The Heat of the Day (14 page)

Connie's could be and was imitated by Louie: having begun by impressing Connie, newspapers went on to infatuate Louie out-and-out. If you could not keep track of what was happening you could at least take notice of what was said--in the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run. This went for anything written down. Once Louie had taken to newspapers she found peace--so much so that she wondered why they had seemed to unsettle Tom. With the news itself she was at some disadvantage owing to having begun in the middle; she never quite had the courage to ask anyone, even Connie, how it had all begun--evidently one thing must have led to another, as in life; and whose the mistake had been in the first place, or how long ago, you would not care to say. Left to herself she had considered that anything so dreadful as this last year could only in some way have been her own fault--Singapore falling the week Tommy went away; the Australians right off even where they were getting that bad fright from the Japs; us getting pushed right on top of the Egyptians in spite of everything; the Russians keeping nagging at us to do something; the Duke of Kent killed who had been so happy; even those harmless ancient cathedrals not to speak of Canterbury getting bombed also; and us running right out of soap and sweets till _they__ had to go on coupons--one more headache.... But once you looked in the papers you saw where it said, nothing was so bad as it might look. What a mistake, to have gone by the look of things! The papers knew Britain had something up her sleeve--Britain could always, in default of anything else, face facts. For the paper's sake, Louie brought herself to put up with any amount of news--the headlines got that over for you in half a second, deciding for you every event's importance by the size of the print. As far as she could make out, the same communiqu6s were taken out and used again and again. As against this, how inspiring was the variety of the true stories, which made the war seem human, people like her important and life altogether more like it was once. But it was from the articles in the papers that the real build-up, the alimentation came--Louie, after a week or two on the diet, discovered that she _had__ got a point of view, and not only _a__ point of view but the right one. Not only did she bask in warmth and inclusion but every morning and evening she was praised. Even the Russians were apparently not as dissatisfied with her as she had feared; there was Stalingrad going on holding out, but here was she in the forefront of the industrial war drive. As for the Americans now in London, they were stupefied by admiration for her character. Dark and rare were the days when she failed to find on the inside of her paper an address to or else account of herself. Was she not a worker, a soldier's lonely wife, a war orphan, a pedestrian, a Londoner, a home and animal-lover, a thinking democrat, a movie-goer, a woman of Britain, a letter-writer, a fuel-saver and a housewife? She was only not a mother, a knitter, a gardener, a foot-sufferer or a sweetheart--at least, not rightly. Louie now felt bad only about any part of herself which in any way did not fit into the papers' picture: she could not have survived their disapproval. They did not, for instance, leave flighty wives or good-time girls a leg to stand on; and how rightly--she had romped through a dozen pieces on that subject with if anything rather special zest, and was midway through just one more when the blast struck cold. Could it be that the papers were out with _Louie__?--she came over gooseflesh, confronted by God and Tom. She did not begin to rally till next evening, when her paper came out strongly in favour of nonstandoffishness--it appeared that we were becoming less standoffish; the Americans had been agreeably surprised. War now made us one big family.... She was re-instated; once again round her were the everlasting arms. Yes, she rallied--for, wife or not, she could see she was not of the flighty build, and girl or not, she rarely had ended by having what she could consider a good time. Neither did she go out with men: she was out to start with. It had been one of those reconciliations after which feeling enters a deeper phase. Louie came to love newspapers physically; she felt a solicitude for their gallant increasing thinness and longed to feed them; she longed to fondle a copy still warm from the press, and, in default of that, formed the habit of reading crouching over her fire so as to draw out the smell of print. While deferring to Connie's _droit du seigneur__ over any newspaper entering the house, Louie hated to see her use it with that sensual roughness. She was unable to watch a portion of fish being wrapped up in newspaper without a complex sensation in which envy and vicarious bliss merged. At the factory, she was drawn to girls and women in whom the same fermentation was to be felt at work--also, thanks to her daily build-up, she felt, and therefore appeared, less odd. Something floated her. She was now, even, in a fair way to make those friends of whom, having Connie, she was no longer in need. Connie's reading of papers was for the most part suspicious; nothing was to get by unobserved by her. Her re-reading of everything was the more impressive because the second time, you were given to understand, what she was doing was reading between the lines. So few having this gift, she felt it devolved on her to use it, and was therefore a tiger for information. As to the ideas (as Louie now called the articles), Connie was a tooth-sucker, a keeper of open mind--they were welcome to sell her anything they could. Conversations at No .10, when Connie's off-duty fell in the evenings, had by now come to groove for themselves a course. Connie conferred herself often upon the first floor, in order to save lighting her own fire. "You saw," Louie had occasion to ask, "where it says how war in some ways makes our characters better?" "Cannot say I had noticed--where did it say?" "Oh, you took where it says away to your room--the one with that land girl pulling that great horse." "Oh, _her__--former mannequin, that was the point of her. It's not what you do that gets you into a picture, if you notice, it's what you did do formerly. She can have the horse as far as I am concerned; but I must say I could derive with some of that fresh air she says she's deriving benefit from. Down underground where I am, in our post, always upon the watch, it might be any time of year or of day or night either.--See about all those birds?" "No, where?" "Off to Africa once again." "Migratory birds those would be, then: Father told me. He liked birds best; ever so many springs he used to be the first to hear the cuckoo; it was chiefly a matter of paying attention, he said. Oh, he used to show me _those__ birds, all along the wires! They always do do--why did it put them in?" "Because they do keep on doing what they always did do, I should imagine. They go to show how Nature pursues her course under any circumstances. Birds like that wouldn't notice there was a war--you might say they were lucky to have no sense. Airman complained how he got in among a pack of birds flying only the other day; decapitated, he said he shouldn't wonder if many of them were. But who's to say _I__ don't get decapitated any of these fine nights; and I do have sense and I do have to worry, so where does that get me? "Still, you'd surely not rather be like the Germans, Connie? I was told how they swallow anything they are told. I know I saw where it said how they do have papers, but not like our ones with ideas. It said how to get _them__ through the war they have to kid them along, but how the war makes us think." "Being prone to that, I did not require war. I always would as soon think as anything else; but what gets you anywhere is character." "The Yanks are struck by our character now they're here." "You ever seen a Yank struck?" "Well, but I saw where it said--" "They're struck on our pubs all right: my friend and I couldn't get in anywhere edgeways the other evening. You might think this was their war _they'd__ started, they and the Russians--" "Oh, but the Russians--oh Connie, how you _can__! When you have to think of Stalingrad at every minute..." Both glanced at the clock. "They are much more different," said Louie, "than all of us." "Oh, I grant you--_they're__ completely titanic. No, if it was Russians we had all over the place here, I should be the first not to complain, I assure you--fighting away like that, if it _is__ chiefly in defence of their own country, they should be entitled to air _their__ views. All I do point out is how we get overlooked, between the Yanks and Russians, when there would have been no war for either of them in the first place had it not been for us." "But I thought Hitler--" "Well, who exhausted his patience? No, one thing I do agree--where it says how character's getting us there. Getting us _where__, of course don't ask me. We must live and learn. I foresee having _my__ hands kept full doing the former." "But isn't much to be learned from the lessons of history, Connie?" "What--Napoleon came to no good, nor did the Kaiser, neither will Hitler do? What we are not told is, who derived the benefit?--and if posterity's half sharp that's what they'll want to know, too. What satisfaction is it to have someone else coming along learning a lesson of history off me? Also in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyway set up to be a lesson; what you _are__ to know you pick up as you go along. Posterity'll only be human nature, taken up with itself. No, what credit you and I don't get now I doubt that we'll get in the hitherto." Louie clapped her hand to her mouth, as though to forbid it ever to speak like Connie's. Behind her fingers she said: "No, you are unkind!" "Who is?" "Talking to me like this." "What, do you want to be like those senseless birds?" "Oh, leave those birds be--I used to see them really! That's what I'd sooner not have about the whole war--them getting mixed up with that airman when they'd set off so gaily...." Louie began to turn her head heavily this way, that way, under some oppression she might or might not elude. She was sitting on the hearthrug, by way of leaning against a chair, but the chair kept skidding away behind her, so also she had to support herself on her hands. Her long strong legs, stretched out in front of her, had by the latening of autumn been forced into stockings: already these were covered with lumpy darns. Connie, feet planted apart, stood up facing the mirror removing bobby-pins from her fringe: she was due on duty at 23.00, which would be only too shortly. She tucked the pins one by one under Louie's clock, but dropped the last on the rug. She paused, looked "down for Louie to pick it up, then clicked her tongue in a fury. Her friend's full eyes, always of an unsafe liquidity in their shallow sockets, had this time overrun. The consequence: glaze on this idiot's cheekbones, a matted dampness--tears need volition to form and fall. "Listen, as if I had not enough without you creating, and about birds, too! If you'd had half what I have to do with the genuine dead! To begin with, whoever saw a bird gay? When they sing it's sex. It's peculiar to me your saying you saw such real birds, or else I wonder your dad never told you that.--Escaped your notice I dropped a bobby?" "Where did you?" "Where?--_there__, by your great feet!" Louie plucked about blindly, all round her feet, in the tufts of rug--losing anything _was__ something, now you could buy nothing. She blurted out: "I did not intend to take on, honestly, Connie; but the birds led to Father. It came to seem unnatural him being gone like that, and Mum, and where we used to be nothing but thin air." "Oh, if that's what it was, never mind the pin. I feel bad now after what I said; but however was I to know what was on your mind? Blow your nose, though, because how you ought to look at it is this way--being elderly your dad was bound to have gone soon in the course of nature; you can't say death's so unnatural; it's just the manner. Also you've got to think how your Mum and Dad were united at the last, haven't you, and how they were able to take their nice home and all their things they set store by with them into the other world. Why, I have seen elderly people left behind here with nothing, everything gone ahead--so pitiful you hardly know what to say. And look at the luck you had, being married and out of it: it would have served no purpose your perishing with them. Not that I'm so sure in my own case I should not sooner be killed than die: I should sooner the less time for morbid thoughts. And what I should wish myself I should wish my dear ones, had I any." "Well, thank you, Connie, I'm sure." "Still, it _was__ wicked." Connie, in uniform slacks and a lace blouse, looked about unwillingly for her tunic. She took off one pearl earring, rubbed at the inflamed lobe of the ear, clipped the earring on again with a pronounced wince. Going on night duty you had all the same to keep up a certain style, and why not? If there were no alerts just at present, not so much as a yellow, you still were not to know who might not at any moment come stumbling in down the post steps out of the black-out, lost--asking where they were and how the hell in that case they were to get to somewhere else. Was the Underground running? which way to the West End? where was Waterloo? where were they to get a put up? what was the matter with staying here with Connie? It was being locked out of every mortal place that got boys down: the post's all night sign attracted them in like moths. No outsider had any right in the post--a civilian ought to know better; by now even foreigners ought to have more sense, but with members of the Forces you stretched a point. For Connie it would have been against nature not to transform the post, in whose front room she watched alone, into an advice bureau: coming in from the anonymity of the darkness anyone was glad to be asked his name. Her post nights were not unlike her kiosk days--soundly as Connie might slumber beside the telephone, she could at any moment pop open a forceful eye. If the nocturnal swelling of her ears constrained her again to remove her earrings, not once had she failed to snap these back into place before whoever it might be was round the door. Let 'em all come, from the D. W. down--she was not to be had at a disadvantage. "Well, you'll be all right for the night, dear," she now stated--pigeon-breasting herself as she buttoned her tunic, tweaked at the basque of it, tautly buckled the belt. Transferring a packet of cigarettes from Louie's chimneypiece to her pocket, she directed a look at Tom's photograph, as though handing over to him. She returned for a second look, always saying nothing.