. It’s the most voluptuous sensation. I could stay like this for ever.’

  Holding her easily with one arm, he paddled them both gently along with the other. Like this, exchanging desultory remarks, they drifted back and forth along the shoreline for a long time.

  ‘Your mother was awfully pleased when I told her you were coming home.’

  ‘I knew she would be; and she made me the pond pudding.’

  ‘She’s nice, your mother.’

  ‘The best. She says the same about you, you know.’ He dropped into what had once been his normal broad tongue. ‘You know what, our Harry – that there Mrs Kennedy is a real nice girl. And she’s clever, do’s that job as good as a man.’

  ‘Did she? Did she really? That’s a real compliment coming from Dolly. One can never tell what she thinks, she keeps herself to herself.’ Has she told him about Hugh? Probably not, Dolly’s not the sort to gossip.

  ‘That’s because she doesn’t feel… oh well, I don’t know… it’s this class thing, I don’t think she would ever get used to working side by side with “Them”.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about work.’

  ‘Fair enough. Shall we go and dry off? Perhaps we might find a tea-house or a café open along the front somewhere.’

  He spread out the thick leather coat and they lay side by side, resting on their elbows facing the sea, allowing the soft breeze and hot sun to dry them. How naturally she had done it, slipping off the shackles of her nurture, freeing her nature, so that when he began to brush the dry sand from her back, she did not pull back but allowed herself to relax into the sensation of his fingers and the rough feel of salt and sand, and her damp hair and the sun burning her skin. She felt lighthearted and joyful.

  ‘Have you always been faithful to your husband?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know, only that I think that you are the type who would be.’

  ‘There is a type then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned so that she could see his expression: it was enigmatic. His hair was so fair and short that she could see his scalp shining through it. He will be one of those men who are bald at forty and even better looking than now… he’ll be like Maurice Chevalier and Eve’s father – he’ll always have women round him. ‘You
don’t look at all like your brother.’

  He laughed. ‘No… our Harry an’t nothing like our Charlie. Anybody who knows us would tell you that. Charlie’s the good son, Harry’s the bad lot.’

  ‘I meant looks. Dolly is extremely proud of her sons, and she obviously adores you. I’m sure you aren’t good and bad sons – that’s sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head. It’s been doing that since Cain and Abel.’

  Now it was his turn to look her full in the face. ‘You’re full of surprises.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Come on. Para sergeants don’t often get to take out a girl who drops phrases like “sibling rivalry” into the conversation.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t give them the chance to.’

  He grinned, displacing a miniature avalanche of sand from his cheek. ‘Let me plait your hair.’ She lowered her head, resting her chin on the backs of her hands, conscious of her breasts and knees cool against the moist sand, her back hot in the sun, the sound and smell of the little rushing waves.

  She closed her eyes and drifted into the red world behind her eyelids, idle with pleasure and a contentment she had not felt for years. She could not have said why she could lie under the cloudless summer sky naked with this naked womanizer whose knee and shin was in contact with her hip, and feel so at ease. He sat breathing quietly as he finger-combed and divided her hair. From a long way off she could hear the occasional lowing of cattle and the call of gulls. Eden before the Fall she thought.

  ‘I haven’t plaited a girl’s hair for years. I always loved doing it.’

  ‘Nobody’s done mine since…. Remembering when that had been, she trailed off. Since summer 1935, under the willow, beside the Test when Nick and I and some of the others went swimming after pea-picking all day. ‘Whose hair did you plait, or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘Paula’s – my sister.’

  ‘I know Paula – a little.’

  ‘I’ve always adored her… still do.’

  ‘No sibling rivalry?’

  ‘Paula’s nobody’s rival.’

  ‘Not even the good son’s?’

  ‘Is psychology your bedtime reading?’

  ‘Only digests, The Idiot’s Guide to Freud – nothing too hard.’

  ‘I can’t tell whether you’re serious or taking the mickey.’

  ‘I’m not taking the mickey. I find psychology fascinating, and now that I’m on my own and there’s nobody to answer to, I can read what I like when I like.’

  ‘Do you have to answer to your husband when he’s there?’

  ‘Can you read what and when you like when you’re in barracks and there are other people around?’

  ‘Touché. You’re a bit of a dark horse though. I’ll bet you are faithful to him.’

  He noticed the shadow that crossed her gaze when she answered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guessed you might be. You’re an unusual woman these days.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think you’re right. I don’t think there’s a woman among those I work with who isn’t faithful. Perhaps you don’t look.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re right, I can’t say I search very hard.’

  ‘Then why date me?’

  ‘Because you intrigue me. Even in all that crowd at the Lyceum, my eye was drawn to you, even before I noticed my Mum. I thought you looked familiar, but it wasn’t that; I loved your whole air of a woman thoroughly enjoying herself. I suppose I was surprised. I mean, I’d seen you when you were a schoolgirl, then occasionally here and there – then suddenly there was this woman with her head thrown back, laughing and jitterbugging with absolute abandon. There, a nice fat pigtail. It suits you, but it’s too restricting for all that beautiful hair.’

  He smoothed dry sand from her, turning her over, moving from her arms and shoulders, to breasts, to belly where he let his hand rest, warm and heavy.

  ‘I realized then that I’d misjudged you, imagining you as Miss Frosty Knickers when you came to the Council Offices.’

  ‘I was enjoying myself that afternoon. They’re a wizard crowd to work with. Now tell me about the crowd you work with.’

  ‘Soldiers. Just soldiers like any others.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. The Paras are a crack regiment. People are reverential when they mention The Paras: you are the crème de la crème.’

  He raised himself on one elbow, she opened her eyes, he smiled down.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘The way you use a phrase like that – as though to the manner born.’

  ‘You think it’s too posh for an innkeeper’s daughter? You talk posh yourself.’

  ‘Not in front of my Dad; posh talk is pansy, affected.’ He picked up a handful of the fine, warm sand and trickled it on her body, making spiral patterns. ‘I realized something about him only recently… my Dad is not simply a man – he is a Working-Class Man. He’s not a socialist so much as a Labour Man. A Working-Class Labour Man with capital letters. Sure of himself. Did you know he got his balls blasted in the war?’

  She blushed at the word and the unexpectedness of the question.

  He went on, ‘Now there’s some psychology for you – a man who loses his virility and expects his sons to compensate by proving that they are better than the next man in everything. Except that when it comes to the sons growing up and getting “full use of their ’coutrements”, as my Mum says, he can’t stand it. He’s eaten up with anger and bitterness. And he’s every right to be – but not with us, not with his family. There are times when I feel so sorry for him that I’d like to put my arms round his shoulders and say, Cry, Dad. For God’s sake have a bloody good cry. But he’s so prickly you can’t get near.’ He kneaded her belly, moving his hand absent-mindedly. She detected the same love-tinged bitterness in his tone that would come into her own voice when talking to Nick about her mother.

  ‘Yet you like him.’

  ‘I don’t know about like, but I love the old bugger. Nothing I’ve ever done has been good enough for him: at grammar school if I got best marks in all subjects, scored the winning goal, got made Prefect, he could never bring himself to say he was pleased. I’ve never been able to please him, to get him to say just once, that’s bloody good, son.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve become Markham’s Don Juan, to get back at him?’

  He slapped her playfully. ‘A surfeit of Freud. Tell me about your parents.’

  ‘Boring story. Came from farming families originally,’ she said, ‘met when they were in domestic service. They longed to be “naice” people, who knew which knife was which. Ma longed for gentility. Ma’s family were small brewers, so she knew the trade; Pa got the licence for the Ruddleman, near Ower, about the time I was bom. Then later they took over the pub at Emberley.’

  ‘What about their little Georgia, is she a naice lady?’

  ‘It’s really strange: when I’m with Hugh’s friends, I always want to make it clear to them that I’m absolutely not nice, not one of their sort.’

  ‘And when you are with the hoi polloi?’

  ‘I don’t feel that I belong there.’

  ‘I recognize the feeling. But you see if I’m not right… after the war there’s going to be this other category of people.’ His tone had changed and for a moment she could have imagined that she was with Nick in one of his earnest moods. ‘Not a class in the present sense of the word, but people like us who don’t wear our origins like hair shirts or coats of arms. My social class was hammered and riveted on to me like leather armour. But I’m gradually popping off the rivets. People like ourselves will make the first class-less class.’

  They were silent for a while, occasionally the smell of civilization wafted across them in the form of oil and petrol from the motor bike.

  ‘You’re gorgeous, Missis Kennedy.’

  ‘I think you must have the knack – I actually feel gorgeous lying here. Is that vain?’

  ‘You’ve a right to a bit of vanity with a face and body like this.’ He continued trickling san
d and brushing it away. Georgia guessed it wasn’t as absent-minded as it appeared, for whenever she opened her eyes he was looking at her; but she enjoyed the sensation. It was as though her body, starved of human contact, fed upon the sensual touch of his hands and the appreciative looks. Hugh was never playful nor attentive, seldom asked her serious questions, never really looked at her as though she was an interesting person. Hugh had never valued her. Only Nick, till now, had done that.

  ‘You used to come to school on the Country Bus,’ he said. ‘Your hair was always shining and plaited; you always looked pink and scrubbed.’

  She laughed. ‘I was. My mother saw to that. She wasn’t going to let me grow up to be a country innkeeper’s daughter.’

  ‘And you didn’t, you learned all the tricks that got you out, like I shall. In peace-time I wear a white collar to work, I speak proper and use the correct knife and know enough to use my fingers to break into a bread-roll; I’ve eaten guinea-fowl and I know what game chips are. I’m probably the only fellow brought up on the Markham Council Estate who does.’

  His absent-minded hand wandered and caressed, she put her hand over it to stop its progress to her loins. She could so easily have let him go on.

  He continued, ‘You got away from your family.’

  ‘Well, they went away from me actually. They went to Scotland. They looked after an old couple for little money in return for the house when the old people died. They wanted me to go, too, but I hated the thought of Scotland.’

  There was a little swish of waves as the tide turned. ‘It is so beautiful here,’ Georgia said. ‘I shall remember this afternoon next winter when the coal has ran out and I’m burning briquettes and sawdust and my fingers are freezing.’

  ‘You are such a beautiful woman that I’m surprised that you haven’t had fifty lovers.’

  ‘It isn’t only the Catholics who tied the fear of God round little girls’ knicker-legs, you know.’

  ‘I know. My sister suffers from it.’

  ‘Paula?’