The Heat of the Day (13 page)

her, with the unbounded night in which no clock struck. "No, I have not heard a clock strike all the evening," she said aloud. "It might be any hour." He had recourse to the luminous dial of his watch. Either because she had not directly asked or out of habit, he kept what the watch had told him to himself; but said, as though in reference to the fact that time had gone by, so that any earlier movement by him or her was now history: "I rather needed a breather. You didn't mind?" She took this, as it could of course be taken, as a hint that though making use of her window it had been his intention to breathe at it alone. "No, do," she said, "breathe as long as you like," and turned to grope in the folds behind her for her way back between the curtains into the room. The movement of stuff and the chinks of lamplight knocked through by her touch roused him--"You can't stay?" he said, "breathe too? I've been liking that. This air now--at least we have that in common. Nothing more, since you say." "I was sorry for what I said." "Did you know you said 'horrible'?" He picked up the word with some hesitation, uncertain whether it would or would not sting twice. "No, what you said was 'horribly alike'--that simply made no contact with what I meant." "I'm sorry--I thought you meant something more. Yes, we both have natures; but what I can't bear is what you do to mine, what you make mine do. If it only were that you loved me, I could do no worse than not love you back; but there has been something worse--somehow you've distorted love. You may not feel what it feels like to be a spy; I do--ever since you came to me with that story. You've banked on my not having the courage to ask one question, and you've been right, so far. However, don't let us talk again." "I must say, I liked it this evening when you were tired. You let me fetch you that glass of milk." "And I never offer you anything to eat or drink." "While you still don't think you want me here, that seems fair enough. Though this evening when we came in and you changed your shoes everything began to be something like what it could be. But then suddenly, somehow, I went and put a foot wrong--got you right up again against what I do. To _me__, tonight, whatever I do's outside." To her, tonight, "outside" meant the harmless world: the mischief was in her own and in other rooms. The grind and scream of battles, mechanised advances excoriating flesh and country, tearing through nerves and tearing up trees, were indoor-plotted; this was a war of dry cerebration inside windowless walls. No act was not part of some calculation; spontaneity was in tatters; from the point of view of nothing more than the heart any action was enemy action now.... Also, letting the curtain drop, returning to lean her forehead against the pushed-up sash of the window, already clammy, she understood, with regard to Harrison, the hopeless disparity between belief and truth. He was sincere in everything he said; probably she might never hear again words like these of his, concentrations of an entire being. At the same time, he misstated at every turn; there was monstrous heresy somewhere in his love; to as much as dispute with him was to injure honour. To be in his embrace would be to accept, forever, that strength was left in nothing but obsession. She was not to know, even, whether, in keeping her by him by the window, he might not be banking on the effect of the dark, on the senses' harmony when there is one sense missing, some sort of harmony of the blind. Indeed his psychic, his moral blindness was most nearly acceptable on unseeing terms; and his abstention from touching her, always marked and careful, was becoming, in this constriction of the embrasure, powerful as a touch. He had been acute in liking her tired: something, an involuntary overflow from her nerves, _had__ begun to fill up the space between them. Only he, though, could have christened _that__ understanding--he, only, thus could have marked the enormous breach, the desert, between understanding and where they really stood. With a jerk, she raised her head from the sash. "Will you go now? I think I must go to bed." "Right," he said, expressionlessly and promptly. She made her way back into the empty room; he followed. "Your parcel," he said, "my hat...." "I'm sorry about the rain. I still don't know where you live." "Might want to get in touch with me?" "I only--" "Don't worry; I shall look in again."

Chapter 8

LOUIE kept a look-out for Harrison in the park, but, as she had feared was probable, failed to see him. Evidently he only could have been there, that one Sunday, for some special purpose; she wondered what his other purposes might be. She continued to ponder, from time to time, over his and her disheartening farewell, which any other girl might have called a smack in the face. "You never know, these days," she would say to anyone who would listen. "You do have to watch--you never know for instance who you might not find yourself sitting next to. Anyone might be funny, for all you know. I met a man who was funny the other day." "What, a scream, you mean?" asked her friend Connie, when this was tried on her. "No, I don't mean." When anyone took her up wrong, a look of animal trouble passed over Louie's face. To talk, which she had to do, was to tender what words she had; to be forced to search for anything further, better, was as persecuting as having to dip for escaped coppers into the depths of her handbag--yes, and that on top of a pitching blacked-out bus--with the conductor standing over her snorting. "No I didn't. I meant, a bit off." "You surprise me," said Connie. "You mean to tell me you never met but that one man in that state? To me these days a man who wasn't a bit off in one way if not another would be remarkable." "Ah, but you meet all sorts," Louie said respectfully. "I've got my head screwed on, which is more than you have." "_He__ said that--he said I ought to take care!" It had begun to appear to her, looking back, that Harrison had fathered and understood her. "It's not even as if," said Connie, "you were a London girl." Louie nodded--yes, there was that, again: she was a Kentish sea-coast orphan. "It's in a way unsettling," she told Connie, "not being able to get back again to where I come from." It was that, exactly. Tom gone, she had lately felt in London like a day tripper who has missed the last train home. Obliteration of everything by winter was to be dreaded. Already the late-autumnal closing in of the evenings was setting a term to new adventures; their scene was vanishing--some sort of mindless hope had gone on haunting her for just so long as daylight had gone on haunting streets. Through the summer her husband's step, still only just out of hearing, could be imagined turning and coming back; while summer lasted she therefore still need not shut up shop. Within the narrowing of autumn, the impulses of incredulous loneliness died down in her; among them, that readiness to quicken which had made her look for her husband in other faces. True, she felt nearer Tom with any man than she did with no man--true love is to be recognised by its aberrations; so shocking can these be, so inexplicable to any other person, that true love is seldom to be recognised at all. Now when she came out from the factory even dusk was over; under the tattered dark of the skies everyone in the streets on the way home looked as purposeful as Harrison; Louie was swept along in one shoal of indifferent shadows against another. Momentarily, dimmed-down blue light from inside a bus or some flash from an opened-then-shut door brought her own eyes into being--vacant, asking, ignorant and askance. Anything else she had with which to draw a second glance from the world--wide Jutish features, big thin-skinned lips--was cancelled: the darkness did not love her. To be not seen was for her not to be. It was a phenomenon of wartime city night that it brought out something provocative in the step of most modest women; Nature tapped out with the heels on the pavement an illicit semaphore. Alone was Louie in being almost never accosted; whatever it _was__ was missing from her step; she walked, she strode, she bulked ahead through the dark with the sexless flat-footed nonchalance of a ten-year-old, only more heavily. No, this was no season for her to be starting anything out of doors. Neither did Sundays, her only daylight at liberty, any more bring return: from the Sunday park the illusory sensuous veil was stripped--one saw clean through the thickets into empty distance; the ilexy love mound rode in a waste of lawn like a ship abandoned; strangers gave one another unmeeting looks. Habituated lovers made the park tour briskly and arm-in-arm; along black paths and round more sheltered seats she overheard chatter of that existence which was the secret of everybody except her--even the refugees could embrace their memories and their injury. Yes, it was in the disenchanted park that London's indifference to Louie stood out most stark and bare. There still was, however, some negative virtue in being outdoors. Indoors meant Chilcombe Street; here resided the fact of her being of meaning only to an absent person, absent most appallingly from this double room. Tom seldom had looked at Louie; he was not one to look again at anything he had once seen. He had been accustomed to spend his home evenings frowning at some technical book, or frowning because he was thinking something technical out. It had been Louie who--chair tilted back, tongue exploring her palate, mind blank of anything in particular--had hour-long passively gazed at Tom. Why now, therefore, should it be his chair that gazed at her? It directed something at her whichever way she pushed, pulled or turned it, in whatever direction she turned it. The discountenancing of the chair by filling it had been her object in bringing strangers she met in the park back here. Now she came to think over it, this autumn, none of her visitors had been seen again: in some cases they had been no more than crossing London with perhaps an hour or two to spend. If any of them ever by chance had come back to look for her, owing to not knowing anybody else in London either, the probability was they had knocked on the wrong door; which from the point of view of her reputation was just as well--soldiers or airmen coming round asking for Louie would have looked wrong. Her wireless, by the way, was by this time dead out, finished, after all their tinkering at it; she had been sorry, each time, that she had ever said anything about her wireless in the first place--its having seemed since Tom left to be a bit off had most likely only been her imagination.... These October evenings, the silence left by the wireless was filled in by the coughing of the gas fire, which now also had some complaint. In order to delay her return home, she had formed the habit of dropping into a caf6 in Tottenham Court Road to eat supper: the place was mirrored--she had the satisfaction of seeing, in bright steaminess, herself, Louie, walk in, look round and sit down. The café habit however came to be interrupted, for as against autumn deficits there was now Connie, and no evening when Connie was off duty was to be thrown away. It was true Connie did have dates, but you never knew. Connie, an A.R.P. warden, had lately moved in to one of the two top-floor rooms of the Chilcombe Street house. She was a year or two the other side of thirty, tough, cross, kind, with bags under her eyes under the powder, a bull fringe and a brick-red postbox mouth. At the first glance, Louie had been alarmed by the notion that this uniformed newcomer must be something to do with the police, and even when this appeared less likely there still was something alarming about that scissor-like stride in the dark-blue official slacks. It could but look as though Connie, in her braced-in tunic, must somehow be one more person empowered to tick one off. It turned out not only that Chilcombe Street was outside the area of the particular wardens' post Connie adorned, and therefore outside her official sphere, but that her ideas of _off__ duty were stringent. She paid rent here in order to have some place to put her feet up without threat of interruption--in fact, it would always be out of order for Connie to tamper with another post's bomb. Therefore, should No .10 Chilcombe Street chance to become an incident while she was reposing under its roof, they need not, she gave out, come coming round after her--unless, naturally, she should require to be dug out. There was not, as it happened, anything doing in Connie's line of business this London autumn of 1942; at the post throughout long hours of duty she dislocated her jaw yawning, or swapping cracks with other posts on the official telephone. To top all, as if watching the hands of the post clock go round and round, night in, day out, above Mr. Churchill's picture were not bad enough, outside persons at sight of her uniform were becoming nasty about the pay she drew, which _she__ knew to be shockingly insufficient. No one who held you were paid too high for doing damn all by the hour could themselves have tried doing damn all by the hour. Not, as she pointed out, that she was by any means doing damn all; Headquarters were everlastingly thinking up something new in order to keep Connie upon the hop. But that was the civilian public for you all over; the minute they stopped being pasted they became fresh--another slight doing-over, if she ought not to say so, would once again show them where they got off. A slight doing-over of London, just now, would in fact have been to her interest: with everything going on being slack it began to look as though they might come round trying to winkle Connie out of Civil Defence. If she could have got out back to the tobacco kiosk where she used to reign, that of course would have been quite another matter, but a Mobile Woman dared not look sideways these days--you might find yourself in Wolverhampton (a friend of hers had) or at the bottom of a mine, or in the A.T.S. with some bitch blowing a bugle at you till you got up in the morning. It was well, she remarked, for Louie being a soldier's wife, though if she had half a head on her shoulders she should have started a kid also. After two or three of their Chilcombe Street evening talks Louie's awe of Connie did not so much evaporate as shift its ground. Decidedly Connie qualified by her nerve to be a saviour of the human race; at the same time she had a tongue like a file, so that you could not take her to be the race's lover. She had walked out of the kiosk, thereby forfeiting a week's pay, on September 1st 1939, because, being funny that way, she had had an intuition that something was really going to happen this time. She was bossy, if she had to say so herself; prey, since childhood, to a repressed wish to issue orders, blow whistles, direct traffic. This had always made trouble for her in previous jobs; in Civil Defence, she had been in the first place given to understand, initiative would be what was wanted. Before she knew better she had signed on. You live and learn. Tom wrote back, he was glad to hear Louie had made a girl friend, particularly one in their own house: she sounded to him as though she should be company. Formerly Tom had not been in favour of being in anyway free with other tenants, which could lead first to chattering on the stairs, next to dropping in borrowing. It was different however now with Louie left on her own--always provided Connie _was__ all she said. In fact, before Connie entered the picture, he had once or twice asked if there were no girl, of the quiet sort, Louie could cotton to at the factory? She had written back that the trouble was that at the factory there were all sorts. She was right, of course, he returned, in being particular. The actual trouble at the factory was, that you had to have something to say, tell, swop, and Louie was unable to think of anything. She felt she did not make sense, and still worse felt that the others knew it. Women seemed to feel she had not graduated; where _had__ she been all her life, they wanted to know--and, oh, where had she? It is advantageous being among all sorts if you are some sort, any sort: you gravitate to your type. It is daunting if you discover you are still no sort--the last hope gone. The one real privilege of the sheltered class is, status for the original: there was none for Louie. With Connie everything was, on the other hand, all right--Connie less spotted the vacuum in her friend than was drawn to it: she was a constitutional rusher in to fill.... The two became introduced and intimate within the same two minutes, the night Connie happened to fall upstairs. At the sound of pound after pound of hard vegetables and an electric torch bouncing down step after step of flight after flight or dropping plumb through the banisters into the hall below, Louie could but rush out of her door. Having switched the mean landing light on she looked up, to see above her the soles of doughty shoes, in one of which was embedded a drawing-pin, fiercely scrabbling for hold on the lino treads: next, Connie heaved up her spare dark behind--it was not till she was upright that she started swearing as though the house were hers: in that line she was royal. She came down three steps nearer the light in order to brush off the knees of her slacks, in the course of which she gave Louie a dirty look. "Anything further I can do for you?" she said. The stair and landing lighting in No .10 was of the kind which puts itself out automatically after two minutes: it not only now did so but continued to do so throughout the search--Louie, galumphing up and down in her pink nightie, helped Connie gather up the potatoes, turnips, carrots, and it was she who finally found the torch. It was a wonderful evening. The stairs which usually smelled of null cleaned airlessness soon reeked of anger-heated government-blue serge--moreover Connie, though not redheaded, was at almost any time of the foxy type. When they were really through it was, by Connie's reckoning, 23.25; consequently there were complaints that night and more next day. Never before had Louie, with her first-floor prestige to which was added that of soldier's wife, been in this or any kind of trouble with the rest of the house. She and Connie finished by drinking tea. There was almost nothing Connie liked better than a newspaper; she had almost always been reading one just recently. She was a collector of newspapers of almost any age, either to look at again or to wrap up things in--she acquired them by every means but purchase, keeping an eye open, wherever she might be, for one which might have been put down even for a moment. Knowing how quick people could be to serve you a dirty turn, she habitually seated herself on any paper or papers she had collected; at the post, to be forced off her papers by any duty made her as _distraite__ as a mother bird. They arrived home with her limp and without a crackle. Compelled to sacrifice one in order to light a fire in the doll-sized grate of her attic at No .10, she would, squatting, having applied the match, peer forward into the acrid smoke to read the last of the print till a flame ate it--you never knew what you might not just happen to miss. This addiction of