A Soldier's Tale (8 page)

No, miss, I'm a milkman. Or used to be, in civvy street, like. Back in 'ighgate, that's in London.

Did you have to get up early, she asked, and bring milk for the small breakfast? Such a hard life.

Oh, it's not bad, not bad at all. 'cept in winter perhaps. Dark they are, those winter mornings. More toast now—'ere we are. Mind you, it used to be 'arder. When I was a nipper, I used to go round with my old man, 'e was a milkman too, on the old 'orsedrawn float. Going up the Archway Road in a winter fog, and the trams with their big 'eadlamps coming through the fog. Ladling out the milk from the big churns with the brass fittings. They stopped all that, said it was un'ygeenic. It's all bottle stuff now.

His pinched pale face became animated as he talked, but suddenly he stopped as if embarrassed and busied himself with the fire and the toast, holding and turning it so that it was an exact golden-brown before slipping it steaming on to Belle's plate, to be eaten with margarine and plum jam from the ration-pack. As he crouched by the fire he glanced across shyly at Belle, at her long delicate fingers busy with knife and cup, at the rich red hair shaken out over her shoulders and catching highlights from the glow of the fire.

Watching them both, Saul realized with amusement that the little man was innocently and worshipfully in
love with her. The tea and toast was a simple man's offering. He watched her all the time as they had their tea and chatted on about life as they had known it during the last years. British meeting French had this great curiosity for all the missing details, for knitting up the wholeness of ordinary life again. At last, he stood up and said, Well, time to be off, I s'pose. Oh, 'ere, I thought you might like these, I got plenty.

He took out three packets of Gold Flake and a bar of Cadbury's milk chocolate and laid them carefully on the scrubbed table in front of her. She smiled up at him with real enjoyment.

Thank you, Charlie—
vous êtes bien gentil
—you are very kind.

You're very welcome, I'm sure, he said, with a duck of the head, and bustled out of the door.

Saul walked with him up the path to the gate.

See you tomorrow, Corp, he said.

That's right, Charlie boy. And ta very much for every thing.

Saul watched him as he trudged briskly up the hill, waving cheerfully as he passed the Brat, who was on watch under the big beech tree.

Some time must have passed then. I can guess at some of the many things he didn't tell me, but
not all of them. He had a curious trick of saying things like: She often talked about her aunts in the country—or: There was this German airman, another one, who was after her to marry him, but she'd never tell me much about him—or: She used to sing to herself in a little voice, but tuneful, when she thought I wasn't listening—or: Sometimes we'd have terrible arguments over nothing much, like whether we wanted tea or coffee. Sometimes it seemed as if he was talking about a woman he'd lived with for much longer than a weekend. There were those things he didn't elaborate, almost as if they were familiar daily details, accumulated over a long time. And when did she give him the twelve-franc copy of Baudelaire?

As she cleaned up, he went across the garden to the latrine. He carried his sten well in sight, and left the door of the little outhouse open. There were fighters about somewhere, and a slow-moving spotter-plane coming and going from a neighbouring field, and a bass engine-sound that sounded more like tanks on the move than trucks. As he walked back up the path quiet-footed, alert to all the sounds around him, perhaps he could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen, in that small voice:

Il me dit des mots d'amour

Des mots de tous les jours

Et ça m'fait quelque chose.

But she stopped when she heard the click and tap of his boot on the path.

That's a nice orchard you got out there, he said. Normandy's famous for apples, isn't it?

Yes, she said, still at the sink, but they are not yet ripe. The harvest will be good at the end of the summer.

Then she stopped, and they both were thinking that there would be time for many things before the apples were heavy on the trees—love, death, even the end of a war.

Come outside for a while, he said.

She turned and looked at him, wary, puzzled.

Come on, he said, the rain's over. Come out and get some air. Nothing's going to hurt you.

She went over to the kitchen dresser and began to tie back her heavy bronze hair with a piece of blue ribbon, watching her reflection in a small mirror propped up on the shelf among the cups. The movement of her raised arms lifted her big breasts under the thin blouse and this excited him. He stepped up quietly behind her and slid his hands
up her sides and across her chest, holding her firmly while he pressed his face against her neck. Her hair fell loose again as she lowered her arms, pulled back against him to ease his grip and twisted around in his arms. She faced him, flushed, flattered, a little angry. He promptly kissed her, close and open-mouthed. She responded to him warmly, but twisted her mouth free.

No, she said sulkily.

Why not? he said. You could fancy it, couldn't you?

No, she said. Not like this. I like to be asked.

D'you mean the Jerries asked for it, all polite-like?

Most, she said, they were
comme il faut
, nice. Not all, but most. Those I liked.

So you don't like me?

Let me choose, Saul, I could like you. Let us walk in the orchard.

She finished tying up her hair. They walked out of the front door; the sky was full of broken cloud, and the light brightened and faded. Up the hill a broad shaft of sunlight spotlit the beech tree and the solitary figure beneath it like a stage set.

See, she said as they stood in the orchard, it will be a good summer for the apples.

The boughs were thick with the small hard green lumps which had once been blossom. After the rain
it was dank under the trees, in the long grass, with a smell of green rawness and rankness. He listened, half expecting a sound of bees; but there was only the small heavy drone of a bumble-bee, drowned in the sound of a convoy of trucks changing gear and grinding up the hill.

Then something happened quite suddenly and unexpectedly, at least by that time in Normandy, when the daytime skies were the unchallenged beat of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. A roar of aircraft suddenly surged up out of the fields and along the line of the road. Saul jerked his head up at the shadowy shapes that flashed by above the orchard trees. At the same time gunfire chattered in the air and scattered, surprised shots answered from the ground.

Saul's reactions were delayed for a few seconds by surprise, before he caught Belle round the waist and flung her to the ground, with his body shielding her. The raiders circled tightly and roared in again, with more gunfire. Splinters buzzed and clipped and whickered through the trees. Then it was all gone.

She was lying close to him, her face pressed against his shoulder. As the noise died away, she raised her head slowly, looking at him and not smiling. He kept holding her close and began to kiss her, she trying to push him away, gently at first. Nothing
was said. He shifted himself, holding her down with his heavy body across hers. His hand moved down and lifted her skirt. Silently she fought him, as if they must both make no sound in case they were overheard by some prowling enemy. Silently he pinioned her arms back in a ruthless grip and tugged at her clothing and his own, until he could roll over on top of her. She hissed with rage as he took her quickly, sorrowfully. To dominate her had become the only thing that mattered, and he had little pleasure of it.

When he pulled back from her he was slow and wary, as if expecting her to attack him with fists or nails. Instead, she lay back in the trampled grass, pulling down her rumpled skirt which had twisted up around her waist and staring up at him in shame and rage. But when she spoke her voice was flat and expressionless.

You dirty English pig, she said, no Boche did that to me.

I bet, he said.

Not like that, she said. That is the first time I have been raped.

I bet, he said.

Yes, you bet, she said with sudden passion. I have been bad, yes, I have been a
putain
, but I make good
love and I give pleasure. I can be good to a man. But not to you. You want to do it all for yourself. The woman to you is for nothing.

She scrambled to her feet, still fumbling to put her clothes to rights and with her copper hair hanging loose about her face. He lay sprawled on the grass and squinted up at her with a shaft of sunlight behind her.

You are just the bull who wants the cow.

She thrust out her clenched right fist and chopped her left hand across her right forearm in a universal and explicit gesture which startled him, for he had the old-fashioned working-class puritanism about how a woman should speak and behave, regardless of what else had just happened.

He propped his back against one of the apple trees, smoking and staring out at the shifting sunlight. I knew it wasn't right, he said to me afterwards in his flat understated way, I shouldn't of done it like that, without kindness. But I think it was more than that: in the post-coital sadness he judged himself coldly and saw himself as a fool who had thrown away a chance of true joy. Yet he knew it wasn't intended: sudden closeness had undone him, the desire to protect had turned into the need to possess.

He was feeling sullen and ashamed, unwilling to meet her, and thinking that she would be in the
kitchen or the bedroom, he walked slowly to the other entrance at the back of the house, and pushed open the top half of the Dutch door.

What he saw there was surprising and, in a way, beautiful. The back door opened into the scullery and wash-house, floored with flagstones. At one side was a copper, set in a brick frame and chimney. On the other was a wooden washtub on three legs and a barrel which was kept filled with water brought in, bucket by bucket, from the pump in the garden. Water could be dippered from the barrel for the copper or the wooden washtub, and spillage ran out through a drain-hole set in the flagstones.

Belle was standing naked in the middle of the wash-house. She must have pulled off her blue-and-white dress and her underwear and flung it in a heap in the corner. She had soaped herself at the tub, scrubbing fiercely at her body which shone pink and as if varnished with soapsuds. Now she stood there with her back to him and with her arms stretched straight up, holding one of the heavy buckets filled with water above her head. She seemed to be full of fury and sudden strength, so that the smooth womanly muscles of her arms and shoulders, back and buttocks, thighs and calves were braced tightly as she balanced the bucket and tipped it. The water,
cold from the barrel on the flagstones, cascaded down over her head and body, and poured out down the drain-hole. She cried out, a small gasping scream, at the shock, and the emptied bucket crashed to the flagstones.

In the following silence the door creaked and she looked back over her shoulder and saw him standing there. With a startled movement she grabbed for the crumpled dress and held it up to cover herself.

Go away, she said, do not watch me.

Sorry, he muttered, embarrassed and a little repelled, I didn't mean—Then, taking in the bareness of the room, he said, Where's your towel?

It does not matter, she said crossly.

Wait, he said, and went quickly round the side of the cottage to the front garden. He'd had a good new towel in his pack and had put it out to dry on the hedge, catching the afternoon sunlight. This he brought back for her. She was still standing there half covered with her crumpled dress, so he hung the towel over the half-door.

There you are, he said, you'll need that.

And she thanked him, watching him with an embarrassed smile at the absurdity of it.

He went back again round the outside of the house towards the front door. The rain had blown over,
leaving the low sun warm in a clear late-afternoon sky, where a flight of Spitfires was making regular sweeps towards the German lines.

He switched on the radio and went back to sit in the open doorway and smoke. There was a Forces Requests programme on; he found it dull and paid little attention, sitting there brooding and staring out at the landscape. Trees and hedges and low hills were beginning to take on a shadowy impenetrable look against the brightening western sky. He could not quite make out the figure of the watcher under the beech tree until the small flash of sunlight reflected on spectacles showed that it was the old man. He finished his cigarette, flipped the butt into the garden and began to dismantle his sten gun and clean its worn immaculate metalwork with an oily rag. He liked to have his gear in perfect working order, and besides, it might help to impress anyone who happened to be watching.

(Of such small actions is war made. And this is the part that most war books get wrong. Trying hard to impress, they multiply the horror and glory, brutality and heroism, boredom and humour of war at the expense of its ordinariness. Most wars are just ordinary. Everyone, even in the worst of wars,
must sleep about a third of each day, and eat two or three meals, and crap even if it's only in a hole in the ground. Soldiers, like anyone else, catch colds and read the
Daily Mirror
and fall in love and trim their nails and play pontoon and listen to Frank Sinatra and change their socks. The sadness of wartime death and suffering is that they are embedded in these familiar things.)

Presently she came in from the back of the house and began to move about in the kitchen. There was a scrape and rattle at the stove as she opened the grate and stirred the fire. He said nothing, but his hands were busily cleaning and refilling the spare magazines. When he had finished he put the magazines, with the cleaning gear, back in the pouch on his webbing belt and stood up, slinging it loose over his shoulder.