A Soldier's Tale (3 page)

There's nothing for you here, I says. I'm staying here for a while, so you'd better go away. Allay-vooz ong, comprennay?

The old man pulls himself up very straight and says, We do not go away, we wait. If you wish this
ordure
, you shall have her. You cannot stay here always. When you go we take her and make the justice. We are soldiers of the Resistance. We do not fear you, Monsieur le Caporal. We wait.

What's she done that's so terrible? I says.

Listen, he says, listen, and he is very angry. She was friend to the Boches, she make love to them. He shrugged. For that, perhaps the women shave her head, to make her shame. But this one, she had friends in the Resistance. She tells a German officer, then the Gestapo—twelve men—my godson—

The old man was very angry and upset and I felt a bit sorry for him. The Brat must have caught on to what he was saying, because he began talking, shouting at me, what sounded like names of people.

His cousin—friends—my pupils—

You're a schoolmaster? I says to him.

Yes, I am school master. I teach English, I admire—I admired the English.

Well, I says, I've made up my mind to stay, and that's what I'll do. I don't care what she done. I'm staying here. When I go, you can do what you like with her.

The old man translated this to the Brat, and the kid snarled at me and spat in the dust. But the old man just stared at me for a while, then he says, Very well, Monsieur le Caporal, real quiet he says it, and turns away. We will wait, he says. And he walks up the road with the Brat following him.

Then Big Stupid comes to life. Cigarette? he says with a cheeky grin on his big face. So I took out my fags and counted out three, one for each of them, and gave them to him, and off he went after the others.

I watched them go up the hill some way and settle themselves under a big old beech tree, on a bit of a bank by the roadside with a good view down the slope. Big Stupid shared out the fags, and they lit up and sat there, staring at the cottage. I stayed by the gate. Every so often I'd look round to see if she was still there, though she didn't have much chance of running away. Each time I could see her watching me through the kitchen side-window, and what she was thinking about God knows, perhaps whether I'd just walk off and leave her.

(And God knows what you thought, and what you're
thinking, Corporal Scourby, I reflected as I listened to him. Did he pity this trapped woman? Did he believe her accusers? I think he was a little sorry for both, as well as very contemptuous. Perhaps at this time he was moved by simple lust and by the thought of using this woman who couldn't refuse him and couldn't escape. And perhaps it was none of these things, but simply a hunter on the trail. In his unreflecting way he followed his instinct. At the moment his highest motive may have been no more than a detached curiosity.)

Well (he went on) presently old Charlie comes back with the stuff, so I took it inside and laid it out on the table and made sure it was all there. Then he went off again, like the good little man he was, but he fixed to look in next day and see if we needed anything.

While she was getting the supper I went for a clean-up. The bog was in the little hut at the end of the garden, and there was this sort of old dairy place at the other side of the house where I could wash. When I went to get a bucket of water from the pump, I could see someone standing under the tree up the hill, but it was too dark to see who it was in the shadow, only I think it was Big Stupid—I noticed that they left a lot of the work to him.

So I had my wash and went back into the kitchen. She made quite a good meal of it, with bullybeef and tinned Russian salad. We drank some of the Calvados out of little glasses and she brought out a bit of that ripe French cheese. Only she didn't like tea and she made some ersatz coffee, you know, acorns roasted and ground up, which tasted terrible.

She'd done herself up and tidied her hair and put on a bit of lipstick, and with that heavy red hair she didn't look half bad. We ate our supper and just talked about things, about what it was like during the war, and the bombing, and the rationing, and how the French felt about the Germans and how the British felt about the Yanks. But she didn't really talk much about herself, and all the time her eyes never left me.

It was getting dark slowly—you know how it was in Normandy, them long evenings and the twilight. She was cleaning up the table and I was standing by the door having a smoke when we heard the Jerry bombers coming over towards the beaches and we could see the ack-ack coming up from the ships in the bay, a proper Brock's Benefit. Strange it was, too, because it made so little noise, at that distance.

She was standing close to me and I slipped my arm around her. She turned to me and I kissed her, but she didn't seem to rise to it. So I pulled her close and
kissed her real hard. Then I turned her and gave her a little shove towards the bedroom.

(When he came to describe what happened between them Saul grew very reticent. Like most working-class people, he was careful with his speech. The newly emancipated words which a bourgeois intellectual or writer or student scatters around like verbal confetti had only a small place in his vocabulary. When he used them, they stood mostly for anger or contempt, not love or sex. And they were used mostly in speaking with men of his own class and age, not outsiders like us, nor women.

And like most working-class men he was modest about his sex life, talking about it in fairly general terms. After all, he seemed to do pretty well at it, and had no need to boast or reassure himself. In part, I suppose, it's a rather special form of territoriality—the animal is nowhere more at risk, more defenceless, than in the act of love. But it's also a realization that this act, deeply serious to those involved, is an absurdity to onlookers. To watch it, even to describe it, is to impair one's dignity. Voyeurs are people without shame or self-respect. So, in what follows, I've had to guess rather more than elsewhere, following out hints and broken sentences in a way
he might hardly have approved. In those simple un-Swedish days, he believed in taking his pleasure in the old way, the woman face up in the dark, the man leading, the woman showing proper enjoyment and appreciation.)

So with the noise of bombs and gunfire coming in gusts across the quiet and darkling countryside, they undressed and climbed into the big double bed in the inner room. He hadn't had a girl, he explained, since the night they'd been called back to camp for the move to the concentration areas and the slow journey to the beaches. There was this ATS girl but she hadn't been all that keen. Now he was excited and confident, he'd eaten and drunk well and the Frenchwoman was new and strange.

But it wasn't going right. She lay in his arms quite passively and let him caress her, but without response. Presently he pulled back from her and said to her crossly, You'll have to do better than this, girl, or I'm not staying. I've never taken a girl that wasn't willing for it.

Still without saying anything, she pulled off the sheet and knelt over him and began to kiss and pet him. Suddenly, as he realized where her lips were going (I said that he was strait-laced, like most
working men) he sat up and slapped her across the side of the head with a full swing of his open hand, so hard that she tumbled sideways off the bed and landed sprawling on her backside on the floor.

After the swift clap of the blow there was silence and the dying sound of guns. She was sitting up, her face and body pale smudges in the gloom.

Qu'est-ce qui te prend, salaud?
she cried out, hurt but dry-eyed, not weeping, and he found for the first time that her fluent English was broken up by strong feeling, whether of love or hate.
Tu me prends pour une putain?
She fought with herself for the words. What you want of me? You want me for a prostitute? I make a good prostitute. I do not love you but I can give you
plaisir
. What you want of me? Everyone want something of me.
On se sert de moi comme pot-de-chambre. Je m'emmerde de tout ça
.

And then she began to sob, sitting on her arse on the bare floor, propping herself with one hand and with the other fumbling at her face to try and brush away the tears. He sat hunched in the middle of the big bed, hugging his knees under the old patchwork quilt and the worn sheet.

You shouldn't of done that, he said, I don't like tarts' tricks. I've never held with tarts.

The angry sobbing went on.

Look, he said, I don't want no tricks, all I want is a bit of loving kindness with it.

I cannot love you, she said, you are just a man who takes me because I cannot run away. You should leave me. Let them take me.

What would they do to you? he asked. They'd give you a bad time, wouldn't they, before they killed you?

With one hand to her mouth, she moaned with fear, and there was a silence, then, Oh, what must I do? she said.

He moved across and sat on the edge of the bed, near to her.

First of all, he said, stop crying and come back into bed and forget about those bastards out there. I'm sorry I done that, he said, and I'd like to make it up to you if you let me.

He reached out his hand to her. She held back for a moment, then took his hand and he helped her back into the bed beside him.

Now, he said, be a good girl and I'm going to love you and then we'll sleep. Forget all the rest. We'll talk about it in the morning.

He had big clever hands that could coax a squirrel out of a tree or break the neck of an unwary German sentry, master any dog, set delicate snares for bird or rabbit, turn a rod of beech into an intricately carved
walking stick. He began patiently to handle her, holding back his raw need for her until she was ready. Steadily and gently he stroked her long thighs and her breasts which were full and soft in the darkness, and her belly and the silky fur of her crotch. She began to respond to him, kissing and touching him, but timidly, afraid to provoke that strange masculine rage again. He began to want her very much, and when he became demanding and pressed her back on the bed she drew him into her. He took her quickly, more savagely than he had meant to, and she seemed to understand and forgive his need. So great was his pleasure that he gave little thought to her, only she said softly some words he didn't understand.

When they rolled apart, he lay beside her staring up into the dark. He wanted to say something to her but forgot. All he could think of was that it had been a long time since he'd lain in a big soft bed, and even longer since he'd been there with a woman warm beside him. There had been claspings under trees and in dark doorways and on sitting-room sofas, but not for a long time this ease and joy. He felt grateful and reached out to touch her. A wind was coming up outside, moving trees somewhere nearby, bringing a flurry of gunfire that sounded almost lazy, followed by a rattle of rain on the window. His hand touched
her belly, the darkness spread out above him and he fell asleep.

Sometime early in the morning he awoke, curled up close to her and with his arm still across her. A small sound and a movement of her body had disturbed him; she sighed heavily in the darkness. The window was a square of faint paleness in the dark. Far off an early rooster crowed, a country sound. No guns spoke.

In the quietness his earliest memories came back to him. Of the darkness before dawn, and cockcrow, and the sound of his mother sighing in the dark in the little airless bedroom. Of creeping out fearfully in the dark across the eyeless bogey terrors of the blackness and the cold floor. Of standing by the bed at last and reaching out to touch the hot wet cheek. Mum, I love you, Mum. Get back to your bed, you little bastard. And creeping back through the desert of the dark to huddle under his old blanket, waiting for daybreak and all the other bitterness of the world.

His mother was a big-boned, florid, fair woman and his father some nameless soldier from the big camp outside Blandford. He lived with Mum in the back room of the estate cottage, with his granny and grandad. Little and bent, skilled in all kinds of farm-work, ploughman, cowman, hedger, thatcher,
his grandad had taught him to use his hands. He was kind and firm with the little boy in a detached way, just as he was with animals. He sometimes suffered from tremendous silent rages which he took out on inanimate objects, working furiously with spade or bill-hook.

Granny was big and florid like her daughter, but in all other ways different, placid where the younger woman was passionate, a chapel-goer and a bible-reader. He had good reason to remember them both for they brought him up when Mum left. To take up a good post in service, so she said, and send money home for him. Soon the memory of her faded, except that he would still wake up at night in the back bedroom, almost believing that he could hear a woman sighing in the dark. He went to the village school where he learnt to read and write and figure. During holidays he rambled about with other boys or went out to take Grandad his snack in the fields. He might sit with him contentedly, in semi-silence. The old man spoke little but enjoyed showing him things—how to plait horsehair into a rabbit-snare, or weave a wattle fence, or carve clothes-pegs. Or how to read the warning cries of birds, or smell rain coming, or take direction by the stars at night.

His mother had faded into a distant and rather
pleasant memory when one day, unexpectedly, he came home from school and saw the big yellow car standing in the lane near the cottage. A jolly fat man in bright check tweeds like a checker-board sat at the wheel smoking a big cigar. The boy Saul squinted up at him in the bright sunlight and wrinkled his nose at the cigar smoke. The fat man laughed and winked at him, the cigar poised in the air.

And there was his Mum in the front parlour and she was old. She was wearing a silly short pink dress which, as even he knew, was too tight for her, and a silly little tight hat and her face was baggy and powdered. She flung her arms round him and hugged him in one of her moods of fierce demonstrative affection. He pulled away and stared at her. And wasn't he a boy, so big and strong, and Gran had taken real good care, hadn't she, like her very own, which he was, and wasn't the country good for him, of course it was, town was no good for kids, though of course there was another side to it. Then there were the presents, a box of Britains' tin soldiers, Black Watch in kilts and topees with a piper, and a field-gun that fired caps, and a picture book of Robinson Crusoe, and a tin of Mackintosh's toffee. She dabbed her eyes with a small handkerchief as she told them how she'd found a good man and how they'd marry when he
made certain financial arrangements and live in a nice house out in the country, somewhere near Epping perhaps, and then they could be all together there.