INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked, nervously irritable.

  He seemed not to know.

  ‘Do you want to go along there?’

  ‘But what about you?’

  She was very tired by now and dreaded the children waking and screaming for Louise. Angus, caught in a nightmare of demands, none of which he felt able to meet adequately, waited slackly for her decision.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘If you . . if you can manage to come back, I’d be glad. But you must see how things are.’

  After he had gone it seemed very quiet. She sat by the window looking out into the night. She felt low-spirited. She wished Alice was not so far away. Alice was the only person she could have talked to about this.

  Angus returned within a quarter of an hour, whiter than ever, to say that Louise and Daphne had been taken to hospital; from what the ARP men had said, it seemed that Daphne was suffering from concussion and Louise from shock.

  ‘What about the other people?’

  He shook his head, unable to reply. They looked at each other, deeply troubled. He said, ‘You look tired. Shall I make tea?’

  Later, while she dozed on the settee, he made a few notes. He judged that Police Sergeant Fletcher would report that Captain Drummond had received a visit from a suspicious character this evening. It was important that he should also report this. His superiors were aware that he was in touch with this group; but it was as well to record his own version of this incident.

  Chapter Eight

  September-November 1942

  The fortunes of the Allies seemed at their lowest ebb. Day by day, the Germans were moving towards Stalingrad. From the desert the news of fighting was conflicting, rumour abounded: at one time, it was said that Rommel had reached the outskirts of Alexandria. It actually passed through Alice’s mind that the Allies might be defeated, that the war could conceivably be lost. The weakness was only momentary – the testing of a nerve. But until now she had been unaware of the existence of this particular nerve. The doubt clouded a whole day.

  She was too happy, however, to be troubled for long. Love coloured everything in rose and gold, abetted by the Egyptian sun. Added to love was Adventure: now, evacuated from Alexandria, she was sleeping under canvas not far from Suez. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable and the desert wind which whips up in the autumn made matters worse. But Alice accepted these minor hardships readily. She was emerging as one of the tougher of her group, able to cope with discomforts which drove other people to

  distraction.

  ‘I believe you actually enjoy this!’ Madeleine accused her. ‘It must be that dreadful hair-shirt upbringing.’

  Alice laughed. ‘I don’t think my headmistress thought she was preparing me for this!’

  She was aware, even at her happiest, of her incapacity to come to terms with the reality of war, of the dubiousness of her determination to abstract from it personal satisfaction. But there was nothing she could do about it – plagued by flies, unable to sleep on the straw palliasse, enveloped in sand, she was persistently happy.

  Irene wrote that she had seen a film about the defence of Stalingrad. Alice, looking out of the window of the Nissen hut where she worked, eyes red-rimmed from the stinging sand, tried to imagine that grim, snowbound struggle. ‘Suppose it was Lewes, or Falmouth . . .’ Whenever she thought of the snow and cold and hardship, of the distant booming of guns, she remembered Gordon with his arm around her waist as they strolled along the Corniche. She could only hope that somewhere in Stalingrad there was, in spite of the desperate nature of the struggle, some dark-eyed Natasha as happy as herself.

  Irene’s letter, she noted, lacked the usual sparkle. The references to Angus were muted. Oh poor, poor Irene! Alice’s own experience of love was so great a contrast, all sunlight and warmth. Gordon’s letters were increasingly tender and full of concern for her welfare. He confessed to feelings he had never been able to reveal when they were together. She recalled their first encounter. She had been with Gwenda and two other very attractive girls; Gwenda already knew Gordon slightly and Alice had assumed he had come to take her out. But after chatting to them all for a few minutes, he had asked Alice . . . She could not now recall the pretext on which he had borne her away. The memorable – the unbelievable – thing was that he had singled her out. Afterwards, in spite of his reserve, there had been times when she had seen her own happiness reflected in his eyes. She had never imagined such power to be within her compass. He spoke in his letters of a time when they would always be together. ‘But you must be patient, my darling. I promise you that we shall be together; only we must not snatch at happiness. Promise me that you will be patient?’ She supposed he did not approve of hasty wartime marriages; and, warm in the glow of his love, she assured him that she was content to wait.

  She had reason to be grateful to him. He had eased her passage into the adult world; he had made the rough places smooth. She believed his love had transformed her, and so it had. She was very popular now.

  ‘All the men like you, Alice,’ Madeleine told her. ‘You are so jolly.’

  Alice was not best pleased by this. ‘Jolly’ in her understanding, related

  to people over forty, of proportions not less generous than those of Margaret Rutherford. In future, she must tone down her exuberance. She did not want Gordon to find her ‘jolly’ on her return to Alexandria.

  They were never short of male company and spent much of their off-duty time swimming at the French Club near Suez. Alice was a good swimmer. These hours of swimming, and lying on the sand, gave her a hedonistic pleasure she had seldom experienced – she, for whom pleasure had tended to be something which had to be inspected and accounted for.

  ‘You’re much nicer than I used to think,’ Gwenda said, wriggling her toes in the sand.

  ‘How did you used to think of me?’

  ‘Oh, a bit better than other people. Not that you seemed to be trying to impress – just that you actually were better.’

  Their male escorts were still thrashing about in the water, and the two girls lay quietly. Alice was pleased to know that she now met with Gwenda’s approval. The acceptance of one’s fellow Wrens was important. It seemed appropriate that it should be Gwenda, herself one of the most acceptable by virtue of her prowess with men and her conviviality with women, who should bestow honour on Alice.

  ‘However do you handle Arnold?’ Alice asked, feeling homage was due from her. ‘He is so sexy he always seems quite beside himself with it.’

  Gwenda looked towards the water, where Arnold was displaying his manliness for her benefit. ‘He is going tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll miss him.’

  ‘I rather think something might be starting with that curly-haired Frenchman – the very dark one. A touch of the tar-brush there, would you say?’

  Alice was surprised. Gwenda was noted for lack of selectivity in her relationships – Madeleine had once referred to her as ‘the last Wren in Alex to go out with a matelot’. But a touch of the tar brush?

  ‘You prefer Arnold?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘While he’s around. One at a time is my only principle. I have to be true to someone – even if only for a little while. And thanks to all this toing and froing in the desert, it is only a little while.’

  ‘Don’t you ever think you’ll fall?’

  ‘Now, Alice, don’t start being superior. I, too, have had my moments.’

  Alice watched the water lapping gently at her feet, wondering whether to go in again. ‘You wouldn’t marry a half-caste?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. What’s wrong with it, Alice? Your chap did.’

  ‘My chap?’

  ‘Gordon. Didn’t you know? I thought everyone knew.’

  Later, she said to Jeannie and Madeleine, ‘I don’t know what made me come out with it. Except that I had been quiet about it for so long. And when she sounded priggish, I suddenly felt it just wasn’t worth the effort of keeping it from her any longe
r.’

  When she saw how badly Alice was taking it, she said, ‘She shouldn’t have poached.’

  ‘Alice didn’t think she was poaching, Gwenda,’ Jeannie said. ‘She wasn’t out here when you had your thing with Gordon.’

  ‘Well, she knows about him now. She shouldn’t take up with a fellow if she can’t accept him the way he is. I wasn’t bothered about his marriage.’

  ‘That is the difference between you that made Gordon choose Alice,’ Madeleine said sweetly. ‘He is the kind of man who can only love a woman who doesn’t approve of the way he behaves. You ought to know that. It’s been going on for centuries.’

  ‘Fuck that kind of man!’

  ‘Oh, such language I never did expect to hear from the lips of a woman.’

  ‘You weren’t brought up in the Bristol docks.’

  ‘I offer up thanks for that every day.’

  Alice wrote to Gordon, ‘I have heard a rumour which has upset me, so you must forgive me, dearest, for being doubting. . . .’ She crossed the words out. There was too much of her hurt feelings there; she must seem to shrug it off. ‘It is scarcely worth repeating, but as it has been said. . . .’ She crossed these words out, too. It was totally insincere to say that it was ‘scarcely worth repeating’, when she was thinking of nothing else day and night.

  As she struggled over the letter, so she came to accept Gwenda’s story. It was not the way Gwenda had spoken, nor the manner in which some of the others had reacted, that convinced her: it was that the knowledge slid too easily into her own mind. The reasons for his reserve which she had recited to herself – that he did not wish theirs to seem like just another wartime romance, that something had hurt him badly in the past, making him unduly cautious – were spurious. She had always known that Gordon was not free.

  Love was pain as well as joy; how could she ever have imagined it possible to cross this threshold without pain? This, she told herself, was the reality of loving. She must be proud of the pain. For a few hours she felt quite exalted.

  It was particularly hurtful that Gordon should have discussed his affairs so freely with Gwenda. Could she be lying? When tackled, Gwenda readily admitted that she had found out about Gordon’s marriage from a fellow officer. He had told her that Gordon had got a girl in Mauritius into trouble; and, being Gordon, had married her when no one, least of all the girl or her family, expected it of him. Alice could believe this. It had probably done the girl no good, but Gordon would have been untrue to himself had he behaved dishonourably. She began to hope.

  Such an unsuitable attachment could not last, surely? He had felt that, in all honour, he could make promises for the future to Alice. So, if she was wise, they could still be happy together. Yet something had changed; and the change was not in Gordon, but in her. He had not been able to tell her. She would have liked to think that he was prevented from fear of losing her; or because he was concerned for her. He had wanted to sort out a few things before he felt free to commit himself entirely to her. But she could not acquit him of pride. That inner pride which had made him so complex, so worthwhile because it gave him added depth, was now the rock on which she stumbled. Was he more proud than loving?

  At last, she wrote briefly to him, ‘My dearest, I have been told about your marriage. It must have given you a lot of pain. I long for us to be together again so that we can talk about this. Your loving, Alice.’ It was in his hands now. She waited to hear from him. If he loved her, he would waste no time in replying. He would know how wounded she must be and he would not let a moment pass before he attempted to console her. She felt sorry for the agony she was causing him, but excited by the prospect that all the barriers between them would come down.

  Days passed and turned into weeks.

  ‘Alice, you must get out,’ Madeleine said. ‘You are quite gaunt. It does not become you. Neither does all this silent suffering.’

  ‘I shall hear from him soon.’

  ‘He’s a sod. Why not accept it?’

  Alice shook her head. The conditions in which she had grown up were for her the natural condition of life. Subsequently, she might learn that this was a fallacy and her intellect would accept it; but in her inner heart she would still regard it as the reality. Just as she regarded the one photograph which flattered her view of herself as being really ‘like’ and all others as yet another proof that she did not photograph well, so Alice persisted in thinking of life as a period of sunlit calm occasionally disturbed by freak storms. She was waiting for this storm to die down. Then she would hear from Gordon, who had in the meantime been making strenuous efforts to sort out his life (Mauritius being some distance away, notwithstanding).

  Finally, a package came from Alexandria. It was a large package and when she opened it, she saw that it contained her letters to Gordon, two of them unopened. She sat staring at them for a long time before she picked up the letter which accompanied them. It was from a fellow officer in the intelligence section. He wrote to tell her that Gordon had been killed several weeks ago. A shell had fallen on a restaurant where he was eating. Gordon had been badly wounded, but in spite of that he had insisted on helping to pull other people from the wreckage. On the way to hospital, he had had a haemorrhage and had died of loss of blood.

  It seemed to Alice that the door to life had been shut in her face. Overwhelmed by this great negative, she could not talk about her feelings. She would have liked to lie on her palliasse day in, day out; but the Royal Navy would have none of this. Activity was thrust upon her. It was now late autumn. Rommel had been held at El Alamein and it was considered safe for the Wrens to return to Alexandria. Within a week of learning of Gordon’s death, Alice was back at the convent.

  The fortunes of the Allies were on the mend. The good news had not travelled to Northern Siam. Matters of less moment were of consequence here.

  Ben said to Tandy, ‘You do that again and I’ll kill you.’

  They were standing in the cookhouse, watched by Tandy’s mates, who were unlikely to come to his rescue if violence was attempted, but who would make sure that their own interests were not put at stake.

  Ben had come back late from emergency duty to find that no food had been saved for him. He knew that there had been an egg allocation. Eggs provided the best nourishment and were seldom available. He felt that Tandy had eaten a day of his life.

  Tandy said, ‘Careful now. You’ll do yourself a mischief getting worked up over things can’t be undone. This place would be just the same when I was gone. All you’d have done was to give yourself a lot of nasty thoughts.’

  ‘I’ve plenty of nasty thoughts as it is, a few more wouldn’t worry me.’

  ‘Murder would worry you, boyo.’

  ‘No more than killing that snake we ate last night.’

  ‘Would you eat me, then? Now that is one thing I might not be able to bring myself to. I’ve thought of it, but I can’t be sure of myself. I don’t believe I’ve the taste for human flesh.’ He was disappointed in himself, and, from his point of view, with reason. Gomer Tandy was now a small, sharp, rat-faced man. He had grown in self-knowledge daily, sharpening his wits and putting them to use for his own salvation. The small rodent was what he had whittled himself down to; and in doing so he had revealed the born scavenger within.

  His wits having nothing else to occupy them now that night was coming on, he set about defending himself. ‘I have to give a lot of thought to what I do. You could say, I work very hard at it.’

  ‘Yes, you certainly could say that.’

  ‘What about our officers, then? All they have to do is hold their plate out! I tell you, boyo, you see life in the cookhouse. You make all that fuss about one egg – where do you think all the others go?’

  ‘And you just stand by and watch, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, I take my pickings. And why not?’

  ‘If I saw them having so much more than us, I’d take it up with the CO.’ Ben was only half-inclined to believe Tandy.

  ‘And mu
ch good that would do you! The MO carries on about it, and they don’t take any notice of him. Look at it from their point of view. They need more food than us. They’ve got all that brainwork to do, haven’t they? Organizing work parties, making sure the men fall in and get off pronto; it must be very exhausting. And then, while you’re all out hacking down the jungle, they’ve got their speeches to prepare – those rousing talks about keeping up morale and the importance of clean living to a healthy body. I tell you, boyo, all this brainwork taxes a man.’

  ‘They’re not all bastards. At the camp across the river, they say the officers go out on work parties with the men.’

  ‘You try selling that to our lot.’

  ‘How about my selling it to you?’

  Tandy made no reply to this. He was dedicated to survival. All his intelligence was bent to this one end, which he pursued with the single-mindedness of a man possessed by a great enterprise. Indeed, Tandy would have said that living was the great enterprise. He bartered, fawned when it suited his purpose, always got more than his share, feigned sickness, and stole. He was adept at avoiding emergency duties, such as clearing away a fallen tree or moving boulders. He had ingratiated himself with the men in the cookhouse and seldom went out on working parties; and had never been known to do a latrine duty. Most men accepted their work conditions as a matter of chance, of being in the wrong place at the right time. Not so Tandy.

  It was the stealing which gave Ben pause for thought. His mother had been ambitious for him; but she would never have stolen for him. Even the will to success must be subordinated to ‘Thou shalt not steal’. It was a matter not only of moral precept, but of self¬respect: whatever else might be said of one, it must be known that one paid one’s way. Ben was having to rethink some of his ideas about survival. ‘If I could only survive by stealing, which, in these circumstances, might well mean at the cost of another man’s life – what then?’ He had not come up with the answer to that yet.

  ‘I hope you rot in hell,’ he told Tandy. But there was little venom in the observation. Tandy’s resilience and energy were astonishing. It was not possible to dismiss him with contempt; his industry was too formidable.