The Honeyed Peace (7 page)

'Now we go inside,' the Bloody Colonel said, 'and drink and drink.'

She felt Sim's pride, as he walked before her, leading the way into his home. There was a narrow hall, with a carved varnished side table, and room for nothing more except hooks to hang the essential raincoats. A stairway mounted one side of the hall; you had to wedge yourself past it to the second door, which Sim opened.

'The library,' he said.

Since the whole house was built for midgets, the size of the room was proper. As furniture there was a day bed, serving as couch, a bulging brown leather-covered armchair, a desk, a bookcase, two straight chairs, and two small tables. A Polish flag was tacked to the wall, and photographs of men and women and children and laughing groups of skiers and huntsmen and Lancers stood or hung in every free space. Orange curtains, of a thin unlined material, covered the window and a striped woven arty blanket and odd-coloured pillows covered the couch. The rug was a purplish thing, intended to be Oriental. A miniature coal fire burned on the hearth, and there was the smallest bottle of gin Lily had ever seen, like a gift sample given away to new customers, and three unmatching glasses, on a tray beside the couch.

'It's absolutely charming, Sim.'

'It is rather cosy, isn't it? We fixed it up with bits and pieces we found in the secondhand shops.'

'This is a beautiful house,' the Colonel said solemnly. 'Not like mine.'

'How is yours, Marek?'

'Mine is full of dirt, ugly, everything broken, cold, disgusting. Sim makes this beautiful house. We come here always to be in a beautiful place.'

'Do you want to go to your room, Lily?'

'Later, darling.' Give me time, give me time until I can see it as beautiful too. 'It's so lovely and warm. What a heavenly room, Sim.' There could not be too much of this; he would not doubt her.

They now heard weak radio music, coming through the paper-thin wall that joined this house to the next.

'My neighbours,' Sim explained. 'They have a nice little girl called Dorothy.'

'The people in Grimsby are good to us,' the Colonel said. 'We are here much time, General, in camp, before we get these fine suits of civilians.'

'A cocktail, Lily?'

'Yes, please, Sim. Oh my, this is the first time I've been comfortable in England.'

Then Marek Starecki, who had named himself the Bloody Colonel long ago, gave the signal: do you remember? And they were showing her photograph albums of the others and the places they had all been, and there were pictures of her too, looking, she thought, forty years younger - how was it possible that she had been so young at twenty-nine and so immeasurably old at thirty-five? Each blurred snapshot of a shell-pocked Italian village, with the same square white-in-the-sun cement buildings, the same dilapidated streets, clogged with their same equipment of war, was a clear and separate and wonderful memory. They laughed with pleasure again at jokes which could never have been very funny; jokes about the chaplain and about Stridek the boxer who married a Polish WAC and was lightly but inconveniently wounded the day after, and jokes about how the Bloody Colonel believed his jeep to be invisible; and no word at all about Michael who had been blown up on a mine and flung, headless, into a tree because that day they were bored and went exploring down leafy deserted lanes, full of military ardour and nonsense; and nothing about the two brothers, the young ones whom Skinny so loved, who were booby-trapped into soggy red messes trying to open the door into a house where a woman was screaming. Only the laughter and the friendship remained, and the unreasonable mocked-at but triumphant feeling that anything was possible after the war.

'Here is my house in Poland,' Sim said. 'The one in the country where I grew up. It was a nice house.'

It was a house built perhaps three centuries ago, for the enormous families of the Mitrowskis. The photograph was poor; you saw a vast faded building, with many square windows and arched doors, and a terrace, on which stood two figures wearing high boots and wee Norfolk jackets, like ancient schoolboys.

Sim looked at this picture with tenderness, as if he could pass through it into the house and his father's voice would boom orders any minute, and his mother would preside placidly at an immense round table, where the ten children gathered for tea.

'First the Germans had it, then the Russians had it. If it is still left, I do not know who has it. I missed it, for a long time, but now I have this house of my own,' Sim said, and put the picture away.

'Who is this one?' the Bloody Colonel asked, showing her a photograph of a very thin, uniformed young man, with wild light eyes, astride a monumental horse. Sim quietly left the room; he did not want Lily to notice his going.

'I don't know him,' Lily said.

'It is the Bloody Colonel! It is the Bloody Colonel when Lieutenant of Cavalry.'

'Marek! You look as if you were going to eat the horse.'

The Colonel studied the picture, laughing happily, seeming not reminded that he had always been an officer of cavalry, until armoured cars replaced horses, and now was an officer of nothing.

'More vodka,' the Colonel said, filling her glass with gin. 'Like those bad Russians.'

And Sim, she thought, has one brother in Scotland on a farm, and one brother in China doing who knows what, and one sister with a Buchenwald tattoo on her arm, and that's the lot; but perhaps four out of ten was a good score for a family. And the Bloody Colonel had the fish and his painting, but nothing else; still it was the same proportion really, he had only two children and a wife to lose.

'I think,' the Bloody Colonel said into the silence, 'in two three four years maybe, when the fish are good and we pay for the boats, we go to fight the Russians.'

'Not me.'

'Not you, General? Who gives coffee and cigarettes and nice things to the Lancers?'

'I don't know. I'm going to an island, made entirely of salt, in the Dead Sea. I'm against war. Nothing good comes of it. Afterward.'

'After? What do you think, such an intelligent girl, they make wars for something? They make wars because that is what men like, they make a war so they get some excitement first before they die; or they only live and die, that is nothing much. General, General, what friends you have now? You are always a happy girl. Why are you talking of after?'

My friends, she thought, are you and those like you, the people who used to be. Am I supposed to welcome more wars, so more ghosts can be manufactured? I don't even like ruined towns, I find nothing attractive in ruins. I see no point, she thought angrily, no point, no point.

'
Madame est servie
,' Sim said, from the hall.

There were two red candles in cheap brass holders on the small table in the dining-room. More of the costly coal burned in the grate. There was a table-cloth, and paper napkins, and something, perhaps a packing box, also covered with a white cloth, pulled up near the table so that Sim could serve without moving. The feeling was that the servants had been sent away, since this dinner was to be an intimate feast. On Lily's plate, an iridescent apricot-coloured glass saucer from the local Woolworth's, lay a small booklet. It was made of dark blue cardboard with a raised gilt figure of a girl in pantaloons, shawl, and a poke bonnet.

Lily opened it and saw, in Sim's agreeably illiterate hand: Menu.
Lobster à la Tobruk, cutlet Alamein, légumes Cassino, salade sauce Ancona, tarte Mitrowski, Claret, Champagne, Napoleon Brandy, Cigars.
They watched her as she read, with their own indestructible gaiety, waiting for her applause.

'But what a chef you have!' Lily said. 'Darling, you spoil me.'

'Nothing is too good for our General,' the Colonel said. 'Only I wish Jan and Stefan did not go out on the bloody boats, so they are here for the party.'

'You'll stay until they come back, won't you, Lily?' Sim asked.

'It depends,' she said, not daring to say 'no', not with this feast and these candles before her. They had done this all for her, who was nothing, nobody, insignificant even as a ghost. They had schemed and saved to make this welcome; how lonely they must be if her coming was such an occasion.

'I want my Tobruk lobster,' Lily said, and Sim flourished before her a small glass plate with two pieces of bright canned lobster adorned with a pompon of mayonnaise. Not on the ration, she thought quickly, but so expensive; and the meat had used both their rations probably for a month, and Sim had shelled the peas, which did not turn out very well and looked grey, and Sim had washed the lettuce and sliced the stunted tomatoes and arranged them in petals, and Sim had fancied up the bakery-shop tart with maraschino cherries and powered it with a snow of valuable sugar. She was not hungry, she was the opposite of hungry with her throat shut to food, but she ate everything; such cooks, she said, such regal fare; such quantities; but they should leave Grimsby at once and open the finest restaurant in London, Paris, Rome. The claret was raw, yet watery, and when it was time to open the champagne she prayed that the cork would pop. I will do anything, she prayed, if only the cork will pop.

They were very gay; Sim loving to be host in his own home, at his first real ambitious party; the Colonel delighted to show off the English he had acquired in the last four years, and delighted to remember and remember. Her smile felt carved on a glass face; her laughter had a sharp false ring. Yet it had been so natural to laugh before; she remembered the three of them on leave in Rome in the dazzling summer of 1944 and she laughed harder, higher, so as not to cry.

Then Sim was saying, 'Shall we have coffee in the library?' and they moved to the room with the bookcase, for coffee and syrup-sweet brandy. Now they were quieter and she was only there as a listener, while they talked of Poland and the Regiment and the future of plaice in Grimsby and how maybe Australia was a fine country for emigrants. Lily felt she was failing them; she should have been able to dredge up, from these separated years, stories that would keep them laughing.

They had finished the remnants of every bottle in the house and the Bloody Colonel was happy and fairly drunk. At three in the morning, he said he must go home, and they made many loving farewells, wedged together in the hall. They would come to the Colonel's home, at noon, for the Art Exhibition.

'My poor Lily, you are exhausted. We have been dreaming of you for weeks; and then Marek and I do all the talking when we know everything we have to say by heart. It is too stupid, I could shoot myself. And you must be so bored.'

'Darling, how could I be bored with you and the Bloody Colonel? Only I am tired. I have been awake such a long time.'

'It is Jan's room when he is here,' said Sim, opening a door in the second-floor hall. 'And there is the bathroom, across there. Should I light the hot water?'

'I'm too sleepy even to brush my teeth,' and she looked at this room and knew the mattress would be stuffed with railroad tracks, and looked at the varnished chipped dresser and the bare table and the single rush-bottomed chair, and, on a tin trunk beside the bed, a water-glass with a rose in it.

She turned and put her arms around Sim and kissed his cheek and hid her face against his coat because now she was too tired to keep back the tears. But Sim took this differently, and held her very close and said, in the softest voice, a new one, 'Darling?'

She became crafty at once; it was necessary to escape from this, and escape with gentleness. She imagined that Sim needed a woman, since Grimsby would scarcely be a gathering place for available beauties, and she guessed he was sick with loneliness.

'My dear Sim, my dearest Sim, I'm sorry.' There were no suitable words.

'I've never forgotten you, Lily.'

And I have never forgotten anything, she thought. But she knew what Sim meant, and she was shocked. How could he, as persuasion, use the perfect and admirable past, now in this grey time? For he was reminding her that once, returning with Jan and George and Lily smuggled along, from a night patrol, a moonlit night when every shadow had been ominous and they came back, having accomplished nothing, relieved not to be tense and watching and frightened, gay as people can only be when there has been danger and they are out of it, that night he had walked across the field to her distant tent; and once, after they had tiptoed hand in hand, making jokes but very nervous, on a beach empty except for the Germans' abandoned barbed wire, and had blown up on no mines, and swum in a lukewarm sea under streaming sunset clouds, once there, on the still warm sand. They had been lovers; but they had never been in love. They were great friends, and both were handsome and gay and wild; and this had been part of their immense joy in being alive and in owning their bodies and those intact. Whereas, in a frigid box of a room, in Grimsby, making love with Sim would be an act of pity on both their parts, or an act of desperation. They had been, in that other time, too good for pity or desperation.

She moved away from Sim, and lit a cigarette and smiled uneasily and said, 'Lieutenant dear, don't let's get things mixed up.'

Prince Mitrowski had known a great many Anglo-Saxon women and they no longer surprised him. Lily would, of course, be in love with someone, as he might have foreseen. And Anglo-Saxon women apparently had a deep-seated objection to going to bed with a man during the time they were in love with another man. This was an unwritten rule they followed and there was little or nothing you could do about it. But so tiresome; here they were in a remote uninteresting town, they were old friends, and the normal thing, as anyone except an Anglo-Saxon woman could see, was for a pretty female and a healthy male to make love, especially if they had a whole house to themselves. He had rather counted on it; he retained a most pleasurable memory of Lily's body, aside from all the memories of her which were like his love and loyalty for the men in his Regiment; and he was disappointed.

Still, he was too fond of Lily to be angry, and too sure of himself to be offended. She was not an ignorant silly girl who could be talked around. But he was puzzled; he found Lily unlike herself. A black Paris dress and good sparse jewels were preferable to a khaki uniform; she looked wonderfully cared for, not older, only more arranged. The peace agreed with her; she had a fine life, travelling wherever she wanted to go, yet she was sad. Perhaps the man she loved did not love her. Was that enough, nowadays, to make people unhappy?