The Honeyed Peace (6 page)

He pulled a chair up to the card-table and moved Beethoven and Goethe so that he would have space to write. The letter was hard to read, each word embroidered in a fine German script.

Dear Erna:

I am very sorry that all has not gone well and I am thanking you and Luther for your goodness. I am perhaps too old to have come to America. I will go away and take care of myself and you will not need to be worried for me again.

With greetings, your cousin,

Heinrich

He took the letter out and mailed it and came home to sleep. He had two hundred dollars' worth of time, and he was going to a little town and he was not afraid any more.

Every once in a while, washing dishes, or mending, or when the radio was playing quietly, Erna would say, in a strange, tight voice, 'I wonder where Heinrich is, Luther. I wonder what's happened to Heinrich.'

Luther would rattle his paper and pretend he had not heard.

WEEK-END AT GRIMSBY

This was the shapeless weather all travellers dread. A smeared grey sky closed down over the smeared brown land. Cold leaked around the window-frames and the door of the railway carriage. England looked larger, flatter, and more desolate than was either possible or fair. No one should move in November, Lily Cameron thought. She was full of hate for this weather, this opposite of scenery, the still pain of the cold, and wondered why she moved at all, any month; even June was a nice time to stay in one place.

There was no law which forced her into English railway carriages in November. Nothing prevented her from buying or renting another house and living in it. But the question was: where? There had been a villa, an ancient stone barracks really, in Fiesole; a glassy flat in Paris; a grim little dump constructed of marshmallow sauce at Praia da Rocha, the bottom edge of Europe where Portugal caved into the sea; a house, dainty and dead, in London; and luckily no house on that jaunt to the glamorous Orient; and only a hotel suite during the brief visit home, if New York had ever been home. It was some sort of record in case you went out for records: four dwellings and a romp around the world in four and a half years, or since May 7, 1945, to be exact. I might as well keep moving, she thought with disgust; it's less trouble.

Then she revolted against this vision of herself as a female Flying Dutchman or Wandering Jew. Stop being pathetic, she thought, rattle your tin cup somewhere else. There was a reason for being on this train. If your friends were too broke to come to you, you went to them, even if they lived in Grimsby, Lincs. You looked forward to a jolly meeting of ectoplasms. Stop it, she told herself again. I am going to Grimsby because I want to. I know what I am doing. It is the one thing I am still useful for: to remember.

How did the English survive their ghastly climate? She stamped her feet furiously, and in so doing kicked an inoffensive stranger good and hard on the ankle. 'I beg your pardon,' Lily said.

A pink-cheeked lady, sitting on the opposite mottled plush bench, smiled politely and returned to her book. This is not the first time I have visited Grimsby, Lily Cameron informed the lady, who read with determined attention. Do not imagine Grimsby awaits me as a delectable surprise. However, I was not a ghost going to a reunion with fellow ghosts, when I came here before. That was during the war, Madam, and a type of English bomber, called, as I remember, the Lancaster, a graceless square job, took off from fields up this way, nightly, for the city of Berlin. I had friends then, as I have now, except at that time my friends were alive or dead, but not in the present intermediate state. I had friends who flew those Lancaster, and I travelled to Grimsby one year to spend Christmas with them. You would hardly believe how gay we became on Spam and blotting-paper bread and marge and the one rationed egg and very little liquor, since liquor was scarce for the working soldiery. We had a lovely time and that night, or rather the next black morning, all the planes came home, so it was a perfectly delightful Christmas and I returned to London in fine spirits.

Then, three days later, a letter arrived from Andrew, who was a Group Captain, written in that neat English handwriting which they all have, rather like pursed lips, and most unsuitable to their personalities. It said: '
You will be sorry to hear that John Wakeford was lost over Berlin the night of 27/28
.' Sorry to hear. You could call it that. Though to tell the truth, Lily said to herself, one did not mourn the dead then. There was no time. I do not need to apologize; I have been mourning them for almost five years. Or probably mourning is not the right word: they live with me.

Sim would be waiting at the Grimsby station which resembled a mine-shaft, except that it was horizontal. When last seen, six years ago, Sim was brown and astonishingly elegant in khaki trousers and bush-jacket and black beret, carrying for practical reasons an Egyptian fly-whisk, a horse-hair plume tied to a bamboo stick. Lieutenant Prince Simon Mitrowski and his Regiment, the Polish 12th Lancers, had by then fought and bounced all the way from Africa in Staghounds, vehicles which were laughingly described by their users as armoured cars. That was in Italy, where the war was most intimate and perhaps most senseless.

And I was a pretty sight myself, Lily thought, in my neat little khaki suiting and my honorary black beret. Me and my canteen, and no one can say that I did not handle the war well; I was the very acme of shrewdness, they should have had me on a Planning Board. For witness the efficient way I advanced myself from Naples and Rome until I landed where I wished to be, in a line regiment of lovely goofy Poles, with sea bathing thrown in, at least in the summer. I knew what I wanted; in those days there was something to want.

Could this train actually be stopping again? Here we are at another of those glorious stations which dot the English countryside, and there is that broadcast female voice, so civil and so ladylike, telling the traveller what to do. Change here for ... on platform two... all passengers. A couple puffed their way into the glacial compartment. Grains of rice dropped from their clothing and both wore wilted gardenias, in buttonhole and bosom.

Would you believe it? Lily asked herself. Would you think that a man and a woman, in their fifties, both so ugly that a solitary life in a cellar would seem their destiny, could go forth and marry each other, and display on their faces this look of embarrassed delight? The woman could hardly breathe for her chins and the heavy box of her breasts. She wore an electric-blue satin dress under her black coat, and her ankles rolled over the sides of her sensible black oxfords. The man was thin, with a neck that would not stay in place and supported his head loosely. His teeth were all out in front and long and yellow, and his hair either grew or was cut so that it started well up his head and sat on top like a parrot's crest.

They did not talk but, whenever they looked at each other, a secret and silent giggle shook them both; and the woman's face was purple with pleasure. Presently, seeing that the lady in one corner was reading, and the lady in the other corner turned towards the window, they reached for each other's hands, and two large swollen-jointed shapeless paws met and held. And both, with fierce discretion, looked at the floor as if they did not know they were holding hands at all.

What do you have to do, what do you have to be? Lily wondered. Must you be poor and ugly and fifty and a native of Lincolnshire, in order to trust life? The present was all right by those two, it was fine, it was the best; they had just made the final statement of confidence, they had married. I must tell Sim. What would she tell Sim? Two people got married. Yet Sim would understand how mad it seemed; like putting all your money in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean, or spreading your arms to fly off a building.

The bridegroom stretched his rubber neck and placed his narrow tufted head on his wife's bosom, and slept. For a time she guarded this precious burden, then slept too. In her corner Lily Cameron took off her shoes, flighty slippers of black suède, and rubbed her feet which could be seen, red-painted toe-nails and all, through the fine stockings. Then she pulled from the rack a large dark mink coat and wrapped it around her as if it were a rented steamer rug. She became a small mound of brown fur.

The train advanced slowly, coldly, through Lincolnshire. Lily Cameron pushed aside her coat, sat up, and said to no one, 'Two hours late. I ask you.'

The bridegroom, very brave but not facing her, said, 'Grimsby's next, Miss.'

End of the line, and the night leaking rain, and the cold would hang like a roof of stone over the town. Poor Sim; there were gayer places to be ghosts in.

The bridegroom helped the two ladies with their luggage, while his wife beamed approval of his good manners. Lily Cameron followed last, and felt the rain on her face, and saw the murk of the station and the jumbled people in raincoats, everyone looking pinched and dim, and going home to nothing tolerable. She did not move; Sim would find her.

Then she saw him, and though he was changed, he was as she remembered. He came down the platform, under the feeble bare light-bulbs, and was very tall and moved with the grace he had. Sim waved and walked faster and then he was kissing her on both cheeks and saying 'Lily, dearest Lily.'

Lily returned, instantly and with joy, to where they had been before. There were the narrow roads deep in flour-white dust, and the regiment moving like a gipsy caravan, but screaming sirens and flying their red-and-blue-striped pennants, from one encampment to one farther ahead. They were always busy with the ways and means of life; setting out, after suitable lies to superiors, in a scout car to bargain with peasants for a goose and for wine, since every night, simply by being night and they still together, was cause for a celebration dinner; and afterwards they lay in a haystack and could not see the dust and the sweat dried, and they listened to the men singing Polish love-songs and the sad but loving songs about home; and cursed the English artillery which chose to settle behind them and make deafening noises that were an outrage in the soft Italian sky. When Sim's squadron was in reserve she would go to their field in the early morning, with plans for a swim on the forbidden Adriatic beaches, not yet de-mined; and find Sim asleep in a shallow pit beneath his Staghound, lying between the driver and the gunner, as cosy as the three little bears. And he would get up, wearing the frayed white silk pyjamas which he had kept all the way from home, via Tobruk, and be immensely charming and invite her to breakfast as if his Staghound were a castle with rose-gardens.

And there were Jan and George and Stefan and the Chaplain and the Bloody Colonel and Skinny, the gentle gloomy batman, who was the kindest man in the regiment, and Paul and the baby jeep-driver, Lubo, who wanted to become a medical student when the war was over. They were all young and greedily in love with every day they had. In memory, the hard and the ugly and the stale were forgotten. Death had no place, no one could have died. And there had never been any winter.

'Oh, Sim,' Lily said, and put her arms around his neck and felt she had come to that distant place where she lived.

'We should get out of this rain, darling, don't you think? I have a taxi. Everything is beautifully laid on, you will see the efficiency. We are going to my house. The Bloody Colonel is waiting for us.'

'A party! How sweet of you, Sim! I didn't even know he was here.'

But in the taxi she was shy and could not think pf anything to say. They had shared no taxis in their past. Sim chatted easily, asking about her life, and she told him of the different countries, the various houses, all the faces. She must have lived it in her sleep, since she could hardly remember where the years had gone. But she knew every farm-house, every village, every road and lane and field and beach, between Pescara and Rimini.

'My dear,' Sim said, 'I cannot imagine anything more wonderful. I so long to travel that I would be excited to go to Birmingham. But we are stuck here, with our fish.'

'What fish?'

'They are plaice. I am sure you have never eaten them, no one would except the English, who are the bravest people on earth but have strange eating habits. The Bloody Colonel and I are the business managers. We have two boats. Jan and Stefan and four men from the Third Squadron run them. I tell you, it is a disaster.'

'But why, Sim?'

'The plaice don't stay where they used to; it is very hard to find them. Then there is always a storm and something falls out of the engines. We will remain in Grimsby our entire lives, trying to catch enough plaice to pay for the boats; thank God I was too clumsy to fish, so they made me second business manager.'

'And the Bloody Colonel?'

'He is very happy because he has become a painter. He goes to Lincoln to night school, and paints beautiful pictures of apples and cups and sometimes portraits of Pilsudski. He does not mind, now that he has Art.'

'I can't believe it.'

'You will see. Tomorrow there is a special exhibition for you, at his house. Tomorrow also we will have a sight-seeing of Grimsby.'

'Are you sure Grimsby's still here?' There was certainly no sign of life around them; even the road was invisible.

'On the other side of the street, please,' Sim said to the driver.

Sim paid the taxi and opened a low wicket gate; she could see the dull shine of a cement walk. Suddenly, from somewhere farther ahead in the darkness, a firecracker exploded, followed by a Roman candle which climbed two feet and fell in a sputtering faint curve. A Polish word, obviously blasphemous, greeted this performance. There was now a string of firecrackers, sounding rather fretful and then, quite handsomely, two globs of coloured fire and a little plant of flames flowering from the ground.

'Fireworks!' she said, seized with giggles.

'It is the Bloody Colonel. He has planned this for days, but forgot the rain.'

They ran down the walk and a man emerged from a shadowy hut, a tool-shed or chicken-coop, and shouted with laughter and said, 'It is like Fourteenth July, no? Hello, General, hello, General,' and threw his arms around Lily and hugged her.