If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  ‘How shall we go on?’ he said. He pulled her close. The voice was cautious. ‘That is … You do want to go on?’ She watched his lips. ‘You’ve found me a wreck,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think? It has occurred to me … that you might be thinking twice. Now that I’m in the flesh, as it seems.’ He smiled, and then grew serious again. ‘I do have to ask.’

  She turned and looked out over the moonlit snow. The wind had quite dropped; the country was unimaginably still. Soon, most probably, there would be a siren going off somewhere, and the bombers would come streaming over, en route for London; but for a moment or two, she could imagine that all the shadowed landscape was untouchable. ‘You’re not a wreck to me, Vic,’ she said. ‘As it happens you’re beautiful – in the flesh. And I want to go on. Of course I do.’

  There, it was not so hard, speaking. They’d strung a few sentences and were still in love, weren’t they? Nothing wretched had emerged to ruin it. Nothing about Tony Rice … She felt reassured.

  ‘We’ll manage, Vic darling. They’ll have to train you, the army. Then you’ll get leave, won’t you? They can’t send you off straight away. So we can meet here. At any time. We can, Vic. What’s there to stop us?’

  ‘You’re prepared to wait? However long it takes?’

  ‘I’ve waited this long. And then I found you. And with the war it’s the same for everyone, isn’t it? We can write. We’ll be just like other people.’

  ‘And Phyllis?’

  ‘Dearest, we don’t know where Phyllis is. And in any case what business of Phyllis’s is it any more, what we do?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I’ll try everything I can to find Jack – whenever there’s an opportunity. Where he is, if he’s alive. If he’s safe. I shan’t be able to rest until I know … You could help me.’ He turned to her.

  Her heart froze inside her. ‘Yes, of course I could.’ She pressed the matter away. ‘We don’t know how things are going to work out. But we will manage, Vic. Won’t we? We’ll manage. Because we love each other. We’ll find a way.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We shall.’

  They walked back to the cabin. She heard the glittering snow crackle beneath her shoes. And under the glittering sky she thought of the beautiful rose she had created and how it already had a worm in it.

  THE MONTHS HAD flickered away like shadows and now it was high summer. They had met twice more at the cabin. He’d never even dreamt of this, back there in the prison. He lay looking up at his battledress, hung over the back of the wooden chair. Granted two days when their leaves coincided, he’d peeled her out of her shapeless WAAF uniform and the secret little house was once again a bower. This life of theirs was astonishing, and perilous. She turned, and her face brushed against his. Her eyes opened: ‘Vic, darling.’ Soon, they made love again. She was fierce about it, as if it were a statement.

  Later, he got up and threw his unseasonable greatcoat on like a dressing-gown. He went out into the sunset, feeling the grass and stones under his bare feet. As he dropped the bucket into the well he caught the woody, dank odour in the column of cold air beneath him. He knew nothing, except that he was a soldier, and that his son was out there somewhere, spirited away.

  The well was a device of his father’s: rainwater came off the roof and was passed through an ingenious outdoor filter to be stored in the shallow borehole. He pulled up a bucketful and tipped it into his jug. The liquid had the colour of twilight. Returning, he stood in the minute, darkening kitchen with his greatcoat hanging open, the soft human sexual smell rising up to his nostrils from the track of his body hair.

  The tandem, parked with its front wheel skewed under the one cluttered shelf, took up most of the space. Directly above its mudguard, where the shelf ended, his bag of notebooks hung on a peg. Vic turned and stood between pedal and handlebar to pour his water into the earthenware strainer on the trestle bench. Shortly, from the lip at the bottom of it, drops began to emerge though the stones, and he set his father’s old tin kettle to fill. Then, squatting cramped by the door, he lit a ring of meths in the Primus and started pumping paraffin up into the jet.

  Outside, against the window he’d glazed two summers before, the August sky was casually magnificent. ‘Yes, all right, I’ll do it,’ he’d said to his wife; and that had brought him here, now, with Clarice. He glanced back through the doorway. A buttery light lay upon her neck. Her blonde hair was loosened to one side, and for a moment the gleam appeared to linger upon her nape before running off down the edge of the scruffy sheet. He put the kettle on to boil. Here, with her, the smallest actions, the most insignificant domestic routines, were charged with vehement grace.

  In East Ham, when he was a child during another war, there’d been an encyclopedia with a picture of a manta ray. The creature was a sinuous black line with lobed underwater lips at its centre. The thinness had been deceptive, no more than a leading edge. Now a darkness had developed again, and lingered on his life, as it lingered upon the city. Clarice had rescued him, but still it seemed any day that the ticket of leave might expire, and the country, bankrupt, exhausted, on fragile transatlantic life support, would soon fall victim to new and more pitiless strokes. Time and tide had gone haywire. Yet this cabin subsisted, lit by the western sky and filled with their love. He looked at her once more, beautiful, too blissful. He thought of the girl in the night-club, who had so reminded him of Clarice – Frankie, the prostitute – and the sudden chaste kiss which had marked a first act of defiance.

  The kettle whistled. He splashed the water on to the tea specks in the chipped brown pot. Tomorrow Clarice would have to go back to her airfield in Norfolk, and he must go back to Hayward’s Heath, to a camp called Borde Hill where, ironically, his battalion had just finished building their own charmless huts amongst the trees. He would be living there thinking of her, until his unit moved again, until he snatched another day to get to London to look for Jack, until he and she next managed to steal time together.

  His parents were dead, killed in the bomb that got the East Ham gasworks on Battle of Britain day. Phyllis’s family – the connection Clarice shared – was bombed out, moved out, untraceable. If Phyllis herself were still alive; if Jack were … He was sure he was. Sometimes Vic could almost swear he heard the boy calling out to him. And it was not simply the love of a father for the loss of his closeness, his growing up, his new steps and little progresses. There was the other matter as well. More and more Vic was convinced it was Tony Rice who had the ordering of Jack’s days.

  Now he was pouring tea for his wife’s naked cousin. Against their moments of happiness stood a seemingly endless military future, the chewed and pock-holed transits of cities, defeat in North Africa already followed by defeat; a threat on every horizon. The day would come when Vic would be sent into action. War had sent Clarice to him; it maintained them both in adultery, sin, blessedness.

  He added powdered milk from his army rations and took in her cup. Her breasts lay unguarded above the bedcovers. He stared at the faint marbling of veins, the red-brown prominences of her nipples; and then, nervous, averted his gaze. She opened her eyes and looked back at him, the open coat. ‘What d’you call this?’ She forced his attention mockingly, indicating the cup. ‘A bloody Coldstreamer?’

  She’d cottoned on to his army slang. He remembered bringing Phyllis tea the morning after the Coal Hole, the open wound on her temple, the marriage pulled tight like a cord. He held out his hand for the cup. ‘I’ll get the pot and fill it up for you.’

  ‘I’m not letting you go.’ Then she set the teacup aside, and pulled him down close to her, stroking his head, slipping her fingers inside the greatcoat to smooth his neck and shoulder. ‘It’s all right, what we’re doing. It’s something new, you and I, don’t you see?’ With her free hand, she took his palm and fitted it to her breast. She seemed to sense his moods before he did. ‘Be easy. Please, Vic’

  ‘Phyllis …’

  ‘Forget Phyllis. Sometimes I think that even if we knew fo
r definite Phyllis no longer existed you’d find a way of inventing her.’ She made him sit beside her on the bed.

  ‘Maybe.’ He shifted uncomfortably, angry with himself, angry in case he couldn’t be sure of her. ‘It’s not as though I’ve been at the front, or anything, is it? I haven’t got so very much to complain of.’

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘What is it, Vic? What’s the matter?’

  He was on the point of accusing her. She would insist on skidding away from the question of Phyllis – and, therefore, of Jack. It was as though she were concealing something, and he was suspicious of her tone. But he bit his words back, frightened of some power she had as a woman, frightened she would leave him the minute he crossed her.

  They did live on a knife edge. Each of them could slip out of agreement and revert to some other state – without knowing it. That was what he’d discovered: everything could so suddenly turn about. A woman’s body, that most closed field of desire, the forbidden parts, the shocking tendernesses. Sometimes they’d tear at him.

  He couldn’t believe she loved just him. She must have other men. Officers would be hanging round her all the time. Bile surged up in him; the whole thing was inscrutable and would make him mad again. He could never hope to satisfy her, in the real sense, in the real world. He tried to believe in their happiness, but a kind of blackness would close over him.

  ‘You’ve noticed how you take the lead?’ he said. ‘You must have. I can’t … I’m all knotted up. What sort of man is that?’

  ‘It’ll be all right. Give it time, Vic. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Time! What time have we got? A couple of days here and there. Part of me is still locked in Pentonville. Even before Phyllis …’ He checked himself. ‘I never courted you. Not properly. Look at me. You’re acting as though it’s all so easy.’

  ‘You did court me. Vic, it was wonderful. We both knew. You loved me, I could tell. You courted me then.’

  Now he was like a vessel on the slipway that would keep going down instead of bobbing off on its own account. How impetuously Pentonville could take hold, the great warp of the prison seemingly dragging him back. Overhead there were bombers, friend or foe – he waited to see if the guns on the Thames estuary would open up. The sky was the merest strip of egg-yolk yellow beyond the glass. ‘I have no spirit, you see.’ He knelt down next to her.

  ‘Vic, darling …’ She held his head against her chest. ‘It’s so hard to get you out. You think everything’s against us.’

  ‘I think something in me … How can you love me?’

  She stroked him urgently. ‘I do, Vic. You have to believe it. Yes, if she knew about us dear Phyllis would do everything possible to ruin what we’ve got. Yes, my father would go crazy … well, maybe he would. Any minute Hitler could finish with Uncle Joe and the Reds and come back with the real invasion. Tomorrow either one of us, or both, could be dead …’

  ‘Clarice … I know.’

  ‘Then we must be doing something very surprising, to cause all this fuss.’

  He laughed with relief. ‘You think it’s all about us?’

  She was serious. ‘Don’t you agree? Don’t you feel that to cut through everything … to insist on being together … isn’t it truly wanting to love that stirs up so much anger and hatred? I mean love that isn’t all mixed up with cruelty and manipulation. Proper love. Surely something can’t bear it, the thought of lovers being together. Or someone. I mean proper sexual love.’

  ‘That might just as well be God, then. Mightn’t it?’

  ‘I shouldn’t entirely think so, Vic. Should you? God wasn’t quite the agency I had in mind, darling. As you well know. Though who can tell what side God’s on.’ She gestured impatiently at the window. ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  He did.

  But now she was momentarily afraid. ‘They won’t come after us will they, Vic? Phyllis and … Tony? We’re safe here, aren’t we?’

  In the see-saw topple of emotions he was too fatherly. ‘If they haven’t come by now I should think they’ve made other arrangements, shouldn’t you?’

  Her fear subsided in his embrace. Some concern – he didn’t know what – made him hesitate to make any further comment about Tony. Both of them were prey to sudden terrors. But now, gradually, the cabin was redrawn around them and he was himself again and her body was lovely – her neck, the vulnerable shoulders, the revelation of her bosom, the narrowing of her side as he caressed it, her skin. She smelt of black-market eau de cologne and her own fresh sweat. Both were delicious.

  He looked around the bare little room with its empty fireplace. Their only furnishings were the debris of carpentry, the stepladder propped against the flimsy wall, the tools and paint pots, hurricane lamps, boatyard planks and saw-cut trestles; their only communication with the outside world was the little crystal set that only sometimes worked. Then he spoke to her of his childhood, of the brother and baby sister who’d died in the flu epidemic, of the ghosts of the Great War he thought he’d seen in the streets of East Ham.

  They held on to each other. ‘It’ll be all right, Vic. Tell me it’ll be all right.’

  Later, they walked far enough for a view of the river. There was a southerly breeze from over the Kentish hop gardens on the other side – he was sure he could smell the beery tang breathing across the tide between the barbed wire and the concrete pillbox. The moon stood up on Germany, half full. He strained as if to hear the small far-off waves slapping and splashing against the concrete flood defences. ‘It’s so very touch and go. Everything,’ he said.

  Dark clouds moved between the sprinklings of bright stars. He could hardly believe she was there in his arms, and not some wraith in the night air before he woke to Hemmings and the cell and the stink of daylight. He touched her cheek.

  ‘Vic’

  SHE WAS DETERMINED to be happy. Her life was gathered into peaks, which were with Vic; and abeyances, at the airfield in Norfolk. Now, suddenly, it was December and they had four days. The more the wind raved outside and the rain pelted slantwise at the low roof and the sounding sides, the more she conjured her secret house a nest made snug in the middle of some wild forest.

  A bladed daylight broke over them in the bed. She supported herself on her elbow and smoothed Vic’s chest, the wiry hairs, the shallow valley of breastbone in the breathing expanse. The cabin drummed. He was awake. The oil stove sputtered on its wick and the room filled instantly with the smoky fug she’d grown used to. Here was refuge, here lay her lover; her hand touching his heartbeat.

  She let her gaze steal from the base of his throat – slowly, tantalising herself – across the chin and around the mouth, savouring his cheek, the architectural detail of his nose, only then allowing herself to link eyes. She fed on his mouth, tasting the breath and tongue, and it was as if there was no past, no war, no Tony Rice – she heard the storm outside as simple music. Her body melted, streaming to him. Afterwards she smiled up at him. ‘You will love me, won’t you? You will always love me, Vic?’

  ‘I’ll always love you.’

  ‘And you’ll always come back and meet me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when the war’s over?’

  ‘When the war’s over we’ll be together.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You won’t be killed?’

  ‘I won’t be killed.’

  In his arms she could rest. She thought of the bunching of years and distance that had brought them together, first at disreputable Limehouse of all places; only to part them on the instant and hurl them to the opposite ends of the earth. Slowly, instinctually, along the next slope they’d reached towards one another again. Their outstretched fingers had eventually clasped here, now, and were holding firm.

  Now she stroked his back, feeling him stir once more inside her and thrust softly with the embers of his passion amid the oil-stove drowse that enveloped them. Scattered, blanketed, she
wanted to keep him covering her for ever. She felt they’d won. Benign rain in a squall dashed at the window-pane.

  He pulled away and lolled down beside her once more, his eyes closed, his breath subsiding. It was the childlike tousle of his hair that momentarily reminded her of Jack, and then immediately, sickeningly – because for her the child was evermore blighted – of Tony Rice.

  They took their breakfast in the middle of the day. She made crêpes over the Primus stove, liking to watch him eat, as though he were still a Lazarus, warming to life in her care. At her suggestion, they walked out along the lane, past the brass-band music leaking from an open window in the Flatman family’s old converted bus, and on through the settlement.

  There was a point quaintly named One Tree Hill, and the rain had declined into intermittent flurries. Their path was the concreted strip to one side of an unmade road. In the years the road had overgrown itself and was now a wide hedgerow between the properties. Here and there, old lords-and-ladies berries still poked up, and the last red drops of nightshade hung. There were rose-hips, too. And in the gaps, through the drenched, wind-blown scrub, they saw the homes of their neighbours, with their thorny, outhouse privies. ‘The great East End land rush,’ he said, as he lit his cigarette.

  She laughed. ‘Sounds like the wagons all lined up at the rail head.’

  ‘Indian country east of Epping. Economic pilgrims.’

  They passed a self-conscious bungalow, of a pattern she’d seen before. Its ornamental fretwork was peeling, and its chequered, patent roof showed more moss than tile. ‘There, look. How grand.’

  ‘A kit,’ he said. ‘Prefabricated. Still, labour full of innocence and reward, I guess.’ He flicked his ash. ‘A secret America, half an hour’s journey down the line from the smoke.’ He grinned and his own smoke was snatched away on the wind. ‘Can you imagine? Every weekend, at the station – unloading all their bell tents and babies.’ A squall of rain hit them from the side. He mimed the settlers’ efforts. ‘Saws, accordions, picnics, bits of timber, you name it. Up the hill they shoulder them all: rolls of picket fence, tubs of creosote. Each family dumping its necessaries on its own plot of land, nailing up cabins and shanties while their children – me for one – ran down to the marshes to watch the big ships coming in and going out. My family hoping for a new way of doing things. A bit of harmless Lebensraum, you might say.’