Key to the Door (56 page)

He pulled her into the perspiring drink-smelling mix-up of the dance-floor, giving in to the honky-tonk jazz of the Boston Stumpers. Her hands rested lightly, as if she were a taxi-dancer approached for the first time. His movements while dancing were those of some sailor who had never taken lessons, and he used the same erratic and exaggerated steps for all rhythms. Yet their bodies moved together and he drew her slowly to him. With a sudden movement, she clung firmly, as if some inner vision frightened her. “Brian,” she faltered, “don't go, will you?”

“No.” They pressed warmly together, close to the dark night of each other. His arm was so far around her waist that his fingers touched the under-part of her breast. Noise and music were forgotten, stranded in a world they had sidestepped from, its fabricated rhythms alien and unmatched compared to the swaying cutoff warmth of themselves. He felt the shape and benefit of her body, thighs intertwining at each step, shoulders and breasts against his. “I love you,” he said. “I feel as though I've lived with you for years, for a life.”

“Don't say that. It's not finished yet, is it?”

He kissed her closed eyes: “What are you crying for?”—misery back and making a lump of stone in his guts, impossible to get rid of because space for it had been there since birth, it seemed. Her forehead creased and lips twisted into a childlike ugliness that she tried to hide. A haze of noise and whisky defeated him, turned easily back the sudden though matter-of-fact intrusions of traffic and ships' hooters from beyond the world of the Boston Lights. Into it came Knotman, framed at the far door with his gorgeous bint—a black flower, smiling as they pushed a pathway to the bar. Mimi and Brian went into another dance, and were drawn tightly to each other: “You're making me dizzy,” she protested. “I'll be sick.”

“Save it for the ferry. Are you going back with me?”

“You know I am.”

They were cheerful by the end of the dance, stayed on for another. “You're thinner than when I first knew you,” she said. “Your bones are sticking out.”

“That's your fault; you're like a magnet and they're trying to get at you.”

“You're crazy,” she laughed. “It's impossible.”

“Crazy,” he said, “like a blind, three-legged blackclock.”

“What's a blackclock?”

“A cockroach. An English shit-beetle.”

“Do they have them in England as well?”

“Sure they do. They have snakes in England, jungle and wild animals and mountains. Cities and swamps and big rivers. You look as if you don't believe me? Well, I can't prove it this minute, but it's true, right enough.”

“If it is, why do you want to stay in Malaya?”

“Because”—even if you don't have an answer, make one up, a lie being better than no answer at all. If when he was a kid his brothers or cousins had asked: What is the biggest town in Australia? he'd rather have said Paris than I don't know. “Because I love you.”

But still the tears came, for no lie could stop them, nor even the truth, since what he had said was certainly somewhere between both. “When I was told you had a wife in England I didn't believe it. I thought the man was lying or having me on. But now you've told me as well, it must be true.” He winced at the delayed action of her trick, unable to answer the cunning of a fine ruse played as much against herself as him.

“I'm sorry,” he said, but it was too late. He had lifted her from a passive sort of contentment, and understood that she couldn't forgive him. “I'll stay,” he said. “I want to. I can't do anything else,” and while they were dancing he imagined them living in some house like the Chinese widow's, on the edge of the Patani swamps, where bullfrogs and night noises rolled an extinguishing carpet over her senses, an oblivious rest for them both from the strident thump and blare of the band that was beginning to send him off his nut.

The next morning those who had been on the Gunong Barat expedition were awakened at five o'clock. The hand of a police sergeant from the guard-room shook Brian out of the death-cells of sleep, lifted the millstone of exhaustion from his head. He'd been home with Mimi and stayed till two, had run the gauntlet of roadblocks between the village and camp, thankful at reaching his bed with no marks of buck-shot on him. It was a feat of tracking, often on all fours by beach and footpath to avoid the groups of Malays who sat smoking and telling tales to each other, alerted for any bandit gang, of whom Brian might have been one. It's getting worse, he had told himself. If I don't get shot by mistake, they'll report me to the guard-house for being out without a pass. I feel like a Chetnik freedom-fighter; or I would with a gun to blaze back with if they tried owt.

“Get up,” the sergeant said. “Out of that wanking pit. There's a job for you jungle lads to do.”

“What's going off?” Brian suspected a practical joke. “It's still dark.”

“A plane's crashed and you've got to go after it.” He stirred Kirkby, Baker, Jack, and a boy from Cheshire. “Come on, get yer hands off it. The ship's going down.”

Brian sat up, but made no move to get out of bed, while Knotman walked along the billet already dressed: “Get weaving. We've got to help those poor bastards down. They're fixing lorries and wireless gear at the MT section.” Brian pulled his trousers on: “Why did the daft bastards have to crash at a time like this? I've never felt so knackered in my life.”

“I suppose you're getting as much of it in as you can,” Knotman said, “before they drag you screaming down to that boat at Singapore.”

“I wish that was what they was waking me up for this morning.”

Knotman threw him a fag. “I'll go over to signals in a bit and find out where it pancaked.”

The sergeant returned: “Look sharp. Get over to the cookhouse and they'll give you some breakfast and rations.”

“How long do they expect us to be away?” Baker wanted to know.

“How do I know, laddie?” the sergeant cried. “I'll get God on the blower and find out, if it means that much to you.”

“It does,” Baker said. “We're on the boat in a couple of weeks.”

“
GET WEAVING
!” he shouted. “Or you'll be over the wall for fifty-six days, never mind on the bloody boat.” They went down the steps and walked off through the palm-trees to a leisurely meal, still finding time to hang around in the billet afterwards. Brian was impatient. “They're fixing the radio,” Knotman explained. “I got on to the DF hut and the plane ducked thirty miles south, they think.”

“In the meantime,” Brian said, “the poor bastards are hanging in the trees, bleeding to death.” He lifted a Bible from the locker of the next bed, opened it, and put his finger on a random verse to find what the future held, a trick he'd seen in a film a few nights ago: “And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.” Among the people. What people? A loony game. I can't make head or tail of it, and in any case I'm not superstitious. His filled pack lay tilted by the bed, this time weighing no more than forty pounds. He was also to collect a medium-range TR, if the mechanics could get it working before they left, for it was the only one at the camp. He flicked open the Bible, again thrust his finger on to a verse: “And they cut off his head.…” It kept opening at the same place because the binding was faulty, and would open there till the cows came home—unless he deliberately avoided it, which somehow he didn't want to do because the more he read it, the more some hidden truth seemed to lurk at the heart of it. He half-understood its meaning by the time the driver poked his head in and bawled out that they were ready to go.

CHAPTER 26

On his first leave from square-bashing, Brian had got into Nottingham at eight of an evening, having taken most of the day to travel from the back-end of Gloucestershire. Reaching the wide green flatlands of the Trent beyond Brum, he felt so much excitement that he couldn't eat the sandwiches and cake dashed out for at the last stop. Cows were dotted by peaceful and diminished streams and sunlight still burned into the packed corridor, and he felt himself being channelled nearer to Nottingham with every circling clatter of the wheels. The excitement in him was not so much at seeing Pauline as at the sensation in his stomach of being lost once more in the vast familiar spider's web of Nottingham and all the comfortable meaning of it.

After a hello cup of tea with mam and dad in Radford, he hopped a couple of buses to see Pauline on the estate out at Aspley. Perhaps by some fluke the house would be empty and they'd be able to love each other on the settee or roll about in one of the made beds upstairs; or if not that, then happen they could go for a walk beyond the Broad Oak and snug down in some dry field of sweet summer grasses.

Everybody was in, at supper, as if they'd been waiting especially to greet him after his first ten weeks drilling like a brainless ragbag for his king and country. You never got what you hoped for, so he might have known it would be like this. Mrs. Mullinder poured him tea in the pint-sized mug that used to be old Mullinder's favourite—a gesture indicating that Brian was already part of the tribal loot. Fourteen-year-old Maureen sat reading
Oracle
by the fire, all self-conscious with her small high bosom and trace of lipstick, her face the spit-image of Pauline's when he'd started courting her at fifteen. They're a good-looking family, he thought, though feeling uneasy at the mother's gaze and the comparative silence in spite of the fact that there were five people in the room. “You look a bit as if you've had a hard time in the air force,” Betty said with a sly grin. “Do you get good grub?”

“Not bad. Sometimes it's pigswill, though.” Pauline didn't say much either, face half-hidden by the hair as she opened a tin of fruit on the other side of the table. However, he was too involved eating his way through the still-lavish supper to let the atmosphere disturb him. Not that he expected them to put the flags out.

Afterwards he suggested a walk. “You'd better tell him while you've got the chance,” he remembered Mrs. Mullinder saying. “And come to some arrangement.”

She broke it on Coventry Lane: “I'm having a baby.”

They stopped by a gate, leaned on it so that he could take the shock. Even going into the air force hadn't wrenched the nuts-and-bolts of his world as loose as this piece of information. The picture of his life was shaken, sent spinning like an iron Catherine-wheel in front of his eyes. He closed them tight, knew that this wasn't the way to take such news, so opened them on green fields rolling up to the tree-trunked bastion of Catstone Wood, a mist-green spear-blade of sky above, which, he realized through his shock, was coloured by the sun going down. “Roll on,” he muttered with a long-drawn-out whistle of breath. “This is a stunner.”

“That's nowt to what I said when I found out, I can tell you,” she retorted, pale and firm-lipped. She was half a stranger after ten weeks' absence, and he felt this wasn't a good way to get to know her again. He remembered how Joan and Jim had got married: it began a mere three months ago by Joan telling Jim that she was pregnant, and by the time she was able to say it was a false alarm, they were engaged and didn't think it worth the fuss and bother to put off the tentative wedding-date already fixed. Jim told Brian at the time that being engaged made people look up to you, treat you with more respect, like an adult at last. But Brian didn't feel he needed that sort of respect, though he wondered whether Pauline had taken a tip from Joan and was only saying she was pregnant to get him on the tramline to matrimony.

“Mam caught me being sick one morning and I said I had a bilious bout, but when it went on for a week she made me go to the doctor's with her. I already knew, though, in a way, because I'd missed a period. I kept hoping it wasn't true, that's all.” She smiled, and he saw she wasn't concerned—like Joan had plainly been—to trick him into an engagement.

“It's a sod, i'n't it?” he said, half-smiling back. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry, was gripped by a hot-aches of the heart and brain.

“It is, if you look at it in that way,” she answered. They walked arm-in-arm along the blue-blackness of the lane, a cold wind blowing into their faces. His next statement came almost without thought—at least, he had wondered whether or not to say it, and decided he would before too much consideration stopped him: “We'll think about getting married.”

“Do you want to?” she asked, in a dead-level inconsequential voice. He squeezed her arm: “I do, if you want to know. If you'll 'ave me, that is.”

She laughed: “Maybe it's a case of having to!”

“We've been going out with each other long enough.”

“In a way, though, I'm sorry it had to be a bit of a force-put. I don't like
having
to, if you see what I mean.”

He was offended. “Why not then?”

“Oh, I don't know. It would have been better the other way.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Not that I want to get married in church or anything like that,” she said. “It's old-fashioned now. As long as you're married, what does it matter?”

“That's a good job,” he agreed, “though I don't expect it'll make your mam and Betty very happy.”

“Well, it's us that matter, duck, i'n't it? Not many people bother wi' church nowadays.”

“They don't,” he said. “We should be in the Broad Oak knocking it back now, celebrating. It's supposed to be good when two people get engaged.” He was fighting away from the part of himself that felt bear-trapped, leg-caught, and pulled into the earth-pits of responsibility.

“I'd love to have a drink, but I can't face it just now.”