Gifts of War (15 page)

Sam cut into what was left of her fish. “All the other sisters noticed it—and it hurt. We used to talk about it, to each other, never in front of Lottie, of course, we couldn’t lose face in that way. We would make sarcastic remarks, but she never seemed to take it on board—she just sailed through the early years, and the rest of us swallowed it. Our parents had a soft spot for Lottie and that was that.”

She drank some water and poured a little more sauce from the jug.

“Now, here comes the weird bit—and maybe you will have a view about it. As we got older, as first Ruth, then Faye, then Lottie turned ten, and then twelve, boys came into our lives and these things began to matter more and more. And… I know I shouldn’t say this, but Ruth and Faye and, yes, me, though I was still barely eleven, were all
reasonably attractive, but Lottie wasn’t. The rest of us didn’t speak about it; nobody spoke about it in the family. But now Lottie started to hurt. And this is my point, or one of my points anyway… that when you are winning, or on the winning side, or in some favored position, success or winning is never as good a feeling as losing or being unsuccessful is horrible. Have you ever noticed that? People who lose feel that loss far more than winners relish winning.”

“You think that’s true?”

Sam was nodding. “Yes, I do. I remember my first boyfriend—he could hardly be called the name, we were so young. But I fell for someone else and didn’t think twice about throwing him over. Yet when I was thrown over myself, by boyfriend number two and not so long afterward, I was inconsolable.” She grinned. “Not for very long, I have to admit, but my point is that losing is much more hurtful than winning is pleasurable.”

“What did you all do about it?”

Sam speared the remains of her fish with her fork. “We all handled it in a different way. Ruth, from having been a tomboy as a girl, now became quite feminine and took Lottie under her wing. Faye was always rather histrionic and rather flaunted her success with boys.”

“And you?” I had almost finished my own fish.

“I suppose I was always the shyest of the three—of all of us, really. It came from being the youngest. It crossed my mind that, although we sisters had never noticed how plain Lottie was as a child, our parents
had
, and although they never said anything, they had realized early on that she might have a harder life as a grown woman than the rest of us.
And that was why they had made her their favorite.”

Sam drank more water. “It had a big effect on me, that insight, their understanding of family psychology. I understood that parents aren’t so stupid, that you don’t always say what you know, that you
think ahead, weigh up what is likely to happen and act on it, that what appears cruel in one light is actually kindness and thoughtfulness in another light. It made me like my mother even more than I did.”

She put her knife and fork together.

“But it had another effect on our lives, too. When I got pregnant, Ruth and Faye tried to be understanding but… well, they were shocked, I could tell, no matter how they tried to hide their feelings— Ruth especially. They were shocked. I repeat that I don’t think they thought I was wicked—more foolish. But yes, they were shocked.”

The fish plates were taken away and the chicken served.

“But Lottie… Lottie was different again. It was as if… as if
I
was now the plain one, the fourth of the four, the one everyone else pitied, the one with life stacked against her. I won’t say she was pleased… she was more… well,
relieved
is how I would describe it.” She smiled but it was a thin smile.

“And how did you react? To Lottie, I mean.”

Sam made a face. “I was grateful, to be honest. I felt so … so
alone
with Wilhelm gone, so cold, so exposed. No one had betrayed me but, yes, I felt betrayed.”

I let a long pause go by. There was a table of six diners across the room complaining about the food. The noise they were making left us in an anonymous corner of relative silence. The staff had enough on their hands and would come nowhere near us for a while.

We chewed on our chicken.

“Why did you do it, Sam?” I said this after a long silence but I had to get it out. It was a natural enough question. “I can understand you sleeping with Wilhelm—of course I can. But… why take the risk of getting pregnant? There are ways … ways of doing these things … You’ve been to college … you must have known… Did he—?”

“No! Stop!” It was a sigh, a cry, a sob, and a choking sound in the
same breath. She snatched at her wine glass and held it to her lips, hiding as best she could for a moment.

A long pause, longer than the one I had let elapse. Tears glistened around the rim of her eyelids. “It wasn’t him.
It wasn’t him!
He didn’t force me, I mean. Not at all. Oh no!”

She took a deep breath, swallowed a huge chunk of air. Again I watched the muscles of her throat ripple and the upper, visible parts of her breasts swell.

Like her mother, Sam had an engine inside her. Her skin glowed.

“We had rented a long boat—a narrow boat, whatever they are called—and were sailing for a weekend on the canals. Nobody asks if you’re married or not in that world. It had been a gorgeous day, a day of birds and buzzing insects and the sound of running water as locks opened and closed, the smell of the other boats’ exhausts as they chugged past, with all their brightly painted weird names. We had stopped for lunch at a pub next to a lockkeeper’s cottage and we did the same for dinner—another lock, another lockkeeper’s cottage, another pub next to it.

“This one was quite rowdy, however. It was late, people had been drinking, and they started arguing, arguing about the Germans, about how belligerent and militaristic they are, how they were building up their forces, their navy, how the Kaiser was a tyrant. You can imagine.”

She bit her lip.

“I was angry, fearful, and embarrassed all at the same time, for Wilhelm. No one knew he was German, of course; he had the sense not to say anything but gave me a sign, and we left. We didn’t speak until we were well out of earshot of the pub and nearly back at the boat. I started to apologize but he stopped me. He said it was just the same in Germany, that the Germans were just as anti-English as the English were anti-German, and that we should ignore it.

“There was a moon and we went for a walk along the canal bank, to calm down. We eventually returned to the boat and sat inside for a while, having a last whisky and talking. We were amazed that we could feel the way we did about each other, when everybody else in Britain and Germany was at each other’s throats. I must say, Hal, it was wonderful, bewildering—and, yes, anxiety-making all at the same time.”

The upper half of her breasts swelled again.

“After a while, Wilhelm went onto the deck for a smoke. I changed into my nightdress. Then he called to me. ‘Sam,’ he sort of whispered. ‘Come out here. Come and look at this.’

“I went out on deck. While we had been talking, the moon had risen in the sky but, more than that, a mist had formed over the canal. It was as if the canal was steaming and the steam was shining—it was made silver-yellow, silver-gold, by the glow of the moon. And the best part is: we were cut off by the mist. It had closed in around us, silently, secretly, and when you blinked you felt its wetness on your cheeks and eyelashes.”

She bit her lip again, thinking back.

“Wilhelm put his arm around me, and as we stood there, enveloped in the mist, we suddenly heard a flapping, a beating, a leathery sound, and two swans flew straight past us, very low above the water, and very close. They came out of the mist—and were gone back into it in no time.

“Wilhelm didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The mere sight of the swans, the fact that there were just two of them, was enough.

“He kissed me. I was wearing just my nightdress, very thin. He put his mouth on mine—and then he put his mouth on my breast.
Oh, Hal!”

Those words went through me.

“What did I feel? No one’s ever written about what I felt. Ever. And no one told me what to expect, not my mother, not Ruth or Faye
or Lottie, not
anyone
. You read poetry and they make feelings, feelings of love, of tenderness, of intimacy, seem so beautiful, so … lovely. But they are … observing, they are outside, their words can be so
… limiting”

Now she let out a breath.

“That’s not what I felt that night. ‘Lust’ is a horrible word, I think. I had been in love with Wilhelm for some time by then, but that night, that night… that night, for the first time, I
wanted
him. When he put his mouth on my breast, I remember that I cried out. To begin with it was surprise, but it immediately turned into something else. A wave swept through my nerves, my flesh was flushed with blood, gorged, and I wanted to wrap my arms and legs around him and squeeze all the juices out of his body and into mine. No one’s ever written about
that!
I wanted him to put his hands and lips and tongue all over me. I was sweating, crying—but in pleasure. I had sensations, more like
anticipations
in my body, in parts of my body that I had never felt before, or even known I
could
feel.”

Sam was blushing now but her eyes still shone: she had to tell someone. This had been bottled up for too long.

“We lay on the deck of the narrow boat. The mist was all around us, but because of the moon it was a source of light as well as a cloak. My body was filled with fire, but fire as a tide—it rose through my body, swept across my skin. And then, and then … I was released.”

Her breathing quieted.

“I don’t think any of my sisters have been through that.”

“Have you told them?”

She shook her head. “I tried. Faye listened, but not the others, not really. They probably thought I was being sentimental.”

A waitress came at last to clear the plates away. It was getting late and we both decided to limit ourselves to coffee, though I also asked for a whisky.

“So, in a sense, you were unlucky.”

“Yes, but not in the way you mean.”

“Oh?”

“I became pregnant that night—yes. But that wasn’t unlucky in itself. We planned to get married and everything would have been— well, aboveboard. And we’d had what we’d had—this amazing evening of… sensual love. It was only when Wilhelm had to go back to Germany, and then war broke out, accidentally almost, that our luck changed. We didn’t know on the narrow boat what was about to happen. Nobody did. It’s not as if… as if Wilhelm tried to take advantage of me. It wasn’t like that at all.”

The coffees arrived.

“But isn’t the result the same?”

“Not at all,
don’t say that!
If I’d just gone with Wilhelm for one night, acting like a slut, and got pregnant, yes, it would have been disgraceful, cheap, tawdry—all those things. But Will is the fruit of that night, that beautiful night… when … well, I’ve told you.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “When everything was perfect.”

We both drank our coffees. The waitress brought my whisky.

“And you’ve not heard from him at all?”

She lowered her eyes. “No.” A short intake of breath. “I felt sure …” She looked at me. “No.”

I swallowed. Wilhelm’s photograph was in my wallet, virtually in Sam’s direct line of sight. My own chest heaved. I took a gulp of water to buy time, so I wouldn’t be tempted to blurt out what I knew.

“What would you like to do tomorrow?”

She was still drinking her coffee and put down her cup. “You will never guess, never in a month of Sundays. You might have some idea if you knew, as you do know, that I love travel, and the
idea
of travel, and you might work it out if you knew, as you do know, that we only have tomorrow at our disposal, but—”

“I’m lost,” I said. “Put me out of my misery.”

“I enjoyed the play this evening, very much, but I know Stratford all too well. Since you ask, I’d like to spend tomorrow in Birmingham.”

I was a bit flummoxed. I was
very
flummoxed. Who ever heard of anyone wanting to go to Birmingham as a
tourist?
But Sam explained: “I’ve never been, we can do it easily in a day without exhausting Will, it’s a big city, with hundreds of small firms, many helping the war effort, and it’s
industrial
. I’ve been living in rural peace and seclusion since before the war started and I want to see the grime and the soot, the overcrowding and the slums, the endless factory buildings and the acres of concrete without any trees, and the forest of chimneys spewing black smoke. That’s what’s fighting this war for us. In some ways, it’s as foreign as the Orinoco.”

So I agreed. We finished our coffees, went upstairs, and, since it was so late, I walked Blanche back to her lodgings. When I returned to the Crown and knocked on the door to Sam and Will’s room, she appeared in her nightdress. It was very thin.

She held her finger to her lips. “Will’s asleep.” Then she stood on tiptoe and kissed me lightly on the mouth. “What a lovely night, Hal. I love it how I can talk to you, about anything. Even … you know.”

I left it there, and turned in.

The Birmingham trip was a surprise, for me at least, and far more interesting than I could have imagined. We couldn’t do too much because we had Will with us, and since neither of us knew the city, I negotiated with a taxi driver at Snow Hill station for him to drive us around for half a day. He thought it was pretty odd that we didn’t want to go to any of the great hotels, or the theater district, or the cathedral, or the museum, or any of the better neighborhoods, but
sought out Wilmot and Breedon’s wire factory in Balsall Heath and the British Small Arms depot in Aston. But, once he realized we weren’t joking, he entered into the spirit of things. And, like a true taxi driver, he certainly knew his own city.

We began at the inland port just off the Bristol Road, where several canals conjoined in a large basin and where there could be found several ship’s chandlers, selling everything from carved tillers, to brass propellers, to ropes of all lengths and thicknesses, to waterproof paint, to paraffin lamps. Will loved all the strange shapes and colors and smells.