Scruffy - A Diversion (33 page)

And in one corner of it the afternoon before her projected departure from Gibraltar sat Miss Constance Boddy and recently promoted to Bombardier Lovejoy in earnest conversation. The interview was at the request of Lovejoy. No one was more surprised than Miss Boddy, engaged in the last rites of assembling her possessions, when the telephone rang in her room and the receptionist announced, “There’s a soldier—I beg your pardon, a Bombardier Lovejoy downstairs to see you.”

The name brought a most strange pang of pain to the heart of Miss Boddy and for a moment she had contemplated an excuse to avoid seeing him. But then her innate kindness rejected this and she had agreed to go down.

In the lobby had waited an embarrassed Lovejoy, even more brushed and spruced than he had been on the fateful expedition to the apes’ village the day before. His cap was tucked under one arm, a fixative applied to his hair so that every grain and wisp was in place, his boots were twin mirrors and in one sweating hand was clutched a wrapped bouquet, open at one end, of red roses.

When Miss Boddy had emerged from the lift he had moved towards her with the uncertain tread of one proceeding to his execution, gulped and declared, “I came to say good-bye.”

He had then stood there quite petrified and apparently incapable of further speech, nor did he make any move to present her with the flowers. It became evident to Miss Boddy that he had something more to say than just good-bye; that it was proving extraordinarily difficult for him; that he would never get it said standing there in the lobby and she took pity on him. Hence the conference in the lounge.

When they were seated, the Bombardier, still clinging desperately to his cap in one hand and the flowers in the other, Miss Boddy asked, “Would you like something to drink?”

“Gord,” said Lovejoy from the very bottom of his being, “would I?”

“Then I’ll order tea,” Miss Boddy said, and did so forthwith.

It had not been what the Bombardier had in mind, but it was strong when it arrived and its tannin content did supply the minimum of stimulant needed to settle Lovejoy’s nerves.

“I have come to apologize,” he said, “that was a rotten dirty thing I done.”

The heart within Miss Boddy was as soft and cushiony as her exterior. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Lovejoy,” she said. “You were only carrying out the orders of your superiors.”

The first step in self-purging and condemnation having been taken, the second was easier. “That’s not exactly true,” said the Bombardier. “There ain’t nothing in the regulations that compels a man to turn himself into a liar for no one. You know, the orful thing was I enjoyed making up them tales. I didn’t know I ’ad it in me.”

Miss Boddy sighed, for her memory had swiftly taken her back to the strand at Hope Cove and the happy days she had spent there in the company of Lovejoy. “I’m afraid I enjoyed listening to them too,” she admitted.

“Makes me feel a proper swine,” confessed Lovejoy. “It was all a pack of lies from beginning to end. Gord! And me who had lived with old Scruff for the last ten years and knew every crochet and wickedness of his black heart. He ’adn’t got one redeeming feature.” Then almost as an afterthought he added, “I suppose that’s what made me love ’im.”

Miss Boddy made no reply to this astonishing admission, but the thought that anyone could love such a specimen was startling to her. And yet there was no questioning the sincerity of the soldier.

“I wanted you and Amelia to come along back with me to Gib,” said the Bombardier.

“Yes, I’m sure you did,” remarked Miss Boddy, but her manner of saying it fired something in Lovejoy and he suddenly cried with a vehemence that amazed him: “No, not
them
with their plots and schemes for the bloody Empire, but me! Oh, Lord, me and my mouth, I’ve said the word again I oughtn’t! Please excuse me, Ma’am.”

Now that he reminded her Miss Boddy was surprised to find that she had not even heard “the word”. She had still been back in Devon immersed in the memory of those days and the particular charm that Bombardier Lovejoy had exercised upon her.

“Me,” repeated Lovejoy. “There was old Scruff back on the Rock needing a mate, there was the war and there was—” he trailed off.

“Yes,” prompted Miss Boddy, curious as to where these confessions were leading.

“Well me and everybody like,” the Bombardier concluded somewhat lamely.

There was a silence while she poured a second cup of tea.

“You’ll be off in the morning, I expect,” Lovejoy opened.

“Yes.”

“That’s a good aircraft, the Handley, you’re flying in. You’ll be safe as a rock,” the Bombardier assured her, using perhaps not the happiest metaphor. Then he added, “I wish you wasn’t going.”

“Really? That’s kind of you to say so.” Miss Boddy was regarding the soldier curiously through the lenses of her gold-rimmed spectacles as she sat, a teacup poised in one hand, her little finger elegantly crooked, and a chocolate cream biscuit in the other. Yet something other than curiosity impelled her to ask, “Why?”

The Bombardier had got himself forward to the edge of his chair. He too had his teacup in one hand, the other was still clutching the undelivered bouquet of roses. “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “I just wish as how you weren’t.”

Miss Boddy thought she had read him. Men, after all, were all alike and particularly men in war. For whatever the reason or cause they wanted their way.

“Everyone has been at me to make me stay,” Miss Boddy said with some sadness. “All those officers and even that sweet child married to one of them. All they care about is to get what they want. And I suppose you too, Mr. Lovejoy.”

“No,” Lovejoy heard himself say to his utter horror, “I’d miss you after you were gone and that’s a fact.”

Something in his tone disarmed Miss Boddy for a moment. “Would you really, Mr. Lovejoy? No one has ever said that to me before.”

“Ma’am, I would, so help me, and I never thought that John C. Lovejoy would be saying that to any woman. Couldn’t you perhaps stay, Ma’am?”

Miss Boddy shook her head. “Our home is in England,” she said.

“But couldn’t you make your home here with me?” Lovejoy pleaded. “Look how Amelia gets on with me,” and again the Bombardier felt both thrill and shock at the sound of his own words. For he was wholly unfamiliar with those processes that take over in a man
vis-à-vis
a woman in which the head has every intention of remaining in control only to be treacherously sold out by the heart.

Miss Boddy couldn’t keep the astonishment out of her voice even while she felt her heart suddenly accelerating. “Did you say make our home with you, Mr. Lovejoy?” she asked.

He had not wanted to say it, but he had, and now his head was nodding in silent assent to the question.

A new and cold suspicion suddenly chilled the sweet warmth that for a moment had flooded Miss Boddy. “Mr. Lovejoy,” she asked, “are you by any chance asking me to marry you?”

Bombardier Lovejoy’s mind silently dictated the reply, “
Me marry? Never in a million years.”
His heart, however, translated it into a simply spoken, “Yes, Ma’am, please, if you would.”

“Mr. Lovejoy,” said Miss Boddy, and only a woman would have been able to detect the quiet misery and pain in her voice, “did they send you here to do this to me? To ask me to marry you to keep me and Amelia here?”

It was now the turn of Lovejoy to be filled with dismay at this evidence of how misunderstanding, suspicion and exigency can distort and twist an honest emotion. “What?” he cried. “The likes of them, a lot of bleeding orficers force me to put my head in the noose? Not—” he caught the naughty word just in time and swallowed it, “—likely.”

“Then why, why?” asked Miss Boddy, and now her own internal anguish lent vehemence to her query. “I am a weak and perhaps silly woman, Mr. Lovejoy, and unused to the ways of the world, but don’t take me for a fool. So many lies have been told to me already. It is because of Amelia—”

Lovejoy looked stunned at this outburst and repeated, “Take you for a fool, Ma’am? No one would ever do that.”

“Then why have you tried to make me one by asking me to marry you?”

And now there settled upon John C. Lovejoy a most alarming and protracted silence as the most fearful struggle went on inside him, words and thoughts and feelings that couldn’t get themselves said. He was like a cocoon from which something was endeavouring to free itself. “Ma’am,” he finally articulated miserably, “I just ’aven’t the words! Can’t you
see?”

Miss Boddy peered at him and did see. She saw his red, seamed, leathery face, wet with perspiration, a pair of blue eyes shining with sincerity and many other things that she had never seen before in the eyes of any man, and for a moment her own grew misty.

She was still holding her teacup and the unbitten chocolate cream biscuit and was suddenly and oddly aware of the angle at which her little finger was poised. Lovejoy, opposite, was also clinging to his teacup and his roses. The hotel lounge was deserted and those passing through the lobby to the lift who might have glanced over towards the corner where they sat, saw only a chubby spinster and a middle-aged Artilleryman chatting over their tea, and would never have imagined the love and the yearning that was overflowing in those two hearts, struggling to be expressed between them.

“I am a lonely man, Ma’am. We’d get on well together. For instance, there’s you liking stories. I could be telling you some that would curl your—” he stopped, realizing that he had slipped on to dangerous ground, but Miss Boddy seemed unaware of the gaffe.

She was in a turmoil. Her heart thumping in her bosom, her head reeling, she heard herself saying, “You are kind, Mr. Lovejoy, it is kind of you to ask me. I can never marry! You see, Amelia and I— It is too late now, I couldn’t—”

“Ma’am,” pleaded Bombardier Lovejoy, “do you want to send me back to my old ways? Drink and Lord knows what? You’ve had me straightened out. I haven’t had a Monkey Juice since I’ve been back. It’s hard for me to do it alone.”

There was never a stranger love declaration, or in this instance one more calculated to affect the one to whom it was addressed. For in the excitement of the journey and the subsequent disappointment brought on by the collapse of St. Harold, Constance Boddy had quite forgotten that what had really moved her to make the voyage with her pet to Gibraltar and acquiesce to the plans to mate Amelia with Scruffy had been her desire to snatch the brand of John Lovejoy from the burning of the Demon Rum.

And, of course, never admitted to herself but likewise never far from the surface, was the memory of how very like the father she had so loved was the same John C. Lovejoy. In a reeling world that was spinning about her like a teetotum, she was suddenly aware of the absurdity of her tilted little finger and consciously, unobserved by Lovejoy, curved it around the handle of her teacup. It was a gesture of abdication. Constance Boddy had had enough of all those airs and graces she had laboriously acquired and with a tremendous and joyful yearning she felt that she was on the threshold of becoming herself again.

But the force of Lovejoy’s argument, the lightning-like revelation that had come to her, plus the affection she felt for this stray of the world, so like herself and who had truly characterized himself as a lonely man, had thrown her into a state of confusion.

“Oh, Mr. Lovejoy,” she cried, “I just don’t know what to say,” then she set down her teacup and biscuit, arose and ran for the lift, which providentially had descended and opened its door just as she arrived. The door closed again and she vanished.

Bombardier Lovejoy sighed and rose, brushing the crumbs from his lap. He called for the bill and paid the 2s. 6d. with a 6d. tip for the tea and walked through the lounge to the lobby and only when he reached there was he aware that he was still holding on to the bouquet of roses, so tightly in fact that several of the thorns had come through the paper and pierced his palm. But he didn’t feel it.

His feet were carrying him down the steps to the exit when a page caught up with him and said, “Bombardier Lovejoy?”

“Yes.”

“You are wanted on the telephone.”

He went into the booth and picked up the receiver. He supposed Tim or Major Clyde had somehow traced him to the hotel, and automatically he said, “Bombardier Lovejoy here.”

But it was not Tim or the Major, the voice at the other end was that of Miss Constance Boddy. She said, “John?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“If—if you want me to still, I will,” then before he could reply the phone was put down.

Lovejoy in his turn set down the receiver. He left the booth in a daze, still clutching his bouquet. He was aware suddenly that he was inordinately happy.

The telephone rang in the Fortress H.Q. office. Major McPherson picked it up and said, “Oh hello, Tim,” when the speaker identified himself. “Yes, just a moment.” He passed the instrument over to Major Clyde saying, “It’s for you, Slinker. Tim Bailey.”

Major Clyde said with resignation, “Fire away. Things couldn’t be any worse.”

Tim’s voice came through, “They might be better though.”

“I can’t bear it! Don’t tell me that old Scruffy has divided parthenogenetically.”

“No,” said Tim, “thank God. One is enough. But you can cancel the passengers for tomorrow’s flight—the Handley-Page going to London.”

“What! You mean the old girl and that cross-eyed she-ape have changed their minds.”

“That’s it.”

“I can’t believe it. Who persuaded her?”

“Lovejoy.”

“By God,” said the Major, “there’s a man. I’ll see that he gets the George Medal for this. How did he do it?”

“He’s going to marry her.”

“What!” yelled the Major.

“I said he’s going to marry her. They’ve fixed it up.”

“In that case, it’s nothing else than a V.C. And talk about a man sacrificing himself for his country over and above the line of duty.” His voice took on the imitative quality of a radio announcer, “They laughed when I said I had appealed to patriotism.”

The diaphragm of the telephone instrument rattled. “Patriotism my eye! Look here, Slinker. Don’t say anything to Lovejoy when you see him.”