If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  Her father was treating her like a child, of course; or like a patient who’d made up a pack of lies about her symptoms and was refusing to face her true condition. Still, her father was crucial. She tried again, and her next words surprised her. ‘I think you could help him.’

  ‘Could I? Help the man who’s been ruining my daughter? A criminal.’

  ‘Oh, really! Ruining! How Victorian! This is now; and he’s not a criminal.’

  ‘He was wrongfully imprisoned, then?’

  ‘No. But …’

  She’d had such hopes of this discussion. She’d come home determined to bare her soul because her father was wise and cured people; but Singapore had fallen to the Japanese since she’d last seen him. ‘It’s the Japs, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s Malaya. It’s brought everything back. That’s why you’re being so distant. I feel it too, Daddy. I do. It’s horrible. And you were right all along.’

  She did feel it. Neither of them could bear what had happened to the Far East. This war had a mind of its own, and cruelty would be heaped on cruelty. No potion, charm or spell could put a stop to it, for childhood was past. Now she wished she’d never told him of her love affair. Through the window the hawthorn hedge basked deep green in the lively air, and the lark had gone so high the song was sheer vibration.

  Her father looked down at his desk and then up at her once again, sharply. ‘All this is leading up to some ghastly confession, I suppose? Something has happened and you’re looking for a way out.’

  There was a further delay before she grasped the implication. ‘No! No, Daddy. It’s nothing like that.’ She blustered. ‘For Christ’s sake! We … We’re careful.’

  ‘I should very much hope you are. I could have wished you’d been much more so from the start.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re being like this, Daddy. I just can’t understand it. I thought you’d be pleased when I fell in love.’

  ‘With your cousin’s robber husband? Or merely your accomplished deceiver.’

  She left the room, but without any stamping or show of defiance.

  In the afternoon she rode out with Bea Bligh, resolved not to broach the subject further. They chatted about wartime things, about Make Do and Mend with the child, Rosalind, so small. It wasn’t much fun, Bea said, since Geoff had been called up. Bea relied on her parents. She envied Clarice her active life with the bomber squadron. ‘Now that the Yanks are in you’d think matters would look up. But for us it just goes from bad to worse. Tobruk again! Why do we have to fight over a desert? You heard about the Hayman boys, of course?’

  ‘Trying not to think about it, Bea. Trying my very hardest.’

  ‘Both of them – within a week of each other. It’s so awful.’

  ‘If I thought about it, I really couldn’t cope. And at the airfield. Each night some of them go down. You just have to put a brave face on it. You go numb.’ She described her role, the emotions welling. ‘Actually, I’m just another dogsbody – completely powerless. You can’t help getting to know them. It’s the same faces every time. And the same missing ones.’

  Rozzie was already quite a talker, apparently. Clarice took the cue and swallowed her feelings. What remained was a sadness – if she and Vic were to have a child it would be a scandal rather than a blessing, so hidden away was their rationed love.

  ‘But there is something you haven’t told me, isn’t there?’ Bea said. They rode along the edge of a field well above Hayman’s farm. The breeze rippled the tall green wheat spears while the bank beside them was alive with the chirr and chatter of insects. From high overhead in the clouds there was a lark again, and another. Clarice drew breath. She felt the comforting flex of Martin’s muscles, and the thump of his powerful walk. The horse remembered her. ‘No. Nothing. Nothing that I’m aware of.’

  ‘You’ll be going back to your base tomorrow, then?’

  ‘I should really go and call in on Boss Hayman and Dolly – about the boys – but I don’t think I could face it, to tell the truth. Such a funk, I know. I’ve got another forty-eight hours. Meeting up with a friend. A day in London. It’s all a matter of who’s got leave when. We seem to overlap once every few months.’

  Bea set her horse into a trot. ‘That would be a male friend, would it?’ she shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘Just a friend, Bea,’ Clarice called after her.

  ‘Oh, yes. Just a friend.’

  Martin snorted and picked his feet up. She felt the kick of the new rhythm up through her spine.

  DESPITE HER BEST intentions, though, her day with Vic in London struck a wrong note from the start. He wanted to follow a lead before going straight out to Laindon, while she wanted to find an afternoon dance, and they ended up doing neither in a succession of pubs and a British Restaurant. Then she put on a too-bright face, and went about buying an American flag, and a cheap framed picture postcard of New York to hang on their walls. When he tried to be amorous she pulled away, her chatter rising glassily, beyond her control. If the war ever ended, she said, they might even squeeze a piano into the little house with them. He said he wished they could manage a simple discussion without it all going wrong; and she flared back instantly. ‘What do you mean, going wrong?’

  ‘I mean I try to say something and you start to get upset. I can’t for the life of me see why.’

  ‘So it’s always my fault.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. There! That’s what I’m talking about. Why is a simple, rational conversation out of the question?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Vic. Why should I? You’re the scientist.’

  They walked on in silence down Oxford Street.

  ‘It’s something to do with my son, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I feel torn in two. As if I have to look for him behind your back. You know that? You get so touchy about it.’

  ‘Do I? Try me.’

  ‘All right. There were a couple of hours to kill before your train this morning. I got chatting to some little lance-corporal in a bar off Leicester Square. He said a bloke called Rice was running all the trade and tarts east of Charing Cross Road. Then he got the wind up, so I told him I was an oppo. Family firm.’ He snorted through his nose. ‘But he clammed right up and said that was all he knew. I just wanted to throttle him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are you? Another lead goes begging because I can’t follow it up and I’m left none the wiser.’

  ‘I mean it. I really am sorry.’

  ‘And there’s another thing, an image I can’t get out of my head – of the kid. He’s caught up like an animal in some wretched net. It’s awful, cobwebby, but I can see his face. He’s looking at me. Everything else is dark.’ He gave a grim laugh. ‘Awful, yet in a way it makes me believe he’s alive. If I just knew where.’

  Clarice tried to speak but her voice stuck in her throat. She couldn’t explain the sudden paralysis that froze her muscles. She held in her possession the missing scrap of information. It hung right on her lips, this vital jigsaw piece, of the house in Upminster where she’d been taken with Jack and Phyllis after she’d visited Vic in Pentonville. But she couldn’t tell him, she couldn’t. … Because he’d ask questions she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to answer. Because it was too horrible and she’d kept silent for so long. The tears prickled in her eyes.

  ‘I suppose the police still haven’t come up with anything?’ she said.

  ‘A whole city full of missing persons?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She would tell him; if only they could be close again. But he was always somewhere else, always thinking about something else. His heart was never really with her; he would never give her himself.

  ‘How is the training going?’ she said.

  He looked at her in astonishment. ‘You really want to know? Night combat, mine lifting, street fighting – that’s what we were up to last week, Clarice. Because the tide’s about to turn, isn’t it? These days we do more charging than digging in. We blacken our faces.
We wear leaves in our tin hats, like hunters. They’re not sending us to Burma like the other battalion – Dad’s old mob. No. All bets are we’re going to France.’

  She was astonished in turn, at his tone. She’d been through so much for him. Her love for him was the most important thing in her life … A plausible rogue, her father had said, attractive to women. A criminal. She’d lost her bearings with him; her heart had gone numb and only irritation stung her. What had she seen in Vic? Just now she couldn’t remember. She’d been so sure, so confident that they’d be doing something extraordinary – upon which even the outcome of the war would depend. Where were her feelings now?

  He walked beside her, down Bond Street and into Mayfair, which was where neither of them wanted to go. She felt dumpy in her uniform. They didn’t hold hands. He chose to carp again about their lack of proper conversation.

  ‘Come on, Clarice. What’s gone wrong?’

  She drew breath; but when, outside the window of a high-class furniture shop he tried to kiss her, his hand at her breast made her flesh creep.

  ‘Nothing’s gone wrong. Just don’t do that. It’s the street, for God’s sake.’

  ‘No one can see.’

  ‘Don’t. That’s all.’

  ‘All right.’

  She could feel him next to her, tensing as he fought to contain his anger. ‘You’re cross with me, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Admit it, Vic’

  ‘I just wish we could agree on some basic principles.’

  ‘But where’s the love?’

  ‘I do love you. I’ve always loved you. That church – remember?’

  ‘You’re so remote. Your voice is so cold.’

  Late in the afternoon, they saw a Chicago gangster movie; and, in the early evening, they encountered their first Yanks. A party of smartly uniformed soldiers came smiling and joking out of a pub in Drury Lane. How they caught the eye, with their style and confidence. She cheered up; but then it came to thinking about the journey down into Essex. They’d spent their money too easily. They had only just had enough for the train, none for the tube. The walk was a chore. And when they did eventually get out to the little house she found for the first time she simply couldn’t respond to him physically.

  ‘It really doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Vic’ She was all too conscious of his disappointment. ‘Because I do. I suppose it’s trying to make everything just like … to try picking up exactly where we left off. The truth is we’ve each lived another life in the meantime.’

  ‘It’s quite all right, darling.’

  He was aroused, and frustrated. Naked, he dropped the packet of army condoms on to an upturned crate and pointedly lit a cigarette. She felt him looking at her body. It scared her. Her own frigidity scared her. From the start, she’d been the determined one. She’d coaxed him to believe in her, that she wasn’t simply leading him on. It had virtually been a campaign. Bitterly, she blamed her father. Surely his words had stung her mind, and bruised her own belief.

  Sitting on the mattress in her RAF bra and blackout knickers, by the weird light of the hurricane lamp, she longed for Vic to comfort her. But he kept his distance, he wouldn’t just be close; and she was hurt, as if deep down he preferred his regiment to her. That rhythmic crunch of boots, that perpetually deferred gratification – he was secure in the life among men, and the more the army made a man of him the more she found his masculinity threatening. It left her out. She felt their future as lovers shrinking to a wartime talking point, like the eager London girls with black GI babies already on the way. It made her wretched.

  ‘I’ll make some cocoa, shall I?’ he said, dully.

  ‘If you like.’

  While he was up, she clutched his greatcoat about her, not moving, listening to his ritual in the kitchen with the Primus. His shadow sprang and darted on the walls as his bulky male figure crossed and recrossed the door frame. And later, when they lay down to sleep, she could feel his piece of flesh poking against her skin like a reproach. She didn’t like to ask him to turn away.

  She woke beside him. The coats had come off the bed, and what should have been a mild night seemed to be draining all the warmth out of her. All the sorrows from the back of her mind were outside the cabin, large as wolves, and trying to get in. She wondered what someone like Vic might do to her when he found out she’d known all along about Jack? With a shock she realised she’d seen him lock the door before he got into bed. Moonlight was falling on him through the little window above their pillows – his pale, thin stranger’s face. She had brought him back. She’d breathed love into him. But she hardly knew him. In the dark, she had no idea where the door key was.

  As carefully as she could she raised herself up, pulled one of the coats around her, and slid across his sleeping body on to the bare wood floor. The moon cast only the faintest illumination, and the odd-job shapes they lived with seemed now completely unrecognisable. She felt her way to the mantelshelf and slid her fingers all along the bits and clutter she scarcely knew they had until she found the torch.

  Vic was a sharp, yellow, absent face amid the strange assortment of uniform and bedclothes. He turned over, as if the light would wake him, and made a sound at the back of his throat. She didn’t know what to do. In the kitchen, she tried the outside door. The lock rattled. The tandem’s pedal raked her shin and she gasped with the pain. The light flashed on the bag of dreams, all that prison stuff. She fancied she heard the booming of guns from somewhere far off. As she turned, the torch swept the twin planks that served as a kitchen bench. The crusts of supper lay next to an open pot of jam.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and screamed. Then she was in his arms and he was himself again, and she pressed all the pain that was in her body against him and cried.

  ‘There, darling. It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  ‘Oh, Vic. I’m so sorry. What am I going to do? What are we going to do?’

  JACK WAITED, SITTING on his bed, locked again in the bare room with its blackout curtains and single rag rug on the paint-spattered boards. The sky thickened outside. He thought of the purer light and the country he’d glimpsed the time before. It had been on the other side of the railway bridge. Now he grew liverish with apprehension. Next to the window, the walls stretched up, and there was a slight crack in the plaster near the ceiling, running down close to the bronze-coloured pipe. It was the continuing newness of the house he found difficult, the peculiar, insistent smell, of lime and paint and metal, which never went away.

  With his gaze, he followed the pipe down again, past the small dust pits in the pink wash of distemper, and saw how it joined into the larger pipe down by the brown skirting and then went into the radiator. By the shapes of the joints, he realised for the first time how the circuit was set up to flow, how it was engineered to take the hot water about the house, to deliver it, and then to return, through the floors and along the walls downstairs, to the heavy coal boiler in the kitchen. The radiator was cold today, its bronzed cast-iron flanges dull to the touch, because they were waiting for coal. But he saw where the water would leave it, and how the pipe led away.

  There were his books on the shelf, and, in their box, his toys with the tin bomber on the top. The golliwog who was losing his stuffing lay on the sheet. He put his hand to the wall above his bed. It felt perfectly flat, yet once again he could see the minute dust pits in the surface. It sucked out the heat from his fingers, from the flat of his palm, and smelt, inevitably, of lime. He couldn’t get the hang of things, and the window was too high to jump from.

  His mother was frightened, because any minute his father would be coming home from business. While he was allowed to the toilet, Jack could hear her on the landing, her high-heeled step trying this way, now that – indecisive upon the noisy boards. When he came out with the cistern still flushing and his own stink lingering in the air she tried to hug him. He felt the brooch she was wearing and smelt the scent on her neck. Then she too
k him with her into the big bedroom while she got changed, trying first one dress, then another, pulling up her skirt and fixing her stockings in the tabs, where a bruise still lay, and then, with the tops of her legs showing, sitting at the dressing-table with her hairbrushes, and bottles and powders, not talking to him while she made herself up. He looked from the skin of her thighs above the stocking tops to her face in the mirror with the lipstick poised. Her pouted mouth between the whitened cheeks was some proud razor slash she would colour in.

  She stood up, blotting herself as she turned round towards him, letting her dress fall back into place. Removing the cloth she’d tied round her shoulders she began to button the gape at her front. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re looking at.’

  Involuntarily, he stepped backwards. His own shoes clomped and echoed.

  ‘Anyone would think you’d never seen a woman before.’ The small wrists pressed each bosom. Her neat, laquered fingernails fastened the last button.

  Jack felt the tight lungs, the breath that would never reach down properly. The bare walls of the house still had pieces of electrical cable coming out of them, where no lights had been fixed. Everything echoed and was unfinished; and the yellow colour, that was not precisely the buttermilk distemper of her bedroom but the duller, more bilious taint that came in from outside, from the school, from the sky, and from the future, seemed to curve the world in so that the cramping of his chest was permanent. Her body stirred and frightened him; so did his own.

  As she left the room to go downstairs, she allowed her fabrics to brush past him. He didn’t know whether he was allowed to follow. He didn’t know whether he was allowed to be present when she told his father to be cross with him. He hung about looking into her jewel box. The items were complete and secret, lying glittering there upon beds of white wadding, a necklace, a ring, the diamanté image of a bird, two pearl drops for her ears. Then he went and pressed his face into the cupboard where her clothes were hung, taking in the woollen, flesh-flavoured, mothballed smell of her. Underneath the dresses the shoes were scattered haphazardly upon some loose magazines. One heel creased a folded song sheet with a blue cover. He made out the words between the lines of the piano stave: ‘I’ve got you under my skin.’