He had forgotten how heavily the Luftwaffe had plastered London in the winter of ’40–’41, and the sight of rosebay willow herb growing in clumps on piles of rubble made him wonder if Bomber Command was doing the same to Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne. He doubted it for, so far, the attacks were largely experimental and the night offensive had hardly got into its stride. He said, ‘You haven’t had any bombing in a long time, have you?’ and she told him not since the big fire-bomb attack of May last year and that Londoners were very pro-Russian on that account. Then she said, squeezing his hand, ‘Don’t let’s go on talking about the old war, Stevie! I can see Monica’s point, you know, it is a fearful bore, although I don’t see why she had to take it out on you.’ She leaned forward and called through the glass panel, ‘Turn right here, then first left! It’s called “Lune de Paris”,’ she went on ‘although God knows why! It’s run by a crafty bunch of Cypriote!’ and then she sat back rather heavily somehow contriving to half sit on his knee so that he thought again, with an inward laugh, ‘She’s a sexy little bitch! I wonder if she’ll tell me a pack of lies about what she does in her off-duty moments?’ and they left the taxi and entered a café where the tables were already laid for dinner.
The food was good by wartime standards and Margaret told him that the owner had extensive black market contacts in Smithfield and who could blame him for using them? Everybody had to eat and could hardly be expected to survive on spam indefinitely. ‘You can bet they don’t down among the cornfields’ she added gaily, ‘I’ll warrant Paul and Claire and the rest of them back in the Valley go to bed on something more substantial than powdered egg and mousetrap cheese.’
‘Claire and others might,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but I can’t see the Old Man using the black market. He’s too damned self-righteous for that!’
‘I like him,’ Margaret said, unexpectedly, ‘I always have, from the moment Andy first took me there. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ he said, pleased with the admission, ‘I don’t think I did. I suppose I thought you took the Old Man for granted like the rest of us. What is it you like about him?’
She considered. ‘His honesty and singlemindedness. That place of his, that funny little Valley, it’s the whole of him and always has been, and I can understand how a man would feel about land he owns. That’s the Celt in me I suppose, even though I’m South-Walesian and that isn’t the same anymore. But my Granfer came from Merionethshire, and that’s about as far Welsh as you can get. Not a soul speaks English up there and they still look on you ruffians as invaders.’ She paused a moment and looked down at her empty plate, so that he thought she was remembering Wales but she wasn’t for when she looked up and smiled she said, ‘He knows exactly where he’s going and so does Claire and that’s rare these days, Stevie.’
It was strange hearing her talk like this about his mother and father, for he rarely gave either one of them a thought, except as a couple of affectionate, sporting old stick-in-the muds, nose-deep in the remote provinces and surrounded by a horde of chawbacons who used a lingo that was standard dialogue between a comedian and his bucolic feed posing as one of the audience. He said, suddenly, ‘Why don’t you go back there, Margy? They’d be delighted to have you for the duration!’ but she shook her head, saying ‘Ah, no! No, no! You and Andy and Monica spoiled me for that kind of thing. There’s no going back, man!’ and before he could question this curious pronouncement she asked if she could have a cognac and he watched her sip it, remembering that in pre-war days she had had to be coaxed to take a second gin and Italian. She said briskly, ‘How about that Coward show? Gaspard could get tickets. Over the odds, of course. Are you flush?’
He asked her if they would take a cheque and she said this was easily arranged, Gaspard, the waiter, padding away like a Mediterranean pimp and returning ten minutes later with the promise of two rear stalls for Blithe Spirit that had been drawing London for months. ‘You’ve got the hang of things at last, Margy,’ he said, ‘and Andy would be proud of you.’ Then, realising that it was after seven o’ clock and that he had yet to book in at an Officers’ Club in Piccadilly, he said, ‘I haven’t told you a damned thing about Monica’s blitzkrieg!’
‘It’ll keep,’ she said, lightly, ‘we’re here to relax and you don’t have to trail around finding a bed. I’ve got a perfectly comfortable couch in the flat I share with Henrietta, who works at the Yank Embassy, and you can use it whenever you’re in town. Now give me a minute to fix myself and ask Gaspard to find a taxi. There’s no sense in walking when you can ride. One of Andy’s dictums, remember?’
As he sat waiting for her to rejoin him he began to wonder about her again, pondering her sudden switches from brittle small talk to flashes of nostalgia in which Andy, his parents, and even the Shallowford Valley were involved, almost as though she was putting up a front to prevent her real mood showing through. There was not much doubt in his mind that she was on edge, or that prolonged separation from Andy was having its effect upon nerves already frayed by the Battle of Britain. When she reappeared, however, he thought she looked prettier and saucier than ever and her lively mood persisted right through the comedy and afterwards when they roamed the dark streets in search of a taxi to take them to her flat on the second floor of a tall, Victorian building behind Smith Street. ‘It’s handy to the hospital,’ she explained, as she fumbled for the key, ‘I can pop back here whenever I get an odd spell off duty. There used to be three of us but Vera got a commission in the A.T.S. and now there’s only me and Henrietta. It costs us all getting on for a fiver a week. There’s silliness for you. I only earn about half that, for ten hours a day on my flat feet!’
They groped their way up the broad staircase in the light of the bluish hall-bulb and she told him to wait on the landing while she fixed up the blackout. ‘We’ve got a Nazi air-raid warden round here,’ she said. ‘He calls up the riot squad every time he sees a sliver of light at a range of two feet! There, that’s done. What’ll you drink? I’ve got pretty well anything, Henrietta gets it from somewhere but I don’t ask whether it’s given, bought or earned!’
She brought him a large brandy and another for herself. The flat was comfortably furnished with large, heavy pieces of the kind one might expect to find in a town house owned by one of the Forsytes. It was still spacious in spite of being divided in two by a new-looking partition. In addition to a large living-room and an untidy kitchen there was a twin-bedded room cluttered with feminine odds and ends. ‘We don’t do much housework as you can see,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got a Mrs Mop who comes in once a week but it’s a terrible slut she is and tiddly most of the time.’
‘Won’t Henrietta object to me parking myself in here?’ he asked, when she brought out sheets and blankets and laid them on the leather couch in the bay window.
‘Not her! She’s not the conventional type. One or other of her boyfriends is here every weekend but if she brings one back tonight he’ll have to curl up on the hearth rug.’ She slumped down in the deep armchair after turning on the gas-fire. ‘I feel all cosy inside,’ she proclaimed. ‘It’s the nicest evening I’ve had since Andy’s embarkation leave. I’m jolly glad Monica ran out on you!’
She looked at him with speculative amusement, shooting her legs at the red glow of the gas-fire and cuddling her brandy glass as though it was a kitten. ‘Now tell me your troubles and see that you don’t leave anything out.’
He told her the truth as he saw it, describing the scene in the hotel bedroom in detail and his overall relationship with Monica in the last few months.
‘It all sounds so casual,’ she said, frowning, ‘just a matter of using one another. It was never like that with Andy and me, not since the beginning,’ and before he could probe this unblushing announcement, she went on, ‘Do you think there’s somebody else after all?’
He said, irritably, ‘Damn it, Margy, I told you over the blower …’ but she cut him short, saying, �
��I don’t mean another woman, idiot. I mean another man!’
It was a possibility that had not even occurred to him and now that it did it seemed almost an affront to contemplate the fastidious Monica climbing into bed with a stranger.
‘No, that’s way off target!’ he said, ‘and if you think about her a minute you’ll know it is! I haven’t been one hundred per cent angelic but I’ll bet the Bank of England she has. Not out of regard for me but because she’s so damned hygienic’
‘That’s so,’ she admitted, with a kind of reluctance, ‘and for another thing she’d never have the nerve. She probably means exactly what she says about staying away until you change your mind. Will you? As time goes on and things get stickier?’
‘How the hell can I? How would it look to the Top Brass? Just one more L.M.F. using the back door!’
‘What’s an L.M.F.?’
‘“Lack of Moral Fibre”. A crack-up. It happens now and again, particularly in Bomber Command.’
He got up and began packing up and down, ‘You’re missing Andy, aren’t you, Margy?’
‘Like hell I am.’
‘Me too. I was thinking, this is the first time we’ve ever been parted. We’ve always done the same things and wanted to do them at the same moment. We had a hell of a lot of fun in the old days, the four of us.’ He stopped pacing and looked down at her. ‘Did you ever really like Monica?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘and she didn’t like me, but I put up with her for your sake.’ She looked at him speculatively for a moment. ‘Come to that, were you all that smitten? It always looked to me as if she married you and then woke up to the fact that she had married two men, not one.’
It was, he thought, a very shrewd assessment but he was not prepared to admit it, or not yet. ‘That’s cock,’ he grumbled, ‘Monica and I hit it off until she got these bloody silly ideas about Service life. She wasn’t upstage when she was in bed!’
‘No,’ Margaret said, ‘I can believe that. The snooty type usually aren’t. But you don’t live in bed, do you?’
She seemed to dismiss the subject and reached out to turn on the radio. Light music dribbled from the set, one of the current morale-boosters about the white cliffs of Dover. She said, kicking off her shoes, ‘I’m a bit tight, Stevie. I keep feeling giggly and then maudlin and anyway, I’ve got to be out of here by five-thirty tomorrow. I’d better turn in now. I’ll brew you a cup of tea and kiss you good-bye in the morning!’
‘Kiss me now,’ he said, for some reason feeling immensely grateful to her.
‘Not likely! I’ve had half a bottle of Burgundy and three brandies and I can’t hold liquor like you and Andy. If I felt your arms round me you’d have to put me to bed in a straight jacket!’ She lifted her hand and walked, with deliberate steadiness, into the bedroom, continuing to talk to him through the open door as he made up his couch. ‘Don’t open the windows no matter how stuffy it gets! You can’t do it without taking the blackout down and that A.R.P. whippersnapper will be hammering at the door in five seconds flat.’ He heard her yawn and stumble. ‘Are you all right, Margy?’ She didn’t answer so he finished making his shakedown and looked in at the open door. Her clothes were strewn about the floor and she was already asleep with the bedside light still burning. He crossed over to switch it off and looked down on her, noting her pleasing chubby face, fresh complexion, and that absurd peek-a-boo hair-do. He thought, glumly, ‘Old Andy always did know what he was doing, the lucky old sod!’
He awoke with a start, blinking into the blackness of the big room and seeing nothing but hearing, close at hand, a rhythmical sniffing, like someone tormented by a running cold. The couch, big as it was, did not accommodate him and he had cramp in one leg. It was cold and very still. No sound came from outside, only the long, regular sniffs from close at hand. He sat up, hitching the blankets about his shoulders. ‘Is that you, Margy?’ and when he thought he heard a mumble between the sniffs, he said, ‘Hold on, I’ll turn on the light.’ But she said, urgently, ‘No, Stevie! Leave the light be,’ and he waited, puzzled and mildly apprehensive.
‘What is it? Don’t you feel so good?’ and when the sniffs moderated and there was a short silence, ‘Is it Andy? Can’t you cope, Margy?’
Then she was beside him and he felt her bare shoulders under his hand. She was wearing no dressing-gown, just a flimsy silk nightdress and suddenly he felt a terrible compassion for her as he might have felt for a child left out in the dark and the rain.
He dragged a blanket from the couch, threw it over her shoulders and held her close to him. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, ‘if you want to snivel all night snivel and be done with it!’ and he sat there feeling deeply moved by her helplessness and wondering with part of his mind, where her flat-mate was and what conclusion she would be likely to draw from the pair of them huddling under a blanket at three o’clock on a winter’s morning.
Presently the sniffs ceased but she did not move away. He could feel her hair against his face and the simple perfume she used reminded him, improbably, of summer in the Valley when he was a boy crossing Shallowford Woods on his cob. She was that kind of person he decided and had never been otherwise, despite their years of racketing about the fashionable resorts of the Continent and the cities of the North and Midlands. She didn’t belong in cities but somewhere like that place in Wales she had mentioned. She was more akin to his mother than to Monica, someone who needed open spaces, country scents, plenty of good food and a big, hearty husband who threw her about and shared her primitive instincts. In a way she had always been the odd one out of the quartette, stringing along for Andy’s sake and for his, sensing the strength of the link between two men emerging from the same womb within seconds of one another. She was worth, he thought, about ten Monicas, providing you had the sense to value her in real currency.
‘I’ll put the kettle on and brew some coffee,’ he said, but she reached out and held him, holding the blanket closely about them so that it would have needed a determined effort on his part to get up from the couch.
‘You told me about you and Monica,’ she said presently, ‘but you don’t know about me. I woke up and felt frightened, frightened about everything, Steve. You’ve got to help me! I can’t go on like this any longer and it’s better you than just anybody, you understand?’
He didn’t, or if he did he did not bring himself to believe the implications of her appeal. ‘You can talk,’ he said, ‘you can tell me any damn thing you like if it helps.’
‘It does,’ she said, ‘it helps more than you know! I can’t face not having someone all that time. I knew I couldn’t a few days after Andy left but I stuck it out as long as I could, longer than I could, you understand now? Then I went on the bottle and that helped for a time but later on it only made things worse. Last Christmas there was a man—Johnny, a medical student—and after him another, a Yank from the Embassy, someone Henrietta brought home. I felt awful about it afterwards and wanted to do myself in. Can you believe that? I wanted to plug the windows and doors and turn on that gas-fire. I felt like doing it again the other night just before you rang. It was either that or go out and find a man. Any man! All these other wives, I don’t know how they cope! Maybe they aren’t made like me, or maybe they weren’t rolled once a night by someone as lusty as Andy. Anyway, that’s the way it is, and if you write me off as a nympho I wouldn’t blame you. That’s what I am I suppose, only, like I say, it wouldn’t have seemed so bad if there had been more to it than just using someone, the way I used Johnny and that Yank. What I mean is, if either of them had meant a damn thing apart from their sex.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Do you want to smash my face in, Stevie?’
She asked him to judge her but he had no useful comment to make. She had made it all too clear that she had been fighting a losing battle with herself from the moment Andy’s troopship sailed into the blue. Men didn’t get leave from the Middle East. It might be years b
efore she could lie in his arms again and it might be never. She just wasn’t the kind of person who could sit hoping and longing and remembering, or pouring her feelings on to sheets of paper. Then he had another thought and it disturbed him more deeply than her confession. Clearly something had been expected of him last night, and equally clearly the flat-mate, Henrietta, wasn’t likely to show up. He remembered the casual way she had invited him here and the way she had relaxed half on to his knee in the taxi. He remembered also that impulsive gesture at the station, when she had seized his hand and pressed it hard against her breasts, and after that the way she had punished the wine and the brandy and then suddenly blundered off to bed before she gave herself away. And now here was a snivelling admission that she had already been to bed with two other men, and, although ravaged by guilt, she was still ready to admit to her terrible need of them. ‘It’s better you than just anybody,’ she had said, and this seemed to clinch the point and, what was worse, leave the decision to him. It was almost as though she thought of him as part of Andy, someone to whom she could turn without disloyalty, not only because he was Andy’s twin but because they had always lived on top of one another, had gone everywhere and done everything together, and he wondered if any kind of case could be made out for either of them in these terms and whether, in fact, it was more treacherous or less treacherous on her part and his. He said, gruffly, ‘Last night … when we came back here … what did you expect, Margy?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I knew Henrietta wouldn’t be back and just hoped, I suppose. That way I could have told myself I was only half to blame for whatever happened and anyway, I’m not pretending when I say I’ve always thought of you as one person. You are, and you always have been. That’s why, the minute I woke up and thought about you in here, I had to come in and blurt it out.’
‘Is that all?’ he said soberly. ‘You feel better now that I know about it?’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 6
