A Soldier's Tale Part 7

Then she bent right down and kissed me, her red hair hung all around my face and it smelt like ripe apples. She set herself astride of me and she says, Is it so?

And I says, No, and then, Yes.

Is it not right? she says.

And I says, Everything's right.

And so it was, after all, the best I ever had.

When it was quite finished she rolled off me and lay there in the gra.s.s with her eyes shut. It was my turn to lean over her.

Was it all right? I says.

And she smiles all rosy and says, It was all right.

Was it like the picture?

It was like the picture.

You're an artist, I says. If loving was an art, you'd be in the National Gallery in London. I've been there once, I says. I didn't like her thinking I was ignorant.

I eased down beside her. The sun was off the orchard now, but it was still very warm and still there under the trees.

There is a poem also, she says, by Baudelaire. And she went on saying the words in French, something about order and beauty looks calm-she began to tell me what it said, it seemed to mean a lot to her. What with the warmth and stillness and her so close I must have fallen asleep.

But we know what the poem was. It was Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage. I have it in front of me now, in the old edition of Flowers of Evil, published by Editions Verda, 11 Cite Dupet.i.t-Thouars, Paris, and sold for twelve (old) francs. When did she give it to him? He couldn't read it, so he gave it to me. It has her signature in it, 'Isabelle Pradier', in a careful unformed hand, in violet ink. The cheap pages have turned brown, and it falls open of itself at page 105, 'L'Invitation au Voyage', as if the pages had been turned by the ghost of a hand. The dead poet begins to speak to the dead woman- Mon enfant, ma soeur, Songe a la douceur D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble!...

My child, my sister, dream of the sweetness of going down there and living together! To love easily, to love and die, in this country which is so much like you! The hazy suns in its smudged skies have a mysterious magic for me, like those treacherous eyes of yours, smiling through tears.

La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute, Luxe, calme et volupta.

There it is all order, beauty, luxury, peace, pleasure.

And he goes on to tell her how they will live in the old house with its dark l.u.s.trous furniture, its deep mirrors. Outside, ca.n.a.l-boats sleep at their moorings. Setting suns clothe the fields and streets in daffodil and gold. The world sleeps in warm light. It is all order, beauty, luxury, peace, pleasure.

She must have learned that poem at school and loved it and remembered it somehow behind the loveless couplings and the terror and the despair. She dreamed of that order and beauty and found it perhaps in the lush summer orchard.

Well (said Saul) what woke me up was a fly settling on my face. A hand gently brushed it away. The orchard was in shadow now and a mite chilly, so she'd tucked the blanket around me. And the flies had found us, perhaps from the dead cows over in the field, and so there she was with her dress loose about her, sitting beside me on the gra.s.s waving the flies away so that I should have my sleep. When she saw me awake, she kissed me and went off into the house, leaving me to get my clothes and gear together.

I went into the house from the back, through the wash-house. The cottage was empty, but this time I didn't think of her scarpering on me, and sure enough I could see that up the garden the door of the jakes was closed. I stood there smoking and looking out in the garden. Big Stupid was on duty up the hill, and the sky was all bright and smoky.

A jeep came b.u.mping down the road, trailing a dust cloud. At first I thought I might just pull back and quietly fade, but it drew up with a jolt at the gate and out hopped our Lieutenant Mortimer, large as life. I reckoned that he was looking for me and that Charlie must have told him about me and where I was. So I straightened myself up and slipped on my jacket, and when I met him by the gate I chucked him up a smart salute. He had a purring lah-di-dah voice, sort of put on, but he wasn't a bad officer at all. He didn't know a lot but he knew how to take advice, and he swore like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d when we took casualties.

Aha, Corporal Scourby, he says, I thought I'd find you here. And how's your pa.s.sionate weekend, eh?

Bit of all right, sir, I says.

Well, I wish it was me, he says. Never mind, I'm liaising with Div and there's a nurse I know up there, if she isn't already bespoke.

Good luck, sir, I says, and I suppose I meant it.

I could see he was smartened up, and he was carrying his swaggerstick, tapping it against his glove, like he was impatient and embarra.s.sed. Behind him, his driver-bloke named Carnall, would you believe it-kept idling and revving his engine as if he wanted to be off.

Corporal, says Lieutenant Mortimer, Private Smith (that was Charlie) told me about your problem. I asked a friend in Mil Guv and I'm afraid it's no good. Once we start moving we'll rely on the Resistance for a lot of intelligence and flank protection. We can't afford to antagonize them, and they're very p.r.i.c.kly. So instructions are not to upset them in any way. The woman's their problem. We can't do a thing. I'm sorry if that's bad news.

It is that, sir, I says. (As a matter of fact I hadn't expected this, it was good of old Charlie to try-like I said, he was stuck on Belle in his own way.) But it's not a surprise. Thanks for trying, sir.

Think nothing of it, he says. Well, I'm not here.

He touched his cap-brim with his swaggerstick, and he was off.

The door of the bog creaked open. Belle came cautiously up the path. She must have been waiting for him to leave.

Was that your officer? she says. What did he say?

I put my arm about her shoulders and led her inside.

It's good news, I says. Good old Charlie told him about you, so he called some friends he has in Military Government. They were pretty important friends, and they talked to the local command of the Resistance. And that did the trick-they'll be ordered off, them up the hill, and told to leave you alone.

She was staring up into my face all the time I was shooting her this line, wondering what she ought to believe. I must have made it sound all right, because when I finished, it was as if she just let go. She smiled and rested her head on my shoulder, and she says, Perhaps I am going to live, in spite of all.

You better Adam-and-Eve it, I says.

And I wished I could myself.

What followed after this was, in a way, the obscurest part of the story, mainly because there was little of it that he could put into his kind of words. He could only say ba.n.a.l things like, We sat and watched the sunset, or, I never seen her so happy, or, We would sit and play pontoon. Again he slipped into this way of talking as if life with the woman had gone on for a long time, and in a way it had.

They'd reached a state of quiet and contentment, like a long-married couple. They lived as if this evening was just one of a chain of thousands, stretching before and after. (In any stable relations.h.i.+p, we stand as it were between the two mirrors of past and future and seeing our days receding, multiplied to infinity in either direction. In Luc Peire's Environment Three, it's a room with the floor and ceiling made of mirrors. Up isn't really so impressive-we're used to looking up into the emptiness of s.p.a.ce, at night when the sky has rolled away. But looking down into empty s.p.a.ce and an infinite regress of your own reflection-that's disturbing. The room becomes a lift, sinking down through endless selves, a time-lift in free fall. Entropy. Free fall. Entropy is free-falling in time.) They created for themselves a temporary past and future. Or, you might say, they expanded that evening into the lifetime of a marriage or a liaison. So what happened went perhaps like this: The champagne in the orchard would have left him thirsty, so he got her to put the kettle on the hob-she'd already stirred up the fire in the grate-and make some tea from the ration-pack, the powdered tea, milk and sugar stirred in together to make a good warm brew. While she stared into the grate and waited for the kettle to boil, he went through into the wash-house at the back and washed out a set of smalls. He had to bring them back through the kitchen so that he could hang them in a corner of the garden that caught the late sun, and she exclaimed at him for not leaving this woman's work to her.

He'd rather counted on this, and after they'd had their tea, sitting together at the old scrubbed table, he brought her a sock that needed a good piece of darning. She also remembered and asked him for his battle-dress jacket, which needed a b.u.t.ton or two tightening and one of his corporal's stripes resewn where it had caught and torn. Actually he was very capable and handy, as you might have guessed, at all that kind of work, but it was pleasant to be sitting there with his feet under the table while the woman bent over her work, st.i.tching neatly with the khaki jacket draped across her lap.

Of course, when I say that he had his feet under the table, I'm using the customary army metaphor, meaning that he was at home there, received as a guest, domesticated, probably sleeping with the woman. It said a lot for the British soldier's idea of homely s.e.xual joys. As the proverb went later in occupied Germany: in the Russian zone the typical s.e.x-crime is rape; in the American, prost.i.tution; in the British, bigamy. There's a lot of truth in that.

Actually he was sitting on the sill of the open doorway with his back against the door-jamb and his half-empty mug of tea beside him. He had his sten and his cleaning gear out, going through his daily routine of cleaning and lightly oiling. Piercingly there came into his mind the picture of himself as a boy of six or seven, sitting in the doorway of his granny's cottage, spooning out of a chipped blue bowl his bread-and-milk well sweetened with brown sugar. Beside the kitchen table, the old lady was knitting at a long piece that was to be his winter scarf. As her busy needles went in sliding quickly over and under, she looked down at him watchfully over her low spectacles.

He set aside the sten and its magazines and began carefully to hone his two knives, spitting on the bit of whetstone he always carried with him for the purpose. The rasp of steel on stone pleased him, and he repeated it slowly, deliberately. It was her silence that stopped him, as he became aware that her quiet movements had ceased. He looked up and found her staring, not at him, but at the sharp tool lying against the stone.

Do you use that, she said, to fight? Is it to kill?

Sometimes I do, he said matter-of-factly, sometimes killing has to be done.

Does it hurt them? she asked in the same flat voice.

Not so you'd notice, he said, at least, they go quick and quiet. That's the whole idea. At least, mostly they do. It's only when I miss my stroke that it gets a bit nasty. But I don't like that to happen, and it seldom does.

She finished her work on the jacket before holding it up for a final inspection and putting it aside on the table. She came down and sat beside him on the step.

What is it like to kill a man? she asked.

He handed her a cigarette and lit it, and one for himself.

Like f.u.c.king a woman, he said, after the first one they're all the same.

Oh, you are horrible, she said, jumping to her feet in sudden pa.s.sion. Completely horrible. Truly English. A brute, to kill men and to-yes-f.u.c.k women.

He smiled at her his hard lonely smile.

Don't take on so, love, he said, I was only joking.

I do not like such jokes, she said, still standing up, and turned stiffly away from him.

Come on, he said, I didn't mean it.

I gave you good love, she said, all I could.

I know. The best.

And you say this now to me?

I didn't mean it, he said. Look, I enjoy going with girls. They're all beautiful, all loving, all different. Killing's another matter. You don't want to have feelings about it-either liking it or being upset. It's like a job to be done. The less feelings you have, the better it's done, the quicker it's done. Now sit down like a good girl, and I'll tell you a story.

It was once early in the war when I was on patrol with a sergeant name of Berry-Harry Berry. He was a short fat bloke-at least, that's what he looked like, with a sort of moon-face, but really he was very quick and crafty. But not very nice.

Well, we had a scratch platoon for this job, and we pushed on to a place where there was a house with a German strong-point inside. You know how quiet it was between the lines, with no one sure where the other side was, not even on the map. I liked it that way, it gave you more of a free hand, and you were pretty safe from b.u.mping into anything real big.

Do you want me to tell you this? he asked.

Yes, she said, go on.

And she sat close beside him on the step, watching him, as if she was trying to understand something.

So we come up close to this house, well hidden near some trees. And everything was quiet, except for those Jerries, there was some of them talking, just loud enough to hear. Now, this might have been part of a defence line, or just a strong-point on its own. So me and old Berry we decided to work around the back, if we could, and see what we could see. We shouldn't really have done that, being two NCOs, because it meant leaving the platoon with only a young lance-jack in charge. But we was pretty sure of ourselves, too sure perhaps, like you'll see.

We worked round behind the house all right, no trouble, and couldn't find a thing. There was a sort of sunken lane there with trees overhanging it, and I thought I should cross it to get just a closer shooftee from the other side. I signed to Berry to wait, and I went down into the lane very quietly. Lucky for me, because when I stood there and got my head up I saw there was a Jerry there. I couldn't make out for a second what he was doing, because he just stood there and seemed to be staring at the sky. Then-I could have laughed-I saw he was having a jimmy-riddle, standing there with his gun slung and his other weapon unslung, if you follow me.

I thought for a second. It seemed a shame to take a man like that, just easing himself, but he might have turned his head at any minute, or I might have trod on a twig. So I decided to play it safe and take him. I had my knife out and I was nearly on his back when my feet slipped out from under me. I should have said that there had been rain earlier, and the clay in the lane was damp and greasy.

Well, there I was flat on my a.r.s.e and my knife gone flying. The Jerry was pretty scared, you can imagine, but he was a quick man, and he had his gun coming up and his mouth open to shout. I thought it was my lot, I really did.

Then standing there behind him was Harry Berry. I still don't know how he did it, but he came out of the dark behind the Jerry, just like magic. And in the same move he had his arm hooked round the Jerry's throat with his elbow under the chin, and when he levered I could hear the Jerry's neckbone crack.

She was looking at him as he told her this, with her face very set, and she winced when he said that he could hear the Jerry's neckbone crack. So he put his hand over hers where it rested on the step, and went on.

That's what I mean about not feeling, he said. I stopped to feel sorry for that Jerry and he nearly had me-if he'd warned the others, they might have wiped out the whole platoon. Berry saved me, much as I disliked him, and I think he knew it.

We didn't say a d.i.c.kybird to each other, but we cleaned out the Jerry's pockets, which gave us some useful stuff to take back-he was a sergeant and he'd got a movement order and some other things on him. But the funny thing was what Berry told me when we got back. We went back the same way we come, as quick and quiet as we could. We reported in and went off to the cook-house to get ourselves some supper. And I thanked Sergeant Harry Berry for what he done, as was proper. Then, Forget it, he says, you'd have done the same. Besides, I like that. D'you know-and he gave a sort of giggle-when I took him, it excited me, and I come in my pants, just like in a woman.

That's what he said to me, just like that. After that, I disliked him more than ever, even though he'd saved my life. I didn't want to be like him, I didn't want to enjoy it. He was a dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Besides, that's another way of having feelings about it, wasn't it? So I managed not to go out on patrol with him again. Sure enough, he got himself killed a bit later, he wanted it too much, took a chance, I suppose.

She s.h.i.+vered beside him and looked up at the sky. The long dusk was drawing to a close. (Do you remember them sunsets in Normandy, Bom? said Corporal Scourby. You know, when the roads began to dry out and the dust hung in the air. All red and gold, they was.) So she s.h.i.+vered and looked up at the sky hung with red and gold; so he slipped his right arm around her and drew her close. With his left hand, that large rough clever hand, he took her left hand, all soft and ringless.

When will it end, the war? she said.

Soon, he said, soon. P'raps even this year, couple of months even. Once we get going, and them Russians, it can't be long, not now.

She shook her head doubtfully.

It has been so long, she said, we have forgotten to hope.

Don't give up, girl, he said. Just think, one day you'll be an old lady telling your grandchildren all about this.

She obstinately would not be comforted.

It is not true, she said, not for me. Where can I go? What can I do?

I'll tell you what you can do, he said. I'll come back as soon as the war's over and I can get leave, and we'll marry. We'll go back and live in England, and no one need know.

(And perhaps as he said this he meant it, for perhaps he needed some comforting dreams too. It was the start of a kind of game between them, to play house, as if they were old married people and this was how they lived, had lived, would live, might live, grow old, have children. Desperately she joined in the game.) Come in, she said, it is cold. Let this be our house. Come into our house.

So they went in; she drew the curtains and lit a candle while he livened up the fire with a k.n.o.b of wood and a bit of kindling. There was a pack of old greasy cards on the mantelpiece. He took them down and laid out a game of patience on the table. The one candle was not enough, so he reached out to the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, where two candles in bra.s.s candlesticks stood on each side of a dark wooden crucifix.

Please do not touch that, she said quickly, look in the drawer, there is another candle there.

Why not, he said. They're good candles, not used.

They're blessed candles, she said, for the dead. When a person lies dead in the house, one places the crucifix at the head, the candles on each side. It is the custom.

She went over to the stove and began to make their supper. For a time there was a companionable silence, broken only by her quiet movements at stove and sinkboard, the sc.r.a.pe of the ca.s.serole being moved on the stove, the rattle as she opened the grate and pushed in more wood, the tinkle of a spoon in a bowl. The cards clicked as he laid them on the table. He played fairly and with concentration, turning the cards in rigid sequence. When the game refused to come out, he neatly gathered the cards, s.h.i.+rred them together and began again. The first card up in the left-hand column was the Queen of Spades: he frowned over it.

Pique dame, she said, nodding towards it.

She was standing behind him watching the game, with her left hand laid lightly on his shoulder.

They say she brings misfortune, she said.

Who says so?

Oh-old women.

Our old women say the same. (A death in the family, his granny used to say, but he was careful not to quote that.) Me, I think it's a load of cobblers. You know, like teacups and horoscopes and all that b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. Look, there's the Queen of Hearts, that could be you, couldn't it? and here comes the Knave of Spades to cover her, like it might be me?

He grinned slyly up at her, but her face in the s.h.i.+fting candlelight was shadowy and unsmiling.

You know what that means? she asked. It is really swords-the Spanish say espada, a sword. He is a swordsman. Like you.

She touched her fingertips to the knife in its sheath at his belt. He tensed up and pushed her hand away.

Don't do that, girl, he said sharply.