Paper Doll (17 page)

“It's very good to see you, Bobby Bryant,” Robin said. She was slowly smoothing her hair back from her ears.

“You look great,” he said. “I've been trying to figure out some way of saying it that doesn't sound sappy.”

She had a winning way of snorting in amusement at herself. “I'm vain, really,” she said. “Comes from my grandmother Janie, I'm told. I'll tell you about her sometime.”

Bryant didn't answer. He had the awful feeling at times like this, when he was at a loss for a response, that Robin was inexorably coming to realize that he wasn't good enough for her.

She got up onto one knee, lifting her hair from the back of her neck, and straightened her arms languidly. “I think I'll have a paddle,” she said.

At the edge she hunched low and swept water up over her arms and chest, giving a little shake as she did so. He closed his eyes again, and heard the splash of Robin diving in and opened his eyes and immediately she surfaced making crouping sounds. “It's like ice,” she was finally able to say.

Her mother had dinner ready when they returned. There was a small pewter pot of horseradish on the table as well, which did not seem to be a mistake, though none of the women used it. Snowberry spooned a small portion onto the outside of his plate. While they ate, Elizabeth recounted in some detail her first sighting of Americans.

“One of them gave Mother a flower,” Robin said. “She's been a supporter of the Yanks ever since. I think he in point of fact gave her one of her own bluebells.”

“Nonscriptus,” Bryant said, remembering Robin's water-color, and her mother smiled, pleased that this American had a finer side.

The women talked about where rationed commodities were becoming available. They talked about the war in the village. “We had a Wellington crash nearby some months ago, as well,” Robin said. “Near the cottage of an elderly friend. We went straight off to look in on her and we found her drinking port in the front room, with a kettle lid on her head, tied with a regimental tie.”

Bryant laughed in a way he hoped maintained decorum. Snowberry grinned.

“She was ready for another blitz, I suppose,” Elizabeth said.

After a custard made from white powder from a lidded tin, Snowberry held out for nightlife, so they walked the half mile or so through the cool twilight to the local pub. At the door Snowberry pointed up to the overhanging sign, “Ye Silent Woman Pub.” Underneath was carved a decapitated woman. “Very sweet,” Robin said.

They sat around a table and listened for a short while to the patrons. Snowberry cleared his throat and smiled and sat up straighter in the chair. “So what did you girls think of a couple of enlisted men asking you out?” he said.

“I put it down to the immaturity and egotism of youth,” Jean said.

“You know the British attitude towards the Yanks,” Robin said. “Eager blunderers who succeed through sheer weight of numbers.”

Bryant could see Snowberry fingering something in his pants pocket and hoped it wasn't the condoms. Snowberry said, “So why date us when the RAF is full of Leslie Howards?”

“Well, you're still to some small degree British,” Robin conceded. “Unruly colonials come over to help. There is that.”

“And of course, you have chocolate,” Jean said. She had large round eyes which frequently lent her expressions a misleading suggestion of credulousness.

“Unruly is right,” Snowberry said with enthusiasm. “The other night you should have seen us. We were at The Hoops and from there we flattened this chemist's shop. Looked like someone had backed a truck right through it.”

“How does one ruin an entire chemist's shop?” Robin asked. She did not sound pleased.

“We started early,” Snowberry said. He slugged his beer.

Robin sighed. Jean sipped the beer. At the bar they were arguing about the quality of the whiskey.

“I guess we're sort of like what you hear about Americans, huh?” Bryant said.

Robin conceded a small smile. “What do the Americans say about us?” she asked. “We're curious.”

“There're two theories,” Snowberry said. “One is that English girls are as loose as a goose, and that they'll say right out what candy or gum'll get you. The other is that they're just like any other girls, and that any guy who thinks differently is a sap. Lewis is always saying that.”

“And to which view do you subscribe?” Robin asked.

“I think you're the berries,” Snowberry said.

“A third theory,” Jean said disparagingly.

Bryant knew the statement to be only half fraudulent: Snowberry was wild about Jean, probably more than he knew, and had been able to keep his feelings fairly discreet, a trick Bryant envied. But he also had quoted theory number one to Bryant more than once, and liked to say concerning Jean's response to alcohol that after a few drinks the three inhibitions she did have disappeared. The commonly accepted wisdom around the squadron based on both experience and wishful thinking was that if you wore wings, you were halfway home.

“You shouldn't flatter yourself, Gordon,” Jean said. “We're here because you're entertaining, and every bit as generous as you're hopeful.” Robin laughed. “And”—Jean touched his cheek—“you're quite handsome, in a younger brother way.”

Snowberry grinned. “Now we're getting somewhere.”

“If you ladies are golddiggers, why not officers?” Bryant asked. “Why not Lieutenant Gabriel, or Cooper?” He was secretly afraid of just that: officers with more going for them stealing her away.

“Don't give them a choice like that,” Snowberry said. “Make it fair. Isn't Gable an officer?”

“I think you've proven quite nicely that enlisted men, with a bit of jerrying around here and there, somehow acquire all the resources available in your Air Corps to officers.”

“I think we ought to put our cards on the table,” Bryant said. “We think you're the berries, and you think we're tops, too.”

Robin smiled. She raised her glass, and they toasted the announcement. One by one they fell to gazing at a poster over the door, of a British Tommy charging forward with a disconcerting ferocity. The caption read,
He's Working for You—Are You Working for Him?
The poster had evidently been torn in half and reassembled. Robin mentioned the connection with the pub's sign. They drank more quickly, looking for the most part at each other, anxious to get out from under the influence of the poster.

On the way back to the cottage Jean and Snowberry held hands. Two children were trying to boot apples soccer-style into a pail. A young woman was peering keenly at the action of a hinge as she swung the door this way and that. It occurred to Bryant as he passed through the village that everyday life was the surprise, not the war: the surprise was in the revelation that all of this life would go on, unconcerned, as he and his friends did what they did every day.

He fancied Robin was thinking the same way. Her eyes were following a low stone wall, and she knitted her brows, as if displeased, the way his father did. Ahead of them Snowberry and Jean were evidently discussing Snowberry's left hand.

“Why don't I ever fall in love at first sight?” Robin asked. She looked at Bryant, who was unable to shrug or smile. The comment seemed thoughtless and deflating. “I suppose it has something to do with my father,” she added. “I never knew him very well. Mother used to say he treated us badly when he treated us at all.”

“I was never very close to my father, either,” Bryant said. But your father's still alive, dope, he thought.

“He was killed in a shipping accident. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.” He wondered what Snowberry and Jean were talking about. “Though that's all you said.”

She said, “It all sounds so pathetic and commonplace I suppose I don't often see the point of going into it.”

He groped for something that would help. He wanted to know more about her, but was retaining very little.

She smiled for his benefit. “It's funny how everyone agrees on the awfulness of growing up, isn't it?”

He thought he should say something. He remembered Snowberry. “Gordon doesn't. He's always telling me these great stories. I always feel like, God, did I miss the boat.”

She gazed ahead sympathetically at Snowberry's back. “Perhaps he's forgotten,” she said.

On a low knoll a terrier watched them with the paranoid expression peculiar to the breed. Another dog lay snoozing with its fur poking through the slats of a garden fence, and before arriving at the cottage, he caught a mysterious and fleeting glimpse down a side lane of a small boy in shorts riding a black dog along a winding path beneath silent and dark trees.

Elizabeth had retired, leaving a pot of tea in its quilted warmer and an overlong note on the dining room table. Bryant had the sudden intuition that she'd been given some sort of instructions prior to their visit. Jean and Gordon went out to the garden despite the dark, and Bryant and Robin tidied up at the strange stone sink. He put away in the cream-colored cupboards dishes or utensils that Robin would then quietly relocate. It began to rain, the sound light on the leaves outside the windows. They heard the heavier sound of running footsteps, and Jean swept back in, with Snowberry behind her. She shook out her hair and Snowberry rubbed his shoulders while Robin circled the room turning out the lamps. Robin kissed Bryant's cheek and Jean kissed Snowberry on the lips and they said goodnight.

“Aw, Jeez,” Snowberry said, shivering a bit for effect.

“Let us know if you need anything,” Jean whispered.

“I need something,” Snowberry said.

“Goodnight,” she said again, and the two girls ascended the stairs. Bryant said goodnight and Robin turned on the landing and hesitated, silhouetted in a nimbus of light in the hallway.

Snowberry climbed the stairs himself soon afterwards, disappointed and tired. “I think we probably do worse with girls than anybody in the Army,” he said as he climbed. Bryant remained in the kitchen, sitting in the dark and listening to the loud ticking of a clock he hadn't noticed. There was a faint biscuity smell. The rain had stopped and the cardboard blackout shutters rattled faintly against the window frames. In the bathroom he discovered behind the washstand an old corner of National bread, plush with mold. The loo was a separate room altogether, with a long chain hanging down from a flushing tank set up higher than eye level. Bryant assumed it had something to do with gravity. He dreamed that night about a Bing Crosby record with Jesus Christ accompanying on clarinet, and remembered wondering vaguely how sleeping people got their hands on such recordings.

In the morning when he woke no one was in the house, and in the garden Robin was standing quite still, with a hand cupped and raised over her forearm, her face as placid and beautiful in its absorption as the face of a woman in a painting. Only the tremor of background primroses compromised the stillness. The air above the trees rang with a mysterious bird. The short sleeves of her blouse trembled, and she slapped the insect, and broke the spell.

When he joined her, they sat in wicker garden chairs under the cherry tree she had written him about.

“They've gone for a walk,” Robin said.

Bryant rubbed his chin. “Were they trying to leave us alone, you think?”

She sniffed. “Jeannie adores the thought of mad, secret lives of endless trysts and intrigue. I suppose I've let her down a bit on that score. The silly thing is, Gordon seems to believe he's initiating things.”

Bryant nodded foolishly, feeling acutely again that he and his friend were overmatched by these women.

An insect thin as a pencil point lighted on his lap. On its back were aqua and scarlet bands as brilliant as fresh paint. An immense white cat perched atop the stone man-hole in the corner of the garden, Cardinal Newman's hideout. Robin made birdlike squeaks with her pursed lips. “That's Puff,” she said. “Here, Puff.”

He asked if she'd been doing any more painting.

“Haven't had much time,” she said. “I'd like to go to art college after the war, I think. I was told by a friend I'd be certain to be offered a place.” She opened her eyes and turned to face him. “Probably end up doing adverts.” Her complexion remained beautifully smooth in the direct sunlight. She seemed pleased by the colors on her arm. She smiled. “What about you, mysterious Bobby? What will you be doing after the war?”

Bryant shrugged. The war had imposed a way of thinking on him, an ability to conceive only in terms of the present. His past was receding, so that calling it forward required ever more effort, and his future was a white wall, bland and abstract enough to discourage speculation.

They had a late dinner, relaxing around a splintery wooden table in the garden with cold meat and pickles. The windows of the cottage filled with the orange and violet of the sunset.

“This is really a beautiful place,” Snowberry said.

“I'd like to have you for two weeks,” Robin murmured.

Jean gave her eye a delicate rub. “Six would do nicely,” she suggested. She crunched a pickle.

Bryant and Snowberry nodded politely.

“You don't seem particularly enthused,” Robin noted.

They were awkward momentarily, uncertain what she wanted. “This is great, too,” Snowberry said.

“Aren't you always wishing the war would go away?” Jean said.

They were silent. Snowberry looked to Bryant. “I can't say that, exactly,” Snowberry said. “There's a lot I hate about it, a lot that's terrible. But in some ways I'm happier than I've ever been.”

The girls looked at them.

“I guess it's hard to talk about,” Snowberry further volunteered. Bryant felt angry and impatient with the question: they were outside looking in. How could they know?

“I know it sounds terrible,” Snowberry said. “I don't mean it to.”