The Heat of the Day (28 page)

fringe--but then, halfway through, the very ordinariness of the action seemed to unnerve her: she stopped dead, hands up, and cried out: "Now we _are__ in the soup!--For example, what's your husband going to say?" "That's what I wondered." Louie frowned and turned on a hot tap: she watched the strong jet of steamy water rush round and round the basin. "Under other circumstances, he might have been pleased. When you think of all he and I have been through together, this seems not natural, Connie, that he should not know." "What do you expect _me__ to do?" "Well, I don't know, really. I was more wondering what I should do myself." "Still, you come asking me: You know you do, you come asking me. Everyone comes asking me." Connie shot out a hand and turned off the hot tap, furiously: the wasted steam died down. "You mad?" she cried. "When the King himself only uses five inches in his bath? Seizing this occasion to take leave of _all__ your senses? What do you think this makes you?--You're only one of many." This Louie seized upon. "Well, I _am__, aren't I--just one of many?" A sort of illumination widened over her features--slowly, but with a sureness from which one might have suspected that it was not new to them. And worse, in the view of Connie, this settled into a look of inward complacency, even sublimity. She admitted: "I've sometimes thought that myself." "Oho," lashed out Connie, "so you feel fine? That's fine." Louie flinched at once. She set and unset her lips; she held on to the edge of the marble slab--meaninglessly, unless this were for support. Between her reflection, and Connie's, and Connie's actual face, no one of them longer to be confronted, she simply physically did not seem to know which way to turn. "Don't _you__ be angry: you're the first I've told! How does it seem of me, then--so awful? Half of the time this is not half real to me, Con-nie; more like a thing I hear of. I don't know how I should feel: I could equally laugh or cry. Whatever _is__ this?--I've got to see from you. You _are__ angry?" "No, you great sissy, no; I just give you up." "I would not for anything have upset you--perhaps I've been wrong?" "Such a time to choose," Connie could not help pointing out, "after night after night of enemy action. Still, it had to come out." She began to pack back her compact, comb and other etceteras into her handbag; she shut this with a very decisive click, which made her think of something more to be said. "Who was it?--You got any idea?" Louie, in what was just not confusion, began to ramble to and fro searching for gloves--one had fallen off the marble on to the floor: she remembered Stella's grace of two years ago. These naturally were not the same pair; they were a degree more fancy, fringed at the wrists, and still more mauled-looking. She stooped to pick up the fallen. "Must be some friend I made.... I don't think the name would mean anything to you, Connie." "_Which__ name wouldn't mean anything to me?" "You and I've seen so little of each other, this last year." Connie, placing her bag in position under her elbow, glanced once towards Louie, down a perspective of wash-basins, with no expression at all. "Rightie-ho, then." Life, it was to be seen, selected its own methods of going on. "First and foremost," she said, "we better had do what we had intended: eat.--That's right, that's right: take one or two more looks round. What are you leaving behind you _this__ time, I do wonder?--Having had our supper, how about if we thought? We shall require to." She guided Louie firmly towards the exit staircase, on which they passed two ladies on their way down. The baby, it was established, would be due about the middle of July. "No doubt we shall be having the Second Front by that time, also," remarked Louie. Her big sturdy build made her state not, for a good time longer, evident: Connie advised her staying on at the factory for as long as could be. Her only pregnancy sickness was for home, for Seale-on-Sea--but ever more strictly, as with each month the invasion of Europe by us loomed nearer, was the ban on civilian entry into that area being enforced. However, now in London, it came to seem to her, _all__ eyes were turning towards the coast, the sea. Spring days growing longer grew more momentous; there were calculations as to the moon; day and night London shook with Invasion traffic roaring through it to unknown ports. Expectation came to its height, and stood: everybody waited. Louie found herself looking constantly into that very photograph of Tom which had once forbidden her; she felt herself beckoned into that gaze of abstention and futurity--was she not in her own way also drawing abreast of what was to be? Tom himself was in the Italy fighting: it went more against the grain with her, each time she wrote a letter, to dissimulate--why should not he reach out a hand to her as she was? She was his wife. She required to tell him of her sense of no longer being alone. That was obstinate vision of what _should__ be could exist side-by-side with instructed fear of being cast out by him was a miracle: not a thing supported it. Nothing, nothing was to be said for Louie. What _would__ he say? From fear of seeing where it said what he would have a right to say, she took against newspapers--whose front pages were themselves being pervaded by pregnant secrecy. When it came to the time when Connie judged that Chilcombe Street might begin to notice--in which case, who knew who might not take it upon themselves to write Tom one of those wicked letters?--Louie was moved by Connie into another room which had been found, about half a mile away: well that she had got that money to draw on, now paying two rents. Chilcombe Street remained her postal address; she headed letters to Italy as from there. In the emptied first-floor Chilcombe Street double room, Connie considered it best to install herself--otherwise, who knew who might not get their foot round that door? Tom with no place to come back to?--that would cap all. Connie, at the start, had done what seemed only right in suggesting there could, of course, be _one__ way out: she always had the address. She had not really, however, expected Louie to have that much sense, or whatever else it took. "Right," she therefore left it. "I somehow knew you'd be stubborn. In fact I'm beginning to suspect this is what you want." "It wasn't what I _wanted__." "So you say. But now look how it's got hold of you." "All things being the same, I sooner would be a mother, I now see. I can't somehow wish to be as before," "What you _were__ in aid of," Connie had to admit, "often was a mystery to me." "There's always only this: Tom not knowing," Louie always repeated, with that movement of her inhabited eyes. "I do so wish, Connie, you'd think of some way I could put it rightly.--What should I say?" Automatically the question repeated itself, more and more taxing Connie as Louie's passiveness biggened with her body. Left in the world of reality, at bay, Connie fell back a little on the general belief that the Second Front would, somehow, set up a moratorium as to everything. The Second Front was thought to be, like a race, fixed for a day or two after Whitsun. Whitsun went by in an irreproachable glare of racing weather: still nothing happened. Ultimately, one afternoon in Chilcombe Street, off duty, Connie took up her pen--only to stare for some minutes longer at the cloth of the table at which, evening after evening, Tom watched by Louie had studied his technical books. It could be possible that his eyes, shifting from the page as he stopped and thought, had left some key to his ego, his mentality, in the table-cloth pattern _he__ must have traced not less absorbedly than did Connie now. She started slowly to write:-- Dear Tom, I take up my pen as a close girl friend whom you may have heard of, of your wife Louie. Am hoping you will let my intruding pass, owing to her not knowing quite what to say, as you will understand shortly. It would mean much to her to know you saw in the true light what I shall now tell you. She has been quite a curious girl in the way she has been missing and fretting for you, always straying about like a dog with no one, and also you have to take into account how completely her parents were wiped out, unsettling her. I know this is much to ask a man, but all I can say is that I have had recently to take much that might seem peculiar into account myself. It is no use for you or me to judge, you simply have to allow for how anything is going to take a person, as to which there is no saying till you see. She thinks so highly of you that it would be of assistance if you could bring yourself to understand how it all was, and therefore think of her fondly at this time, owing to all she is going through for your sake. There is no disguising that left to ourselves many of us are peculiar, one mistake leading on to others, so must trust you will see what is to blame. I fear I ought now to come to the point, letting you know that, consequently, Louie is now about-- --Connie was interrupted by an imperative ringing of the street door bell, followed by rat-a-tat on the knocker. Stubbing her nib on her writing-pad she listened, persecutedly, lowering her head, waiting. The attack renewed itself: no step of anybody going to the door was to be heard anywhere in the afternoon house. She put her thumbs to her ears, re-read the letter as far as it had got, then all at once found herself thinking slowly: "How if I never had to finish it?" She went down and took in the telegram--which was, indeed, for Louie. Having opened the telegram, Connie stood in awe. "Nearly, I _was__ presumptuous," she thought. Questions to which we find no answer find their own. She set out to walk through the torpid glary May afternoon streets to that other room, just across the railway line, where Louie was. "So if I had worried, it would have been wrongly, for nothing," was one of the first things Louie remarked, later. "I should now be blaming myself for not having known better--instead of which, it was wonderful how I did. That always came, you see, from knowing him patient with me from first to last, however upright he was.--What've you done with where it says? I want to have that, to keep. "The telegram--do you?" "Why yes: for the kid." "They're ACROSS!" It had happened--under a curdled windy improbable June night. The whole of the story narrowed down to Louie, still with _her__ hour ahead, heavily going to her window. Voices were in the street below; multiplied, one voice from dozens of radios came lancing across and across itself out of dozens of windows standing open. Louie leaned out and shouted: "What--is that true?" It was. There was, however, nothing for her to do but sit down again to her seven-year-old stitching--until she, uncontrollably, dropped her work, pushed up her cheeks with both knuckles, began to pray. There was at the same time being an unco-ordinated movement into churches. The unexpected-expected day, with its feeling of elsewhereness, ran its broadcast-echoing course. You could not take back what had been done. The lucid outgoing vision, the vigil for the fighters, lasted ten days more, till the Secret Weapon started: then, it was shameful how fear wrenched thoughts home--droning _things__, mindlessly making for you, thick and fast, day and night, tore the calico of London, raising obscene dust out of the sullen bottom mind. There was no normal hour. Connie first brought Louie back to Chilcombe Street--what did it matter, any longer?--then attempted to run her out of London, but, to where? On and off, on and off sounded the sirens in the nightmare sunlessness: perpetually, Connie had to be dashing to the post. "I should not care to go among strangers," reiterated the sweating Louie, holding tight to the end of the big familiar bed. Then again the wail would go up the air. "The sireen, again--whatever are they thinking of?" "That's the all bloody clear, dear--you never learn, do you?" "Does not make much difference, though, does it, Connie?" The boy was born a little before his time. Christened Thomas Victor, he took no notice of anything--however, Louie agreed she should take him out of London now he was born. He and she, accordingly, departed from the very door of the hospital into abeyance in a Midland county, in which luck guided her to a still handsome second-hand pram. This pram she learned to wheel, brake, tilt, even to tow behind her as she progressed gazingly along the windows of shopping streets. The baby's intention to survive put itself across her and taught her sense: the clearance, across at the other side, of the last of the enemy out of the Channel ports made it possible for her to return to Seale-on-Sea, an orderly mother. The sea, there, glittered as though nothing had happened. She installed herself in the lodgings. Then, that very afternoon of her return, she could not wait; she took Tom straight round to his grandparents'. The thin air which had taken the house's place was, now that she stood and breathed in it, after all full of today and sunshine; the ridges left by the foundations feathered and stirred with grass in light and shadow. It was September, dahlias and asters blooming only a garden or two away. This was, as it always had been, a very quiet road, inland, with lime trees planted along the pavement. The baby slept in his pram on the flat site of the entrance-path to the house: uphill, the church clock struck, and she looked up at the sound. Next day, the sun was succeeded by a white quiet light. Just after six o'clock in the evening, Louie wheeled the perambulator some way out of the town, along the canal path, towards the Marsh. Reeds grew out into the still water; ahead, there was distance as far as the eye could see--a thoughtless extension of her now complete life. Across the canal the hills rose, bare, above the other bank's reflected oak trees. No other soul passed; not a sheep, even, was cropping anywhere nearby. A minute or two ago our homecoming bombers, invisibly high up, had droned over: the baby had not stirred--every day she saw him growing more like Tom. But now there began another sound--she turned and looked up into the air behind her. She gathered Tom quickly out of the pram and held him up, hoping he too might see, and perhaps remember. Three swans were flying a straight flight. They passed overhead, disappearing in the direction of the West.

The End