His Second War Page 10

  At his side the wife of the Brigadier was asking him what he imagined the German armistice terms would be. He answered with the deference due to her husband’s rank and the caution prescribed by her husband’s presence at the table. As he answered, his eyes kept lifting, turning, glancing across the table.

  She was still turned towards the Brigadier. She was listening rather than talking. He had only twice heard her voice. It was a full, rich voice. She seemed completely absorbed in her conversation. Was she really as absorbed though, as she seemed to be? Was she really unconscious of his presence across the table? Had that meeting of their eyes meant nothing? Had not it been mutual? Had it been on his side only? He did not know but he had got to know.

  He did not hesitate. He had gathered from a remark of the Brigadier’s that she was working at the Ministry of Information. They would be leaving after lunch, that was to say, in opposite directions. “If I’m going to make any contact,” he thought, “I must make it now.”

  He leant across the table.

  It was the barest opening: the merest pause in the Brigadier’s flow of military reminiscence: it was barely an opening at all; but he leapt at it.

  “I do think that’s so true, sir,” he interrupted. “One can find oneself in the middle of a battle with absolutely nothing to do, with nothing to worry one: a calm in the centre of a typhoon. There was one day just like that. It was the second week. My section was north of Arras …”

  It was a story that he had told a dozen times since his return three weeks earlier from Dunkirk. He knew it by heart. He could follow his own thoughts as he was telling it. He was addressing the Brigadier, but it was to her that he was speaking. “I may be in the War Office now, but I’ve done real soldiering.” It was that he was saying.

  “My section was north of Arras,” he was continuing. “We were waiting for orders. There was nothing for us to do till we got those orders. It was a warm spring day. There was a garden attached to the office in which we worked. We sat out in deck chairs. There was a small artificial pond that we had stocked recently with trout and goldfish. We wondered what would happen to the fish when we had moved. We wondered if they would starve, if the goldfish would eat the trout. We wondered whether it wouldn’t be more humane to let the water out of the pond and tell the cook to make a friture. For the whole morning we sat out there in the sun in deck chairs debating that. We were so absorbed in our debate that we didn’t realize how absurd it was that in the middle of the greatest battle in the history of the world a section of intelligence officers should be debating the fate of a pondful of baby fish.”

  The story was greeted, as it was always greeted, with a burst of laughter, but as far as he was concerned the point had been reached and passed long before that laughter came. He had the answer to the question that had inspired his telling of it.

  It had been mutual. It had not been on his side only. It had happened to her as well.

  Two hours later he sat at his desk in the War Office; her name and her telephone number—the general M. of I. number—scrawled on the pad beside him. The room was empty. His G.2 was in a conference with the Colonel. The opportunity for which for an hour now he had been waiting had come at last. “Euston 4321,’, he called. Then a moment later: “Can I speak to Miss Stella Barclay?”

  She laughed when she heard his voice: a laugh that contrasted excitingly with the secretarially formal tone with which she had answered the bell’s ring; a laugh that acquitted him of the need for the careful preliminaries that he had planned. He could go straight to the point with that laugh singing in his ears.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “whether we couldn’t lunch one day.”

  “I think that would be fun.”

  “What about to-morrow?”

  “To-morrow would be fine.”

  “How long do you have for lunch?”

  “An hour.”

  “Would it be possible for you to take a little longer?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Shall we say Claridge’s then, at one-fifteen?”

  “I think that would be a very nice thing to say.”

  “I think that it’s very nice of you to let me say it.”

  “I should have been furious with you if you hadn’t.”

  They arrived simultaneously at Claridge’s.

  He had expected that at first they would feel embarrassed. They didn’t though. They slipped at once into an easy comradeship, into something that was cosy and intimate yet was more than that, since they saw it, since they felt it, not as a thing in itself, but as a prelude.

  “I’ve the feeling,” he said, “that I’ve known you all my life.”

  She smiled.

  “I’ve read in books that that’s how it sometimes is.”

  In her smile there was a roguishness, mixed with a frank acceptance of the situation, of all the possibilities, all the implications of the situation, that fired him. In the street outside, the headlines of the evening papers were placarding the collapse of France. Three weeks ago he had been wading out from the Dunkirk beaches to the waiting rowing boats. A month ago in a helpless confusion of bombs and refugees, of blocked roads and cut communications he had been desperately attempting to piece together the information on which some kind of a strategy might be based. At that very moment in Whitehall high-placed officials were weighing the possibilities of invasion. For all he knew, before the week was out, he might be trying to stem, here in England, the same confusion that a month earlier he had known in France. He did not know. He scarcely cared. He could not see beyond this moment.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

  Not that he needed to know. He knew her. He did not need to know things about her. The things that she was telling him, the things that he was hearing were not important in themselves; they were symbols, and no more than that, of this sudden mysterious affinity of each for other—that she was twenty-three years old, that her home was in Gloucestershire, that her father was a doctor, that she had two brothers, one in the army, one at school, that she herself was employed in the censorship side of the M. of I., that she was living with an aunt in Kensington—what did these facts matter in comparison with the one main fact that they were talking easily and intimately together, that she was talking easily and intimately about herself.

  “And you, what about you?” she said. “How old are you, twenty-eight?”

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “As much as that. It’s your uniform, I suppose. Uniform makes everyone look younger. What were you before the war? You weren’t a soldier, were you?”

  “I was a barrister.”

  “A successful one?”

  “Starting to be.”

  “How did you get in the Army then? Were you a territorial?”

  He shook his head. Except at school when he’d been in the O.T.C. he’d done no soldiering, but had known, though, directly the Germans took over Austria, that war must come. “I started looking around to see what I could do,” he said. “There was a series of courses for the Intelligence Corps. I went on one of them. I was in France by the third week of September.”

  “And are you permanently at the War Office now?”

  “I’ve no idea. One doesn’t know what plans they have. One has to do what one’s told. I’m rather hoping, though, to get posted to a formation.”

  “And how do you feel about your career?”

  “What do you mean, how do I feel about it?”

  “Do you feel that the war’s come at the wrong time for you, just when you were getting started?”

  He shrugged.

  “Sometimes I think so. But one doesn’t know. No one knows what the world will be like when all this is over. “We shall all find ourselves in pretty much the same kind of mess. I’ve made a start. I’ve got connections. I’ll start again with less of a handicap than most and anyhow I don’t think that there’s any point in thinking about things like that right now.�
� He paused. He looked her very straightly in the eyes. “I think one should live in the moment now,” he said.

  The last sentence was said not only after a pause but slowly as though it were something said personally to her. She met his look, then nodded. “I think that too,” she said. “I think one should live in the moment now.”

  There was a pause. Their eyes still held each other’s. It was a solemn pause, as though they were agreeing on a pact. Then lightly she changed the subject.

  “Where are you living now?” she asked, “in London?”

  “At my club.”

  “Is your home in the country then?”

  “West Waltham, just near Maidenhead.”

  “And what’s your family, are both your parents living?”

  He hesitated. It was the question that he had dreaded: the issue that he had known, had sooner or later to be faced. Probably it was as well that it had come up now. It was a fence that they had got to clear. Best to go straight at it.

  “My father died when I was quite a kid,” he said. “My mother’s re-married to a Canadian. She’s lived in Montreal the last ten years. It’s my own family at Waltham.”

  “Your own family?”

  “A wife and two small children.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause: a pause during which a slow flush coloured the pale magnolia of her cheeks. Her eyes rested thoughtfully on his, then dropped. She looked down at her plate. She had chosen an escalope de veau. She twisted the spaghetti round her fork with an Italian expertness. She twisted and went on twisting then abruptly laid down the fork and raised her eyes.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “I’m sorry but it isn’t.”

  Her voice was firm. Her eyes were steady. There was a certainty, a conviction behind her words that robbed him of the power to reply; when he half-started to speak she cut him short.

  “No, no,” she said. “No, I know what you are going to say; that one can’t decide a thing like that right off. But one can. That’s just the point. One must or it’ll be too late. No, no, don’t interrupt. I know what you are going to say, something about our being friends, but that too is just the point. It isn’t a question of our being friends. If it was just a question of our being that, we shouldn’t be here now. You wouldn’t have asked me out to lunch on the afternoon of our first meeting after a lunch when we hadn’t exchanged a word with one another. I felt something, you felt something, and what we felt wasn’t friendship, wasn’t even the prelude to any friendship. That’s why it must stop now, before it is too late. There’s always a point where one can cut clear. That point once passed, one’s finished.”

  “But surely, I don’t really see …”

  Again she cut him short.

  “Don’t you? Perhaps you don’t, but you ask any girl who hasn’t married during her first two seasons and she’ll tell you the same thing, that the one fatal thing for a girl to do is to get herself mixed up with a married man. It’s so easy for her to do. In a way they’re more attractive than bachelors. They’ve more assurance. They’re used to women. They’re more expansive. They haven’t got to be on their guard against responsibilities in the way that a bachelor has to be. There’s nothing easier for a girl to do. There isn’t anything more fatal. It gets her nowhere. It wastes two years of her life. It leaves a mark. It’s always the same kind of mess.”

  She spoke with the firmness of a judge delivering sentence. She was as direct, as straightforward now in her refusal of the implications of the situation as she had been earlier in her acceptance of the fact of it. She was a real person right enough: someone who stood up to life and fought it. His spirits sank at the firmness in her voice. But at the same time his heart glowed with admiration. She was a fine person. She really was, and there was this affinity between them. What a marvellous time they could have had together. The sense of loss was overpowering.

  Something of what he was feeling became apparent in his face. The look in her eyes changed. Her voice softened.

  “After all,” she said, “it is quite a happy marriage, isn’t it?”

  The question was almost an appeal. As though she were trying to offer herself an excuse to go back upon her words. If only he could offer her that excuse. If only he could say “No, it’s a wretched marriage.” He couldn’t though. He couldn’t lie. He had to be straight with her. She had been so very straight with him. He couldn’t tell her anything but the truth.

  “It’s a marriage that works,” he said.

  “You’ve not thought of breaking it?”

  He shook his head.

  “And how long is it you’ve been married?”

  “Six years.”

  “How old are your children?”

  “Five and two.”

  “Just the ages they start to be amusing, just the age when the elder one will start to need you. No, no, my dear, it just won’t do.”

  Her voice was tender and her smile was friendly, but with a good-bye kindness, a final friendliness. He had the sensation of something beneath his heart going round and over.

  TWO

  That night he went down to Waltham for the “one day off a week” to which as a Staff Officer at the War Office he was entitled.

  His wife Mary was waiting for him at the station. It was a warm and sunny evening. She was wearing a thin cotton frock and a floppy hat. She looked very young and cool and pretty. It was strangely familiar to find her waiting at the wheel of the Austin Seven saloon that in 1938 had seemed so ridiculous and now in a period of petrol rationing seemed in retrospect so sensible a purchase. It was hard to believe that not only a year but a whole world had passed since the days when he had returned every night to find her waiting there.

  It was a week since he had seen her, but her first question was, as it had always been:

  “Well, and what news from the great city?”

  And though it was a week since they had met, his answer was as it had always been:

  “I haven’t any news, what’s yours?”

  And as always that one question set and answered, she started on the account told in her smooth, unhurried voice of her day’s—in this case of her week’s—activities; of what the boy had said, of how the girl was learning to walk, of a row she had had with Nannie, of the rector’s having called, of a local tennis party; and as of old he sat back in the car half-listening, reliving his own day, thinking over his work, of the people he had met, of the work that awaited his return; thinking as of old how little his life in London, his real life, bore to his family life here.

  Everything was changed in London. Nothing seemed changed down here. Place names had been knocked off signposts; the traffic was held up at a turning of the road by a series of concrete blocks, a bridge was manned by a couple of civilians armed with unlikely-looking rifles and with L.D.V. armlets attached to their tweed coats. There was a further traffic block when a posse of policemen insisted on examining the identity card of every driver. But such incidents belonged to his other life, the work side of his life, the army, Whitehall, the war.

  It might be that at that very moment the Germans were preparing to throw their battalions across the Channel. It might be that within forty-eight hours England would have woken up to find herself subjected to the same dangers by which France had been overthrown. It might be. It might well be. Yet even so, that menace, the precautions against that menace—the torn-down signposts, the Local Defence Volunteers, the checking of identity cards, the concrete roadblocks—were part of that other life, his life in London, in the army. They bore no relation to this static familiar world of home; this constant factor of a car waiting at a station, of a drive through high-banked lanes, of a smooth, unhurried voice describing the delinquencies of a parlour-maid, of a Queen Anne house at the end of a chestnut avenue.

  The light was failing as the car swung out of the village road. A year ago, light windows would have welcomed him between the leaves. The windows were blacked out now, but there was the same rich scen
t of flowers from the garden. In the hall there was the usual friendly litter of coats and hats and children’s playthings. Through the half-open door of the dining-room he could see the cold supper laid out upon the sideboard, a long-necked bottle projecting from a cooler. In the green panelled drawing-room a large bowl of flowers was standing on a centre table. The curtains had been drawn, but the many-coloured rows of books had a warm and welcoming look under the shaded lights.

  “Shall we go straight in?” she asked.

  “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  He was ready enough already. It was too late for him to bother to change out of uniform, but he had a sudden feeling that before he sat down to supper, he would like, with the memory of that lunch table clear before his eyes, to remind himself just how unchanged was this familiar world of his.

  At the head of the stairs he turned. The nursery was on the first floor, at the end of a passage. Shut off from his own suite of rooms. The door of the children’s room was open. The blinds were drawn, but a nightlight was burning on the mantelpiece. He could distinguish the two dark heads upon their pillows, the baby rolled up in a cocoon of blankets, the boy with his sheet flung back, one arm curled round the neck of a teddy bear. Next door in the day-nursery, the Nannie, her dinner finished, was ironing out some clothes. She was a thin middle-aged but lively Scot with a twinkle in her eye. She looked up with a smile as he came in.

  “It’s good to have you back,” she said. “Master Peter was so excited he could hardly sleep.”

  On the landing outside his dressing-room a black poodle bitch was stretched out like a rug before the door. At the sight of him she ran towards him, squiggling, wagging her tail, baring her teeth in a kind of smile. He closed the door of his dressing-room, switched out the light, pulled back the curtains. A waxing moon, mingling with the last light of the day, silvered with twilight the small walled garden with its box-hedged archery, its herbaceous border, its great copper beech. In the paddock beyond the kitchen garden a mist was rising, unchanged, utterly unchanged.