PM_E_441 - Cold Snap

by Francis King

  At their goodbye, she put a hand to each of his shoulders and looked for a long time into his eyes. He had to make an effort of will not to let his own eyes waver or retreat from her gaze. ‘We must stick together,’ she said at last. ‘Whatever happens.’ She shook him. ‘Nothing must stop us. Thomas, are you listening to me?’

  He gave a weak smile and shrugged his shoulders.

  She shook him again.

  Later, as he was trudging back alone to the camp through the chill of a gathering mist, something strange – even miraculous, he was to think later – happened. It was as though, while the distance between the lodging house and the camp was decreasing pace by pace, so at the same time Christine’s serene, undeviating confidence in their ability to make a future together was filling him like cold, clear water rising up and up in a previously stagnant cistern. Yes, she was right. To continue with the relationship in circumstances of illegality, secrecy and stress was infinitely better than to abandon it. Each time that they met, it would continue to be for a few brief, clandestine hours over a weekend. When they parted it would be without knowing for certain when next they would see each other. But all that did not matter. It did not matter in the least.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next Saturday, Thomas left early, having decided not to risk slipping back through the barbed wire of the camp for two weekends running. Christine accompanied him. Since it was raining and he had with him neither umbrella nor coat, she shared her own umbrella, her arm linked in his. All that afternoon they had made love, from time to time breaking off to smoke a single cigarette between them. At one moment there had been a knock at the locked door and then a succession of even louder knocks, followed by a frenzied rattling of the handle. They had frozen in silence. Margaret, Mrs Albert, her obnoxious son Ralph? When Christine had begun to giggle, Thomas had put a hand over her mouth.

  Bicycle bells rang impatiently; cars swished past; figures flitted through the moist, melancholy twilight with heads lowered. But they themselves did not hurry, abstracted in a long, leisurely dream. As they passed the New Theatre, a figure waiting on the steps peered out at them through the rain. It was, Christine realised with a shock, Mrs Dunne, in a soiled, beltless white raincoat and a beret pulled down low over her forehead. In one hand she was holding an open umbrella, not over her head but outwards from her body, as though to ward off any possible assailant, while with the other hand she struggled to tuck an errant wisp of damp hair back under the beret. Christine glanced at her; Mrs Dunne stared back with narrowed eyes. Then Christine and Thomas had passed on, into the jostling crowds, the rain and the darkness, and Mrs Dunne could no longer see them. She was meeting her husband, manager of a bank in the High, to see The Gondoliers. He, not she, was a lover of Gilbert and Sullivan. As he approached, she greeted him: ‘Such an odd thing has just happened …’

  Meanwhile Christine had told Thomas: ‘That was my tutor. Oh, hell!’

  ‘I guessed it was.’

  ‘How could you guess?’

  He shook his head. ‘I felt. She saw us together. Maybe that’s bad for you.’

  ‘Don’t let’s think about it.’

  ‘Maybe she wonders why you’re with –’

  ‘Don’t let’s think about it. Please.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They walked on in silence. Then, as they approached the station, Thomas said: ‘Here you must turn back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s too long a walk for you. It’s not … pleasant from now on.’

  ‘No, I’ll come with you. I want to see the camp. Even if it’s only from outside.’

  ‘But then you’ll have to go back all this way alone. There are bad streets. And you’re becoming very wet. Let’s say goodbye here.’

  ‘Oh, no. No!’

  They trudged on, over a gravel-strewn road pitted with holes brimming with water, past lots where machinery rusted in rank grass, sodden front gardens of stunted red-brick bungalows, and an occasional field enclosed in a jumble of wooden stakes and barbed wire.

  From time to time other prisoners, muffled in long, dark-blue overcoats, would hurry past, some of them momentarily turning to stare at the well-dressed, beautiful English girl splashing through puddles on the arm of one of their fellows. Often these prisoners would themselves have women with them, young girls for the most part, with mud-stained stockings and hair on which the raindrops coruscated. When these girls peered at Christine, she imagined that their faces assumed an air of mockery or disdain. Such girls could be found haunting any camp where troops were stationed or, failing that, where POWs were penned.

  Eventually one particularly noisy group passed them, composed of at least half-a-dozen prisoners and even more girls. One of the girls was belting out ‘She Wore a Little Jacket of Blue’ in a powerful but erratic contralto. She was enormously fat and, as she waddled along, her head shaking from side to side under a scarlet pixie-hood, a prisoner, far slighter than she was and only a little taller, suddenly scooped her up in his arms and ran ahead with her. Breaking off from the song, she kicked out, giggled shrilly, and then emitted one piercing screech after another.

  ‘She sounds like a pig being killed. And looks like one.’

  Christine felt genuinely sorry for her. ‘Poor thing. One might imagine that every juvenile delinquent girl in Oxford trekked out here on Saturday and Sunday evenings.’

  ‘Horrible.’ He spoke with a puritanical distaste.

  ‘Well, if you think of the sort of lives that most of them must lead –’

  ‘Horrible,’ he repeated with a little shudder. ‘Prisoners boast – they have made love to girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. They think all English women are similar. For me – better to go without.’

  ‘What can the poor things hope for in return?’

  ‘A baby!’ He gave a contemptuous laugh.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so censorious. Please, Thomas. It’s not like you.’

  ‘Prisoners have no money. But such girls don’t want much. Perhaps a ring made from a spoon. A brooch perhaps, made from an empty sardine tin. Not romantic.’

  ‘You’re awfully priggish about the wretched creatures.’ She pressed the arm linked with hers, to take the sting out of the reproof. ‘There can’t be much fun in their lives.’

  ‘If I speak strongly, maybe it’s because … Sometimes I myself feel … Maybe you can’t understand this. Maybe I shock you.’ He turned his head away from her.

  ‘Of course not. No.’ So far from shocking her, the thought that from time to time one of these girls had excited him and perhaps – who knows? – had even had sex with him, made her feel a vicarious thrill.

  ‘It’s not so much that you wish to make love with a woman. But you wish to have a woman – any woman – close to you. To look at, to talk to. Like now with you.’ Once again he turned to stare at her. ‘Do you prefer me not to tell you such things?’

  ‘Of course not. I want to know everything about you and your life.’

  He sighed. ‘But such solutions are always ersatz. All of us know that. That makes us feel ashamed.’

  ‘Am I also an ersatz solution?’

  You?’ He stopped in his tracks, shocked and furious. His grip on her arm tightened painfully. ‘You’re not one of these prostitute girls. Please – don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Is there so much difference?’

  ‘Christine!’ He shook her arm. ‘I told you – don’t talk like that!’

  She laughed; but, lips compressed and brows contracted, he did not laugh with her.

  They were now on the last and steepest curve of the road before it reached the camp. She halted for breath, forcing him to halt too. ‘I’d never realised how far it was.’

  ‘I make myself hurry by thinking of how I’ll be punished if I’m late. Once Horst and I returned too late from Michael. A week in the calaboose.’

  ‘How is Horst?’ she asked as they resumed their by now effortful trudging.

  ‘Oh, he’s okay? As
on previous occasions when she had asked about Horst, she had a sense of doors being shut and blinds being pulled down.

  ‘Did he leave the camp this Saturday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought he might have gone to Michael’s tea party.’

  ‘He doesn’t go to Michael. You know that, Christine.’

  ‘Life must be boring for him.’

  ‘He has many things to do. He’s always, always busy. He doesn’t often leave the camp.’

  Oh, but why were they having this absurd, prolonged conversation about a man whom she disliked, when already ahead she could see the entrance to the camp. It was as if, a ghostly presence, Horst had intruded on them.

  Thomas had put a hand up to her cheek, gently stroking it. Seeing how raw and swollen it was in the glare of the spotlight high up on one of the observation towers, she cursed herself for having once again forgotten to press on him a pair of the woollen gloves knitted for her by her aunt, to replace a pair, given to him by Michael, and yet again ‘borrowed’.

  ‘We must say goodbye here. We don’t want the guards to see us.’

  ‘The other girls have gone right up to the gate.’

  ‘You’re not one of the other girls. I’ve already told you that, Liebling.’

  As he took her clumsily in his arms and kissed her, first on the cheek and then on the mouth, forcing her lips open with his tongue, she was all the time conscious of nothing but the sweaty smell of the greatcoat in which he was muffled.

  ‘Until tomorrow?’

  She nodded, her eyes suddenly making out, over his shoulder, a couple clutching each other under a rowan tree further down the slope. Did she and Thomas look as graceless as they did?

  With a final, abrupt kiss and a wave of the hand, he turned and strode off; and she at once experienced a baffling sense of relief. She took a few steps and then halted under an insistently dripping tree. From there she watched while he trudged up the few yards that now remained between him and the entrance. When he did not look back, she herself turned away. As she descended the hill, her previous relief suddenly began to surge into a no less baffling exhilaration.

  The couple farther down the road had separated and the German was thrusting towards her, shaved head lowered, with long, impatient strides. A farm labourer, she decided, as he came closer; and therefore better able to endure this sort of life than poor educated Thomas was. He passed her without even glancing in her direction, his wide face tensed into the exasperated concentration of a child worrying over a lesson he cannot master. The girl was already running away down the hill, trailed by a thin, shaggy mongrel dog. But soon her headlong pace slackened; she halted to pick up a stick to throw to the dog and, when she moved again, it was not at a run but with draggingly indecisive footsteps that brought Christine nearer and nearer to her with each stride.

  They were now both on a footpath crossing a triangle of wasteland covered in brambles, old clothing, rusty tins and sodden newspapers. A brook, swollen with melted snow, raced alongside, washing clean the roots of the stunted thorn trees bristling along its banks. Eventually this brook thrust under a bridge, where the girl halted, to gaze down into the frothy, mud-stained waters; her dog sat leaning against her legs. Hanging over the rickety balustrade, her bosom pressed up against her thin arms, she struck Christine as being no more than fourteen or fifteen. Her hair had probably once been curled, but the damp now made it hang in wispy ringlets to her hunched shoulders. She wore an overlarge mackintosh blotched with oil stains, a crocheted beret and platform-heeled shoes each with two wide straps across the instep.

  She turned from her contemplation of the brook just as Christine passed her. ‘ Excuse me!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You couldn’t spare a fag, could you? I gave my last to my bloke.’

  Christine hunted for her cigarette case in the pockets of her coat; then, as she held it out, she suffered a moment of irrational panic – suppose this girl-child were to snatch it and make off with it? It had been Ben’s last gift to her.

  ‘Ta. Got a light?’

  Christine was already pulling out a box of Swan Vestas.

  The girl sucked greedily on the cigarette, as Christine did up her coat and pulled on her gloves. ‘Cor – I really needed this.’ She sucked again. Then, as Christine began to walk on, she called after her: ‘Say!’ Reluctantly Christine halted and turned.

  ‘Who was that one with you? Was that Thomas?’

  Christine swung away and, head lowered, continued to hurry on.

  ‘Say! Wait a mo! There was something …’

  In her haste Christine yet again splashed into a puddle and yet again icy water spurted up her leg; but on this occasion she hardly noticed. To herself she was saying all the angry, ungenerous things that she had wanted to shout back at the girl but had not dared to. Get away. Don’t talk to me. Leave me alone. I’m not one of your sort. I want nothing to do with you.

  As she turned into the main road, she heard a voice: ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’

  It was Bill, screeching to a halt in his battered, rain-streaked jeep.

  ‘Oh, just trying to get out of this cold and drizzle.’

  ‘Jump in!’ He pushed the door open for her. ‘Now, madam, where do you want your chauffeur to drive you?’

  ‘Well, where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere in particular.’

  She laughed. ‘You must be going somewhere. No one would go out in this weather just for the fun of it.’

  ‘No one except me. My plans always tend to be fluid – like this ghastly winter … Why don’t we go and have a bite at the Randolph?’

  ‘I don’t think I really have the time. I’ve so much work to do. Thanks all the same.’

  ‘Ah, well … Some other time perhaps. At least let me drive you home.’

  ‘If it’s no bother.’

  ‘I’m always at your service, as you know.’

  He was wearing a khaki balaclava helmet, a leather jacket tied round the waist with a length of string, and some RAF flying boots.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Seeing my German back to the camp. I’ve always wondered what people mean when they talk of ‘‘the sticks’’. Now I know.’

  ‘How are things going between you two?’

  Christine hesitated and then told him, without any cautious or craven editing of her story.

  At the close, he whistled through his teeth. ‘Not too good for you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s really nothing to be sorry about. I know now that he loves me. That’s the only thing that matters.’

  ‘Well, if that’s really how you feel … Oh, gosh! I don’t know why I’m butting in like this. You know your own business best. But, well, it seems to me that you may be going to have a pretty rough time of it.’

  She shook her head, staring out through the windscreen at the lights of the oncoming traffic. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, I always thought you had guts. But still … The fact that the poor bastard is married …’

  ‘You’re not being very encouraging.’

  ‘Sorry … It’s just that I hate to think of you … Waste. I hate waste.’ It was like Michael saying, as he so often did: ‘Mess. I hate mess.’

  She continued to stare out, now dizzied by the onward rush of approaching headlights.

  ‘You realise that, if there is anything that I can do, any way I can help you, then, well, you’ve only got to ask? I mean that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When they reached the Wellington Square house, Christine said reluctantly: ‘Come in for a drink.’

  ‘No, I won’t do that. Ta ever so, all the same,’ he added in a parody of female gentility.

  ‘But I thought you said –’

  ‘Well, when I invited you to dinner at the Randolph, I was preparing to cut a meeting of the Liberal Club. The other day they elected me treasurer. God knows why, since I’ve always been hopeless with money. So, on second thoug
hts, perhaps I really ought to go along.’

  ‘Of course you ought! … How’s the work going?’

  He pulled a comic face. ‘Ghastly! I’ve had an ultimatum. I was hauled before Bowra yesterday. He told me I’d have to take two sections next term – Old English and Shakespeare. If I don’t pass, I might as well stop wasting my own and the College’s time – as he charmingly put it.’

  ‘So now you’re going to settle down to a really hard slog?’

  ‘I doubt it. A really hard snog would be preferable.’ He sighed and then blew out his cheeks. ‘No, this means I’ve had my ticket. I’ll just get into Poppet and drive away the day before the first exam starts.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. If you do a little work, you can quite easily wriggle through two sections.’

  ‘Perhaps. The trouble is I’m getting pretty browned off with Oxford. I think it’s time I moved on.’

  ‘What’ll you do with yourself?’

  ‘Oh, God knows! Sufficient unto the day …’ He began to clamber out of the jeep. ‘You know, on second thoughts, I think I’ll give that meeting a miss after all.’

  ‘No, no! You can come and have a drink some other time.’ She put her hands to his shoulders and gave him a gende push. ‘You must go to the meeting.’

  ‘What a bully you are!’ He began to clamber back. ‘Did you like the flowers?’

  ‘Oh, crumbs! I never thanked you for them. Yes, they were lovely. You must think me very rude.’

  ‘I expect you’ve had lots and lots of things to think about.’ Suddenly he was glum. ‘Well, since you insist, I’d better be on my way. When shall I see you again?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘How about lunch tomorrow? At the Kemp – or anywhere else you fancy.’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’

  ‘One o’clock. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  As he moved off, he turned to shout: ‘I like you very much.’

  ‘I like you,’ Christine shouted back.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I – like – you,’ she shouted even louder. ‘I – like – you.’

  He had been grinning back at her in the light of a solitary lamp post. But the grin faded and he began to shake his head when at last he heard what she was shouting.