by Henry Green
‘Why she’s very good, Mr Pye.’
Pye knew everything. ‘Isn’t she in some trouble with her daughter?’ Hilly denied all knowledge, wondering if old Piper told him things.
‘All you women are the same,’ Pye went on, ‘you’re each in league with one another.’ Now that he had forty-five under him, men and women, he meant to keep everything in control, in his hands. ‘There’s nothing that breathes to beat you things for standing together.’
‘Thanks for calling us things,’ Hilly said, and smiled.
‘You don’t get my point.’ She seemed to have education and this intimidated him, so that whenever he thought of it he said to himself ‘kid gloves.’ ‘No, when I ask a thing, I mean a question of that nature, what I’m getting at is, is there any way I, the individual responsible for the efficiency, and that means the happiness, of this station, is there any reasonable means by which I can alluviate the little things that count such a lot to everyone, not only men, at times such as the present.’ ‘Blast you, you lying blackguard,’ said Eileen under her breath. Hilly spoke out loud. ‘I don’t think I quite understand.’
‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘If you think she came away from that daughter of ’ers before she ought, then, if it would make it any easier, I could what we call cover ’er, that is I could let her go away for a week-end without them up at the Station knowing she was away. Of course, by doing that I’m liable to run my head into a noose.’ ‘I can’t stomach it, shut up, oh run off,’ Eileen cried out herself and he went on, ‘But I want you girls to know I’ll do anything in reason, anything I can, I will.’
‘Well, Mr Pye,’ said Hilly, ‘she hasn’t said anything to me. Perhaps she hasn’t seemed quite the thing just lately, but then she hasn’t been here more than three days, it’s strange to her.’
When at last he was gone, they burst into excited whispers.
‘What d’you make of ’im, I could scream sometimes, reelly I could, he’s the limit.’
‘I’ll tell you what I wondered, if he meant to trap one of us into telling.’
‘You mean – she’s a friend of ’is – of course he engaged ’er.’
‘No, not that, but to judge of us, to see what we’re like.’
‘Oh my God – if it’s like that – I’ll go back to private service or get into a canteen – ’e thinks we’re out to work against ’er – I see – and the first to say a word, reelly, is the one that man thinks ’e’ll get rid of.’
‘No, I don’t think so, at all.’
But Eileen was not to be diverted.
‘Oh, if it’s like that,’ she went on, ‘why, while she gives that old Piper extra already whenever my back is turned, if that’s how it is, then this is no place for yours truly. There’s only so much to go round, and if I’m to see my kitchen invaded by a madding crowd of men asking for more because one’s been favoured behind my back, then it’s more than the job’s worth, even if there is a war on.’
‘When she talked to you about her daughter did she seem upset?’
‘Oh yes, I wouldn’t like to say she was putting anything on, oh no, I mean, it did sound reel to me. It’s dreadful when you come to think.’ She gave Hilly some pitiable details. ‘But she is slow,’ she wound up, ‘as you can see, not that you’ve ’ad much to do with kitchens before,’ she put in, ‘but there, I can’t go tell that Mr Pye, it wouldn’t be right.’
‘And you’d rather have her here than not, lass,’ Hilly said. She was nettled.
‘I’d rather be without that officer, what do they call it, in charge,’ said Eileen, and her mood changed. ‘Oh dear, see what a pother he’s got us in and the dinner hardly started. Don’t notice what I said, I get like that.’ She began to hum, ‘She’s been and gone and lost it at the Astor. She wouldn’t take her mother’s good advice.’
Every nine days Richard’s turn to do orderly came round. He was aware of the kitchen undercurrents, but paid no attention, not at first. He also began by ignoring Hilly.
His wife, Dy, had gone to the country to be with Christopher. Unless he went sick there was no way he could manage to see her before he was given annual leave, or until they were allowed to work ninety-six hours to get forty-eight hours off, a practice that was not begun until well into November. He began to come awake, to get restless. She was nervous of raids on London. The few times she did come up they were awkward together.
These first weeks of war firemen were still heroes to the public, and to women especially.
There was, that autumn, a great promise of spring, the same unease as can be felt on a day, in March, that the morrow may bring summer weather, and that women’s breasts, it was a phrase of Richard’s, would again, as at each turn of the year, make themselves evident under light clothes.
In night clubs, it has been described, or wherever the young danced, couples passed the last goodbye hours abandoned to each other and, so Richard felt, when these girls were left behind alone as train after train went out loaded with men to fight, the pretty creatures must be hunting for more farewells. As they were driven to create memories to compare, and thus to compensate for the loss each had suffered, he saw them hungrily seeking another man, oh they were sorry for men and they pitied themselves, for yet another man with whom they could spend last hours, to whom they could murmur darling, darling, darling it will be you always; the phrase till death do us part being, for them, the short ride next morning to a railway station; the active death, for them, to be left alone on a platform; the I-have-given-all-before-we-die, their dying breath.
Pye we have seen preoccupied by his past, revitalised in a way that took him by surprise. Richard, after his fresh tide of longing for Dy had ebbed, found he was increasingly absorbed by what was left to him of the sights and sounds, and by the feeling, as he had it now, of that early summer they had first met, the year he got to know her.
Each spring seems new, the first. It seemed to him it had been in April, but the afternoon she asked to be shewn round his parents’ country place was in July. The roses, when they came to the rose garden, were full out, climbing along brick walls, some, overpowered by their heavy flowers, in obeisance before brick paths, petals loose here and there on the earth but, on each bush and tree of roses, rose after rose after rose of every shade stared like oxen, and came forward to meet them with a sweet, heavy, luxuriant breath.
Sitting as he was on the back step of a heavy unit pump, with a mangy kitten swiping at flies attracted by a cod’s head in the gutter at his feet, the nine years that had passed, the position he was now in, all this lifted him as though in a balloon made lighter than air by the scent of roses.
The afternoon, it had been before tea, was hot, swallows darted low at the level of her thighs, a blackbird, against three blooms bent to the height of its yellow beak, seemed enchanted by terror into immobility as the two of them halted, brought to a full stop at the corner round which this impermanence caught them fast. He turned to her and she seemed his in her white clothes, with a cry the blackbird had flown and in her eyes as, speechless, she turned, still a stranger, to look into him, he thought he saw the hot, lazy, luxuriance of a rose, the heavy, weightless, luxuriance of a rose, the curling disclosure of the heart of a rose that, as for a hornet, was his for its honey, for the asking, open for him to pierce inside, this heavy, creamy, girl turned woman.
He had been sticky, then, in flannels, but not so hot as he was now, dressed in thick labourer’s uniform, proofed against fire and water.
Roses had come above her bare knees under the fluted skirt she wore, and the swallows flying so low made her, in his recollection, much taller than she had ever been.
Back in his present, he heard a tap of high heels. Looking up, he saw Prudence, dressed in green as of dark olives like to the colour of that cod’s head. She smiled, but did not stop. Still under the influence of his memories, he thought how sharp she appeared against the black wall with AMBULANCE painted in grey letters three foot high, knife sharp compared to t
he opulence his darling had carried about in her skin, sheathed for display to his senses, in the exuberance of his mother’s garden.
Her bare legs had been the colour of the white roses about them, the red toenails, through her sandals, stood out against fallen rose leaves of a red that clashed with the enamel she used, the brick paths had been fresh, not stained, as the walls here, by soot-saturated rain.
Here, as Prudence drifted quickly off, so much younger now than Dy, so much the opposite of his heavy serge in the lightness of her dress that he broke violently out swearing, here, where he had seen Prudence lit up from under her frock by a blaze of the midday sun directed through her window, and he broke out sweating, he poured with sweat, here again he thought he broke the spell of what had been and, accepting his new life for the first time, he momentarily determined to join in the delights he imagined men and girls were sharing out to each other in the desperation of the times.
‘Conger eel chasing, cock?’ Looking up he saw Shiner laughing, nodding his head towards Prudence, who was almost out of sight. ‘Go on, say it, that’s right,’ Shiner encouraged, ‘get it out of the old system. And ain’t you perspirin’. Conga, eh?’
Richard laughed back. As loud as he dared he swore all he knew. Shiner went on:
‘It’s muckin’ awful, ain’t it, the first few days, the conga little place you’ve left, the little woman there, eh, it’s like the first days out at sea. Sitting on the old rail where they can’t see you, the old ship trembling under your arse, and that mucking awful sea for miles. Then you kind of fall in with it and everything’s conga. But stone me up a bloody gum tree, thank God I got a job on land.’
‘I know,’ Richard said, and then went too far, ‘and to think I put Pye on to that girl with the one she lives with.’
‘’Ow d’you mean, put ’im on to them?’ Shiner said. He had not heard.
Talking too fast, Richard explained. At the end he said, ‘and the frightful thing was, I meant Pye to get off with them so I could do myself a bit of good,’ borrowing Piper’s phrase, ‘with him,’ he wound up rather lamely.
It drifted into Shiner’s bullet head that this what’s his name, Roe, was pansy.
‘Naw,’ was his comment, ‘no skylark?’
At this Richard saw that he had made an impression it might take weeks to live down as, when an individual is observed drunk, as Roe was accustomed to say, from that moment, to those who witnessed it, that man is a habitual drunkard.
But Shiner was not worrying. He had once been out in a foreign port with two girls and a pansy, the pansy paying, and it ended in smashing stroke, he’d had both girls in the same bed. So, with a look of childish cunning, he asked if Richard would introduce him some time, ‘as between shipmates.’ Richard could not credit being addressed as shipmate. His confidence returning, and to put himself absolutely right, he told Shiner that he did not ponce for them.
‘Naw,’ said Shiner, equally at a loss in Richard’s company as Richard was in his, ‘straight up, is that what you do for a living?’ They had neither of them come across anyone in the least resembling the other.
‘What d’you think I am, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Naw, your getting me wrong, mate,’ Shiner said. ‘I only meant we’re all in the same ship an’ if you was goin’ up you might need a pal for the other one.’
Taking stock of Wright, Richard thought to himself that neither Shiner nor Pye would have much chance while he was in the room, even if those two girls were good for anything of the kind, which he doubted. But in this he was wrong twice, both times.
‘I could manage more than those two in the same bed,’ he replied.
The Regular Fireman, Wal, had notice he was to be transferred to another station. Pye decided that there must be a farewell do. He asked Richard to invite Ilse and Prudence. Richard telephoned. They accepted. At once Richard assumed that Pye could not have been up to their flat again or he would have asked them on his own.
Beer was laid in. Gin was bought for the ladies. Pye shewed ignorance when he supposed that one half bottle of this last would be enough. Richard pointed out there must be at least two halves, particularly if Hilly was to come. Pye could not hide what he felt about this expense. ‘If I’d thought that,’ he said, ‘I’d’ve got in the distillery, by Jimmy Jesus.’ Richard again considered the man had no chance with girls such as these, when he had no idea what they were like.
Then there was a question as to whether the watchroom women should be asked. If Hilly came, and they were not invited, it might lead to trouble. ‘Well, send them in a glass of beer,’ said Pye, ‘though, mind you, I’m running my head into a noose to hang myself with, the Chief Officer’s very hot on liquid refreshment, it’s not long since the wet canteen at Number Fifteen was closed, in fact no more than a matter of twelve months back, and as to gin, spirits is forbidden anywhere on the premises, let alone the ’oly of ’olies. But I’ll chance my arm on this occasion.’
Everyone subscribed what he could afford, and, on the night, as Richard stood lonely by the door to bring both girls in when they arrived, they were so very late, under the high brilliant stars, he wondered if they would ever come. When they did, and said something about hoping there would not be a fire to break the party up, it was symptomatic of this change which by then had come over people’s fears, that they did not think a raid was likely. He was surprised to find they knew the station rode to ordinary fires. He was too dense to recognise this as evidence of Pye.
‘Yes, we call those civilian jobs,’ he said.
Taking them through the appliance room, where the pumps were kept, and there they exclaimed at how dark it was, he wondered if they were nervous. But he saw, once they had come round a corner of sandbags into blinding light, that they were just amused and that it was Pye, Wal, and the other men at the station, on the silence their entrance made, who were confused.
‘So there you are then,’ Pye said, and got a laugh, for this was one of Piper’s expressions. As he introduced the two girls to Hilly, ‘My driver,’ he told them to take no notice, ‘the men’s amusement is on account of its being a manner of speech one of us uses, you’ll pardon me, ladies.’ He set Prudence down to the trestle table on one of the pews which had been lent from a neighbouring church. He took the seat by her. There was no room for Richard, who had to draw up a beer crate to get next Ilse. Hilly, rather coldly, said conventional things. They accepted stiff gins without comment. Piper unexpectedly called out, ‘All the best, ducks,’ as they were about to drink and suddenly they were in, conversation became general, only now and then each of the men looked at their sleekness and this, with the twenty or thirty present, meant that a dim glance, a dull enquiry, a muffled undressing look, shut on and off continuously at them from one after the other of these one hundred watt shadow-carved faces, as bulbs go on and off on an illuminated sign while it is still daylight.
The large room, part of a disused West-end motor saleroom, had plate-glass windows which, so polished once, had been coated with black paint. As with all showrooms, it was overheated, and because there were no civilian fires to fight the men were discouraged, in daytime, from opening what few doors had been left by the sandbagging for fear the public might be led to protest at their idleness. During black-out hours it was impossible to have any ventilation. They were not allowed to turn down the radiators because a General Order had been circulated which drew attention to the danger of burst pipes. All day long they spent under powerful electric lamps, however brilliantly the sun might shine on snow laid over gardens across the way.
The room was painted yellow orange. The floor was done out with flags of artificial stone which, whatever the scrubbing, gave off a thick grey dust. All, as they sat in this bare room, had purple shadows hacked out beneath their eyebrows, chins and noses by the naked, hot spotlights in the orange ceiling.
The library at Richard’s home was old, long and low. Its daylight came from beneath a vast cedar on the lawn. The walls were covered
by books as dark as their oak shelves. Where it could not be seen without getting up to look, a grandfather clock tick-tocked.
At night shutters, and in front of these, curtains covered by a Morris design, closed all sound of the cedar out as it groaned under the weight of snow or, in other weather, absolutely black in moonlight as the wind outside swept through and through.
He tried to explain to Ilse. He felt awkward. She was distant. He wished he had been next Prudence, who was deep in with Pye, laughing and sparkling. His old friends had left London. This meeting with a new girl made it necessary to share past experience, to exchange he did not know what. And with any female, it seemed, but this, whose cold country could have given her, so he thought, no such memories as his own.
In white paint over the black, life-sized skeletons had been drawn on the showroom windows.
‘Ach,’ she said, breaking into his laboured description of the library that she had not understood, ‘So you remember. You are like my country. Yes, with your skeletons that you have painted.’ She meant they did not mind remembering they were to die. He fell for this.
Before war broke out, with girls, in the first few minutes, Auxiliaries, unless drunk, had been too diffident to say they thought themselves a suicide squad. The women considered perhaps they might be, but, for the most part, were too interested in chances for new society that the various preparations for war, the regrouping of men, gave them, to bother to assess danger as between war-callings. Now the Fire Brigade had no drill halls, and had never, so far as Richard’s district was concerned, given a dance for the Auxiliaries. Accordingly, in those days, when he went out with a girl, a magnet, he relied on a lecture they were given at the time, or rather was driven to refer to it immediately so as to talk about himself at once. This lecture told how a gigantic death roll must follow the first raid, together with a great number of what were called conflagrations. This word meant the calling out of every available appliance within reach. So Richard was divided, when he talked, between a wish to quote from this official view of what was likely, which included the opinion that the AFS must suffer heavy losses, and a reluctance, falsely gallant, to alarm the sex. In the end he would give them this lecture in full always and at the earliest, as he proceeded to do on this occasion. He invariably found these girls had no fear but that the Auxiliaries would come out all right. At first he supposed they took this line to still his fears. But whenever he bothered to be honest he had to admit they were a long way from paying attention to what might be his final bit of trouble. As he told Ilse, while enjoying a return to this oft-told horror story, he was watchful, expecting the usual ‘Oh, you will be all right, we shall all be.’ So that he was daunted when she said, ‘Yes, and it is my thought that your people in this country have not done enough, not nearly, no, you are such a long way far to go even yet, you will not realise,’ she said. ‘I was so surprised,’ she said, ‘to see those death bodies, skeletons, up there, such a lot think bombs do not explode because they come from Czechoslovakia. I, I like you here, but oh how you are hated abroad, yes, even your own allies. I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but you have chosen, ach, so dangerous a thing, this fire, and I wished I could tell you. Because,’ and she turned on his her serious, ice-blue eyes, intensely, most boringly friendly, ‘Prudence, she is English like you, she does not agree with me, she thinks all this is good fun and I . . .’
