A Woman's Place (39 page)

‘I didn’t see you there,’ he said, hovering before the now-deserted area. ‘I’m a bit late this morning. My mother wasn’t too well.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, making to pass him, but he touched her arm, making her hesitate.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask, would you come out with me one night this week?’

She shook her head. ‘I told you, John, our going to the pictures was just that one time. I shouldn’t have. It could have started up all sorts of problems.’ She realised that his hand still lay lightly on her arm. The hand seemed to tremble.

‘Eveline, I can’t help what I feel about you,’ he whispered. ‘I feel … I feel very strange. I feel …’

He was leaning close to her, and with her heart thumping, her throat tight, the lonely emptiness inside began to mount as, hidden by the coats hanging on wall hooks and free-standing racks, she could hear his rapid panting mingling with hers.

Seconds later she returned to her senses with a jolt. With all her strength she gave him a mighty push, sending him staggering into one of the racks, almost knocking it over.

Frantically he steadied it as she shouted her anger at him. Then he was moving away, stammering that he was sorry, he couldn’t imagine what had come over him. She stood silent as he hurried from the cloak area.

She was still there when Connie came in a few minutes later to see where she had got to. Seeing her strained expression she asked if she was feeling ill.

‘I came over a bit faint,’ she answered and had Connie come to look closer at her, studying her face which she felt must be unnaturally flushed.

‘You don’t look very well.’

‘No, I’m all right now,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Just a passing thing, but I thought I’d better stay here until I felt better.’

‘It’s this work,’ said Connie. ‘It’s too much. It can get you down. I really pray this war doesn’t go on for much longer or we’ll all be falling ill. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she insisted, glad to see that Connie finally seemed convinced. How could she have been so silly?

Over the coming week she felt deeply ashamed of what she had nearly allowed to happen. It felt unwholesome too, as if she must have seemed no better than a common slut for him to think he could take advantage of her like that.

Now she couldn’t look at him without feeling creepy all over. He too appeared ill at ease and avoided her eyes if ever they met. Unable to believe that she could have actually let herself get into such a situation to warrant that sort of attention, she even thought of leaving her job with some excuse or other. But it was he who left. She didn’t know where he’d gone, and wondered if he’d perhaps tried again to join up.

Connie remarked after he’d left, ‘He was an odd sort of person, don’t you think? He was quite friendly at lunchtimes and then without cause he began to behave as though we’d done him some injury. Strange, leaving so suddenly. I wonder why? Did he say anything to you?’

‘I suppose he had his reasons,’ she said, shrugging. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘No, I suppose not. I’m glad he left. I thought he was a bit odd sometimes, coming over to eat his sandwiches with us women. I sometimes thought you encouraged him a little too much.’

Eveline made no reply to this observation. But the next three weeks were spent in private reflection. She would never have done so but what if she had and she’d fallen pregnant? It didn’t bear thinking about. It had happened to her before, and so easily, her recollection of that time being awful, haunted by fear of being marked out, pointed at as a loose woman.

She’d been so fortunate in having had Albert rescue her as he had, a selfless, wonderful man. How could she have considered allowing herself this time, even if only for a split second, to be carried away all because she had felt so lonely? Thousands of women were feeling lonely without their men, but they didn’t allow themselves to get into some ridiculous situation behind a pile of coats in some cloakroom. Thinking back, it might almost have been funny if she hadn’t been left hating herself for having come near, as she kept seeing it, to betraying the man she loved.

So far the lull had lasted some several minutes other than the occasional snap of rifle fire at a head poked briefly above a parapet; opposing trenches ran only tens of yards apart in some places. A lull always felt uncanny on ears deafened by the scream of shells and still ringing from the unbroken violence of explosions that seemed to rip the very air to shreds.

Crouched in the mud at the bottom of the trench, his back against its crumbling wall, Albert glanced across at George. They grinned at each other, teeth gleaming starkly from dirt-encrusted faces, but neither spoke. The last bombardment had been too shattering to resort now to conversation.

Without a word, he laid his rifle to one side and fished into his breast pocket for a packet of cigarettes, flattened and grubby, offering one to Albert. Wordlessly he took it. Lighting up, they drew satisfying lungfuls of the sweet smoke, smoke that helped ease a tense body, unclench the teeth and calm that peculiar twitch to facial muscles that betrayed a man’s secret anguish caused more by the excruciating din of shellfire than fear of death itself.

George dug into his pocket again and drew out a grubby notepad and stub of pencil. Opening the book, he bent his head and began writing. It had to be hastily written, the note to his wife. If allowed to finish it he would put it back into the top pocket of his filthy tunic until it could be handed to someone coming along the line to be posted for him.

Albert looked at the others sprawled along the trench’s length as far as he could see, which wasn’t far. Originally straight, it now wound like a snake, much of the parapet caved in from direct hits and partially dug out again by sappers, other parts just left. It was a mess.

He turned his glance from the body beside him. The man had fallen back from a lump of shrapnel to the side of his head during this last assault. He now lay face up in the mud, eyes staring sightlessly. Albert wanted to close them for him but lacked an effort of will. Instead he lifted his gaze to survey the trench. Men were slumped in various postures, arses and elbows in half a foot of water, uniforms covered in mud and blood that wouldn’t dry in this weather, ears and cheeks wrapped around in mufflers or balaclavas against the freezing wet of February, helmets balanced on top. There was little talking.

Others were moving among them, medics, taking away the worst casualties, stretchers negotiating collapsed parapets, the slightly wounded having field dressings applied by mates, given a cigarette and water. Some groaned but for the most part they lay or sat quiet until they too could be helped away which would depend on when the next assault began. The dead, like Lt. Morrison beside him, lay where they’d fallen, some half buried in mud or with just the odd limb protruding from the collapsed part of the trench, men preferring not to notice them. Removing half-buried bodies, much less parts of bodies, wasn’t a priority, if they could be removed at all between attacks. The stench of putrefaction was something one never got used to.

The lull was lasting. Grateful for small mercies, Albert used the moments to find his own notepad and pencil. He could at least start a letter to Eveline in what was left of this break in the shelling. Folded in the notepad was her last letter, a few weeks old now, and a scrap of grubby brown paper, reminder of the Christmas parcel she’d sent – a slab of Christmas cake, a packet of boiled sweets, a block of milk chocolate, a pair of knitted khaki socks and a khaki balaclava which he was now wearing under his helmet. It felt nice and warm too.

George too had received a food parcel, from Connie. They’d scoffed the lot when thankfully at a rest camp and feeling relatively civilised once more, apart from attending a funeral party and visiting the tiny cemetery with its simple wooden crosses where some of the men they had known were buried.

Before writing, he reread Eveline’s letter as he had done a dozen times already. She had written to him about her Christmas, and it was like reading about another world. She’d written light-heartedly about an explosion at Allan & Hanbury’s chemical factory behind where they lived in Waterlow Buildings.

It went off with such a crash, I dropped a cup and saucer from our best china set, broke it to smithereens. Soot came down the chimney and covered everything. Then Connie came rushing round to us carrying Rebecca in her arms. I mean, Rebecca’s nearly seven years old and she was carrying her like she was a baby. Their faces were black with soot and she said her flat was covered in it. There was no other damage but she was in such a state, absolutely terrified.

Her other news had had him worried out of his life for her, speaking of raids from Zeppelins and now aeroplanes, and of an explosion at the Venesta munitions works not far from the one where she worked, sixty-nine people killed there. She’d said the newspapers reported that it had been heard in Wiltshire. She’d scared him. It could have been the factory she worked in. What if he survived this war, as he was sure he would, having gone through three years of it, only for her to be killed by some explosion where she was working? It was after all a munitions factory. It could happen.

Bending his head, he began to write: ‘My dearest darling,’ then found his hand shaking – fear for her or because of this last bombardment, he couldn’t say.

His efforts to try again with more determination were cut short anyway by a renewed outbreak of shellfire, an officer yelling for them to go over the top to occupy an enemy trench some forty yards away apparently reported to have been evacuated.

With the others Albert scrambled over the subsided rim of his portion of trench, bounded forward, body bent double, gun held ready to fire, ears battered by whiz-bangs and flashes. Someone beside him threw up his arms and fell backwards, sliding into a shell hole of muddy water. He ran on, intent only on reaching the hopefully vacated trench and – please God – safety. It could be called an advance, though where to in the gathering darkness broken only by the flash of whiz-bangs, no one knew.

It was a tidier, deeper trench than theirs but, with the continuous shelling at last letting up, no haven from the incessant rain as they cleared the place of the dead that Jerry had left behind, ugly sights from which most averted their eyes. That done, in pouring rain they stood for most of the night and part of the next day, needing sleep and longing for the relief to arrive, while Lewis gunners and snipers fired sporadically at any moving target.

Albert finished his letter two days later after a series of particularly harrowing bombardments; his section was finally relieved and he was left with a field dressing on a wide shrapnel graze on his upper left arm, George with a dent in his helmet which only a second before he had replaced on his head at the moment of one renewed bombardment. Both did indeed seem to be leading charmed lives when ten of their section, including their officer, had lost theirs, and four had been seriously wounded.

‘Let’s hope,’ he ended his letter, ‘I last this war out,’ but erased the words as too pessimistic, and wrote instead, ‘to see you soon, darling.’

Two and a half years of fighting for just a few feet of ground gained only to be lost again; surely it couldn’t last much longer, something had to happen eventually, one or the other side having to give in and call a halt to this stupidest of wars – so long as it wasn’t his side!

‘See you soon, darling,’ he’d written. Then in early April after being sent to the rear for several weeks of other work and further training, that prayer was answered.

His arm healed by then, he and George found themselves being given leave quite out of the blue – a week in old England. Armed with the necessary papers, leave pass, certificate, they were hardly able to believe their luck.

It was strange to set foot in England, clean and brushed up. But it wasn’t until he set his foot on English soil at Southampton that a peculiar shaking inside him set in again as it had often done after a particularly nasty bombardment, as if his nerves didn’t belong to him. It would take all his willpower to control it, and after a while it would stop, but during that week of unbelievable peace he was to feel it several times more, though he said nothing of it to Eveline.

With no advance warning of his coming – he said there’d been no time to send a letter – Eveline felt her face go first chalk-white on opening the door to his knock, then heat up in a enormous surge of joy, throwing herself into his arms, unable to keep from dissolving into uncontrollable tears as she drew him inside their flat and still unable to believe what was happening.

‘Where’s Helena?’ he asked when finally she’d got control of herself.

‘At school,’ she told him, still breathless from the shock of seeing him. ‘She’ll be so excited to see her dad.’

‘Let’s go an’ collect ’er,’ he said, ignoring her intention of making him a cup of tea straight away. ‘We’ll ’ave a proper tea and something to eat, all three of us tergether. An’ if they won’t let ’er out, I’ll ’ave something ter say about it!’ he added aggressively.

‘George is ’ome on leave too,’ he told her as they made their way over to the school. It felt so strange, him walking beside her, talking to her as if they’d never been apart. Mentally, she had to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming.

It was a week of sheer bliss that she refused to let be marred by the thought of his having to go back to France, telling herself that when he did, it would be somewhere set well behind the lines, some training camp or other, drilling new replacements coming out. He and George had done enough.

Eveline felt the week speeding by, hating so much of it being taken in fulfilling family duty when all they wanted was to spend it together.

‘We must spend a bit of time with me mum,’ Albert said. ‘’Er with both me and Jim away fighting.’ Which was only right when his mother had some time ago willingly taken on the job of seeing Helena to school and fetching her back to look after her until Eveline could pick her up after work. Though her own mum was more inclined towards Helena these days, the shop kept her busy and she was probably glad for someone else to do it.