by Francis King
‘No, no! I don’t want to dirty your sofa.’
‘But I can put a newspaper there.’
‘Not necessary.’
She gave up. She flung a cushion down by his feet and lowered herself, cross-legged, on to it. ‘Tell me your news. What’s been happening to you?’
‘You must never ask a prisoner for his news. He has no news. Everything is always the same. No change. Tea still without milk and sugar. Still bugs in the hut. Still snow and cold. All, all the same!
Disturbed, she gazed up at him. ‘Poor Thomas! Is it beginning to get you down?’
‘Beginning! A long beginning.’ Tilting his head on to the back of the sofa, he closed his eyes for four or five seconds.
‘The only consolation is that life might be even more horrible in Germany.’
‘That’s no consolation.’ Silence. Then: ‘And you? What have you been doing?’
‘Oh, nothing special.’ She did not have the heart to go through her week. Uneventful and unexciting as most of it had been, it must certainly have been better than his.
‘Tell me, please. Tell me.’
‘Well, if you’d really like to hear …’
‘Yes, I wish to hear. Tell me.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
On one afternoon, she began, Bill had come to see her but she had been out; he had left a bunch of flowers wrapped in cellophane, which for some unaccountable reason she did not pick up from the table where he had left them, until Margaret came in, exclaimed, ‘What a huge bunch! They must have cost a fortune’, and offered to arrange them.
On another afternoon, alone at a Playhouse matinee, she had seen Michael, forlornly slumped ahead of her in the half-empty stalls. Having overcome a reluctance to seek him out in the interval, she had found him surprisingly sympathetic and friendly. As they sipped cups of lukewarm, bitter tea and crunched Marie biscuits, it seemed absurd that they should so recently have been so disagreeable with each other.
On Thursday she had heard from her widower father. He wrote incoherently, referring to information that he had forgotten ever to give her, and scratching out whole paragraphs so cursorily that she was still able to read them. He was worried about money (was he ever not worried about money, despite his pension and investments?); the doctor had started to give him some different injections for blood pressure; and he was once more considering whether to resign from the presidency of the local branch of the British Legion. This letter Christine had still not answered, although she knew that the delay would upset him.
On Friday there had been a tutorial, with Mrs Dunne yet again showing displeasure, this time over an inadequate Latin prose. ‘Are you really quite well?’ she had once again asked. Christine had wanted to reply: ‘ No. I’m lovesick.’
Through all this Thomas listened with what she was sure was a genuine, if surprising, interest. From time to time he asked a question – how old was Bill, what was the play to which she had gone, had her father been an army officer, did Mrs Dunne have children? – as though any information about her life would more closely knit together a relationship that was in danger of unravelling. Sometimes, if he did not understand some word or phrase, he would interrupt her to ask its meaning.
Having finished her account, she realised, with sudden dismay, that in fact she had revealed to him nothing of what had been happening to her at a far more profound level than that of these trivial, tedious incidents: nothing of the alternating excitement and boredom, joy and despair, in which she had passed the interminable days that had separated her from him. There were periods when she had been totally indifferent to the world around her, moving in a meandering, intoxicating dream, and others when she had lain on the sofa brooding about the future, their future, in a darkness from which there seemed to be no possibility of ever emerging. Last night she had fallen asleep thinking joyously ‘ He loves me, I love him’; but the night before, restlessly awake through the desolate early hours, she had asked herself all those questions – how, when, where? – with which, she had persuaded herself, their lives would be increasingly tormented.
But of all this she made no mention. At any other time she might have done so, but today she felt afraid of revealing to him the obsessive, unwearying impetus of her love, guessing, she could not have said why, that by doing so she would further darken the gloom in which she had found him.
Thomas had begun to caress her. But as his hands moved over her body, she became despairingly convinced that all this tenderness was no more than his way of putting out of his mind, in a transient stimulation of the senses, all the difficulties and decisions that were weighing on him.
Unable to remain motionless any longer under his increasingly exploratory touch, she twisted round with a small groan, placing her arms around him, her head in his lap. Now even his uniform, with its stale, sour smell and its abrasiveness against her cheek, added to the anguished pleasure of their contact. He in turn put his arms around her, pressing her closer and closer, until, overcome by physical discomfort, he finally released her. But still she clung on to him, as they had clung on to each other that afternoon at Blenheim under the ceaselessly dripping trees, waiting as if for some unseen disaster – a bomb, an earthquake, a stroke of lightning.
‘No! No!’ He had jumped to his feet. ‘Better if I go now.’
Still crouched on the floor, she began clumsily to button the front of her blouse. ‘Go? What on earth do you mean?’
‘Sorry. Mistake. My mistake.’ The way in which he isolated each of these words, speaking them as if he had learned them by rote in a tongue unknown to him, imbued them with a peculiarly desperate emphasis. He extended his arms towards her. ‘Forgive me, Christine. I love you – truly I love you. Of course. But. No.’ He shook his head. ‘Best I never come again. Believe me – that is best. Forget me, forget me, Christine.’ He turned away, reaching out for the cap that he had thrown on to a chair
‘What is all this? What are you talking about? Have you gone crazy?’
‘No, it’s life that’s crazy.’ He blinked, blinked again. He pointed to the sofa. ‘Sit. Not on the floor. Here. Sit.’
She obeyed him. ‘Well?’
‘I’ve been thinking. All week I’ve been thinking.’ He spoke quietly, almost meditatively. ‘What happened at Blenheim, what has happened to us. For that, yes, I am happy. But also, also sad.’
‘Oh, but, Thomas –’
He put a hand over her mouth, so roughly that she felt the sharp impact of his forefinger on her upper lip, pressing it against her teeth. ‘ No, listen to me. Listen. I’m a prisoner, yes? No home, no money, no future. Yes? I’m a prisoner here for another year, maybe two years. And after that? In Germany – no family, no work, nothing. And you – if you come with me – what happen?’ Under the stress of what he was struggling to tell her, his command of English began to disintegrate. ‘You leave friends here in England – Michael, Margaret, this Bill – and in Germany you find – what? Coldness, suspicion, maybe hate, yes, hate. Here you live in comfortable house, have clothes, books, good food.’
Suddenly she could no longer listen, gazing intently into his louring face. ‘Oh, how little you understand me. As if I really cared about all those things! I’m lucky to have them, I’m happy to have them. But I don’t need them, not at all! Things like that don’t matter, not a bit.’
‘Not now,’ he said softly. ‘But later. Now we are like – like people who are drunk. Or like people who are, are – Droge beigemischt – drugged. We’re frightened of nothing. But it can’t always be so. We wake. We see it is a dream.’
Suddenly rage consumed her. She jumped off the sofa, crossed over to the mantelpiece and, with agitated fingers pulled a cigarette from the packet that she had left there and struggled to light it. ‘Are you absolutely without any spine?’
‘Spine?’
‘Courage.’
Her desire had been to wound him. She saw now, with dismay, that she had wholly succeeded. He hung his head; a flush mounted
to his cheeks and forehead.
She once more sat down on the sofa and rested the cigarette in an ashtray beside it. ‘ Thomas, listen.’ She reached for his hand and, yet again a mother reasoning gently with a frightened, despondent child, took it in hers. ‘I know the future’s pretty black for us. Of course it is. But we love each other.’ She tilted her head upwards and stared into his eyes. ‘Don’t we? Don’t we?’
At the second time she put the question, he nodded slowly.
‘Well, then. In that case, all those other things are trivial, meaningless, wholly unimportant. You have me, I have you. That’s all we need. All we should want.’
His tongue moved over lips chapped by the icy east wind in which he had been working on the new road. ‘ You don’t understand.’ His tone was sullen and petulant.
‘You’re always telling me that I don’t understand things. What don’t I understand?’
‘Something you don’t know. Something I’ve never told you. That was my mistake.’
‘Well? Tell me now.’
Again his tongue moved over the chapped lips, again he blinked, this time repeatedly, as though a gust of wind had blown some grit into his eyes. ‘I’m married.’ It was so soft that she wondered for a moment if she had heard him correctly.
‘Married?’
Hands tightly clasped, he nodded.
A silence followed. As she stared at him, willing him to raise his downcast eyes, she had a sense of all the objects in the frowsty, comfortable room – the piano, the chairs, the tables, the cupboard, the bookcases, the desk – all, all colliding, smashing together, splintering in the same delirious, dizzying vortex. When at last she spoke, she was surprised by her calmness. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
At last he looked up. ‘Because, as you just told me, I have no – no spine.’ He spat out the unfamiliar word.
In a weary voice she said: ‘ It makes no difference.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Because it happens to be true. We’ve started on this road and I’m happy to go along it with you. Wherever it takes us.’ Looking at his slumped body, his head tilted forward so that she could not see his face, she now felt only the desire to communicate to him her own resolution. His weakness only lent her more strength; his indecision only made her path clearer. She had seen the major flaw in his character, a fatal lack of what she had called spine, and it no longer frightened or repelled her.
She waited for him to say something. Head still lowered, nothing came.
‘Do you still love your wife?’
‘No. Only you.’
‘Does she love you?’
He gave a brief, bitter laugh. Then he raised his head. He swung round and faced her. ‘Oh, Christine, you do believe that she is now nothing for me? Nothing, nothing! You do believe that I hid my marriage not because I wished to cheat you but because I was afraid – so afraid I lose you?’
‘Of course!’
‘I wished to tell you at Blenheim. And I was a coward, I couldn’t do it. Then I was going to write to you. And then too – I was afraid. This afternoon I was going to tell you and after that leave your life. And this afternoon too …’
‘Don’t let’s go all over that. You have told me. That’s what matters now. Now tell me about your wife. What is she like? When did you marry her? Tell me. I must know.’ Even as she pressed the questions on him, she thought: Oh, this dreadful curiosity of mine! She jumped up and fetched two cigarettes. She lit one and placed it in his mouth; then she lit another for herself. She dragged the smoke of her cigarette deep into her lungs. ‘ Tell me.’ It was an order.
Reluctantly, he began. He sat far back in his chair, his face averted. She leaned forward, elbow on knee and her first cigarette and then another constantly raised to her mouth. Repeatedly she interrupted him, asking for some information about something still not revealed or for some clarification of something still not fully understood. By this stern, sometimes even implacable imposing of some sort of coherence on the narrative that he reluctantly brought out with so much incoherence, she at last came to a measure of understanding of his destructive and finally desperate marriage.
He began with the difference between the ages of his wife and himself, since he clearly felt that to be the key to their whole relationship. Ilse was seven years older than he was. They had first met when, as the daughter of new neighbours in the farm next-door to his family one, she had come over to look after him at times when his parents were too busy to lavish on their beloved only child all the attention that they thought he needed and deserved. For this service they gave her what they always called ‘pocket money’. His memories of that period were only happy ones. The robust blonde girl, with her already maternally large breasts, would join in his childhood games, buy sweets for him, and constantly subject him to friendly teasing about such things as his precociously adult vocabulary, his frequent inability to catch a ball thrown to him and the dreamily withdrawn state into which he would so often retreat. After she got married and left the neighbourhood to move into her husband’s farm, five hours away by the slow train that halted at the village stop only once each day, he was overcome by a sense of abandonment. His teachers then complained to his parents of his lack of interest in his studies and asked him if he were unhappy about something. Indignantly he replied, ‘Of course not.’
Half-a-dozen years later she returned to her old home, a childless widow, after the death of her husband, a man in his fifties, in a road collision involving his tractor and a carelessly driven bus in a narrow lane. Now thirteen, the pubescent boy was at once attracted by the mature woman and, to his delight and amazement, she returned his feelings. Soon they began to arrange meetings that would appear to their respective parents to be wholly accidental. In the corner of some remote field or in the kitchen or barns of one of the two farmhouses when everyone was out, she would allow him to become intimate with her firm, strong body, even if she would irritably push his hand away whenever it threatened to explore too far. Eventually she began first to masturbate him and then to go down on her knees to fellate him. Each of them became insatiable for this last act.
He went away to university in Göttingen. Here he flirted with girls attracted by his grave good looks. Under some bushes in a park, while rain spattered down on them, he even had hurried, furtive sex with one of these, a Czech science student with a face of astonishing pallor and desperate eyes. But he never ceased to think of Ilse and to long for the vacation. Soon after he was back home, he had achieved with her all that he had ever dreamed.
When the next vacation brought him home, she suddenly put it to him, out of the blue, not when they were making love but while they were listening to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony on the wireless in Thomas’s parents’ otherwise empty house, ‘Why don’t we get married?’
He pondered, brows puckered, for a moment. ‘Yes. But later. Not now. It’s too soon. First I must get my degree and get a job.’
‘I have some money. No need to worry about a job. You know, I’m not a poor woman now. I inherited money from my husband. Not a lot of course, but enough. When we’re married, you can live with my parents when you’re not in Göttingen. Then, after you have your degree and your job, we’ll buy a house. With my money. Of course.’ She had worked it all out.
He graduated, he got a job teaching English at a secondary school, and she bought a comfortable little house on the edge of the town in which he was employed.
Then, within a few months, he realised that he had made a terrible mistake. There was something both crude and bullying about her, so that her clamorous personality began first to get on his nerves and then to disturb and disgust him. She had failed to have a child by her first husband (‘He was past it,’ she would say contemptuously, always putting the blame on to him) and she had now become obsessed with having one by Thomas. He would return exhausted from a hard day at the school only to have her demand, as soon as they had eaten one of the dreadful meals that she w
ould prepare for him with hasty indifference, that they must at once go upstairs. When, despite all his efforts, her menses occurred with unfailing regularity, she would always then put the blame on him. What was the matter with him? Wasn’t he a real man?’
Eventually he decided that he must tell her that he wanted a divorce to release him from this hell. After all, what was the point of her sticking to a man whom she despised, or of his sticking to a woman who had become physically and emotionally repellent to him? But Ilse was adamant. The staunchest of Roman Catholics, often deploring his refusal to convert to her faith, she told him implacably that she could never agree to such a ‘sin’. He was hers, just as the German shepherd dog that barked ceaselessly at the end of its chain outside their house was hers. She was never going to release either of them from their bondage.
At the end of the story, Christine asked, ‘And what has become of her now?’
He shrugged. He did not know. The last that he had heard, from an aunt of hers almost three years ago, was that she was nursing in the casualty ward of a Berlin hospital. Now all over Germany people were desperately searching for their lost loved ones. Why should he begin a probably fruitless search for a lost unloved one? But he feared that eventually she would find him. She had that kind of obsessive persistence; and once she had found him, she was not the sort of person to give away her recovered possession, however little she herself wanted or needed it. Of one thing he was absolutely certain: she would never agree to a divorce.
He pressed his hands between his knees and gave a sigh that was almost a groan. ‘Now you will understand why we must stop seeing each other.’
Christine shook her head. ‘ Certainly not. No. No one is going to keep you from me. No one, no one, no one. Never.’ The obstacles, to him insurmountable, that he had revealed to her, had merely fortified her determination and love.
As Thomas tried repeatedly to argue, he felt both amazed and diminished by her steadfastness.
