INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  Alice sailed, and Judith and Louise settled down to life in Sussex at the Braddons’ farm.

  Meg Braddon had faded gold hair, parted in the centre and bundled loosely into a knot at the nape of her neck – a style suited to someone who ‘never has time to think of myself’ as she was constantly saying, thus giving her hearers the uncomfortable feeling of themselves being too self-concerned. Her face, however, was far from meek; if she had no time to think of herself, she had plenty to discover the shortcomings of others. She was a strong, energetic woman and needed to be, for life on the farm was hard. Most of the day she wore Wellington boots and an old coat which looked as though it belonged to someone else, and had been snatched up in headlong flight to some emergency in the yard. She had the manner of one always on her way to an emergency.

  Judith wondered whether the emergency might not be Harry Braddon. Harry was a man of implacable goodness and calm. He believed the best of his fellow men, and was an uncompromising pacifist who dismissed as propaganda stories of Nazi atrocities and persecution. If incontrovertible evidence, which conflicted with his views, was presented to him, he accepted the fact without exploring the consequences. ‘A terrible thing,’ he would say, whether of a brawl in a pub or an undisputed massacre. ‘But it is not for us to allocate blame.’ He was opposed to violence and bloodshed among his fellow men, but such sentiments played no part in the decisions which he made regarding livestock or vegetation. He was a ruthless, efficient farmer; and a friendly, courteous man, completely impervious to the opinions of others. Judith thought that Meg had probably solved the by no means easy matter of living with him by opting for constant activity. By late evening they were both too tired for speech, let alone an exchange of views, and went to bed where, it would seem, they enjoyed the untroubled sleep of the physically exhausted.

  They certainly did not wake to noises in the yard as Judith sometimes did; nor did they heed the barking of the dogs. If ever she referred to this, Harry said, ‘foxes’ and Meg said, ‘You are not used to country life, Judith.’ It would have been useless to tell Harry that she suspected the Italian prisoners sometimes escaped from their camp and returned to the farm after dark. Even if this had been the case, he would have seen no reason to interfere with their freedom of movement, provided they did not interfere with his livestock.

  Louise cherished her aunt and uncle because they did not try to justify themselves; they did not seek the sanction of society for their behaviour, or submit their ideas for the endorsement of scholastics. They were, she said, ‘originals’. She admired the way they worked, expending themselves from dawn to dusk, asking nothing in return but sufficient energy to face the next day. When she began to teach Lucio English, she saw no need to mention the fact. She, too, was an original.

  During the day, Louise helped with the housework, while her mother worked in the kitchen. Her mother was a better cook than Aunt Meg, who was glad to be relieved of indoor work. Louise saw Lucio when she gave the men their meals, or went to call the children in from the fields. This did not allow much time for English learning. One evening, he came to the kitchen door when Louise was doing the ironing. ‘Are you playing hookey?’ she asked him.

  He was flirtatious, but not difficult to restrain. She enjoyed the practice of what once had been so familiar a game.

  The farm had seemed a place of endless possibilities when she had come to it on holiday during her childhood. Then she had counted the precious days, dismayed at how they rushed by. Now, the farm had become a prison and the days passed relentlessly the same, offering no escape from tedium. The fields, where she had once felt so free, were green walls sealed by a grey November sky. The long line of the Downs, which had made her spirits soar as she gazed from her bedroom window in the first light of the morning, now grimly marked the limits of her horizon. Her uncle had a ramshackle car, but this was only used in dire emergencies; even had there been no petrol rationing. Aunt Meg would never have let it be used for pleasure because of the sailors dying in tankers. There was a long walk to catch the one bus a day into Lewes, and little to occupy her there until the bus returned late in the afternoon.

  The children, playing in the yard and ‘helping’ with the animals, experienced the ecstasies she had known as a child; they needed her less than ever before. Her main occupation was keeping them dry and clean, which was not easy with so much mud. There was a mysterious mechanism in an outhouse which produced hot water on the rare occasions when her uncle had a mind to operate it. Most of the time water had to be boiled on the kitchen stove. Aunt Meg assured her that it was all a great improvement on conditions in her young days. She sounded as if she was looking back to a more splendid past. An inappropriate attitude, Louise thought, for a woman of progressive ideas; but then, as far as Aunt Meg was concerned, things material must be extracted from progress as chaff from the wheat.

  Judith cooked with grim determination, seeming to welcome the challenge represented by the recalcitrant stove and the shortcomings of the store cupboard. She was in no need of assistance, having been mistress of her own kitchen all her married life. Louise was cold, often wet, always lonely and bored.

  She went for a walk every day, not so much for the bodily exercise as to exhaust the anger building up within her. Whatever happens, she vowed, I will not become one of those sullen, frustrated females. The spectre of such a woman was her enemy against whom she must fight resolutely. When she returned as the light faded, she played hide-and-seek around the house with the children. They became hysterical with excitement. Normally, she would not have encouraged this.

  ‘It’s not good for them,’ Judith said, looking at her daughter’s flushed face, aware of an excitement of a different order from the children’s.

  ‘They go to sleep more quickly afterwards.’

  ‘And have nightmares!’

  The beginning of December was wet, too. Rain fell on yeasty mud; there was a smell of wet straw and dung. Louise walked down the sodden lanes; at each step she felt the pull of the earth as she released first one foot, then the other. The rain was soft on her cheeks. One afternoon, Lucio walked with her on some errand he had fabricated. The hedges were webbed with misty rain; overhead, the dun sky was porous as a soggy sponge. When it came on to rain more heavily, they stood in the shelter of a stone wall. A cottage had been here once; people had lived, bred and died in it, their world bounded by the hedgerows and woods which defined the limits of the farm. Now there was only the chimney wall left standing as their memorial. Lucio put an arm round Louise and drew her close; his other hand fumbled with the buttons of her raincoat. The rain was drumming down, turning the drenched path into a muddy river. While Lucio kissed her his wet fingers were exploring beneath her jumper. She gasped at their cold touch and he laughed delightedly. She strained away from him. The rain cascaded on to her upturned face, taking her breath away. His fingers circled her stomach and the treacherous muscles twitched and jerked as the tight knot in her stomach began to ease; spasms shook her

  body. At the same time, she experienced a sense of fluidity and a rising wave of colour. She cried out ‘No!’ and, surprising herself as much as him, wrenched away. He was angry.They heaved and struggled, cursing, laughing and slipping in the mud until they had exhausted themselves.

  When he saw that she would continue to resist, he released her. They leant against the wall while the rain stung their faces, and trickled icily between the seams of their garments. She let him lick the water from her face, like a thirsty mariner.

  It was after this that she began to go out at night to give him English lessons. He felt the need building up in her, and he was patient – she was his only hope and he could not afford to risk losing her.

  But what was he to her? The weather had changed. On clear nights when he bent over her, the stars in his hair, the moon on his shoulder, he was some mythical creature conjured up by a maiden’s secret dreams. What was she doing with this madness, she who lived for the day and had so little time for the
fantastical? In the daytime, she would barely have recognized him. He had no identity; and when she was with him, she herself seemed to lose identity. It was a part of the compact between them.

  She was not a person who could live in two worlds. His darkness, his foreignness, began to invade the day. The house took on a new aspect. It no longer bore the imprint of her uncle and aunt – a place stripped of pretension, bare, clean, smelling of beeswax and carbolic. She could remember a time when, during the day, light seemed to reach into every nook and cranny of the house; it was full of the sunlight which had been a constant factor of her childhood. Now, it belonged to the night and the owls. The candles and occasional oil lamp lit only a small area, and beyond was shadow and darkness. People bent forward into the circle of light and then receded; she saw the busy fingers moving, but there was no face, no body.

  How different this was from the feeling Guy had aroused in her! When they first met, and in the early days of their loving, the world had seemed so bright and jewelled, so sparkling. She remembered how he had looked at her, with such wonder and delight, with such tenderness. Where was tenderness now? Yet, although she had no interest in him as a person, nor he in her, she began to realize that Lucio had more power over her than Guy had ever had. If she could tease and torment, arouse and disappoint, so could he. All day, she thought of nothing but his hands on her body. She could have shrieked at the children when they demanded attention. She avoided her mother. Her mother knew.

  One morning when she looked in the mirror, she saw a face that was heavy and sullen: the face of the enemy. She needed help. Always before there had been someone she could talk to – usually Alice, who was a good listener and tended to confirm her attitudes. She decided to talk to her uncle.

  She knew that her uncle had advanced ideas. When she had conceived out of wedlock, her parents had had to make a reappraisal of their whole view of life. Harry, who believed that sexual experience should come before marriage, had been unconcerned. Judith had said tartly, ‘He didn’t have sexual intercourse with Meg before he married her, and I sometimes doubt if he has had it since! Anyone can have ideas; it’s the putting into practice that gives rise to problems.’ In this, she was unjust to Harry. The responsibilities of advanced ideas weighed heavily upon him. Had they gone hand in hand with enjoyment, he would have been nothing but a Bohemian. So, having eschewed ‘thou shalt not’, he must measure up to the puritan in self-denial. The life which he and Meg led was harder than it need have been; not only was pleasure more unfavourably regarded than in the Fairley household, but an austere regime of clothing, eating and drinking was enforced. More than that, thought itself must be examined with increasing rigour as the years wore on, and there was less and less occasion for amusement and light-heartedness. To be trivial was worse than to be Bohemian. Meg and Harry carried a heavy burden. It would have been asking too much of them to see that, while refusing to make moral judgements, their whole attitude to life implied a considerable judgement on the way that most people ate, played, housed themselves and passed their time.

  Louise had little idea what she was inflicting on her uncle when, as she washed her Wellingtons under the tap in the yard, she said, ‘I’m finding it difficult without Guy.’

  He paused, watching the water easing the mud off the sole of her boot. She waited, imagining that he was summoning all the considerable forces within him to her aid; whereas, in fact, he was searching for a form of words which would not put anything in to her mind. Eventually, having decided that this could not possibly influence her, he said, ‘Yes, I am sure this must be so.’

  ‘I miss him physically,’ she went on, supposing that he was trying to draw her out. ‘Other women go to dances and meet people. I can’t see that that is harmful. I expect Guy goes to dances when he gets the chance. We can’t live like monks and nuns until the war is over, can we?’

  The introduction of the cloister deflected him from the uncongenial subject of dances, and he said, ‘No, I should hope not!’

  s‘I still have feelings. All that doesn’t just stop because Guy isn’t here.’ She wondered how much her uncle guessed. He was gazing into the far corner of the yard, a brooding agony in his face. It was the expression she once remembered seeing on the face of the contralto singing in the St Matthew Passion – she had not been able to decide whether the singer was grieved by the crucifixion or dissatisfied with the lower register of her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘War does present young women like you with great problems.’ He was more at ease now that he had found a theme. ‘This is forgotten all too easily amid the talk of heroes in uniform. And the children – to all intents and purposes they are fatherless; but who thinks of them?’

  It was a rhetorical question, but she took it personally. ‘They’re happy enough,’ she snapped. ‘But what am I to do?’

  He winced. ‘My dear!’ He really was fond of her – or had been when he last saw her with any clarity, as a lively girl. Rather a lot of water was being wasted; he bent down to turn off the tap. ‘Are there any dances held near here?’ He screwed up his eyes as if to winkle out some elusive fact from the depths of memory.

  ‘I’ll soon find a dance! But ought I to go?’

  ‘Ought?’ He was on firm ground here. ‘Oh, Louise, ought is a word we should never use where others are concerned.’

  ‘I’m not others. I’m your niece.’

  ‘My beloved niece.’ He put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Look into your heart, my dear. You have always had your own kind of wisdom.’

  ‘It’s not my heart that is troubling me.’ Her heart knew the answer. Guy could not be harmed if she had an affair, provided she did not cease to love him. Love has no need of sexual fidelity. It would have helped her, however, if she could have talked this over with someone who was capable of understanding this great truth. There are times when even the most strong-minded person can be in need of support. Surely her uncle must appreciate this.

  Her uncle looked at his boots, gloomily contemplating desire. Had she already committed adultery, he would have been the first to denounce the first person to throw a stone. But as he gathered that adultery was in prospect, rather than retrospect, he was at a loss. In fact, he was in the same position as any other loving uncle, of being reluctant to say anything for fear of making matters worse. ‘You must be Louise,’ he said. Inspiration came at last. ‘ “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” ’

  Louise, not herself short of this kind of inspiration, responded:

  ‘Come to the stolen waters

  And leap the guarded pale

  And pluck the flower in season

  Before desire shall fail.’

  ‘Ummh . . .’ Harry said.

  There, Louise saw, they must leave it. His mind lay hidden, limpid and clear and – she was sure – pure as a mountain stream. She would not forgive him for refusing to allow her to drink of it.

  Yet perhaps something had been said, either by her uncle or by William Shakespeare, which was of value, because she did make a decision shortly after this conversation.

  Judith precipitated matters when she asked one morning at breakfast, ‘And how is Lucio’s English getting on?’

  She looked, not at her daughter, but at Meg and Harry, challenging them to acknowledge what was happening.

  Louise looked at her mother and did not answer. She admired her mother at this moment.

  Harry said, ‘Is Louise teaching Lucio English? That is very kind of her. These men must be so isolated, cut off from their own homes.’

  ‘And the comforts of home,’ Judith said.

  Meg, who had begun to clear the table, said, ‘Louise, I hadn’t realized! My dear, we must make things easier for you. Why don’t you use the little sitting room? You could take several of them in there, couldn’t you? Lucio and the others.’

  Harry said, ‘Yes, I don’t think we should distinguish between them
.’ He went into the scullery, and soon they saw him striding across the yard.

  The children scampered after him, and Judith followed, shouting to them to put their Wellingtons on.

  Meg collected crockery and walked towards the door. ‘I think I could provide paper and pencils – or crayons. We have a stock of things I used to keep for all of you when you were children. Those were good times, weren’t they, my dear?’

  Louise remained sitting at the table. When her aunt came back to see what was keeping her, she said, ‘I can’t stay here any longer. Aunt Meg. Mother and I aren’t compatible at close quarters. I’ll go back to London with the children. The bombing doesn’t seem so bad now.’

  Meg said, ‘You know best, my dear.’

  The decision had not ultimately been difficult. Lucio represented something too dark, too much a betrayal of herself. But the need was still there, and the resentment.

  Chapter Six

  February-June 1942

  ‘He makes you feel so at home in his company,’ Alice wrote to Irene from Alexandria. ‘I have never enjoyed being with anyone so much. Just having his arm around me is bliss; nothing more than that, as yet – he isn’t the sort to rush things. I think we shall probably see quite a bit of each other. He never pays any attention to anyone else when he is with me. Jeannie says he looks at me as if he could eat me, but she always exaggerates. You can talk to him about all sorts of things that really matter – slum clearance, birth control, books (I’m afraid he doesn’t like Charles Morgan). He tells me I’m a bit too serious and he is gently teasing me out of it.