It's a Battlefield Read online

  He glanced at the table. Even now there was a form half filled in. ‘I declare that I have not made a previous application. . . .’ She had signed her name, but had not yet written her address. ‘Milly Drover,’ the spidery writing fell apart between the letters, which ended in a jagged hole and a blot of ink. The writing seemed to him, after the copper-plate of the office, very individual; she had been absent-minded, paused and hurried on, ended fiercely because of her thoughts. He felt tender towards her writing, touching it with his finger, wondering how long it was since the ink had dried. ‘Milly Drover,’ he read again; it pleased him that their names were the same; for a moment it seemed that she was his wife. He took out his fountain pen and added his address in rough imitation of her writing. When he looked up again he saw her image in the mirror watching him.

  ‘What are you doing, Conrad?’

  ‘He read out, “I declare that I have not made a previous application. Signed Milly Drover. Address, 16, Wallace Road.’

  ‘Wallace Road,’ she said vaguely, and then began to laugh. ‘Conrad, what a fool you are. I’m so happy.’

  ‘Happy?’ he asked incredulously. There was a slight flush on her cheek-bones, and her wide mouth trembled; it occurred to him that she had been drinking.

  ‘Yes. Everything’s going to be all right. I feel it. I made her sign. She didn’t want to sign, but I made her sign. I feel – I feel as if there’s nothing I can’t do.’ She took off her hat and threw it on the bed. Conrad had never known her talk so much; he was anxious, startled, disappointed. He was like a man who had been separated from one he loved for many years and returned to find her almost unrecognizable, so drastically had time worked on her. ‘I’ve never tried before,’ she said, ‘to make people do things. Jim was always here. I didn’t know that I could, but I can.’ She came and sat on the edge of the dressing-table beside him and stretched her arms and yawned.

  ‘You’ve had something to drink, haven’t you?’ he asked uneasily.

  ‘Yes, Conrad, three sherries. Just like that. One after the other.’ She was laughing at him; that, he thought ruefully, was what remained of the familiar Milly. Yesterday she had taken him seriously, she had appealed to him; the mood had not lasted.

  ‘Where did you get the money?’

  ‘Mr Conder treated me.’

  ‘Who’s Conder?’ he asked sharply. ‘I’ve never heard of Conder.’

  ‘I hadn’t this morning, but he’s helping me. He’s a journalist. He knows Kay. Don’t be so gloomy. Look at yourself in the glass.’

  ‘I’ve never known you talk so much. He’s a clever man to make you talk.’

  She pulled his tie out of his coat. ‘He’s middle-aged. Conrad, and bald and married with six children. You needn’t be jealous.’

  ‘Jealous,’ he said, ‘that’s a curious word to use to me. Jealous?’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything odd,’ she said. His sharpness had sobered her; she spoke in a low voice, defensively; it was the familiar Milly who spoke in that way; even if he had closed his eyes or turned his back, he would have known how she was looking, away from him, into corners, shifting her gaze, not from guile but from fear that almost anywhere she might find an enemy. He remembered her in the cramped smoky church, on the day of her wedding, amid the smell of anthracite and the drumming from the distant drills in the High Street, answering ‘Yes’ with sudden loud defiance as if even in the church she expected enemies and foresaw unhappiness.

  ‘I brought you some flowers,’ he said. ‘I put them in water.’

  ‘I saw them. They’re lovely.’

  ‘They aren’t much. They gave me the wrong ones. And they’re overblown. They won’t last long,’ and immediately he thought of Thursday.

  She said with less conviction: ‘Everything’s going to be all right. I feel it.’

  ‘You mustn’t expect too much from that petition.’

  ‘I made her sign.’

  ‘At the best it means eighteen years.’

  ‘He’ll be alive,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He’ll be glad to be alive.’

  ‘And you?’

  She looked at him almost with horror. ‘Me? Of course I’ll be glad. It will be heaven. I’ll be seeing him.’

  ‘Once a month.’

  ‘What are you getting at? Do you want him to hang?’

  Conrad walked away from the mirror, along the bed, ten feet to the end wall, and back again, touched the mirror and made it swing, throwing up the reflection of his own face and the bed behind towards the ceiling. ‘I’m not sure. I’m seeing things clearer.’

  ‘You needn’t stay here,’ Milly said, ‘if you want him to hang. You can go to hell.’

  ‘You’re more important than he is.’

  ‘Who to? You?’

  ‘Yes. What’s the good of pretending? When I say you’re pretty, I mean pretty to me. When I say important, I mean to me, not to Ramsay MacDonald, not to the Queen.’

  She said quickly, trying to divert him: ‘I saw the Queen just now. Going into a cinema. Why does she wear hats like that?’

  He took no notice. ‘Can’t we ever enjoy ourselves again because Jim’s made a fool of himself?’

  ‘I thought you were fond of him.’

  ‘I am fond of him. But he’s making me hate him. I’ve got to hate somebody for this. Something’s wrong, and the constable’s dead, and I can’t hate the law.’

  She said with despair: ‘Be reasonable. It’s nobody’s fault. Hating doesn’t get you anywhere, any more than loving does. A bed in a hospital, that’s about where both get you. You look too far ahead, and you spoil everything. I was happy enough when I came home. I’d done something. I felt sure we’d save Jim, but you talk and talk and now all I want to do is to go to bed and cry.’

  He looked at her with astonishment. ‘That’s odd, because I was cheerful too. Till you came in. I had a joke to tell you. I went into one of those Bond Street shops where they sell guns and pretended I wanted a revolver.’

  ‘Why a revolver?’

  ‘It was for a joke. I ordered the shopman about. Complained. Then I said I hadn’t got a licence and came away. It seemed a good joke at the time.’

  ‘It’s the flattest joke,’ Milly said, ‘that I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘It does seem flat now,’ he said wonderingly, and they both at the same moment began to laugh. He did not know why, but as he set the mirror swinging for the second time and saw bed and face and powder-bowls rocket out of sight, he was back in the mood of carillons ringing out the hour in Atkinson’s, of flower scent above the pavement, and of the girl running past knocking his umbrella aside. His face was no longer stiff with suspicion of unspoken criticisms. She had told him that he was a fool and that his joke was flat and that he could go to hell. He cherished her words as if they had been the highest praise, lost his suspicion with the idea that perhaps she had said the worst she could of him.

  ‘And this,’ he said, ‘this is flat enough: “I declare I have not made” . . .’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not flat, that’s funny,’ with tears in her eyes. ‘Conrad, you fool. You fool, Conrad.’

  The mood carried them safely over several hours. Kay had not returned at tea-time; by supper he already felt that he had lived for several years with Milly. But the dark and the turning on of the light drove them a little way apart. ‘It won’t be long before it’s winter,’ he said. ‘Is Kay all right?’

  ‘She knows what’s what,’ Milly said. She lit the gas and drew in her chair and began to crochet; he watched her for a while. She rushed at it with a reckless disregard of her pattern; again and again she had to unpick a row. The result was a patch of striped material neither round nor oval. Conrad took out his papers and tried to work, but her nearness confused him. Her legs were crossed; their thinness, her bony knee, the tangle of her moving fingers, the red slippers trodden down at the heels which dangled from her toes, her bent head, the high cheek-bones, filled him with a sadness he did not try to explain. Painfu
lly, loop by loop, she unpicked; recklessly she dashed at the row again, the pattern fell from her knee and its corner was singed by the heat of the flame. The cold burning light scorched him where he sat; he turned the fire lower, and her face darkened as the glow retreated. Her legs reminded him of the limbs of native children photographed by missionaries. The children stared back at him from white screens in the county school, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, with no idea of the pathos they were intended to convey. A bony knee, a slipper trodden at the heel, they were enough to rouse again his longing to hate, Jim, the director’s nephew, the man joking outside the Berkeley, anyone who threatened in however indirect a manner that bony knee, that slipper trodden down.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What are you making?’

  She raised her work against the light. ‘Something’s gone wrong,’ she said. ‘It oughtn’t to be nearly square.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A béret.’

  ‘Doesn’t the pattern help?’

  ‘The pattern,’ she said. ‘Oh, the pattern. No one can understand the pattern.’ She began to read very rapidly: ‘3 treble in the 5th chain from the hook, miss 2 chain, 1 double crochet in the next, what do you call it – asterisk – miss 2 chain, 4 treble in the next, miss 2 chain –’

  ‘Give it to me,’ Conrad said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘You can’t – you can’t crochet?’

  ‘It’s easier than book-keeping,’ Conrad said.

  ‘You know,’ Milly said, ‘what’s wrong with you is that you’re too perfect – you’re quiet, you’re clever, you can crochet. What could a wife do with you?’ She mocked him in a voice completely empty of amusement; she had caught his own mood; he stared at her with a sadness and a hunger which was hardly sensual at all. It was a hunger to release her; she had no more business here than the dumb sun-scorched children in the stove-heated county schoolroom. A memory which had inhabited a corner of the room, which had made a third to their talk, fled and left them aware of how they were alone together. Other occasions of partial loneliness came back to him, days when Jim was at work and Milly had consented to be with him, slightly tearful, slightly satirical at the cinema, on the bus top grinding down Hammersmith Broadway towards Chiswick, pulling at the window beside her to open it, in Kew Gardens pretending to understand the names written on the steel labels, tired and quiet and wanting her tea in the tropical heat of the Palm House. But they had never been so alone as between the gas stove and the gas fire, on either side the porcelain-topped table.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said, ‘I’m going to go to bed. Kay won’t be in for hours yet if she’s with a man.’ She took a quick suspicious look at him as if she were wondering: Are you a man? You are quiet, you are clever, you can crochet. Are you a man?

  ‘I’ll make up a bed on these chairs if you’ll show me where your blankets are.’ She opened a cupboard door. ‘They’ve never been used,’ she said. ‘Somebody gave them us for a wedding present,’ and he was aware again of the hot church and the distant drills. ‘How jealous you were of me,’ she said. ‘I laughed at you with Jim. He didn’t like it. You were scowling when I came up the church.’

  ‘Did you notice me?’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t scowling. I didn’t feel like that at all.’

  She buried her hands in the deep warm pile of blankets. ‘How did you feel?’ She was rushing him as she had rushed her crochet, recklessly.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I loved you even then.’

  Then she was painfully, loop by loop, unpicking. ‘Well, it’s only right for a brother.’

  ‘Give me the blankets.’ He began to make his bed and did not look up when she said, ‘Good night, Conrad,’ and went upstairs to bed. Of course, he thought, she wasn’t leading me on; she was just careless as she is when she’s working. She can’t think of me as a man. Conrad. It was the name, he could almost believe, that prevented it. His parents had no business calling him by such a name, the name of a seaman, a merchant officer who once lodged in their house. ‘What was there about him?’ he had often asked. ‘Why call me after him? Was he clever?’ ‘Not that I know of,’ they said. ‘Was he kind to you?’ ‘Not particularly.’ ‘What happened to him?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘Was he with you long?’ ‘A few months.’ ‘Then why, why?’ ‘I dunno. Gave us the idea, I suppose. No good calling you Herbert. Your uncle was broke.’ So ‘Conrad, Conrad, Conrad’ had been flicked at him across the desks, across the asphalt yard, driving him into isolation, while the Jims, the Herberts, the Henrys flocked together and shared secrets. So ‘Good night, Conrad,’ leaving him alone in the kitchen. So happiness running by him. So the wrong roses dropping on the pavement. His umbrella that leant in a corner slipped and rattled on the floor, and at the same moment he heard a door open in the hall above. It was Kay, of course, though at first he hardly recognized her steps. They were light and slow and lingering. Standing there beside the chair with a blanket over his arm, he could almost imagine that he was listening to a rich woman, walking over a deep carpet, thoughtful and sensual, waiting for a lover. She came down the stairs and he waited for her enviously. She was humming a tune, she was happy, she had got what she wanted.

  I’m right, he thought when he saw her face. She had more colour than usual – that meant nothing, for she put it on herself, but her face glowed with health. She looked sleepy and satisfied like a cat after milk.

  ‘Milly gone to bed?’

  ‘Yes.’ She yawned and stretched and kicked a piece of paper across the floor. He knew that she had not come into the kitchen alone; she had brought a man with her; he was in every sleek movement, he was in every thought; he was all but in her body still. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Enjoying myself,’ she said. She looked at the clock and he saw her as if she were rising reluctantly from a bed. ‘I’d better be off.’ She was remembering the factory, the rattle of the boxes and the clangour of the machines.

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

  ‘So it is. Tomorrow,’ she caressed the word and watched him with malicious amusement. He knew that she wanted him to ask her questions and he would have disappointed her if he could. He put two chairs together and arranged a sheet and two blankets. ‘What a housewife,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘Do you grudge a girl a little fun?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’d do it yourself if you could,’ she said. ‘It makes a girl tired all the same, but thank God for men.’ Then she trailed up the stairs and he heard her open Milly’s door and begin to talk. She’ll turn her out, he thought, she won’t stand for that; one might as well have a tart in the house, and he listened for angry voices, for slamming doors. But he heard nothing but Kay’s voice talking on. She’s stopping her ears, he thought, and then – she’ll be half undressed, she’ll catch cold, and again with sorrow and hunger he thought of the desperate eyes and the smell of anthracite, of bony knees and trodden heels and half-starved native children on a white screen. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said aloud, ‘this is too much; it’s not fair.’ He meant that it was not fair, the thought that if his brother were hanged, Milly might be desperate enough to marry him.

  He put down the blankets and went to the foot of the stairs, then mounted step by step. He heard Kay talking, Milly was silent. ‘Three months, darling, since the last. I was just ready for anything.’ The door was open, and he could see Kay sitting on the bed; Milly had her back turned to him; she was crouched on a stool at her dressing-table brushing her hair. She had taken off her stockings and he saw how the skin of her legs was a little rubbed and abraded; he could see the gleam of the thin hair. Her eyes were looking back from the glass at Kay, while the hand brushed and brushed. She was tired and anxious and at the mercy of anyone at all. She’s too tired, he thought, to tell her to go.

  ‘Darling, such a bed. But it took ages to bring him to the point. How he talked. He told me all about his wife.’

  ‘His wife?’ Milly whispered.

&n
bsp; ‘She’s dead. But he would tell me what a wonderful marriage it had been. And afterwards he sat up in bed and began talking about her again. She painted pictures. He said they were wonderful. He said, “Do you like pictures?” and I said I liked pictures of dogs and people bathing. So he said, “You’re academic,” and I told him that he couldn’t call me names just because he’d had what he wanted. And then I got up and dressed; and he called a taxi and we said we’d meet tomorrow. And that was all.’

  Milly said, ‘What are you going to do tomorrow?’

  ‘The same again, I expect,’ Kay said. ‘A girl’s got to work off steam.’ She leant back on the bed and stretched her legs. ‘It’s rotten for you, Milly,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had a man for months. It’s not healthy.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Milly said, ‘not with a stranger.’ She swung away from the mirror and said to Kay in a low, savage, curiously innocent voice. ‘What does it feel like with a stranger?’

  ‘A pig in a poke,’ Kay said. ‘Sometimes you hit on someone wonderful. Sometimes it’s not worth the trouble of untying your shoes.’

  ‘And tonight?’ Milly asked in a dry cracked childish voice.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t bad,’ Kay said, ‘if he hadn’t talked so much. There’s someone I’d have liked better, but you can’t always have what you want. When you’ve got a pash for someone like I have, anybody’s better than nothing; it makes you so that you can’t wait. Anyway, he gave me a lovely supper, and oh, Milly, I forgot to tell you the best part of it all – the Mouse. It came out as bold as you please. He threw a shoe at it. Fancy my nearly forgetting to tell you about the Mouse.’

  How simple she seemed to make it, Conrad thought, retreating a few steps down the stairs as Kay crossed from Milly’s room to her own, how simple this going to bed. It was only love which complicated the act. He heard the door of Kay’s room close behind her satisfied, sleepy and triumphant figure, and again he came hesitatingly up the stairs and saw Milly in front of her mirror with her thin knees drawn up nearly to her chin. He watched her, tried to think of her savagely without her clothes as one thought of an expensive prostitute in a restaurant, but the thin legs, the hopeless immaturity of her breasts failed to excite him. Kay had excited him more than this, with the smell of a man still about her. Why don’t I go to bed then, he wondered; why stay and stare at a half-naked girl unless I want her? He told himself that he would be satisfied to hold her all night in his arms and talk, do nothing but talk, talk of what they could do to help the man they both loved. He was without jealousy or passion, but when he heard her say, ‘Conrad, come in,’ and saw that she had seen him all the while in the glass, he felt ashamed as if she were a girl he had got into trouble.