It's a Battlefield Read online

  Jules was silent, driving with one hand. A woman moaned and drank and moaned; the earth was dry and a coffin was lowered and the Fire Brigade presented arms. Out of these two came happiness, came this particular evening sun flaming across the radiator, came this sense that never again would he be alone.

  She was deliciously out of place in the Park, a little bored, a little puzzled, making up under a tree. It was almost too dark to see herself. She peered into her mirror and banged the compact shut. ‘Listen, Jules, you must be sensible.’

  He began to laugh at her; the grass had gone grey and a bird persistently called. ‘Why talk about being sensible? You don’t want to be sensible.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said thoughtfully. She looked at him with more interest than she often showed to a man. The men she usually companioned had money and did not work, or the work they did was something she could not understand because it was so highly paid, but Jules was like her in this, he had a boss, he went to work early and his hours were long. Mr Surrogate had said: ‘Don’t let’s be sensible,’ but he had not meant the same as Jules. He had meant, ‘Sleep with me now and don’t worry me later,’ he drew her out of her own security while he remained himself quite safe in his warm lit flat. He hadn’t, above all she resented that even while she lay with him, he hadn’t to go to work in the morning. But Jules had. He was no more independent than she.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘we won’t be sensible.’

  He clapped his hands and said: ‘We won’t go back tonight,’ as if the idea had suddenly struck him. He did not let her know that, while she was washing in the cottage where they had tea, he had taken a room for the night. He was delighted that she did not take offence; only protested that she must be at work ‘so early’. ‘I’ll drive you there,’ he said. Again he might have told her: you’re marrying me, you’re not going back to work, but the black-coated wisdom of the elderly tradesman restrained him.

  ‘Will you love me?’ They pressed against each other and protested and laughed and told indecent stories and were happy. The leaves crackled on the ground and a rabbit’s tail flashed like a match under a bank of ferns and disappeared. When they held their breath it seemed to them both for a moment that they had never heard so deep a silence; they thought of London at night and how the heavy lorries shook the walls; ‘So quiet,’ she said, but already she was thinking: This is serious. I wanted him to do this to me after the meeting. I’ve never wanted a boy like this before. My God, I’m crazy. I’ve got to be careful or there’ll be an accident.

  ‘Not really quiet,’ he said, taking his arm away from her, hearing the dogs bark in the village, the rustle among the leaves, the gentle fall of earth as an animal passed, the turmoil of insects. But one called this quiet, as one called darkness black; it was the nearest approach to silence. Even if the insects and the dogs were still, there was always the beating of one’s own heart. He quite forgot her while he thought: even when I’ve been most alone, I’ve always had other things to listen to than my heart; I’ve never noticed it beating.

  She slid lower against the tree trunk and said: ‘How hot it is.’ It was less than two hours since she had said: ‘How cold,’ but kneeling now she was in the shelter of the branches, and the dry crinkled leaves held warmth close to the ground like earth-browned hands sheltering a flame. She sucked the back of her hand which a stem had scratched and her lipstick left traces on the skin; she watched Jules with a hunger she had never allowed herself to feel before. He was lost again, peering over the bracken between the beeches, and she did not speak a word to help him find himself. She was willing that he should be lost a long time with his eyes a little dilated and his breathing uneven and the hand which touched hers as insensient as a stranger’s in a crowded Tube. She could feel herself for a few minutes abandoned with him, Milly’s demands on her forgotten.

  But Jules’ thoughts when they returned to her were practical. He suddenly laughed and put his hands on her shoulders and forced her lower in the bracken. The stems scratched through her stockings, and as she resisted him, she could feel the earth in her nails. ‘Don’t be a fool, Jules.’ He was on his knees too, forcing her back and laughing at the same time. He was not strong, but he was quick and resilient. He bit the lobe of her ear and pushed at her with his head between her breasts. She remembered the lipstick in her hand and smeared it across his face from nose to chin; she began to laugh too; she could smell the bracken and the earth mould and the Coty Naturelle and a spray of gorse in bitter flower behind her. ‘Stop,’ she said, ‘wait a bit. Let’s go indoors.’

  He loosed her and sat back on his heels. ‘That’s a promise.’

  ‘Why can’t you wait till night?’

  He grinned and made a little vulgar gesture with his thumb. ‘Ready for more tonight.’ He began to whistle; he tried to do a handspring, but put his hand on a thistle and swore. He was happy, he was conceited, he was cocksure. He had his girl. He said: ‘Did you see Conder? Thank God, I’ll never be like him. I wouldn’t be alone like that for anything. I want company – always. I’d be afraid, alone like that. I’d get fancies.’ He flashed at her with comic hopefulness. ‘You aren’t a Catholic by any chance?’ Easier, then, the formality of marriage, more final the barrier against loneliness, an impregnable dyke till death; otherwise the sea corroded.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘why?’ She stretched her legs regretfully, thinking: why didn’t I play with him? It would be fresh like this in the open. What are a few spiders when you’re hungry? ‘Why? Do you want me to marry you?’

  He shied quickly away, got to his feet. ‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’ Games of chance, the pleasures of the senses. . . . But it was absurd. He wanted her, not only at this moment but for ever, and why should a black-coated ghost, a solicitor, the distant voices of Petit Tourville restrain him? Government securities. Four pounds a year in interest. ‘Listen,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t marry you,’ Kay said. ‘I’m fed up with gentlemen. They keep you waiting half an hour and then they don’t turn up. He was fond enough of me last night, I can tell you.’ Her disappointed senses found a little relief in the thought of the pink counterpane, the beautiful dead woman envying her pleasure from the wall. Jules listened with admiration. She was a catch, surely even that disappointing libertine, his father, must admit that she was a catch. She was young and pretty and practised; he could not imagine a wife who could more ably stir his senses. He felt no bitterness that he was not the first man she had known; one did not expect as much when wages were so low, employment so precarious, everything which made life worth living, the cinema, the dance hall, powder and scent and rouge and stockings, so dear.

  He egged her on; he liked hearing her speak of marriage without realizing how close it was to them, how attainable. ‘You wouldn’t want to marry,’ he laughed, and kicked an ant-heap and felt a curious freedom in the grey air. A leaf span down the wind and touched his cheek. He was in at the death of something old and he was happy.

  ‘I might try it,’ Kay said.

  ‘You’ve got too many friends.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lose them. My husband would have to toe the line and shake hands. He’d get what he wanted at night.’ It was the answer he had hoped for; he had no wish for any intimate loneliness in love; he wanted uproar, new faces, parties at Southend. ‘Meet Bill. This is Ern. Fancy you not knowing –’ Marriage was the switchback, the giant racer, the lobster teas, the guarantee that one would never be alone. He would even have, welcomed her parents if she had had any; but they were both dead. He would never be one to say: ‘Can’t we be alone together?’; he had even bought Conder’s company with the foreign coins he picked up on the café floor.

  ‘You’d never be satisfied with one man.’

  ‘Depends on the man.’

  Loneliness was only too easily attained; it was in the air one breathed; open any door, it opened on to loneliness in the passage; close the door at night, one shut loneliness in. The toothbr
ush, the chair, the ewer and the bed were dents in loneliness. One had only to stop, to stare, to listen, and one was lost. Then sorrow gripped him for all the useless suffering he could do nothing to ease, he was torn by humility, he was desperate for a place in the world, a task, a duty. But give him voices, company, and he was happy, he was cocksure, he was vulgar, he showed off.

  ‘You see what I can do.’

  I’ve got to be careful, she told herself over and over again. This is when a girl gets a baby; when she’s got a lech like this; when she doesn’t take precautions; when she doesn’t want to take precautions; when she’s in love.

  They were at the park gates. There was no moon. The dark was round them, but the lights of the car made a small friendly glow in the road. You could almost believe it was a fire to warm your hands at. ‘Come on,’ Jules said, and took her hand and ran towards the car. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said, thrusting her into her seat, climbing into his own without opening the door, pushing at the starter. Warmth passed between them as he pressed down his foot and she tried to quiet her own excitement by telling herself that this was only the echo of last night; of three months’ abstinence. But there was this difference. Desire before had always been a form of coquetry; one was careful even if one wasn’t good; she had never before been bitter because she must be careful, had never longed to be taken as she was, anywhere, anyhow, in the car, in the bracken, and damn the consequences. If we were married, she thought, if we had money, if we were married.

  He had ambled all the way from Boxmoor, but now he drove wildly the dark road back to Ivinghoe. The trees shot up against the light and disappeared; a single cottage at a right-angled turn; a woman flat as cardboard at a gate. When the car came out on to the ridge of down, the wind snapped at them, got into their clothes, worried them like a dog. They left it behind, driving down behind the hump of the beacon. He said: ‘This bus can move,’ put his arm round her, accelerated. Kay laughed and pressed herself close to him and told him to go faster, faster, faster. The little needle waggled and climbed. ‘I’m in a hurry.’ You could see nothing but the splash of chalky road in front; you were alone in a small vibrating cage, with a blue light burning above the dial; you had never been in this car before today. Like a horse that feels the weakness of its rider’s thighs, it had the mastery; it bucketed towards the centre of the road. ‘Go on. Go faster.’ They were both a little frightened; he knew the car was not completely under his control; she knew that he was scared. So she said: ‘Go faster, faster,’ daring herself and him. The cross-road at the bottom of the hill rushed up to them; she saw a light shooting along the hedgetops on their left and: ‘Look out, a car,’ and heard him fumbling at the brake. Two wheels lifted, she closed her eyes, and as the car shot diagonally across the road, prayed: ‘My face, don’t let it be my face.’

  ‘Good driving that,’ Jules said, and she opened her eyes while he continued to boast in an uncertain voice that there were not many drivers who would have avoided a collision. ‘It gave those other fellows a start. If I’d lost my nerve –’ The arrow waggled, fell, the hedges bobbed slowly up and down, a farm, the first house. ‘I believe you were scared,’ Jules said. He took a cigarette out of his packet to show how unconcerned he was, but the match he struck wavered and went out. He forgot to light another because they had arrived.

  He went on boasting all the way upstairs. He stood between the bed and the washstand and boasted. He was such a driver, he was such a regular fellow, he had nerve enough for two. She sat on the bed and made up her face and felt a faint nausea. He stretched out his hand to prove his words and she smiled when all the tension of his muscles could not prevent it shaking. ‘You couldn’t hold a tea-cup,’ she said.

  ‘You ought to be grateful,’ he told her in his light cocksure conceited manner. ‘That was driving.’ She thought at first that like other men he was talking to hide his shyness, that he had lost his confidence now that he was alone with her, but he was boasting because he was happy, because he had been scared, because he had thought the car would crash and he would be alone again with Conder and the café. Never for a moment had it occurred to him that his own life was in danger. It was too vibrant now to be cut short like that, too certain of what it wanted.

  ‘Jules,’ she said. ‘Jules, can’t you wait?’ but she had no wish to wait, she welcomed him: she only regretted the promptitude of the embrace when it was so quickly finished that it might have been no more than the gesture he had made her in the park, a salutation across the street. He was with her, he was in her, he was away from her, brushing his hair before the glass, whistling a tune.

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ she said. He glared at her; he had an idea that he had not satisfied, and he was irritated. He would have been humiliated but for the thought that there were months and years ahead; they were going to marry; he would do better next time. The window was open, and he could smell bacon frying in the kitchen below. ‘Eggs and bacon,’ he said, ‘I’m hungry.’ He forgot for a moment what they had just been doing; there was so little to remind him of it, now that his body was quiet again.

  She said: ‘I’m not hungry,’ sullenly.

  ‘If only,’ he said, remembering everything, the legacy, the drive, Kay on the bed, ‘there was something to do. I don’t know why we came out here. We might have gone to the pictures, had a party.’ He spun round to the mirror to form a quick image of himself in a hired dinner jacket, opening a bottle, proposing a toast, shaking hands, ‘meet my fiancée’.

  ‘You could have had your friends in,’ he said, ‘and we’d have announced –’ but the concerted opinion of Petit Tourville restrained him. ‘My legacy.’

  Kay lay on her back with her legs crossed and her eyes half closed. She loved him and had found that he had given her less pleasure than many chance companions. You expected such a damned lot from love, a unique excitement, a quality of everlastingness; no value remained unshaken when love was this: Jules with you and then Jules further away than he had ever been, cute and cocksure and self-satisfied, studying his face in a mirror.

  ‘You talk such a hell of a lot,’ she said, ‘about that legacy. £150 isn’t much. I’d show you how to get through it inside a week. Why, I’ve known men who’ve earned that every week,’ she said, lying desperately with the idea that if she could destroy his thought of the legacy, he would be once again Jules dissatisfied, Jules who had a boss and must work in the morning like herself, the hopelessly lost Jules, who waited outside a cinema, while she drove off with Mr Surrogate, inarticulate, with no realization that she was crazy for him, that she was hungry, that she would love him anywhere, anyhow. ‘Every week,’ she said, ‘God’s truth I have.’

  He blinked at her. ‘Spend it in a week?’

  ‘Any girl would show you.’ She could not have pricked the bubble of his conceit more effectually. He left the mirror altogether and came to the foot of the bed; this was the Jules of the café, the Jules between the tea urn and the till, the Jules she loved. Never mind now that he had not satisfied her, she lay back and sighed with happiness, dreaming of the night and other nights. It was almost possible to believe that she might give up her friends for him; if he asked her, marry him. For a year or two they would be perfectly happy; she would not go to the factory; and then when they were no longer crazy about each other, thank God you could give each other up; a friend of hers had got a divorce for five pounds. But Jules was a Catholic. ‘Do Catholics divorce each other?’ She had not meant to speak aloud.

  ‘No,’ he said furiously, ‘no.’ It seemed to him that he had grossly exaggerated his love for her; it was a feeling one got until one had had the girl, and then it went; what was worse, he had exaggerated the value of his legacy. She was right; a girl could run through it in a week: his father was right: ‘Government securities’ – five pounds a year; it was better than spending it. He began to count up what he had already spent that day. If I drove her back now and cancelled the room. But he shrank from the loneliness of the night which would fol
low. Besides, he told himself, I have not decided. I can still ask her tonight, tomorrow morning.

  ‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said, ‘to see if supper’s ready.’ He opened the door, loneliness was in the dark passage, he stumbled on the unlit stairs, loneliness round his feet. Even the room below with the table spread for their supper was empty, so that he turned to call to her: ‘Come quick,’ but thought better of it. The fire was laid, but needed a match. He had no match and he felt in his pocket for a spill to light from the gas. This was not as he had intended: ‘Meet Ern. Haven’t you met, Bill? Don’t you know –’ He could hear her moving slow-footed overhead, but he was satisfied in the body, he was uninterested. It was a very lonely state, satisfaction. He told himself again, I can always ask her tonight, but he knew quite well that he would be as silent on that subject as the room was silent, the passage, the stairs.

  The petition paper for Drover’s release crinkled into flame. He bent and held it to the fire.

  *

  It had needed all Conrad’s courage to follow the resolution he had formed in the night, when he had lain awake and listened to Milly crying, even as far as the street. A policeman passed; it was odd how quickly one became afraid of the law, but when he had got what he wanted, he would fear no one.

  What shall I do with it?

  What excuse shall I give?

  What’s the good of it?’

  But he had not had enough sleep to answer questions. Somebody touched his arm, pushed him a little to one side, and went on down the pavement. Again he felt the wild anger, the hatred, as when he heard the jokers outside the Berkeley. They didn’t know me, they didn’t notice me, but I know one of them all right, I’d seen him in court day after day, yellow in the face, old, worn-out, watching Jim in the dock, Jim who was young and fresh and as good as dead.