It’s a Battlefield (16 page)

‘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.

‘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.

And he had brought trouble on her. This was not happiness brushing his umbrella, not love watching him at second-hand, from the mirror. ‘Shut the door.' She whispered the words. She was full of shame and fear and unhappiness. Her skin was as dry as a child's with fever. She was a child who had been aged suddenly by sickness. He remembered a boy at school who had died from influenza, how in the last hours before the nurses had put a screen round the bed, he had watched all that went on in the sickroom with a fallacious, an elderly wisdom; he was not really wise, not really old; he was only feverish and very weak.

‘Did you hear what she said?' Milly asked, ‘that it was rotten for me? Did you hear what she'd been doing?' If he had felt the slightest lust, he would have fled; it was the unexcitement in his love, the element of pity, that kept him there. It seemed unbearable to him that she should suffer.

‘You ought to turn her out of the house.'

‘Conrad,' she said, ‘don't be a fool. Don't be a fool, Conrad. She's right. Eighteen years. Do you think I could stand it? One's got to begin some time.' He wanted to tell her that this was sick-room wisdom, but there was no time to argue. She was speaking to him and he wanted to stop her. Otherwise she would suffer later at having been the one to ask, and she had already enough suffering to bear; he wanted to spare her anything he could. ‘I want –' she said, and even then, in his hurry to interrupt, he noted with pain and without surprise that she was too honest to use a kindlier or more tender word.

‘Listen,' he said quietly, ‘you know I love you. Let me stay. That was why I came upstairs. I couldn't sleep.' He felt no guilt at all; this did not harm his brother, this hopeless attempt to shield her, for she had not even been deceived; she was glad, she was grateful, she was his friend, but she didn't believe a word he said. Then she touched him with timidity, and his flesh stirred, and he felt a degree of guilt which only the bed and the tiring of his body and the forgetting of his love in the direct contact of skin with skin, the thrust of lust, could temporarily and in part assuage. When he felt her shudder, he had a dull sense of an irrevocable injury which one of them had done to the other. Love had been close to him, in the kitchen, before the glow and the hum of the gas, between chair and chair, which had escaped him now in the bed, in the dark. One of them had injured the other, but it was not their fault. They had been driven to it, and holding her body close to him with painful tenderness, it was hate he chiefly felt, hate of Jim, of a director's nephew, of two men laughing in Piccadilly. When he awoke in the night she was crying, and nothing that he could do would stop her tears. He thought of Kay happily asleep in the next room and lust, he thought, they call that lust and this is love. He meant the hate and the pain and the sense of guilt and the sound of crying in the greying room and sleeplessness and the walls shaking as the early morning lorries drove out of London.

*

‘Caroline,' the voice said, ‘Caroline.' It added with metallic kindliness. ‘It's not like you to forget a friend. Ten years ago . . .' The Assistant Commissioner plodded back through those years; they led through suffering, through home-sickness, through resignation; along jungle paths, across mosquito-haunted nights, past a good many deaths of one sort or another. But the telephone did not allow much time for reflection. ‘I want you to dine with me – on Monday.'

He had just time to emerge, as it were backwards, at the other end of ten years; the final dinner at the Army and Navy to the only man with whom he cared to spend his last hours in England; his valet waving decorously from the quay; the mist which hid the Needles, hid England altogether, so that he could not give the final glance which sentiment would conventionally have compelled from him. Before that – of course Caroline telling him to write, pouring out tea, turning to a politician.

‘I really don't think . . .' His table was littered with papers; the wireless invention was not satisfactory; the unofficial reports on Drover were coming in from various districts.

‘You can't refuse me. It's absurd. The day after tomorrow. Only two hours.'

‘If you could – er – see my, my desk.'

‘Such old friends. We mustn't allow the threads to be dropped. Too absurd. After ten years.' The appeal to sentiment was heartlessly efficient; it had struck him in the place where he was most vulnerable and at the hour when he was most alone. Even his secretary had left him in his room at the Yard; all those men, whose hours of duty corresponded with his, were departing; their voices faded down the long passages between the glass cubicles.