The Lonely (12 page)

He was back once more in the yesterday in the rough, low room of the Highland farm-house, where he had crouched before the flickering peat-smoke fire through the night with Patches in his arms, warming her with his heart and never knowing how much he loved her.

Jerry was fearful again, because already the cherished picture was fading like a dream that is as vivid as life upon the waking and an hour later has begun to dissolve like summer fog when the sun rises. He could remember the fire but not the fireplace, the smoke-blacked, steaming kettle but not the iron from which it hung, the texture of the blankets wrapping the still form of Patches but not the color, the sleepy smile at the corners of Patches’ mouth but not the mouth itself.

It had seemed then that the shadowy walls of the low, rough chamber leaping in the firelight were the compass of the world. Yesterday was buried and forgotten; Patches was breathing in his arms, and there was no tomorrow. But this was today, and only fragments remained.

From the bureau in his boyhood room the grave, trusting eyes of Catharine Quentin looked down at him. The sweet, well-remembered tones of the hall clock on the stairs chimed the hour of nine, and he listened almost as though he expected to hear his mother’s voice call: “Bedtime, Jerry,” as she had when he had been a child. He could smell the summer’s night fragrance of the flowers from the garden and hear the familiar voices of kids shouting and playing in the street, music from a radio, and the distant rolling of a train on the Long Island Railroad.

He was home, and England was aeons away and a dream. Gedsborough Airbase in the chill grey of the yet unborn morning—himself sitting high in the nose of his ship with Sam Bognano while the engines thundered in the warm-up and the cavalcade of Liberators began their slow march along the side of the field to the take-off like ghostly elephants—was but a fabric.

The chunk-chunk-chunk of the slot machine in the officers’ club; Lester Harrison and his mocking eyes; jeep rides down narrow English lanes; London concealing its gutted, broken heart behind the blank façades of still untoppled walls; dreary, hopeless, friendly Kenwoulton and the smell of weary bodies and poverty inside the cinema; the dark shuffling of unseen feet through the steel-and-stone caverns of blacked-out railway stations; the sharp pungency of soft-coal smoke; the impatient, frustrated, falsetto shrieks of the locomotive whistles; and—Patches, Patches, where was she?

He tried to see her in the darkened plotting-room in the operations H.Q. of the Spitfire fighter base where she was stationed, her small head, with the soft bun of brown hair coiled at the back, bent over the crisscross squares of the radar screen, rigid with concentration as the light beam swept about the dial on its eternal circle, picking up the momentary glows, the fleeting luminosities that indicated the spot where there was an aircraft in the sky.

Jerry thought of himself sending out thoughts of Patches like the radar waves, and trying to catch upon the panel of his mind the tiny bright reflections of her being. Then he glanced at his watch and made the calculation of the difference in time and realized that Patches would not be at ops. It was not quite morning yet in England. She would still be in bed in her room on the upper floor of the dingy house in Bishop’s Lane, sleeping.

And now he could see her, for he remembered her sleeping, the sweet and touching innocence of it, the little hollow spot at her temple and the curve of her cheek, the brown lashes against the clear white skin, the thick coil of silken hair down one shoulder, and the way she kept one hand curled beneath her chin. She slept with all the warmth and softness of a kitten.

The door was open again, and relief at finding Patches mingled with the loneliness and heartache that came from the reliving of moments with her, awakenings of yearning for her presence that only served to throw into relief the realization that he had solved nothing. Nothing was certain beyond the fact that in less than four hours he would be back again at La Guardia Airport to board ship and fly back to England and whatever awaited him there.

What did await him there? Sweating out the remainder of his missions, briefing, take-off, flight, flak and fear, battle, and the racking struggle homeward with battle damage, or the joy and relief that came from a pushover assignment, interrogation, mess, movie, boredom, sleep, the routine of the air war . . .

What would happen between Patches and him? Would they take up where they had left off, would there be stolen moments of intimacy together in some grubby room, where he would try to recapture the high romance of the honeymoon in the Paradise of the Highlands, or would they dance as usual, and sit at their table as though nothing had ever happened between them, to part with a casual good night at the clubhouse door when the lorries came at midnight to take the girls back to town?

There seemed to be two of Patches now: the quiet;, undistinguished little mouse who had been his companion to pass the hours at the Saturday-night dances or of an evening in Kenwoulton, just another British girl in the light-blue uniform of the RAF to whom, between the times they happen to be together, he never gave so much as a passing thought, and that other Patches to whom he was indissolubly wedded.

And as he thought of her, fears and doubts once more entered Jerry’s mind. Supposing it hadn’t meant as much to Patches as it had to him? What if he offered himself to her, asked her to marry him in spite of everything, and she rejected him? There might even have been someone for whom she cared, off with the British armies or at sea. Her going away with him might have been on an impulse, a momentary escape from reality and wartime strain. And when he struggled against the torture of the thought, he would hear the cynical, brittle voice of Major Lester Harrison, the man who had been his model and who knew all about such things—“This isn’t the U.S.A. Girls aren’t as puritanical as they are back home.”

He tried to remember how she had looked and what she had done when he had told her that Saturday night, so many ages ago at the dance, about being engaged to marry a girl back home, and that it had to be understood that there wasn’t to be anything serious between him and Patches, and that everything between them was to be over when they returned from Scotland, and he could not recall her face or her expression.

But he did remember her saying: “I shan’t change my mind. It will be beautiful. And when it’s over, we’ll shake hands and say good-bye . . .”

And that’s how it had happened later . . . Later? Yesterday! Never a sign, never a tear, not so much as a trembling of her fingers when the slowly accelerating London-bound express had broken the casual farewell grip of their hands. “Good-bye, Patches . . .” and only her cool “God bless, Jerry . . .”

That was how he had read the rules of the game. That was how Patches had played it. It was he who was acting like a mooning, lovesick kid, crying for something that was over and done with. And he had wanted to be a man! Then why in God’s name didn’t he learn how to act like one? . . .

The turmoil within brought him to his feet in a kind of desperation and took him to the window of his room, where he stood looking out over the short gravel driveway and the deep green of the shade trees under the glow of the lamps of the entrance gate.

Diagonally across the street, half hidden behind elms, lay the warm, friendly mass of light and shadows that was Catharine’s house. He could see the white shingles illuminated softly by beams from the upper story, and there was light from the french windows of the drawing-room, where the lamps were lit. He knew the house, inside and out, as well as his own.

Jerry gazed at the house across the street. Catharine was there. She moved behind those walls somewhere in calm serenity and utter faith in him. He remembered how she had looked late that afternoon when he had seen her on the street in front of the library, and her figure came alive in his mind with a kind of painful clarity.

A half a hundred yards, a street that could be crossed in a few strides to come from darkness into light. England suddenly became as distant and remote as the farthest planet. He thought about Catharine and himself and the long, sweet, peaceful years they had known each other . . .

I I I

L
ONELY AND DEPRESSING
as it was to be back in Kenwoulton quartered in the dank and gloomy house in Bishop’s Lane, Patches was in a way glad that she had come home first and by herself. It would be several days before Jerry returned, and she was grateful for the respite it gave her to collect herself, to think a little, to try to bring to an end the war between her mind and her emotions.

She had arrived in the late afternoon, and there was nobody in the house when she went up to her room. She did not pause at the foot of the stairs, where the wonderful hegira with Jerry had begun. “. . . at thirty-one minutes past ten hours, the morning of June 18”—their voyage together had ended in the train in St. Enoch’s Station in Glasgow. It was when the railway carriage in which she had been standing so straight and tearless at the window had reached the first bend at the end of the platform, and she lost sight of the diminishing figure of the boy with the dark hair who was holding his crumpled, rakish soldier’s cap on high, that Patches looked down at her watch and, shielded by the rising clatter of the wheels, whispered: “. . . and it ended at one minute past nine, on June 27, for ever,” and the first bright drops had fallen upon her wrist and splashed from the dial of her watch.

When she arrived at Kenwoulton, Patches had hurried home and to her room to change her clothes. There was a kind of urgency upon her to lay aside the civilian garments and return to the stiff, dowdy anonymity of her uniform, as though by shedding the apparel of one life and assuming the garb of another she could leave behind all the memories, the longings, and the heartaches.

Embraced by the familiar cloth of the Air Force skirt and tunic, she felt almost at ease, sheltered, and protected, and her heart lifted. It was not difficult the next day to go back to her duties and her old way of life, to slip into familiar routines of work and concentration that occupied her mind to lull her into a sense of false security. But soon she was to know that there was no escape from herself or from Jerry.

For Kenwoulton was full of Jerrys, American flyers who, even though they did not look like Jerry, reminded her of him, with their trim battle jackets, silver wings, and rows of stars and ribbons, their clear, bold, mischievous eyes, the expressions of their mouths, their careless gait, and, above all, their voices and speech, as though cut from a pattern.

These were but externals, but Patches found herself looking for Jerry among them. Her eyes followed their figures, the set of their shoulders, the freedom of their carriage, and she found herself yearning to be with them, to hear them talk, because it would bring her nearer to Jerry, and it came as a shock to her to find how great this longing was and that nothing apparendy had changed in her.

But many things had changed in her, and this was yet a greater shock when she encountered herself in a mirror. It was the first time she had paused to look at Patches. It was another girl who gazed back at her, and she was frightened.

With whose eyes was she looking at the face and form in the glass, and whose eyes were staring back? It was she, and yet she saw and felt subtle differences, changes in bearing, expression, and personality of which she had not been aware. Something of her that was familiar seemed lost, something new that was strange appeared to have been added. It was with a dreadful and growing feeling of loneliness that she studied her own form and features in the mirror. Jerry was gone for ever. But what if the Patches she knew, and with whom she had lived in a kind of inner peace and contentment, were gone too?

She blamed only herself for what she was suffering and for the more intense suffering she knew was to follow. She had done something that she felt in her heart was right but that she knew in her conscience was wrong. She had gone away deliberately with a boy who was engaged to another girl, who had told her that in the end he would go home and marry this girl. She had gone into it with her eyes open, Jerry had never told Patches that he loved her. He had made the nature of the affair plain from the beginning.