Small Wars (27 page)

Chapter Six

Clara’s stitches were taken out the day after Hal had left the barracks. She tried to lie still as the cold steel point slipped between the skin and the thick black thread, and cut. She felt the tugging and stinging pain echoed by her muscles inside, yearning, it seemed, for what was gone. She had been told she wouldn’t feel anything after a while. There would be no more periods, no more babies. She had her twins. She looked up at the ceiling, not at the doctor bending over her or the nurse standing nearby.

Her father was waiting for her. He had brought her up to London to the hospital. Clara felt a hot tear slide from the corner of her eye down her temple and into her hair. Her father was waiting. Her father. Her mother at home with the children, and she, without her pregnancy, or any other parts of her adulthood, was made a child again.

Hal had been taken back to his parents’ house, too, by his father, discharged and baseless. Both of them children, alone, with everything taken.

‘Here, just a moment now,’ said the doctor, and dabbed her with sweet white pads.

Cyprus. It had been encased around and above in hard blue sea and sky. They had made their small home on it, been taken in by it, and she had lost him. Such a small place to lose a person, she thought, and now, released, they were both alone.

‘Are you all right?’ said her father, taking her arm, squeezing her fingers as they reached the door of the hospital. They heard the sound of heavy rain on the tops of the cars. A man, coming in, opened the door for them. Her father stopped to put up his umbrella but Clara had stepped ahead of him out into the rain.

Hal arrived home – his parents’ home – with his father, when the rain had stopped, but their breath was in clouds in the wet air and their fingers raw with cold just from carrying the cases in from the car. They came into the hall. The tall gloomy hall, with cold tiles as hard as steel to walk on; in childhood it had been as comforting to him as Clara’s was to her. Now the house, with its dark walls, gilt-framed pictures on chains, hanging too high to look at comfortably, carpets and corners that were discoloured by damp or light, hard dark frames of straight chairs and chilly corridors, this house now, gave him no welcome.

His mother came to meet them. She was a narrow woman, flat-chested, in a thick, dark green woollen suit. A single row of pearls lay rigid on the thin sinews of her neck. She’d had two other boys who had died in infancy; Hal was her precious survivor. ‘Oh, Hal,’ she said, touching him suddenly on his cheek with her flat palm as she kissed him. She couldn’t meet his eye.

Hal’s father was an older version of Hal, it had often been said and had always been a source of pride to them both.

They heard a door opening, a distant voice, and the thud of the dogs hitting it as they came through. Then scraping paws on the tiles and breathy barks, and the two hairy muddy spaniels raced each other into the hall.

All three of them busied themselves with the dogs, who did not remember Hal, having been puppies when he saw them last.

He went upstairs. His bedroom looked out onto the grey grass, first of the garden and then of the plain, where in his childhood the cavalry had charged in their scarlet coats, mowing down the hapless enemy with shining swords as he watched from his bed, imprisoned by coughs and colds. He had heard the bugles and the cries of battle amongst the battering hoofs.

Supper was in the dining room, a room cold enough in winter to see your breath. Accustomed to a companionable silence, it was hard now for any of them to eat. When it was over, Hal’s mother went away, to her room, or to write letters, and Hal and his father took the dogs out for the last time, before shutting them up behind the door to the boot room, guns and scullery.

The night was sharp and clear, with no moon. The dogs went off, noses down, into the darkness to do their business. Hal and his father stood shoulder to shoulder.

‘Perhaps you’ll go back,’ said his father, not looking at him.

Hal felt his chest contract for him; it was not to comfort Hal that he had said it, but himself. ‘It was good of them to call it leave,’ he said at last.

His father looked across, checking his expression.

‘What will you do now?’

‘I’ll have to see about a job. I’ll go after breakfast. Up to London.’

‘Can’t think what, can you?’

‘No.’

The dogs, hearing the flapping of a pheasant in the deep grass, set off barking.

Hal’s father said, ‘I won’t insult you with a lot of rubbish. Pretending it’s not as bad as all that.’

Hal nodded. His father turned away. ‘Come on, dogs!’

They went inside, muddy footprints on the flags by the back door, his father drawing the bolt firmly behind them.

The next morning, after breakfast as he had planned, Hal put his things into the car and waited for his father. He had said goodbye to his mother already. She had been crying. He could not remember a time in his life when she had cried – certainly not over him, perhaps animals or at the death of her sister. She had touched his face again with her dry fingers; he wanted to be gone.

At the back of the house, the smaller staircase led up to the back landing, above the garden, where he had played as a child. There were doors to spare rooms, or maids’ rooms, never used, with damp beds that had blankets folded over their mattresses and pillows stacked without cases. Hal found himself climbing the thin staircase.

He stood looking along the landing’s greenish length, with the October light from the windows on his left touching the painted portraits and photographs.

He walked quietly. It was as if his feet kicked through the legions of toy soldiers that had once covered the floor. He looked at the faces in the frames, the uniforms, plumes, grey moustaches of old soldiers, hands on swords of young ones, gleaming oil-painted medals, resolute expressions of unerring valour. Faces that had fought, had led, and served. It was not for him, not for him any more; he was not one of them and he could not serve.

The train rattled past fields and autumn woods, through Somerset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, smaller and smaller country, and at Paddington the tracks met other tracks that became a mass. It passed sidings, abandoned carriages, sheds and chimneys; the sky became thicker and greyish as smoke met clouds and fogs and city mists. The smell and rumble of the big city hit him hard as he got off the train, porters pushed past him, commuters, families, who knew their way and were hurrying, had purpose.

He left the station, and stopped at a news-stand, pulling coins from his pockets with trembling hands to buy an
Evening Standard
. Opposite the news-stand was a café, and Hal sat by the misted window in thick smoke and the smell of bacon, bought a cup of tea and looked through the classified advertisements in the back, underlining numbers with a pencil.

In a few hours, he had found a room between Westbourne Grove and Bayswater. It was cheap, on the second floor of a boarding house. He paid the landlady a week’s deposit, and a week in advance, although he didn’t know if he’d stay that long. He hadn’t thought about timing; he didn’t know what might happen, but unpacked with his usual care, folding and hanging his things, preserving symmetry as best he could. Then he sat on the bed. There was a green armchair by the window, with an antimacassar on the back of it and a stained seat.

He knew he must phone Clara. She was still weak and ill with that cut in her and he was frightened, even knowing she was with her parents. Frightened for her but, if he was honest, frightened for himself, too: he couldn’t imagine she would want anything to do with him. This sick fear was new to him; like shame, it had been unknown. Now he was well acquainted with both.

There was a telephone in the hall downstairs, on the wall, next to the umbrella stand.

There were two other rooms that shared the bathroom on the landing, then three more and a bathroom above that. The pipes were noisy, and noisier where they came out from the walls and ran along the ceiling of his room, which had been cut from a larger space. Hal sat and listened to the pipes, thinking he should get some change for the gas because the room was cold, but not getting up to do it.

The October dark came in early because it was a cloudy afternoon. He could hear a newspaper man repeating the same word over and over. Sometimes he would stop, then start it up again a little while later. The street lamps came on. Hal thought he should really see about getting some change for the meter so that he could get the fire going. He heard footsteps up the stairs, a woman’s, then more, running, then quiet.

What about me, Hal, what about us?

He must telephone Clara, and let her know he was going to find a job.

He thought that before he could find a job he must try to sleep in this bed. The bed had a pink candlewick bedspread and the wardrobe tilted towards it, with a mirror on the front that he had not been able to look into. On the corner of the small table by the bed were two hairpins. It must have been a woman’s room before it was his.

He thought of beds in barracks and officers’ messes, all of them he’d known, and the schools too, the collective sleeping places of his life, those kindly institutions, the compounding of company. Beds in dorms, in shared studies, down hallways, other boys, then men, the ranks of beds, rows of doors, bedrooms in Germany, Sandhurst, London, Winchester. He had lived his life in companionship, held richly by it, knowing those around him, names, ranks, faces who lived above, below, alongside, around him.

He must ring Clara. She should know he wasn’t letting her down – not completely.

He eased himself back on the bed, up, back against the wall, to half sitting, with the pillow doubled behind him. Closing his eyes, he was back in Cyprus for a moment, with Clara away in Nicosia, the intolerable weight of the hours ahead, and loneliness.

What about me, Hal, what about us?

He got up.

The telephone in the hall was occupied. A girl was using it. She looked like a secretary, perhaps, and had her hair in rollers, which she touched self-consciously when she saw Hal coming down the stairs, turning away from him.

‘I know,’ she was saying, in a West Country accent that reminded Hal of home, ‘I know, but if he doesn’t ask her, then they never will, will they?’

The front door opened, and a man came in, wearing a hat and a mac. He shook off his umbrella, and the girl on the telephone bristled, like a cat being splashed.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. He had a thick moustache and a case that might have contained samples. ‘Excuse me.’ He put his umbrella into the stand and slid past Hal up the stairs.

Hal wasn’t used to narrow hallways, and carpet on the stairs: he was used to sun-bleached rock and cracked plaster, diesel fumes on dry wind. The smell of boiling vegetables filled the house, and the clatter of pots.

‘I’d better go,’ said the girl. ‘There’s someone waiting. Give my love to Mam.’ She said goodbye and hung up the phone, glancing coyly at Hal as she went past, then running up the stairs in her stockinged feet, pulling her cardigan round her.

Hal stood by the black telephone. ‘Bayswater 2254,’ it said, in italic ink on the dial.

He picked it up, finding the coins, readying them carefully, in a stack. It was an old habit. They had used to talk for a long time when he called her.

Clara was sitting on the stairs, watching the telephone. She had done it when Hal was at Sandhurst, and in Germany, when he would arrange to call, or promise to try. Now she was waiting for him again. Moira and George saw her, passed by her on the stairs.

The telephone rang. Moira, in the drawing room, heard Clara, answering, say, ‘Oh, hello,’ knew it was Hal, and closed the door.

There was no need for Hal’s stack of coins.

‘Clara? Are you all right?’

‘Are you? Where are you?’

‘London.’

‘You’re not coming?’

‘No. I have to get on.’

‘I’ll come there.’

‘No, you shouldn’t –’

‘Hal. I’m coming. I need to talk to you.’

‘I’ll meet the train, then.’

Chapter Seven

The very heavy sky threatened rain. It was a little warmer than it had been. Hal had spent the morning in two appointments. One was with the unemployment office, the other with a friend of his father. The man was called Henry Featherstone, a wine merchant, and one of Hal’s family’s few non-military connections. He had an office in St James’s.

Hal had fought his sense of unreality, climbing the stairs, not in uniform but in the dark suit he’d had for five years or more and hardly worn. The stairway up from the lobby was gold-edged and brass-railed; there were offices on each floor, and the secretary at Featherstone’s was an efficient woman with freshly painted nails and a younger assistant. The place smelled of respectability and confidence, if such things had a smell. Hal gave off need and confusion, he thought. He felt foolish in his upright bearing, that straightening up was all he knew how to do and of precious little help to him in this wide world.

Henry Featherstone was a tall man, sixty years old and slippery with urbanity. They had been extremely polite to one another, with almost no allusion to Hal’s whole adult life having been spent in the army beyond the observation that he did not have a degree. It was a foreign country more absolute than any peasant village in southern Cyprus or grim suburb of Berlin had ever been. He had left with no clear idea of whether Henry Featherstone intended to employ him, but very clear indeed about his own ignorance of vintages, regions and grape varieties, let alone the vagaries of the spirits markets. He had learned that much of his time would be spent at châteaux in France and the Grill at the Savoy.

‘Willing enough, eh?’ Henry Featherstone had said, with a sharp, insinuating look.

Hal had raised his chin. ‘Of course,’ he said.

He was thirty-one years old with no training or real education, no experience of any use to anybody. Hal had heard the expression ‘As if he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him’ before. He had thought it funny. He hadn’t known the feeling. This man, this suave man, who wore a gold signet ring and sat so comfortably in his chair, must see he was hollow. He was meeting Clara at noon. She would see it, too. Leaving, going down the hot overlit staircase, it was if the air itself outweighed him.
Treherne out
, he thought,
clean bowled
, but it didn’t help: no quick vision of green grass and a white pavilion, just the empty gilded foyer ahead of him, the silent lift and the rows of small brass bells. His feet made no sound on the carpet as he left.

He walked along the platforms at Marylebone Station, looking for the right one. The train whistles and shunting sound of expelled steam mixed with the smoky smell of the air and the damp coldness and he saw her – long before she saw him – getting carefully down from the train, through the people, slowly easing herself, holding onto the door, as if she were an old lady. He wanted to run towards her, hold her, help her – but he was far away, frozen, observing. Then, jolted into action, he started towards her.

‘Platform ticket,’ said the guard, extending a uniformed arm. Hal waited, obediently.

She came towards him and began to smile.

‘Don’t carry that,’ he said, taking her small case from her. ‘Why did you bring it?’

‘I didn’t know if I’d be able to get back tonight.’

Outside Hal waved a taxi forward from the line and helped her into it. They sat back in the deep seats. Neither spoke. She gazed straight ahead. Her hand lay beside him on the black seat. He wanted to touch it, but was prevented. ‘Are you hungry?’ he said.

‘If you like.’

‘My room is – I’d rather not go to it.’

‘Fine, then.’

They had the taxi let them out on Westbourne Grove, not knowing exactly where to go, avoiding his room and neither of them thinking sensibly. The pavement was full of people. Hal tried to shield Clara. They walked some way with just the occasional ‘Here…’ or ‘Let’s try…’ until both stopped – ran out of ideas – and Hal guided her by the elbow towards the side of the pavement on the opposite corner from a cinema.

‘This is hopeless,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, I should have thought…’

They stood, still figures amongst the crowd, and it began to rain.

‘Umbrella?’

‘I didn’t think of it.’

Around them, black umbrellas went up. Clara almost laughed, didn’t. He saw her face, looking up at him, his red, white and blue girl. ‘You want to leave me,’ he said.

‘No,’ she answered him, and, ‘No, Hal.’

‘Oh,’ he said, relief like the cutting of bonds, frightened by his feelings. His eyes hurt. ‘Damn it.’ He looked around for somewhere to hide.

‘Here.’ Her fingers found his hand.

He turned from the crowd, from her.

‘Hal – stop it. Look at me.’ He couldn’t. ‘Darling…’

The rain, which had been thin, began in earnest, quite suddenly. Thick cold drops, impossible to ignore. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, ‘you’ll catch cold. Here.’

He pointed over the road to the cinema, where the crowds, even at that time, were quite thick around the door. They crossed the road, half running, and got under the canopy, lit by bulbs, and glancing around them. He took hold of the tops of her arms and held her, looking into her face. ‘I went for a job.’

‘Did you?’ she said faintly.

‘You should be sitting down. You look – this is no good.’

There was a queue at the kiosk.

‘Just until the rain –’

‘Yes, all right –’

He bought tickets, and immediately afterwards the woman pulled down the shutter.

‘Sold out,’ she said.

‘What’s the film?’ asked Clara.

‘I don’t know.’

They pushed inside to the warmth and cigarette smoke, the felted darkness.

The white screen flashed brightly past the heads of the people jostling at the entrance. The dark silhouettes of strangers in rows, the smell of their scent and hair cream and moving bodies as the usherette passed the beam of her torch over them to find seats. The speakers blared loudly in the opening chords of Pathé News, sharp sounds and sharper picture, the plumed cockerel, all heads lifted and turning. This was the reason for the crowd; this was the urgency in the feeling of the place; this was the need that had dragged them there.

Hal let his hand drop from Clara’s arm. He was pressed against the wall by people, not noticing them, or anything, just watching.

‘Yesterday. The Canal Zone. Egypt. British and French troops began the invasion of Port Said…’

The big screen, huge pictures of the invasion, filled his sight. The parachutes, floating under triumphant music, the vast troop carriers…

‘Twenty thousand troops began their dawn invasion,’ said the commentator, his clipped, portentous tone sealing the jolt from image to image, and then Anthony Eden.

‘Today in Whitehall, the Prime Minister spoke…’ His magnified face, staring down into the crowd, it seemed, his voice resolute and passionate. ‘Britain and France have joined in this action that will safeguard the world…’

Clara, shielded by Hal’s body, looked up at him. He didn’t see her.

All around him people, sitting and standing in couples, groups, fidgeting in their soft civilian suits, watching with their vague, ill-tutored civilian eyes, and he, forced amongst them in the thick city air of England…

‘Hal.’

He felt her press close to him, her arms around him in the dark. Her hand was on his cheek, forcing his eyes from the screen, and he, looking down, saw nothing and felt only her lips against his mouth.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Don’t –’

There were boos in the crowd, the people, watching, shifted their attention. Some fell silent, looking for the noise, and others joined in with it, a low sound, almost too deep to hear.

‘And we can bring peace and stability…’ Eden went on, to boos and hisses. Somebody threw something at the screen, a whistle, laughter, catcalls.

‘Let’s go,’ said Clara.

‘Yes, all right. Come on.’

They turned away.

Behind them, scenes of protest, crowds, banners in Trafalgar Square, the voice followed them out: ‘…as meanwhile, in London today, a large crowd of protesters made their feelings known…’

He took her hand and led her out, using the suitcase to push people aside, apologising, until they came out into the deserted foyer.

Rain poured thickly down. It beat on the pavements, bouncing up, and ran in trickles and drips about the doors and glass panes, splashing onto the carpeted step, puddling. Hal looked down at Clara, who was white-faced, and when she looked back her eyes were almost black, the pupils dilating into the blue irises.

He couldn’t imagine her walking, not through the rain. ‘Here. It’s not far.’

He picked her up easily, and the case with her. She tucked her face into him, putting her arms around his neck. He crossed the wide road where cars, blinded by rain, rolled slowly.

Hal, carrying Clara, walked fast up the pavement through the rain. In a minute or two they were at the door to his lodgings, drenched, him out of breath, her face wet, his hair dripping cold wet drops onto her face. Her skirt was wet, his trousers splashed and heavy. He set her down. ‘All right?’ He took his key and let her into the dark hall. ‘Up on the left. At the front.’

The bedroom door was loose and light on its hinges. Hal had lit the gas and hung her skirt nearby to dry. They lay on the thin bed together, with no space, touching all down their bodies. He stroked her hair from her face, pulling the pink cover over her. It wasn’t clean. They didn’t look at it.

‘You shouldn’t have come all this way,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you were thinking.’

Her feet were wet in her stockings, darker where her shoes had been. The white skin of her thighs was very smooth. He lifted her blouse, lightly, from her stomach and Clara shut her eyes. She had a nylon belt for a sanitary towel, too, the fragile practicality of her femininity. He slipped his finger under the elastic of her silk knickers, it wasn’t tight, he lifted the band away from her. The long cut was raised, slightly, the points where the stitches had been still red. She put her hand over his. ‘Don’t touch it,’ she said.

‘I won’t,’ he said, but stroked with two fingers the skin that was unmarred, in small strokes, where it was soft and wouldn’t tickle her or hurt. ‘Tell me about the girls,’ he said. ‘Anything.’

‘They’re so well, Hal. Much happier now. Meg says, “Don’t do that,” all the time. Lottie has been gardening with my mother…’

As she spoke, he tucked her things and the cover around her again.

‘They’re both finding it jolly cold, and woke in the night twice last night. They need proper flannel nighties. It will be a horrible shock for them.’

‘Hot-water bottles,’ he said.

‘Yes, but we’ve only the one.’

The gas fire popped and hissed. The dark rain fell outside, the constant sound, far faint drops and closer drums and taps, too. They held hands.

The silence lengthened.

‘Meg says “lub” for “love”…’ she said, slowly.

He waited until she closed her eyes. He shifted his arm uncomfortably. After a while, Clara, sleeping now, settled into him, and Hal, his eyes open, listened to the falling rain.