The Honeyed Peace (14 page)

The Peace Conference was well attended by many of the former Spanish War correspondents. I do not know about the others but I felt that I had lived longer than was decent, and judging by the appearance of my friends, who had also been wandering around the wars, we looked that way. One afternoon, limp with boredom and prickly with contempt, I was taking my ease in the Luxembourg Palace Press bar when Owen James came in. I had seen him once in Italy, during the Cassino winter, but our real bond was Spain. We fell upon each other with loud rejoicing. We settled the affairs of the world. We told each other how this Peace Conference ought to be and wasn't. And, for no reason, he mentioned Shorty.

'Do you remember Jean Roche?' he said. Jean Roche was a French correspondent in Madrid, who wore the largest horn-rimmed spectacles I have ever seen on anyone.

'Sure,' I said.

'Well, he kind of kept up with Shorty in Paris after the war.' The war, for us old boys, was always Spain. 'He met her husband. I had dinner with Jean last week. He told me about Shorty.'

'Yes,' I said.

'It seems she and her baby and her husband moved down somewhere in the country with her father-in-law,' Owen James said. 'Then the krauts took over, that part was occupied anyhow. It was okay for a while, you know nothing gets organized too fast. But the krauts started settling in and checking up on everybody and seeing everything was on the level. Shorty didn't have any papers; there wasn't enough time for the red tape between her being married and the war declared. And she was a German anti-Fascist, which as you know is what the krauts would not take, and had been in Spain, which was really bad, and her first husband was a Jew, and that's the kiss of death. So it seems Shorty sat around there thinking about all this. Jean Roche got it from her husband. And then one day she walked out the front door and disappeared.'

'But why,' I said, 'why?'

'Well,' Owen James said, 'she left a note, so her husband told Jean Roche. She said she didn't want to bring danger to her baby.

He was to look after the baby, that was all; she didn't want to make trouble for the kid.'

I said nothing and we had two more brandies.

'But now,' I said, 'but now that it's over, hasn't anything ...'

'No,' Owen James said, 'she's gone; I guess you have to assume she's dead.'

'How dreadful,' I said, and the word sounded insulting to me, tiny, feeble, a caricature.

I remembered Shorty in her happiness. Owen James wouldn't have known what she had; Owen James wouldn't know about the peace on her face. Then somebody bounced into the bar and said, 'The whole Yugoslav Delegation is boycotting the session,' and everyone rushed for the Press galleries. I did too. I have not thought about Shorty since.

This week I am in New York, that mammoth stone ant-heap, buying unseasonal summer clothes. The sky sparkles in these parts and those who can go about wrapped in furs. I am buying silks and cottons, as I am leaving for South America on a long insignificant assignment about something or other. It seems that the calendar is confused for South America, and they have summer while other folks have winter. I do not know why, in the middle of inspecting without interest a pale green flowered print, for wear during the cocktail hour, I should have remembered Shorty. I do not know why at all. It occurs to me that, if you live long enough, there are more people you would like to forget than people you would like to remember. I would like, for instance, to forget Shorty as I have forgotten her name.

MIAMI-NEW YORK

There were five Air Force sergeants and they got in the plane and found seats and began to call to each other across the aisle or over the chair-backs, saying, 'How about it, Joe? I guess this is the way to travel,' or saying, 'Where do they keep the parachutes?' or saying, 'Boy, I've got a pillow, what do you know!' They were loud and good-natured for a moment, very young in their new importance of being bomber crews, and they wanted the other people, the civilians, to know that they belonged in a different, fiercer world.

There were a half-dozen of the men who seemed always to be going to or coming from Washington, the men with grey suits, hats, hair, skin, and with brown calf brief-cases. These have no definite age and curiously similar faces, and are all equally tired and quiet. They always put their hats in the rack above the seat and sit down with their brief-cases on their laps. Later they open their brief-cases and look at the sheets of typed or mimeographed paper, or they go to sleep.

The stewardess was young, with blonde hair hanging to her shoulders. She had a neat body of the right height and weight, and a professionally friendly voice. Fasten your seat belts, please, she said. Would you like some chewing-gum? Fasten your seat belt, please, sir. Chewing-gum?

A woman sat in the double front seat behind the magazine rack. This was the best seat, as she knew, because there was enough room to stretch your legs. Also you could see well from here, if you wanted to see. Now, for a moment, she looked out the window and saw the few palm trees at the far edge of the field blowing out in heavy plumes against the sky. Therewas something so wrong about Miami that even a beautiful night, sharp with stars, only seemed a real-estate advertisement. The woman pulled off her earrings and put them carelessly in her coat pocket. She ran her hands through her very short dark upcurling hair, deliberately making herself untidy for the night ahead. She hunched her shoulders to ease the tired stiffness in her neck and slouched down in her chair. She had just leaned her head against the chair-back when the man's voice said, 'Is this place taken?'

'No,' she said without looking at him. She moved nearer to the window.

The plane taxied into position, turned, the propellers whirled until in the arc lights of the field they were great silver disks, the, motor roared, and the plane started that run down the field that always, no matter how many times you had sat it out, no matter in how many countries and no matter on how many fields, in whatever weather, always stopped your heart for one moment as you waited to see if this time it would work again; if this time, as all the other times, the enormous machine would rise smoothly into the air where no one really belonged except the birds.

'Made it,' the man said softly to himself.

She looked at him then. He had said it as she would have said it, . with wonder that the trick worked.

He turned to her and she could see he wanted to talk. She would only have to say Yes, and smile, or say Nice take-off, or say, What a lovely night; anything would do. But she was not going to say anything and he was not going to talk to her if she could help it. I have ten hours, she said in her mind to the man, and she said it threateningly, and they are mine and I don't have to talk to anyone and don't try. The man, finding her face closed against him, pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket, and made a distance between them, smoking and looking straight ahead.

She could not ignore him though he did nothing to force her attention. She had seen him without really looking; he was a Navy lieutenant and the braid on his cap, which he still held, was faded grey; his stripes and the active-duty star were tarnished; his uniform looked unpressed, and he had a dark weather-dried sunburn. His hair was a colourless blond, so short that it seemed he must have shaved his head and now the hair was just growing in, a month's growth probably.

With resentment, because she did not want to notice him, she studied him, not caring if he turned his head and caught her. She stared with impersonal professional eyes, the beady eye of the painter, her husband called it. His face in repose looked brooding and angry; the whole face was square. His eyebrows lay flat and black across his eyes, his mouth did not curve at all, and his chin seemed to make another straight line. There were three horizontal lines marked one after the other across his face, and blocked in by the hard bones of his jaw. But when he had turned to her, wanting to talk, he had been smiling, and his face was oval then with all the lines flared gaily upwards. Perhaps the gaiety came from his eyes, which were china blue - or was it his mouth? she thought, trying to remember. It was an interesting face; it belonged to two different men. Where had he picked up this dark thinking angry man, who showed now? What do I care? she said to herself. Let him have six faces.

I wonder what she's sore about, the man thought mildly behind his complicated face. She doesn't look as if she was the type of woman who's sore all the time. Pretty women weren't usually sore all the time. He could place her, in a general way, as people of the same nationality can place each other. She had money and she had taste; her clothes were not only expensive but right, and she wore them without concern. He had not heard her voice but he imagined what it would be; Eastern, he thought, kind of fake English. She would be spoiled, as they all were, and at a loose end, as they all were too. But her face was better than most. It was small and pointed, and even though she was sore, she could not make her face look dead. Her hands were good too and he noticed, looking at them slantwise and secretly, that the nail-varnish was cracking and she had broken or chewed off the nail of her right pointer finger. It was childish and careless to have such nails, and he liked that best about her. Sore as a goat, he thought. Then he forgot her.

He relaxed, behind the angry square of this second face that he had never seen and did not know about. He relaxed and enjoyed himself, thinking of nothing, but simply enjoying being home or nearly home. He had been gone eighteen months and without ever saying it to himself, because he made no poses, not even practical realistic poses, he had often doubted that he would get back. Whenever he began almost to think about not ever getting back, he would say to himself, contemptuous and mocking: Life on a destroyer is a big educational experience, you ought to be grateful.

He had worked briefly in the office of his father's mills before he became an officer on a destroyer, but he did not want to be a business-man again. Or rather he could not remember what it was like, being a man in an office, so he had no interest in it. He did not want anything now except to be happy. He was happy. He told himself how fine and comfortable the seat was and what a fine time he'd had last night in Miami with Bob Jamison and those two beauties and what a fine time he would have tomorrow and all the other days. He stretched all through his body without moving, and felt the fine time bathing him like soft water and sunlight.

No doubt he has a splendid little wife waiting for him, the woman thought. He is evidently going home and, from the looks of him, his face and his clothes, he has been somewhere. He had ribbons sewn to his blue serge chest. Ribbons could mean something or nothing; every man in uniform that she knew had ribbons. They rode nobly and with growing boredom on the subway from their homes down to Church Street and presently they had ribbons. They lived in expensive overcrowdedness in Washington and wandered around the Pentagon and went to cocktail parties in Georgetown and had ribbons. There were for instance those two charmers, faintly ageing glamour boys of an earlier era, with silver eagles on their shoulders and enough ribbons to trim hats, who had just returned from London. She was certain that they had never ventured much farther afield than say Piccadilly Circus, in case they worked in Grosvenor Square. So what real ribbons were or what they meant, she did not know. However, looking at this man, she thought that his ribbons would mean something. His wife would know about the ribbons at once, if she did not know already, and she would be very proud. Why shouldn't she be? the woman asked herself irritably. What have you got against wives?

Am I not in fact a service wife myself? she thought. Could I not wear a pin, with one star on it, a little oblong pin made of enamel if you haven't much money, but you can also get it in sapphires, rubies, and diamonds if you feel that way? Have I not just returned from seeing my husband off in Miami? A man is leaving for service overseas; he has forty-eight hours' leave; his wife flies to him to say goodbye; they have forty-eight lovely last hours together and the lovely last hours were like being buried alive, though still quite alive so you knew all about it, with a stranger whom you ought to love, but there it is, he remains a stranger. Other women managed to run their hearts smoothly: patriotism, pride, tenderness, fare-well, homesickness. I'm not such a bitch as all that, she thought, defending herself; Thomas is only going to Brazil. I wouldn't mind going to Brazil myself. I should think he'd be enchanted to go to Brazil. As long as you aren't doing your own work, it's far better to be in Brazil than in Miami or Pensacola or the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Only, if I were a good wife, a service wife, I'd have made more of a thing of his going. Why does he want to be fooled, she thought angrily, why does he want to fool himself? Why does he go on about loving me when I am everything he dislikes and distrusts? She could hear Thomas now, and her heart moved with pity despite the anger. I love you more than anything, Kate, you know that; I only want you to be happy. He believed it while he said it; and she felt herself to be cold and hard and ungrateful and somehow hideous, because she did not believe it at all.

She groaned and moved her body as if it were in pain. The man beside her turned, and stared, but he could not see her face. All he saw was the stiff line of her right shoulder, hunched up away from him. The woman was saying to herself, desperately: Forget it, forget it. There is nothing to do. It's an enormous world, with millions of people in it; why can't you stop thinking about your own dreary little life? Thomas will be gone months, a year, two years.
Stop thinking about it
.

Suddenly, and without any sort of plan or direction from her brain, she pulled the square diamond engagement ring and the baguette diamond wedding ring from her left hand, pulling them off brutally as if they would not come unless she forced them, and she thrust the two rings into her coat pocket with her earrings. Then she rubbed her left hand, crushing the fingers together. The man beside her, who had seen all this, said to himself, Well for God's sake what goes on here? She's not sore, he thought, she's nuts. He amended that thought: Nuts, or in some trouble of her own. He wanted no part of trouble; he did not understand it. Living had become so simple for him that he understood nothing now except being or staying alive.