INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  Judith said, ‘They have school lunches. Jacov sees to that. And when they leave school, they’ll be in the Army – being fed like fighting cocks, if Guy is anything to judge by. He’s put on half a stone since he’s been lolling about at that camp.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ Stanley warned.

  ‘Why not? We’ve called Hitler’s bluff and he’s got no cards to play.’ Ben wanted to believe this. He was thinking of his future as a great defence counsel. It was a role which appealed to him, not primarily because of his sympathy for the underdog, but because it seemed to offer more in the way of attacking expert witnesses – policemen, doctors – all of whom he saw quailing as he rose to cross-examine. The war was a diversion, unnecessary and irrelevant.

  At the beginning of the new year, Guy was still ‘lolling about’ in camp. It was only at sea that Great Britain was already demonstrably engaged in a war. ‘We should attack!’ Mr Fairley fumed. ‘What are we about, sitting here waiting for Hitler to come to us!’ He himself was not sitting about. The elementary school of which he had been headmaster had been evacuated to the West Country. Arrangements had, however, to be made for the education of the not inconsiderable number of children who remained behind – their parents convinced that Hitler posed a less potent threat to their children’s well-being than the unspeakable deprivations of rural life. Nowhere was this view held with greater tenacity than in the slum dwellings. Mr Fairley, not by birth a Londoner, had a great respect for such staunch unreason. He proceeded to create a post for himself as the Borough’s teacher in over-all charge of the education of non-evacuated children.

  Ben Sherman was by this time engaged in a diversion which had put the war and his career in the background. He was in love.

  Several years ago he had had a brief argument with Daphne Drummond about Mosley, whom she much admired. At the time of this encounter, it had crossed his mind that he would like to teach this young woman a thing or two. No opportunity presenting itself, nothing had happened to damp down the spark of interest which she had aroused on that occasion. Then he met her unexpectedly in London, early one January evening in 1940. She was walking down Piccadilly, and paused in the shadow of the Ritz before stepping into the last of the daylight. Perhaps he had worked too hard, become a stranger to delight. At the moment when she walked from shadow into late sunlight, he felt a yearning so intense it jerked him out of his stride.

  His first love had been Louise, who had attracted all eyes. As he recognized Daphne Drummond, he had the feeling that she was his discovery, rare, exciting, but with a certain detachment which he imagined would not make her immediately attractive to other men. When he stepped to her side, she said, ‘Hullo, Ben.’ They had had distant glimpses of each other over the years, and she found nothing surprising about their meeting on this occasion. It did not surprise her that he should ask her to have tea with him. She was not much given to surprise.

  ‘What price Mosley now?’ he asked, when they were seated in a tea shop.

  This did earn him a raised eyebrow. It had been four years since that conversation, but he spoke as though they were still confronting each other in the Uxbridge Road. She paused before answering, unhurriedly reassessing him. Then she said, ‘That’s taken you a long time.’ The reply dispensed with those preliminary stages of a relationship which Ben had hitherto found so wearisome that his interest seldom survived them. The war was undoubtedly responsible for cutting out much of the tedium, but he had an idea she would always be quick and positive – or decisively negative.

  Later, as they walked towards Green Park, he said, ‘When can I see you?’

  ‘You’re seeing me now.’

  ‘Next time.’

  ‘Are we through with now, then?’

  In the park he investigated how far he might go. She seemed to enjoy the ensuing tussle more than his embraces. He could tell that these were games she had played before. He might consider Daphne Drummond to be unique, but for her Ben Sherman was a male who conformed to a familiar pattern. We’ll see about that! he thought grimly.

  He did not, however, make much progress. Their play, increasingly rough though it became on subsequent occasions, was part of an exercise which she seemed to find invigorating as a brisk country walk, bringing colour to her cheeks, brightness to her eyes, but giving her heart little trouble.

  He planned ways of seducing her. The time of year was not propitious. It was well-nigh impossible to seduce an active, warmly- dressed young woman in a park, if she hadn’t a mind to it.

  Then, one evening she assumed herself too much in command. They were saying goodnight at the front door of her home in Shepherd’s Bush. Ben noticed that only the windows at the top of the large, double-fronted house were blacked out. The servants were in bed. The rest of the house appeared to be empty.

  ‘Are your folk away?’

  ‘Yes.’ Provocatively, she enumerated, ‘Mother and Cecily are staying in Bucks because Mother is terrified of the guns on the Scrubs, which she seems to think are trained on our house. My father is in the Navy now, and Angus seldom honours us with his presence.’ She turned to insert her key in the lock. He moved close. ‘Oh no you don’t, Ben!’ She wriggled free of his grasp and snaked through the doorway. She would have slammed the door on his wrist, uncaring whether she did him injury or not, but he was the stronger.

  As she faced him in the hall, something he had not seen before darkened her eyes. The realization that she was afraid excited him. He picked her up. In spite of her compact strength, she was a light burden. ‘You can call for the servants, if you like.’

  He knew which must be her bedroom – he had stood in the road often enough, staring up at the dim outline of her figure before she drew the dark curtains.

  In the bedroom, she said quietly, ‘Put me down, please, Ben. I have to take my time.’ He put her down but held her close, pressing his body against hers. Her limbs were trembling. She said, ‘Let me go. I don’t intend to cheat.’ In spite of her undoubted agitation, the tone of voice fell something short of entreaty. He unbuttoned her coat, and eased it from her shoulders to the ground. The curtains were not drawn across the window, but it was a dark night, lit only by occasional flashes from the trolley-bus wires. She put a hand against his cheek. ‘You must be patient with me. It won’t work otherwise.’ He was touched by this first show of weakness. He had wondered if she was a virgin; now that there seemed no doubt of it impulses which were chivalrous stirred in him. But when he tried to reassure her, she pushed him away. He banged his shin on the bed post. Pain concentrated desire. The moment of tenderness was short-lived.

  ‘There must be a candle, or a nightlight . . .’

  ‘By the head of the bed.’

  While he pawed his way along the bed, she undressed. The nightlight was shaded and gave only limited illumination. He lifted it, and looked round. She was standing by the bed, naked. He felt his throat constrict. In hollows beneath shoulders and ribs, and under the curve of the belly, the flesh glowed with the dusky lustre of a grape; while breasts and hips, swelling in the soft light, seemed themselves to be luminous, and the nightlight only a pale reflection of the body’s radiance. The air was charged with energy. He was still as if his heart had ceased to beat. Could he have moved, he would have fallen on his knees before her.

  She said sharply, ‘Be quick, damn you!’

  He put the nightlight down with shaking hands; the softened wax glistened in its cupped holder. He began to undress. In the road a bus lumbered by. A woman shouted, ‘There’s a pillar box here, Fred. Mind the pillar box, I say!’

  Daphne laughed unsteadily. ‘Do you think Fred’s hit the pillar box?’

  He came to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. She caught her breath.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It will be all right!’ he repeated less gently.

  ‘I can’t, I tell you! I thought I could, but I can’t . . .’

  He was not accept
ing denial now that he was so fervent for her. When he pushed her down on the bed, she fought with a ferocity for which he was unprepared – no prudishness this, it might have been her life that was at stake. In the street, the woman was wailing, ‘My glasses, Fred! I say, I’ve lost my glasses!’ Daphne thrashed and moaned; she muttered words under her breath, her head strained away from Ben, as though there was someone in the darkness whom she was entreating. He was shaken by the violence of her resistance. But when he released her, she put her arms round his neck and whispered, ‘Yes, yes!’ He was clumsy; her fingers clawed his shoulders and drew blood. Altogether, there was more blood than pleasure. While he dressed, she cried.

  ‘You can cry for both of us,’ he said, savage with disappointment. But her crying was quiet and very private. He might have played no part in what had happened.

  His previous encounters had shed only a dim light on the psychology of sex, and such understanding as he had came from reading the exploits of others – from which he had gained the impression that it was more usual for the man to regard the woman as object than the reverse.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, determined to salvage something. ‘What is this all about?’

  She hunched over, away from him. ‘The maids will hear.’

  ‘I can’t leave you like this.’

  ‘Can’t leave me! Whoever do you think you are? Get out of here.’

  He went. ‘You’re best rid of that!’ he told himself as he stumbled down the short drive.

  Something crunched beneath his feet on the pavement. He bent and picked up the frame of Fred’s glasses. A warden who was passing told him that the last bus had gone.

  The long walk to his lodgings seemed the loneliest in his lonely life. Moments of panic seized him as he groped his way down dark, unrecognizable streets. ‘I can’t go on like this!’ he kept repeating, as though things had been going wrong for some time before he became involved with Daphne. But they hadn’t, had they? He had been doing fine – he had got a good degree, they thought well of him in his chambers, he was twenty-five and at the start of a brilliant career. Why should he feel the weariness of a man who has taken a wrong turning, and has been urging himself on, while all around him the townscape becomes more and more unfamiliar? In the course of his journey, he asked the way of a lamp-post, fell over a dustbin, and collided with a policeman. The policeman, who had come off duty, was pleased to accompany him.

  ‘You must get very lonely,’ Ben said.

  The policeman said he was a Baptist and the Lord Jesus walked with him. Ben, brought up among people who talked like this, felt homesick for a way of life long since rejected. When they reached his lodgings, the policeman put a hand on his arm and said, ‘You are not happy, brother. I can tell that.’ His earnestness was all the more impressive for his not being visible. ‘And you never will be happy until you take your trouble to the Lord.’

  ‘It’s not the kind of trouble I can “take to the Lord”,’ Ben said uppishly.

  The policeman was not impressed by claims to sin of a superior order. ‘You read your Bible! There’s all the sin you could wish for -murder, rape, incest, and none of it meriting more than a few words. When I hear people boasting about their sins, I long to sit them down to read the story of David. Now there was a splendid sinner!’

  In his room, Ben opened the Bible at random. The first words that met his eyes were: ‘He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord.’ He threw the Bible on to the floor.

  He was fiercely angry that he had been given a moment in which he had glimpsed something beyond expectation or understanding, only to have been betrayed by this wilful girl. For several weeks he avoided Daphne. Then, remembering Louise’s pregnancy, he became anxious. Eventually, he telephoned her, and asked her to meet him for a drink.

  She came, a spring in her step, from the direction of Green Park. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, and she greeted him with such spontaneous good humour she might have been his sister.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked when they sat down with their drinks.

  She accepted his meaning without self-consciousness. ‘I had a scare. But I drank half a bottle of gin and had a hot bath.’ She might have been relating how she had shaken off a cold. ‘We’d better take precautions next time.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was going to be a next time.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ She looked at him, neither bold nor defiant, but direct. ‘You want to, don’t you?’

  ‘But you?’

  ‘I’ve just said, haven’t I?’ At such moments she seemed the least equivocal person he had ever met.

  It was little better next time. She fought with the same searing desperation. Whatever it was that gripped her, there was no doubting the genuineness of her emotions – her anger, fear, disgust, pain, her hideous grief, were not feigned.

  ‘You don’t want this, do you?’ he said angrily afterwards.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ She beat at him with her fists. ‘I do! I do!’

  He put his arms around her, holding her close against whatever it was that threatened her. ‘What is this?’ he whispered, at a loss.

  ‘I’m going to be a whole person.’ The words came through clenched teeth. ‘And this is the way it’s done, isn’t it?’

  He knew then that he was being used in some way he could not begin to understand. It was a good enough reason for having nothing more to do with her; but it became his reason for seeing her. He would not part with her until he had made her need him. He pictured her clutching at him, begging, beseeching, pouring out secrets he no longer had any wish to hear in a vain endeavour to hold him. She quivered to please him, the sweat larded her body. When he was confronted with the reality, it was bracing as winter frost.

  The family was still away. He saw her every night that week. Although she was a mischievous, high-spirited companion, there was none of this blitheness in her love-making – only a grim struggle against what seemed, at the very least, a natural disinclination.

  He could not get her out of his mind. Hitherto, he had placed the women who interested him in two categories – those whom he might marry, and those whom he could treat lightly. Daphne was not a person to be treated lightly – as had been the French waitress, Marie, and the cinema usherette, Cherry, both of whom gave their favours indiscriminately. On the other hand, she was not the kind of woman he intended to marry.

  Although he was ambitious, Ben did not think in terms of marrying well. His American father had gone down on the Lusitania when his son was a year old. Lizzie Sherman had worked hard, taking in lodgers, doing dressmaking, to give her son a home and a future. She had loved him dearly; but there had not been time or energy for demonstrations of affection after she had fed and clothed him, and kept house for the lodgers. He, inheriting her stoicism, had accepted this. Occasionally, he would speak of the things they would do together when he was a man and able to support her. She had listened wryly, already feeling her mortality in her leaden stomach; but she had never laughed at his dreams. Grieving, he still saw her as she had been in her last years, worn and ill. Time had not yet restored to him the happier, more resilient young woman who for a few brave years had succeeded in making an adventure of misfortune.

  Ben respected women, particularly those who had to work hard. From such, he was resolved to find a wife. Unfortunately, a capacity for hard work was not in itself stimulating. In the days when he had been attracted to Louise, love had been a matter of shining eyes and floating hair, of inconsequential laughter and a certain proud carriage of the head. Daphne was not beautiful in that spell¬binding way; loving Daphne seemed a matter of perversity more than anything else.

  When she asked him to a party at her home, his first inclination was to refuse. ‘My father is on leave,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come? You used to be friendly with my brother Angus, and he’ll be there. And Irene Kimberley – you have met her at the Fairleys.’
r />   Ben, with Mr Fairley in mind, thought he would find it awkward to meet Lieutenant Commander Drummond. But he went because he was curious. His scruples soon disappeared. It was difficult to imagine this handsome, urbane man being discomposed by a little matter of his daughter’s seduction. Ben listened with impatience to Drummond telling a story about a pilot who had landed on the wrong aircraft carrier. ‘. . . until he was in the mess, when someone said “There’s only one thing wrong with that, old chap – this happens to be the Victorious . . .” ’ Although Drummond had not been to sea, he nevertheless contrived by his dry, laconic manner to give the impression of one who, had he chosen, could have recounted more costly misadventures. He himself might be casual, but he left his audience to assume gallantry and quiet courage. Now, in his forties, he was good-looking still, but his face had the high colour and broken veins of the drinker. He had affected the style of the Fleet Air Arm pilot, wearing his hair longer than regulations permitted. In civilian life, he had thought it imperative to be well-groomed, but the gold braid on his sleeve had a worn look – Ben thought he probably rubbed it with emery paper. He moved from one group to another, off-hand, disparaging, carelessly amusing. He was the sort who would speak lightly of the deaths of other men.

  Ben sipped his drink, contemplating something offensive to say. A few minutes later, as the Commander proffered cigarettes, he asked, ‘Weren’t you a supporter of Mosley at one time?’

  Drummond saw no need to parry this thrust. ‘Still am, old man, still am! No apologies for that! He would have done a lot for this country, if only he’d been given his head. Got rid of the trash – know what I mean? He made a few miscalculations about Hitler, of course. Not that I’m one of those who think that Hitler is a monster.’ He looked to where his son, Angus, was talking to Irene Kimberley, and raised his voice. ‘We’d be wise not to smash the Germans. If we do, we let the Russkies in.’