Eye of the Needle (3 page)

3

F
ABER…GODLIMAN…TWO-THIRDS OF A TRIANGLE
that one day would be crucially completed by the principals, David and Lucy, of a ceremony proceeding at this moment in a small country church. It was old and very beautiful. A dry-stone wall enclosed a graveyard where wildflowers grew. The church itself had been there—well, bits of it had—the last time Britain was invaded, almost a millennium ago. The north wall of the nave, several feet thick and pierced with only two tiny windows, could remember that last invasion; it had been built when churches were places of physical as well as spiritual sanctuary, and the little round-headed windows were better for shooting arrows out of than for letting the Lord’s sunshine in. Indeed, the Local Defense Volunteers had detailed plans for using the church if and when the current bunch of European thugs crossed the Channel.

But no jackboots sounded in the tiled choir in this August of 1940; not yet. The sun glowed through stained glass windows that had survived Cromwell’s iconoclasts and Henry VIII’s greed, and the roof resounded to the notes of an organ that had yet to yield to woodworm and dry rot.

It was a lovely wedding. Lucy wore white, of course, and her five sisters were bridesmaids in apricot dresses. David wore the Mess Uniform of a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, all crisp and new for it was the first time he had put it on. They sang Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd, to the tune
Crimond
.

Lucy’s father looked proud, as a man will on the day his eldest and most beautiful daughter marries a fine boy in a uniform. He was a farmer, but it was a long time since he had sat on a tractor; he rented out his arable land and used the rest to raise race-horses, although this winter of course his pasture would go under the plough and potatoes would be planted. Although he was really more gentleman than farmer, he nevertheless had the open-air skin, the deep chest, and the big stubby hands of agricultural people. Most of the men on that side of the church bore him a resemblance: barrel-chested men, with weathered red faces, those not in tail coats favoring tweed suits and stout shoes.

The bridesmaids had something of that look, too; they were country girls. But the bride was like her mother. Her hair was a dark, dark red, long and thick and shining and glorious, and she had wide-apart amber eyes and an oval face; and when she looked at the vicar with that clear, direct gaze and said, “I will” in that firm, clear voice, the vicar was startled and thought “By God she means it!” which was an odd thought for a vicar to have in the middle of a wedding.

The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them, too. David’s father was a lawyer—his permanent frown was a professional affectation and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about the RAF and war in the air was a fad that would soon pass.) But nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away, God forbid. No, they all looked like David’s mother, who sat beside her husband now, with almost-black hair and dark skin and long, slender limbs.

David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man—his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.

The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.

When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.

KISSING THE BRIDE
was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to—well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilized and dropped the whole business.

She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well…But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime Father would have hired the Albert Hall.

So far nine people had said, “May all your troubles be little ones,” and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, “I want to see more than a fence running around your garden.” Lucy had shaken countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like “I wouldn’t mind being in David’s pajamas tonight.” David had made a speech in which he thanked Lucy’s parents for giving him their daughter, and Lucy’s father actually said that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one’s parents.

A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her husband. “David, this is Uncle Norman.”

Uncle Norman pumped David’s bony hand. “Well, m’boy, when do you take up your commission?”

“Tomorrow, sir.”

“What, no honeymoon?”

“Just twenty-four hours.”

“But you’ve only just finished your training, so I gather.”

“Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge. Besides, with all this going on they can’t spare pilots. I expect I shall be in the air tomorrow.”

Lucy said quietly, “David, don’t,” but Uncle Norman persevered.

“What’ll you fly?” Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.

“Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She’s a lovely kite.” David had already fallen into the RAF slang—kites and crates and the drink and bandits at two o’clock. “She’s got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and she’ll turn around in a shoebox.”

“Marvelous, marvelous. You boys are certainly knocking the stuffing out of the Luftwaffe, what?”

“We got sixty yesterday for eleven of our own,” David said, as proudly as if he had shot them all down himself. “The day before, when they had a go at Yorkshire, we sent the lot back to Norway with their tails between their legs—and we didn’t lose a single kite!”

Uncle Norman gripped David’s shoulder with tipsy fervor. “Never,” he quoted pompously, “was so much owed by so many to so few. Churchill said that the other day.”

David tried a modest grin. “He must have been talking about the mess bills.”

Lucy hated the way they trivialized bloodshed and destruction. She said: “David, we should go and change now.”

They went in separate cars to Lucy’s home. Her mother helped her out of the wedding dress and said: “Now, my dear, I don’t quite know what you’re expecting tonight, but you ought to know—”

“Oh, mother, this
is
1940, you know!”

Her mother colored slightly. “Very well, dear,” she said mildly. “But if there is anything you want to talk about, later on…”

It occurred to Lucy that to say things like this cost her mother considerable effort, and she regretted her sharp reply. “Thank you,” she said. She touched her mother’s hand. “I will.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything.” She kissed Lucy’s cheek and went out.

Lucy sat at the dressing table in her slip and began to brush her hair. She knew exactly what to expect tonight. She felt a faint glow of pleasure as she remembered.

It happened in June, a year after they had met at the Glad Rag Ball. They were seeing each other every week by this time, and David had spent part of the Easter vacation with Lucy’s people. Mother and Father approved of him—he was handsome, clever and gentlemanly, and he came from precisely the same stratum of society as they did. Father thought he was a shade too opinionated, but Mother said the landed gentry had been saying that about undergraduates for six hundred years, and
she
thought David would be kind to his wife, which was the most important thing in the long run. So in June Lucy went to David’s family home for a weekend.

The place was a Victorian copy of an eighteenth-century grange, a square-shaped house with nine bedrooms and a terrace with a vista. What impressed Lucy about it was the realization that the people who planted the garden must have known they would be long dead before it reached maturity. The atmosphere was very easy, and the two of them drank beer on the terrace in the afternoon sunshine. That was when David told her that he had been accepted for officer training in the RAF, along with four pals from the university flying club. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

“I can fly all right,” he said, “and they’ll need people once this war gets going—they say it’ll be won and lost in the air, this time.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” she said quietly.

“Not a bit,” he said. Then he looked at her and said, “Yes, I am.”

She thought he was very brave, and held his hand.

A little later they put on swimming suits and went down to the lake. The water was clear and cool, but the sun was still strong and the air was warm as they splashed about gleefully.

“Are you a good swimmer?” he asked her.

“Better than you!”

“All right. Race you to the island.”

She shaded her eyes to look into the sun. She held the pose for a minute, pretending she did not know how desirable she was in her wet swimsuit with her arms raised and her shoulders back. The island was a small patch of bushes and trees about three hundred yards away, in the center of the lake.

She dropped her hands, shouted, “Go!” and struck out in a fast crawl.

David won, of course, with his enormously long arms and legs. Lucy found herself in difficulty when she was still fifty yards from the island. She switched to breaststroke, but she was too exhausted even for that, and she had to roll over on to her back and float. David, who was already sitting on the bank blowing like a walrus, slipped back into the water and swam to meet her. He got behind her, held her beneath the arms in the correct lifesaving position, and pulled her slowly to shore. His hands were just below her breasts.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said, and she giggled despite her breathlessness.

A few moments later he said, “I suppose I might as well tell you.”

“What?” she panted.

“The lake is only four feet deep.”

“You…!” She wriggled out of his arms, spluttering and laughing, and found her footing.

He took her hand and led her out of the water and through the trees. He pointed to an old wooden rowboat rotting upside-down beneath a hawthorn. “When I was a boy I used to row out here in that, with one of Papa’s pipes, a box of matches and a pinch of St. Bruno in a twist of paper. This is where I used to smoke it.”

They were in a clearing, completely surrounded by bushes. The turf underfoot was clean and springy. Lucy flopped on the ground.

“We’ll swim back slowly,” David said.

“Let’s not even talk about it just yet,” she replied.

He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down. He stroked her hip and kissed her throat, and soon she stopped shivering. When he laid his hand gently, nervously, on the soft mound between her legs, she arched upwards, willing him to press harder. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him open-mouthed and wetly. His hands went to the straps of her swimsuit, and he pulled them down over her shoulders. She said, “No.”

He buried his face between her breasts. “Lucy, please.”

“No.”

He looked at her. “It might be my last chance.”

She rolled away from him and stood up. Then, because of the war, and because of the pleading look on his flushed young face, and because of the glow inside her which would not go away, she took off her costume with one swift movement and removed her bathing cap so that her dark-red hair shook out over her shoulders. She knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands and guiding his lips to her breast.

She lost her virginity painlessly, enthusiastically, and only a little too quickly.

THE SPICE OF GUILT
made the memory more pleasant, not less. Even if it had been a well-planned seduction then she had been a willing, not to say eager, victim, especially at the end.

She began to dress in her going-away outfit. She had startled him a couple of times that afternoon on the island: once when she wanted him to kiss her breasts, and again when she had guided him inside her with her hands. Apparently such things did not happen in the books he read. Like most of her friends, Lucy read D. H. Lawrence for information about sex. She believed in his choreography and mistrusted the sound effects—the things his people did to one another sounded nice, but not that nice; she was not expecting trumpets and thunderstorms and the clash of cymbals at her sexual awakening.

David was a little more ignorant than she, but he was gentle, and he took pleasure in her pleasure, and she was sure that was the important thing.

They had done it only once since the first time. Exactly a week before their wedding they had made love again, and it caused their first row.

This time it was at her parents’ house, in the morning after everyone else had left. He came to her room in his robe and got into bed with her. She almost changed her mind about Lawrence’s trumpets and cymbals. David got out of bed immediately afterward.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“Somebody might come in.”

“I’ll chance it. Come back to bed.” She was warm and drowsy and comfortable, and she wanted him beside her.

He put on his robe. “It makes me nervous.”

“You weren’t nervous five minutes ago.” She reached for him. “Lie with me. I want to get to know your body.”

Her directness obviously embarrassed him, and he turned away.

She flounced out of bed, her lovely breasts heaving. “You’re making me feel cheap!” She sat on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

David put his arms around her and said: “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. You’re the first for me, too, and I don’t know what to expect, and I feel confused…I mean, nobody tells you anything about this, do they?”