From a Distance (2 page)

Smoking had become his comfort, the only act in his soldier’s daily life he felt he chose for himself. He was on land. What did he do now? He lit a fag and angled his leg to the wall, his shoulders warm against the brick, comfort in the contact. He was on home ground. He watched through narrowed eyes as army units dispersed. Private Williams over there was wrapped around a blonde in a blue coat, her hat perched like a small nest over her ear. Williams’s beret had fallen off, his hair waxed to a sharp ridge above his face. He kissed the girl. Who was she? Michael was momentarily embarrassed by his own ignorance. He threw down the cigarette, a wry twist in his face. Knowing Williams, she was probably the first woman he had run into, a kiss as random as a bullet.

As if in a dance, figures came forward cautiously, until the whole Salvation Army and all their congregation had someone to hug from the troop ship. Embraces and kisses, versions of Private Williams and his welcome chimed along the quay. Laughter bubbled and burst in the crowd as the band crashed cymbals and began a Dixieland jazz tune that didn’t quite work. A pause followed, then ‘We’ll Meet Again’ swooned out of the big shiny tuba. Michael knew he should feel euphoria, hysteria or excitement of some sort, but he felt nothing. He was empty. He drifted above the scene like smoke, he had no point of reference, no one was coming to meet him. No one knew he was back.

In his last letter he had told Janey he would be home ‘before too long’. His fiancée. His sweetheart, at home in Acle with her parents, waiting for him. A whole lifetime lay ahead for him and Janey. Somehow, what that might mean to them both after the war had never surfaced in their three short weeks together. Three weeks. Why could he not have just left it at that?

Michael rolled his head against the wall and the rough brick was solid and comforting. He’d been wired when he met her, biting his nails, smoking even more than now, if that were possible. Unable to be still. Extraordinary, really, that Janey looked twice at him. She was kind. When she laughed, the sound soothed him, gave him respite from the tension running through his body. With her, the clatter of his nerves, which felt like the ceaseless rattle of marbles in a tin, was stilled. He traced a hand across her cheek in wonder at the soft bloom. His response to Janey was visceral. He wanted to touch her, to feel the pulse beneath her skin. Physical contact, resting his arm along her shoulders, sitting beside her, thighs touching, refreshed him. She reminded him that he was alive, and he needed to know what that felt like to go back to the front. When he asked her to marry him so soon after they met, he meant it with all his heart. For ever was so temporary, yet promises were vital in wartime. Now he was not so sure. To be honest, he could scarcely remember what she really looked like. The photograph he had was unreal somehow without her scent, her voice, the touch of her hand. He’d looked at it a hundred times, but it was hard to believe she existed, that her life was running on in some distant parallel universe to his own. It wasn’t that he had anything better in mind, it was more that he could see now how little he had to offer her. They would have got married on his next leave. Sherry with her father and into a suit and off to the Registry Office in Norwich. No fuss, no church wedding, just a quiet exchange of vows. Perhaps that was a sign in itself, he thought. It would have been another memory, a colourful day, happy and hopeful. A year after they met, Normandy came instead. That was two years ago and Michael hadn’t been home since.

Michael left the harbour. Exhaustion and confusion coursed through him, chasing out any sense of purpose or decision-making ability. A pub door swung open, a pair of soldiers, arms around one another, stumbled out grinning. Michael went in. The dark interior was a surprise, he blinked and sat down. He didn’t want a drink, he wanted peace. He pulled out his wallet to look at the photograph of Janey. He’d commissioned it from a photographer in Norwich to mark their engagement. There she was, her lashes feathering on her cheek, a serene gaze, her fair hair shiny and bouncy, lips pinkly pretty in the hand-tinted picture. Charming, but flat. He wished it evoked a memory, a spark of conversation, but it didn’t look real. The studio setting was false and distancing but it was all he had. Tucking the picture back into his wallet, he closed his eyes. If he tried hard enough, could he conjure up Janey’s scent, floral and delicate like her? Could he bring any part of her to life? Her soft skin, her kindness, her warmth? He craved the sweetness that surrounded her, it had intoxicated him. He didn’t know if he loved her when he asked her to marry him, he’d just known she could make him forget. She was a beacon to live for through Normandy and the rest.

In the pub, a wood-tinged aroma of cigarettes and a yeasty blast from the beer muffled the senses. Michael bought a whisky and took it outside. He pulled out the last cigarette from the last pack he’d had on the boat, and stopped a passing couple for a light. The soldier had his kit bag over one shoulder, his arm around his girl, shrugging her to him with a grin like the Cheshire Cat on his face. He flung down the kit bag but kept holding on to the girl, who wriggled closer and let her hair fall over one eye. Michael noticed a dust of freckles across her cheek, and a tiny scar at the edge of her eye which disappeared when she smiled.

The soldier flicked open his lighter for Michael. ‘There you are, sir, best of luck to you, sir.’ He saluted and they swung off down the road, the girl’s mouse-brown curls bouncing on her shoulders, his arm around her waist, their step in perfect time with one another.

Janey’s father was the rector of Oby, a tiny village near Acle, about twenty miles from Kings Sloley. The day after he had proposed to Janey, Michael had been anxious, waiting for her father to return from church. Was there a right time of day, or a correct day of the week to ask a vicar if you could marry his daughter? If there was, surely it was after the morning service, in the Sunday hiatus before lunch, where the smell of boiled cabbage mingled with the fresh fragrance of lilac in the hall, and the grandfather clock ticked, reassuring and regular as a heartbeat.

Michael could still see the painted glass paperweight on the desk, and taste the coat of anxiety dry on his tongue as he waited for Reverend Thompson to pour him a glass of sherry. The vicar’s hand, when he passed the glass to Michael, shook a little, but his gaze was steady. Michael wished Janey was in the room with him, and knocked back the sherry in one. It was sweet, unexpectedly sickly, and potent. He spluttered into his handkerchief, then wiped his eyes.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I wonder if you, if I, if we—. I’ve asked Janey to marry me and I hope you will give us your blessing.’

God. Was that right? Should he have put it differently? Had he been impertinent?

Reverend Thompson looked grave. He was nodding, his mouth folded neat as a napkin in his flat pale face. It seemed to Michael that he might never answer, and his mind raced ahead with the difficulties of protocol that this would bring. Should he ask again? Is silence a yes? He coughed. The room was stifling. He found his gaze swerving towards the door no matter how hard he tried to keep it on the Reverend.

Finally the utterance came: ‘If she’s chosen you, you’re a lucky young man.’

For a split second Michael had no idea what he meant, then relief shot through him. They shook hands. What was supposed to happen next? Michael looked uncertainly around the room, and in that moment, the Reverend took advantage of his lack of concentration and vanished noiselessly into the garden through the floor length sash window. Dazed, Michael went to find Janey.

A lifetime away from that moment, he imagined more than could recall her presence, laughter spreading between the two of them as he held her in the chilly tiled hall of the rectory. She was wearing the flowered dress she’d had on the day he met her, pale blue with pansies scattered across it.

The pansy freaked with jet

The line from Lycidas, about a youth killed in his prime, leapt into his head in the pub bar, with Southampton noisy and harsh around him. Tears scorched his eyelids, a veil across his memory. Poems were scant comfort, but they were something. Michael clung to lines and verses, turning them over in his head when he didn’t want to think of anything else. Whisky burned, licking a path down into his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten today, no one had, the ship had run out of rations before it left Italy, and the only food on board was black market chocolate and dry bread stolen by soldiers from Italian farms. He couldn’t imagine what men looked like with more than an ounce of flesh on their bones any more. The pub shelves behind the bar were stacked with a few tins of tobacco, and a jar of pickled onions.

Now he was back, he would eat regular meals. Michael imagined days spooling endlessly by marked by plates of sandwiches like the ones at his cousin Angela’s wedding. Fish paste or corned beef. Not egg mayonnaise, Angela had explained to him, laughing, the eggs had been saved for the cake.

Angela’s mother with a slash of orange lipstick and a long pheasant feather in her hat, ‘Would anyone like a top up? There’s another pot brewing.’ A future full of cups of tea and rationed slices of fruitcake over which people would politely nod as they passed the plate. He swirled his whisky in the glass and knocked it back. Rationed cake and tea. Was that what this had all been for?

Angela married an RAF pilot in 1942, the Christmas before Michael met Janey. Soon after, he was called back to his unit and sent into the sky. Had he known, like Yeats’s airman, what was to come?

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above

Angela hadn’t had a lot of time to become a wife. She lost a husband she scarcely knew, and was stricken, bereft of something she’d never had. Their time together measured in slices of wedding cake and sandwiches.

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death

The same story echoed everywhere. Janey’s unfaltering smile, and her kindness steadied Michael. He’d met her then, home on sick leave, a flare up of malaria. His nerves had grated like steel on ice when he woke with a start every night. In the lanes of his childhood, where he strolled with Janey, Michael had listened to her identify honeysuckle and heartsease, pansies again, and ragged robin and love-in-a-mist, she knew all the flowers of the hedgerows. He was soothed. Janey taught piano to the infant class at her local primary school. Michael felt the joy of fluttering impulse, and was led on by the indomitable essence of spring, the rousing cheeriness of blackbirds singing, and Janey’s uncritical friendliness.

No one could imagine the future during the war. Michael looked around Southampton’s broken streets, dusty and gaping, a filmset unreality for the servicemen milling about, these thin ghosts, free to go anywhere, do anything. Maybe he should have married Janey there and then, on that first leave when he met her. Michael had known he was looking for solace when he asked her to come and spend the last nights he had at home at a pub near Angela’s parents’ farm in Suffolk. That short time was an oasis, though, in truth, he could only remember fleeting images. They went to see Angela, the visit to his cousin the excuse for visiting the Suffolk coast. She welcomed them to the farm but her smile was dull. She sighed in the pretty sitting room with its sea view and the vase of sweet williams gay and colourful among the family photographs on the mantelpiece. She waved them off from the door and retreated back into her grief.

The air was sweet, a cloud of gnats hung above the duck pond, and swallows dived and swooped across the water, turning on sharp wing blades. Their spirits flying, Michael and Janey hurried to the sea, played tag on the beach and fell breathless against one another.

‘Shall we swim?’ Her challenge. How could he say no?

‘After you.’ Smooth calves, a flash of skin and she was in the sea. He dived under the first wave beside her, turned to see what she was looking at and a wave towered over them. It hurtled down as his hand caught the jut of her hip and he pulled her deep under him, holding her closely, safely beneath the wave.

At night Michael smoked and paced, he stretched a yawn and brushed against the ceiling of the bedroom. He didn’t fit in the chalky pink room, with its windows hung in sweet frills patterned with grey feathers. He pushed the window wide and leaned out into the velvet night, the damp scent of leaves and soil lingering about him. Janey slept, her skin like petals, so soft he thought it might tear when he touched her. Back in the bed he curled himself around her, reaching for her, face pressed to her shoulder, craving her peaceful sleep. Both nights they stayed, he lay awake, afraid that she might stir and become aware of how much he wished this time would never end.

He returned to the ruined French beaches, and their idyll became fragmented memories, blown from time to time across his thoughts like the wind-tossed apple blossom that had once existed in Normandy’s orchards. Almost two years on, no feeling was attached to his thoughts of Janey except anxiety. They hardly knew one another. He forgot her birthday, she remembered his, and sent a card that smelled of her scent. He loved the waft of sweetness curling out of the envelope, but he couldn’t bring her to life in his mind. She remained a studio image and a crumpled photograph. He hadn’t written much after that, though she sent frequent cards and letters. He kept them, but he didn’t reread them, like the others did. He wasn’t sure if he was different from everyone else. Did he care enough? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that Janey had no idea he was in Southampton today, she didn’t even know he was alive.