If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  The whole column was turning left into an alleyway between two old houses. The stones underfoot were ancient cobbles, and the walls, with their miniature, leaded windows, rose up patched and stained on either side. The few noises of the street fell away behind them, and a sense of stillness prevailed.

  And then all at once there were flagstones underfoot, and railings around a bright green space with gravestones, like an island out of time. The great church stood in the centre of it.

  Warren half halted, and was pulled forward again. He found his gaze taken up the height of the sunlit tower, up higher still to the tip of the thin green spire with its glinting weathercock. The air all about it was the clearest blue. The procession of boys that was called a crocodile was moving towards the church.

  There were mothers, black-hatted old ladies, children in short coats, a father in uniform. Ahead, at the end of a brief approach, the notes of an organ leaked from behind a black door. Now Warren wanted to run away, but the shuffling progress of the crocodile took him forward.

  Shadowed wood met huge shadowed stone. He was seated near the front, on the right, where the school had the first rows. All about him a filtered light was like the dust of dried roses. Boys were on their knees, pressing their faces against the wooden shelves in front of them. He sat, still, preparing himself. He looked for something to fasten his attention to.

  Ahead, past the soaring stone columns, past the woodwork – more of it, darkened and banked, hooded and carved into some frenzy of ornament – there was a cloth-covered table, gold-worked, with a cross and candles. And above it blazed a coloured window with a man on the cross. The nails were perfectly visible, driven through his hands and feet.

  Behind them there was some movement and they all rose to their feet. The music swelled and filled the space, and he looked up past the line of tattered flags, hanging like an arrangement of cobwebs, to where, high up in the roof, carved roses and painted cherubs’ heads stared back down at him. A spy, a sinner, he would be exposed. If he could only pass through the ordeal of these next minutes, or hours. He saw the procession of robed men and boys crossing the stones, stepping up under the arch towards the cross. In another window he saw a crucified snake.

  The crowd stood and spoke or dropped to its knees, or stood again and sang. He tried to join in, struggled to keep up, mumbling along, mouthing the tunes. There was a story of the Israelites from the Bible, just as at the little red school, but deeper, and longer, and more magnificent. The choir sang. A letter was read out. Still there were no deeds, and no one spotted him. It was nothing but words; but such words that struck fear into him, and thrilled him, too.

  For when a frocked man climbed into a wooden turret, Jack heard: ‘I sent to know your faith, lest by some means the tempter have tempted you, and our labour be in vain.’ And then, for a second, he seemed to look directly at Jack: ‘When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me. And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning. These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended. They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me. But these things have I told you, that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.’

  And as the priest spoke and spoke, and the great vault filled with his words, Jack held on to the hint about the father sending a comforter, and about remembering – until the prayers were said for the King, for the empire, for the soldiers in Burma, the sailors holding the seas, and the bomber crews over Germany; until, in the lapse of time and more time, the hymn was sung and the priests and choir withdrew and nothing was left in the air except the organ, its peals and runs making the same shapes and colours as the stained glass.

  That night, in his iron bed, he tried to return to the cathedral in his imagination, summoning again those moments when the singing voices blended and changed themselves, rising up into the immense overarching space. He tried to bring Clarice there with him, and the indistinct figure whom he had once known, the father from the rose garden. Then tears came unstoppably, because he didn’t know where he was.

  A CAR HORN honked furiously, and when Vic emerged from the cabin still holding his paintbrush he saw Clarice jumping out of a USAAF car. She hauled her bundles out after her, then posed with him against the front woodwork. The obliging Kodak owner departed in a blare of trumpeting and Vic led Clarice indoors. She’d been transferred to Lincolnshire; she had one day and one night.

  After they’d made love she wanted to see everything in detail. The inside window frames were picked out in a stolen camouflage green, while the neat plank table was entirely white. Expanses of decently stained floor had two fibre PT mats for rugs. On the walls, he’d fastened up her pieces of fanciful Americana, the crossed flags, a picture of a B-17 Flying Fortress, a view of the plains of Colorado with some Rocky Mountains in the distance, and her New York. An odd assortment of chairs had appeared, courtesy of a sergeant in Vic’s battalion who’d delivered them in a truck, no questions asked. Now they were neatly arranged, all painted the same shade of camouflage buff.

  ‘Oh, Vic. It’s marvellous!’ She kissed him.

  Their old air force radio stood on an ammunition box behind him. He backed their embrace slightly towards the wall, and with his free hand switched it on. Soon, as it warmed up, notes of American dance music jostled their way out from the little speaker.

  ‘Vic! You’re an angel!’

  They swayed together softly. He steered her around the new furniture, distrustful of her exclamations, and of the man who’d brought her.

  She broke away, and proceeded to take out from her bags samples of an astonishing, brash chintz. She held them up to the window. ‘A dead navigator’s mother gave them to me,’ she said. ‘We’ll be such pioneers of taste.’

  He laughed awkwardly and tried to embrace her again, but it seemed to him there was already an implication in the air, as though just a few moments ago he’d made her submit against her will. He wanted to argue it out with her but bit his tongue. Instead, for the next two hours while she was busy cutting and pinning her curtains over the blackouts, he took up his paintbrush again.

  Every now and then, he paused for a cigarette and turned to look at her. He thought how blissful she was, and of the first summer, and how he was losing her. He watched her slight arms holding the fabric up, her fingers deft at the pins – how beautiful was the fine blonde hair that lay loose upon her shoulders, caught in the streak of sunlight through the window.

  Before she’d finished, he had to go over and stand behind her, kissing her neck, touching her breasts with his fingertips. She flinched, yet angled her head back to kiss him. But when he tried to go further, smoothing his hand over her skirt, nudging her towards the old, makeshift bed again, she tensed and squirmed free.

  ‘Vic, darling,’ she said. ‘The room is absolutely transformed.’ There was a bright, unreal note to her voice. The new paint smells seemed to stick in his nostrils.

  Down by the Thames where they strolled, she told him the gossip of her squadron. The night bombing offensive was to continue, of course. He told her of his unit’s proposed six-week move to Wales for a joint operation with the Black Watch. She said it would make a change for him. The mended tandem lay on the straggling salt-meadow grass behind them. Sounds of war drifted across the wide river, the unremarkable booming of anti-aircraft fire, and he slipped an arm about her waist. The local kids played at the water’s edge, barefoot with their fishing nets in the cow-trodden estuary mud.

  They walked to where talkative wavelets lapped into a tiny bay. At the end of a roll of barbed wire a piece of iron was hammered into the water’s edge. Beside it, one or two of last year’s reeds stood tall, and their spiked featherheads fringed the view of the oil refinery.
He was angry, frustrated. Always their time together was like this, like treading on eggshells.

  She seemed to read his thoughts. ‘What is it, Vic? I’d rather you told me?’

  He felt immediately cornered. ‘It’s about us, as usual.’

  ‘All right.’ She was defensive. ‘Talk, then. I wish you would, sometimes. I wish you did show your feelings more, Vic’

  ‘About how we are, where we’re going.’

  She made no reply, but turned her face away.

  He plunged on. ‘I mean, the more free of that prison I feel, the more I desire you …’

  She’d become quite silent. Now she stopped walking. They turned rather awkwardly to face one another. The sun was westering. It struck long bars of fleeting gold in the river surface. Out in midstream a grey torpedo boat was plying towards the sea.

  ‘It seems to me we were perfectly happy only a moment ago,’ she said. ‘And then you want to make some kind of an accusation.’

  ‘I don’t expect it as a right. I just wish we could talk about it. That’s all. You go cold.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m frigid, aren’t I?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean, darling. You know it’s not. Don’t you see? It almost has nothing to do with sex.’

  ‘Almost’ She spoke scornfully.

  ‘Why! Why is it always so difficult? We’re trapped. We’ve got nowhere in all this time. Everything is still exactly as it’s always been. That airman who dropped you off …’

  ‘Don’t start, Vic. Of course not. He’s just a chum, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Your God,’ he said glumly. ‘What’s He bloody playing at, I wonder?’

  She slapped him suddenly, fiercely on the cheek. ‘What do we know of God, either of us?’

  He was astonished. ‘Why did you do that?’ The sting of the blow throbbed up around the corner of his eye.

  ‘I came down for you, Vic. To see you. And all you want to do is spoil it. Why can’t you just tell me you love me? I just need reassurance, that’s all.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me? Why can’t you reassure me?’ It was becoming that same weary struggle over who would back down first. She was as obstructive as Phyllis.

  They pedalled back along the main road, and up the hill to the cottage, in silence. When they arrived, he stalked off to the waste ground to stand and smoke. She didn’t love him. He wanted to burn the house down. Wasn’t this crude, rickety, and absurdly tricked-out shack plainly an image of himself. He looked at the outline of it, against the late afternoon – a joke. She could take her pick of any number of glamorous American officers, men who risked their lives. What could she see in him?

  Later, when he returned to the cabin, he saw her huddled up in front of the empty grate. There were tear stains on her face. And yet they still held apart from one another, offering only functional snippets of speech, about the tea, the washing-up, what they might eat. Then he collapsed and she was in his arms. ‘Oh, Vic,’ she said. ‘I do love you. I do.’

  ‘And I love you, darling.’

  He lay in the dark, kissing her mouth. Her body was soft beside him. When she slept he heard guns again, far away. He got up, tiptoeing naked across the bare floorboards to his newly painted window, and twitched the dressing of floral chintz aside. Beyond Upminster, a roving crown of searchlights, from Dagenham, Romford and Barking, threw the nearby branches into silhouette. Between the beams, incredible colours, neon reds and fluorescent greens, flared suddenly. Golden strings of tracer bullets arced into the sky. His son was either under it somewhere … or maybe he was dead, after all. He felt powerless, missing him: his face, his voice, the way he perched his cheeky head sideways when he misbehaved, the way he clambered up and down the stairs one at a time at the flat. The three-year-old was years gone. Vic was losing hope.

  A SMELL LIKE smouldering fibre hung in the air and mingled with the oily whiff from the West India Docks. She clung to his arm before the burnt-out wreckage of the house in which they’d first met, her aunt’s in Morant Street – Phyllis’s mother’s. The sky was a mottled haze through which only driblets of sun filtered down. Curiously angled crane tips speared the line of the missing rooftops, and half a ship’s funnel projected from behind a blackened chimney-stack.

  In a cafe on the Commercial Road they looked at each other over the stained red-and-white tablecloth. Their mugs of tea steamed in the space between them. He could see she was wound up. He knew the way he tapped his match at the ashtray threatened to drive her to distraction. Through the window he could see the communist slogan daubed on the shell of a building opposite: ‘SECOND FRONT NOW’. The summer had gone.

  At last he got round to lighting his cigarette.

  She sought to comfort him. ‘It’s natural, Vic’

  ‘But you don’t want to help,’ he said. ‘That Tony Rice …’

  He could almost see her heart stop. All along there’d been something, something she held back. How tired he was of the struggle with her. ‘What is it? Tell me. Why won’t you tell me?’

  He watched her mouth move, as though she tried desperately to frame some formula of explanation. She could not. Even now as she stirred her tea, staring into the muddy liquid in its stark white enamel, he saw that she would deny him.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Nothing at all. Why do you keep on at me?’

  Vic looked at her intently. He saw how defiantly she met his eye.

  ‘The Blitz is long over,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go on worrying like this. You’re here with me. What about us, Vic? Don’t I matter to you?’

  ‘Of course you matter to me. You’re everything, darling.’

  They drank their tea in silence. A car passed in the road outside.

  Back in Laindon, she said she needed to feel his arms around her. If he so much as touched her more intimately, she flinched away. He caught sight of his face in her mirror; he looked strained and withdrawn. He blamed her.

  ‘Why do you make me feel this way?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not making you feel any way.’

  And he knew she was right. But he watched her withdrawing in turn, and it made him furious. Then the anger would fill him up, despite all his efforts, just waiting to be discharged against her. And there she was, angry too, her defences on a hair trigger, as she sat opposite him at their white table. The slightest thing would set it off.

  He made an effort to be light, whistling as he cleared the table, but his best intentions were subtly ironised, and she sensed it.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know very well. You know it irritates me.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Your bloody whistling, of course.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘You just do it to annoy me.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Christ!’

  Then he was hurt and gloomy, and his mood seemed to exasperate her. They bore the soured atmosphere between them all evening and went to bed in silence.

  AND IN THE morning he lay beside her as the dawn broke, alert to birds shuffling and chattering in the cold wooden eaves, and to the sudden whirrings of their wings. He remembered a dozen such mornings and the passing away of hours, days, months of the love that had brought her to him. How vile, the way it could be switched out; to be replaced with a dull resentment.

  He watched the delicacy of her eyelashes, flickering every now and then with her dream. The fair hair, loose-permed these days, straggled waywardly. As her skin gave slightly towards the pillow, her right cheekbone was the more softly defined, and the faintest down of hairs lay upon it.

  Somewhere he still loved her. He wanted to stroke her hair, and whisper in her ear, as she always had to him, to convince her that it would be all right again, it really would. If only he could believe it himself.

  Her eyes opened and for a moment he looked straight into the blue waking irises. When he spoke, however, and put out a hand to her, he found her resisting. She blam
ed the approach of her period and briskly announced her intention to get straight up and make them a breakfast. As she dressed, he watched her coldly, supporting his weight on one elbow. He saw her tuck a towel about her as if for the first time she felt embarrassed. The cloth made a soft disturbing line across her naked back. The dark hairs on his own forearm saddened him.

  She brought the meagre bread and marge, and placed it in front of him.

  ‘It’s not easy, Vic. What we’re doing.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He heard his voice come out hard and controlled. He saw it made her wince.

  ‘Listen.’ She was making herself ignore him. ‘There’s a fine line between us. Don’t you see? It’s not class, Vic, it’s just a line. Below the line you stand to spiral downwards, for ever. Above it, love has a chance, if we choose.’

  He made no reply. He got out of the bed and rummaged in his trousers for his tin of makings. Then at length, after he’d rolled his cigarette, he spoke. ‘And intimacy?’

  ‘Damn you! I knew that was going to be it.’

  He knew she felt wretched; yet she insisted and he couldn’t stop himself. She took off her clothes and submitted herself to be embraced. He thought she’d almost prefer him to be violent. The cottage seemed drear and remote, and he sensed she wanted nothing so much as to get away from it. He knew she forced herself to kiss, clenched her teeth against the pain as he came into her. When it was over, he simply felt puzzled.

  In the afternoon they took the tandem out. They stopped on the crest of the ridge and looked across to the west. ‘Down there’s Upminster,’ he said. ‘That’s the way Phyllis and I used to come up every weekend, to get the cottage finished. Through Upminster, past the red school and through the railway bridge. Shall we ride down there and have a look round? A cup of tea? It wouldn’t take long. Anyway, we’ve got time.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘I’d rather not. Do you mind?’

  ‘No. I don’t mind. Just thought it might be something to do. Take us out of ourselves. There’d probably be somewhere to get a cup of tea.’