The Green Gauntlet (8 page)
‘Not likely! I’ve had half a bottle of Burgundy and three brandies and I can’t hold liquor like you and Andy. If I felt your arms round me you’d have to put me to bed in a straight jacket!’ She lifted her hand and walked, with deliberate steadiness, into the bedroom, continuing to talk to him through the open door as he made up his couch. ‘Don’t open the windows no matter how stuffy it gets! You can’t do it without taking the blackout down and that A.R.P. whippersnapper will be hammering at the door in five seconds flat.’ He heard her yawn and stumble. ‘Are you all right, Margy?’ She didn’t answer so he finished making his shakedown and looked in at the open door. Her clothes were strewn about the floor and she was already asleep with the bedside light still burning. He crossed over to switch it off and looked down on her, noting her pleasing chubby face, fresh complexion, and that absurd peek-a-boo hair-do. He thought, glumly, ‘Old Andy always did know what he was doing, the lucky old sod!’
He awoke with a start, blinking into the blackness of the big room and seeing nothing but hearing, close at hand, a rhythmical sniffing, like someone tormented by a running cold. The couch, big as it was, did not accommodate him and he had cramp in one leg. It was cold and very still. No sound came from outside, only the long, regular sniffs from close at hand. He sat up, hitching the blankets about his shoulders. ‘Is that you, Margy?’ and when he thought he heard a mumble between the sniffs, he said, ‘Hold on, I’ll turn on the light.’ But she said, urgently, ‘No, Stevie! Leave the light be,’ and he waited, puzzled and mildly apprehensive.
‘What is it? Don’t you feel so good?’ and when the sniffs moderated and there was a short silence, ‘Is it Andy? Can’t you cope, Margy?’
Then she was beside him and he felt her bare shoulders under his hand. She was wearing no dressing-gown, just a flimsy silk nightdress and suddenly he felt a terrible compassion for her as he might have felt for a child left out in the dark and the rain.
He dragged a blanket from the couch, threw it over her shoulders and held her close to him. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, ‘if you want to snivel all night snivel and be done with it!’ and he sat there feeling deeply moved by her helplessness and wondering with part of his mind, where her flat-mate was and what conclusion she would be likely to draw from the pair of them huddling under a blanket at three o’clock on a winter’s morning.
Presently the sniffs ceased but she did not move away. He could feel her hair against his face and the simple perfume she used reminded him, improbably, of summer in the Valley when he was a boy crossing Shallowford Woods on his cob. She was that kind of person he decided and had never been otherwise, despite their years of racketing about the fashionable resorts of the Continent and the cities of the North and Midlands. She didn’t belong in cities but somewhere like that place in Wales she had mentioned. She was more akin to his mother than to Monica, someone who needed open spaces, country scents, plenty of good food and a big, hearty husband who threw her about and shared her primitive instincts. In a way she had always been the odd one out of the quartette, stringing along for Andy’s sake and for his, sensing the strength of the link between two men emerging from the same womb within seconds of one another. She was worth, he thought, about ten Monicas, providing you had the sense to value her in real currency.
‘I’ll put the kettle on and brew some coffee,’ he said, but she reached out and held him, holding the blanket closely about them so that it would have needed a determined effort on his part to get up from the couch.
‘You told me about you and Monica,’ she said presently, ‘but you don’t know about me. I woke up and felt frightened, frightened about everything, Steve. You’ve got to help me! I can’t go on like this any longer and it’s better you than just anybody, you understand?’
He didn’t, or if he did he did not bring himself to believe the implications of her appeal. ‘You can talk,’ he said, ‘you can tell me any damn thing you like if it helps.’
‘It does,’ she said, ‘it helps more than you know! I can’t face not having someone all that time. I knew I couldn’t a few days after Andy left but I stuck it out as long as I could, longer than I could, you understand now? Then I went on the bottle and that helped for a time but later on it only made things worse. Last Christmas there was a man—Johnny, a medical student—and after him another, a Yank from the Embassy, someone Henrietta brought home. I felt awful about it afterwards and wanted to do myself in. Can you believe that? I wanted to plug the windows and doors and turn on that gas-fire. I felt like doing it again the other night just before you rang. It was either that or go out and find a man. Any man! All these other wives, I don’t know how they cope! Maybe they aren’t made like me, or maybe they weren’t rolled once a night by someone as lusty as Andy. Anyway, that’s the way it is, and if you write me off as a nympho I wouldn’t blame you. That’s what I am I suppose, only, like I say, it wouldn’t have seemed so bad if there had been more to it than just using someone, the way I used Johnny and that Yank. What I mean is, if either of them had meant a damn thing apart from their sex.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Do you want to smash my face in, Stevie?’
She asked him to judge her but he had no useful comment to make. She had made it all too clear that she had been fighting a losing battle with herself from the moment Andy’s troopship sailed into the blue. Men didn’t get leave from the Middle East. It might be years before she could lie in his arms again and it might be never. She just wasn’t the kind of person who could sit hoping and longing and remembering, or pouring her feelings on to sheets of paper. Then he had another thought and it disturbed him more deeply than her confession. Clearly something had been expected of him last night, and equally clearly the flat-mate, Henrietta, wasn’t likely to show up. He remembered the casual way she had invited him here and the way she had relaxed half on to his knee in the taxi. He remembered also that impulsive gesture at the station, when she had seized his hand and pressed it hard against her breasts, and after that the way she had punished the wine and the brandy and then suddenly blundered off to bed before she gave herself away. And now here was a snivelling admission that she had already been to bed with two other men, and, although ravaged by guilt, she was still ready to admit to her terrible need of them. ‘It’s better you than just anybody,’ she had said, and this seemed to clinch the point and, what was worse, leave the decision to him. It was almost as though she thought of him as part of Andy, someone to whom she could turn without disloyalty, not only because he was Andy’s twin but because they had always lived on top of one another, had gone everywhere and done everything together, and he wondered if any kind of case could be made out for either of them in these terms and whether, in fact, it was more treacherous or less treacherous on her part and his. He said, gruffly, ‘Last night … when we came back here … what did you expect, Margy?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I knew Henrietta wouldn’t be back and just hoped, I suppose. That way I could have told myself I was only half to blame for whatever happened and anyway, I’m not pretending when I say I’ve always thought of you as one person. You are, and you always have been. That’s why, the minute I woke up and thought about you in here, I had to come in and blurt it out.’
‘Is that all?’ he said soberly. ‘You feel better now that I know about it?’
‘In one way I do. I should have gone mad if I had kept it bottled up any longer but just seeing you, and hearing your voice is hell. I couldn’t have got through last evening without all that drink.’
His instinct was to shy away from involvement. He said, breathlessly, ‘This is crazy, Margy! God knows, I like you a lot, and always have, but you and me—how would it help? You’d feel even worse when I’d gone, and me … I’d see myself as the all-time bastard every time I thought of either you or Andy.’
She said nothing but under the blanket he felt her body contract slightly and her withdrawal seemed to reaffirm that the decision was his and that she had emptied herself of blame simply by telling him about the medical student and the man from the Embassy. He understood this and resented it but there seemed nothing to be done about it. He said, bitterly, ‘You would feel that way, wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ she said, and he was shocked by the steadiness of her voice, ‘I wouldn’t feel any way, except glad. Glad because it was you and not someone who was out looking for a randy woman!’
He wanted then to escape from the folds of the blanket and reject her with a laugh or a conventional gesture of sympathy. A sound like a groan escaped him and, without in the least moderating his yearning for her, anger rose level with pity. She knew what he was going through but she didn’t help him, and he knew that it was not from lack of sympathy on her part but because these last few months had robbed her of the power to make an emotional decision.
He had no idea how long they sat there, her head on his shoulder, her body inclined to him by the angle of the couch and the folds of the shared blanket, but presently she said, in the same emptied voice, ‘Anyway, Andy won’t come back. I knew that the day we said good-bye at Chester Station, and he went off to that Personnel Despatch Centre. Maybe it was knowing it that made me act the way I did. I don’t know, I don’t know a damn thing anymore, except that everything is going to pieces and only you being around keeps me from wanting to pack it in.’
Her fatalistic acceptance of Andy’s death, and the despair inherent in her voice frightened him as he had never been frightened by physical risks he faced almost every day of his life. He said, helplessly, ‘For Christ’s sake, Margy—don’t talk like that …’ but suddenly she threw aside the blanket and moved away from the couch so that he thought she was crossing the room for the drink he so badly needed. He soon realised otherwise. She had returned to the bedroom leaving the door wide open and switched on her bedside light. He called, furiously, ‘Get something on and for God’s sake let’s both have a drink!’
‘I don’t want any more to drink,’ she said, quietly. ‘If you do, help yourself.’
There was silence for a moment as he made a great effort of will to get up, pour himself a stiff brandy, drink it and get to hell out of the place before she could move within reach again but suddenly she reappeared in the doorway, the light behind her, so that she might as well have been naked. That way, he thought, she looked exactly as he had just imagined her without clothes, her limbs plump, rounded and nicely proportioned, so that he suddenly thought of his wife’s figure as angular and without promise. She stood there perfectly still, looking across at him without a flicker of embarrassment or apology. Then she said, very levelly, ‘In for a penny in for a pound! That was another of Andy’s dictums, remember? Come in, man, and lock the damned door behind you!’ and she shrugged herself out of her nightdress and climbed slowly into bed.
She had to shake him when she brought in the tea and he opened his eyes astonished to see her wearing that identical scarlet-lined cloak he had expected to see at the station. There was no hint in her manner or expression of the hysteria of less than three hours ago and when she addressed him by name she might have been hailing him on the beach at Deauville where he and Andy and Monica were sunbathing while she wandered off to fiddle with one of those idiotic little machines that accounted for her loose change wherever they went.
‘I’m going now, Stevie. You take your time. You’ve nothing to get up for, have you now?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing’ and then, as he took the cup a little of her tranquillity passed to him and he looked at her with a kind of awe that acknowledged her ability to solve her problems so swiftly and resolutely. He opened his mouth to say something but she lifted her hand and pushed a playful finger against his lips. ‘No inquest,’ she said. ‘When do you have to go back?’
‘I’m due in camp at 0800 hours tomorrow and it’ll mean catching the 1.30 a.m. from King’s Cross. Will you be back in time?’
‘I’ll see that I am,’ she said, ‘and don’t bother about Henrietta. She’s off on a dirty weekend of her own. King’s Lynn I think she said. She won’t be here until tomorrow night. Good-bye now. There’s cornflakes and a few rashers in the ’fridge. Milk too if you want to make yourself coffee.’ She bent and kissed him on the mouth and as she drew away she gave a little giggle. ‘You’re plastered with lipstick,’ she said, ‘and you look like the broken-hearted clown! Don’t worry! It’s done and it’ll stay done, so make the best of it before everything goes bang!’
IV
I
t is just possible that Monica, married to Andrew instead of Stevie, might have become reconciled to the life of an R.A.F. camp-follower.
Most people, both in the Valley and out of it, thought of The Pair as interchangeable but Claire for one had always known they were not. There was a fanatical streak in Andy that reminded her of Paul and was entirely lacking in his twin. Both had been unspectacular scholars at school but once they were launched into the scrap world old Franz Zorndorff had soon recognised the complementary contributions each could make to his business concerns. Stevie had charm and an amiability capable of conjuring a profit from the crustiest dealer and the fields in which he operated, cozening, bribing, softening up prospects, were bars or clubs. Andy showed himself more adept at mastering the economics of the trade and later, when they became fliers, he was able to pay the same address to the scientific aspects of aerial warfare. With Stevie, at least up to the moment he flew a bomber on operations, the war in the air had been little more than a lark. Technicalities bored him, even though he never had much difficulty in absorbing enough of them to make him an average pilot, but Andy soon outgrew their initial approach to flying and became deeply interested in the slow build-up of tactical skills as opposed to the hit-and-miss approach of the dashing amateurs who filled the gaps made in professional cadres by the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain. With the development of this more objective attitude some of the natural exuberance left over from his youth departed, enabling him, to an extent, to regard the extravagances of the R.A.F. façade in much the same light as his down-to-earth sister-in-law. He did not crumple his cap. He did not use much slang. And he had no personal animosity against the enemy, thinking of him as he had once thought of schoolmasters and rival scrap dealers, people there to be outwitted, targets for his ingenuity and daring.