Reading by Lightning (32 page)

He left on the eight o'clock coach, and he must have been in the battery when we heard on the wireless that Hitler had invaded Poland. That was a Friday. On the Saturday, in spite of the heat and to calm herself, Aunt Lucy made a rag pudding. On Sunday morning she picked the Michaelmas daisies that had bloomed so early because of the hot summer and put them in a jar on the table. Then she put on her new green and yellow dress and, although Uncle Stanley didn't want to leave the wireless, she made him go to church with her. Madeleine and I were sorting out our things for school, rooting around in the bookshelves to find the books Lois and George had used in Sixth Form. A lady was giving a program about how to cook with tinned food, and suddenly her voice was cut off and the announcer said, This is London, and the voice of the prime minister came on. We both stood very still in the middle of the living-room carpet. Neville Chamberlain reminded England that he had asked Hitler to withdraw from Poland. I have to tell you, he said in his thin grey thread of a voice, that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. Then they played “God Save the King,” and we kept standing because it didn't feel right to move around or sit down during the anthem.

He's declared war, said Madeleine in a small voice, and I thought how funny it was to put it that way. There's Mr. Chamberlain standing by his desk in his morning jacket. He's just taken a telephone call, his face is grim. There are children, maybe, playing outside the leaded window of his study, but he can't see them or the bearded seed heads of last spring's clematis hanging over the casement. He stands with his hand still on the telephone receiver, cornered into saying something unequivocal. So he says it. War! he declares.

The next day the papers were full of the SS
Athenia
being torpedoed by a German U-boat and 112 passengers dying, and what I thought was, Well, they won't be able to make me go home now.

Jenny knocked over a can and something rolled around in the dark. What in heck was that? she said.

It's corks, I said. Uncle Stanley put them here. If they start bombing we're supposed to put them in our mouths. So we don't bite our tongues off.

Funny he bothers, said Lois. He's sure to like us better that way. We laughed like maniacs. It didn't matter, not even Uncle Stanley expected Germans to be walking the streets listening for noise, not at this stage.

We were under the stairs, where all the junk had been cleared out and cushions and blankets piled. Madeleine was gone with Aunt Lucy to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the street. Aunt Lucy wanted us all to go, but I said I had a sore throat, and Lois had just washed her hair, so she settled for Madeleine. Aunt Lucy felt it her duty as wife of the ARP warden to go and to model the right attitude. She kept a tin of barley sugar in her bag for the kiddies. She kept a scarf handy to tie over her curlers when the signal sounded. Imagine someone getting caught in a bombardment because they've stopped to fuss with their hair, she said. The shelter was cold
and smelled of wet jute from all the sandbags stacked around. If we had to stay into the night, there would be the moist snores of elderly strangers and the fretful voices of children waking up confused and scared. So when the ARP warden walked up the street turning the handle of his rattle like a hurdy-gurdy, Jenny just came over to our place and we squeezed under the stairs. It didn't matter: these were practice air raids.

Jenny wasn't mad at me, she was over Monty. She'd met a sailor from Portsmouth at the canteen. His name was Joe and she'd known him for three days, and just that morning he shipped out to the North Sea. She sat with her big legs folded under her, looming over us in the dark. She wore her father's pomade when her hair was unruly, and it filled the little space under the stairs with the smell of apples.

Joe was a right pest last night, she said. He wanted a little sommut to take with him. That's how he put it.
Come on, love, just a little sommut to remember you by,
he says. But I said,
Right-o, you'd be leaving a little sommut behind, more like. That's what I'm afraid of,
I said,
It's what you'd be leaving behind!
This war suits the lads to a T, don't you think? She passed us over a little bag of boiled sweets. What about Archie?

What about him? said Lois, taking a sweet.

When's he leaving?

Next Tuesday.

You watch. He'll bring his da's car this weekend. More room in the back.

I don't think so, Lois said stiffly.

I told Ma I was joining the WACs, Jenny said. But I was just winding her up. Girls look vulgar in khaki, don't you think? That's what everyone says. Friday I'm going back to the canteen. With Sally Higgins.
She's
joined, did you hear?

I don't know Sally Higgins, said Lois. How would I hear?

Come with us, said Jenny, poking me. Monty won't mind.

It's not Monty she fancies, said Lois. Lily's in love with a boy from home.

I can't go Friday, I said. I'm going to the music hall with my auntie.

And then we heard the ARP warden, Uncle Stanley or the other one, coming up the street ringing a handbell for the all-clear.

All the rest of the week I magnified my cold, although by then my throat was sore only if I thought about it. Secretly I hated George Formby. So in the end Aunt Lucy took Madeleine and one of her friends and I lay in bed with a hot-water bottle. After they left I heard Lois going downstairs in her high heels, and then I heard Archie in the hall. Their two voices went back and forth, and then the door slammed and the house fell quiet.

I lay in bed and thought about George. This was what I'd been wanting, the house empty so that I could think about George. George had been moved from Failsworth. He was somewhere on the moors, at a place he called Fetlock Fields. All day the captain blew his hunting horn and they charged across a meadow thrusting Great War bayonets into a row of straw-filled Germans hanging from low gibbets, with the sergeant screaming, Shove it in 'is adjectival gut. Twist the adjectival thing!
Adjectival
was George's word, it took the place of something else. They were taught to scream as well, they had to practise it. They threw rocks in lieu of grenades, pulling imaginary pins out with their teeth.
It's a joke from the last war,
he wrote,
but we actually spent Wednesday digging a slit trench and Thursday filling the adjectival thing up. Nothing but chickenshit day after day, it's designed to make you long for combat.
He signed off,
Auf Wiedersehen, George.

I'd spent those two weeks before he went to Failsworth in an agony of wanting to know where I stood with him. During the day Uncle Stanley had him working at the ARP depot and at night there was always someone around. When he went into Manchester to pick up his insignia, when Aunt Lucy said I should go along to keep him company, I was almost faint with happiness. I wore my blue poplin dress with the gored skirt and borrowed a cameo pin for the throat from Lois.

Is it true that you fancy Imogene? I said as soon as we got on the coach.

Yes, he said. We were secretly married in March. He looked at me with disgust. He didn't touch me until we got off at Piccadilly Gardens, but I knew from the way we sat on the tram that things would be fine between us.

At Piccadilly Gardens he laced his fingers through mine and we walked close together up Portland Street towards the town hall, through the press of people. We went to the post office, where an old man gave us his place in the queue in respect of George's uniform, and we looked into the library in St. Peter's Square. Then we drank coffee in a café on Deansgate Street. He had until four o'clock to report to the depot, so after the coffee he took me into the Manchester Art Gallery, where Darwin and other famous intellectuals lectured when it was the Manchester Institute. It was in the Roman style, with columns in front. He wanted to show me a famous painting he thought I might know. He dragged me into a gallery and I was taken aback to see that he was right, I did know it. There, in a little painting shaped like a church window, was Jesus from the cover of a Sunday-school book, knocking on the door of someone's heart.

A
woman
posed for this, George said. The artist used Christina Rossetti as his model for Jesus' face.

An ornate lamp spilled yellow light over Jesus' face and
there was something confiding about the way his small hand hovered over the door. I looked warily at the familiar bearded face, which struck me as sad yet reconciled, not like any woman I had ever seen but not like any man either.

Then we spent a long time looking at a frieze George remembered, casts from the Parthenon. It was a strip of writhing, muscular forms, some with the hind ends of horses and some just human. It depicted the battle between the centaurs and Lapiths, George knew it from Ovid. The Lapiths had invited the centaurs to a wedding, and the centaurs got drunk and tried to make off with the bride. Ovid had an eye for detail, for ripped nostrils with jellied brains oozing out of them. George had read it in Third Form and said that all the boys loved it. George pointed out how the weapons were the goblets and candlesticks from the banquet table and the antlers that had decorated the walls.

Why would you study that? I asked.

Isn't it obvious? he said. It was the turning point of Western Civilization. The victory of civilization over barbarism. Order over chaos. Athens over Persia.

That's what I had to remember now that George was gone: standing in the lobby of the Manchester Art Gallery, under the big, square skylight and the four big lamps, looking at the centaurs and the Lapiths braining one another with candlesticks, and then standing in a doorway at Piccadilly Gardens after George had been to the depot, kissing while we waited for the coach, him reaching out and pulling me into an entrance, the way I had the first time with him. The height of him, the furtive dart of his tongue into my mouth. Him reaching for me at last, as though the war had taught him desire.

I turned off the lamp and lay in the dark. There was a half-moon, I knew without looking out the window. But the blackout curtain was pulled, and I lay in bed in the dark and
wrote to George in my mind.
Must I be interested in all of this?
I asked him.
Or is it enough if I'm interested in you?
Finally I knew I wouldn't fall asleep and I got up and went to the window and opened the curtain to let in the moonlight. I sensed right away that there was someone in the garden. Straight below me, in the corner you could see only from our bedroom, Lois was perched on the garden wall, embracing Archie, who was standing with his back to me. He seemed to be leaning into her, moving rhythmically against her. I could see her slender, white legs on either side of him, bright in the moonlight, and I felt understanding creep over me, starting deep inside me rather than in my brain: it was like coming across an engine room that accounted for a secret humming you could feel through the whole building. She had her face turned up to the moon (her look was preoccupied, as though she had to concentrate, brace herself), and I saw that she was not really embracing him but holding up his trousers.