The Green Gauntlet (7 page)

III

H
e did not see her in the crush at the barrier and had resigned himself to waiting in a telephone kiosk queue to ring the hospital when a knot of sailors, toting enormous kit bags, moved aside to reveal her standing alone outside the buffet, legs planted astride, hands clasped behind her back, her smile asking him to join her in a parody of the military turmoil of the platform, with its aimless swirl of blue, navy-blue and khaki. To Stevie she looked like the last pre-war woman alive.

She gave him a couple of sisterly kisses but her gesture in holding on to his hand, and pressing it hard against her breast, told him at once how much she was missing Andy, and how genuinely pleased she was to see him. Stevie was not an intuitive man but there wasn’t much you could teach him about affectionate women. He was flattered to note that she had gone to some pains to dress for him, for he had expected her to be wearing a coif and one of those dramatic cloaks nurses wear when they snatch an hour or two from the wards. She had never had Monica’s taste but today he was glad of it. She was her old self, half jazzy, half svelte, with a hairstyle that was manifestly a copy of Veronica Lake’s ‘peek-a-boo’, one hazel eye almost masked by a shining husk of hair that swept across her cheek and ended defiantly under a small, dimpled chin. He said, ‘By God, Margy, it’s a joy to look at you! Barring Monica every Judy I’ve seen in three months has been a compromise between a wardress and a musical-comedy bandsman. Where do we celebrate?’

‘I’m off until six a.m. tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I swopped duties with a staff nurse. It cost me thirty bob. It took a world war to make me understand the real value of money!’

‘What the hell made you go back to nursing?’ he asked, chuckling. ‘You didn’t have to. Andy told you to keep the Birmingham flat going. It couldn’t have been the bombing or you wouldn’t have come here.’

‘I was bored and I didn’t fancy joining anything and being bawled at by one of those horse-faced daughters of the Empire. Besides, nursing was the only thing I knew. You remember how Andy abducted me from a hospital, don’t you?’

He hadn’t remembered but he did now. They had both been involved in a road crash in South Wales and Andy had been detained with a rib fracture. Later he had returned to the hospital and whisked her from under an outraged sister’s nose, and Monica had thought it all rather silly and common, until she realised how completely Andy was bewitched by this droll little Welsh girl. She got used to her however, for Andy had seen to that and so, in a less direct way, had Stephen himself, for he had never underestimated the value of her cheerfulness that offset, to a great extent, Monica’s starchiness and Andy’s occasional sulks. Until now he had never thought of her as anything more than a woman who was pretty and companionable, and he realised that this was because, without actually giving offence, Monica had always contrived to downgrade her into the shop-girl class. She said, as they hailed a taxi, ‘Don’t unload now, Stevie, wait until we’ve got a meal inside us. I’ll take you to a joint the Americans use in Soho. All the places you once knew are blitzed or closed up. It isn’t easy to eat in town nowadays, you have to know the right people and pay the right price.’

He was surprised by her newly-acquired sophistication and wondered where she had found it. Was it the company of civvies she had taken up with since Andy had sailed away, and if so, did she do more than flirt with them? He decided that it wasn’t his business and also that she was entitled to make the best of a bad job in this drab ruin of a city.

He had forgotten how heavily the Luftwaffe had plastered London in the winter of ’40–’41, and the sight of rosebay willow herb growing in clumps on piles of rubble made him wonder if Bomber Command was doing the same to Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne. He doubted it for, so far, the attacks were largely experimental and the night offensive had hardly got into its stride. He said, ‘You haven’t had any bombing in a long time, have you?’ and she told him not since the big fire-bomb attack of May last year and that Londoners were very pro-Russian on that account. Then she said, squeezing his hand, ‘Don’t let’s go on talking about the old war, Stevie! I can see Monica’s point, you know, it is a fearful bore, although I don’t see why she had to take it out on you.’ She leaned forward and called through the glass panel, ‘Turn right here, then first left! It’s called “
Lune de Paris
”,’ she went on ‘although God knows why! It’s run by a crafty bunch of Cypriote!’ and then she sat back rather heavily somehow contriving to half sit on his knee so that he thought again, with an inward laugh, ‘She’s a sexy little bitch! I wonder if she’ll tell me a pack of lies about what she does in her off-duty moments?’ and they left the taxi and entered a café where the tables were already laid for dinner.

The food was good by wartime standards and Margaret told him that the owner had extensive black market contacts in Smithfield and who could blame him for using them? Everybody had to eat and could hardly be expected to survive on spam indefinitely. ‘You can bet they don’t down among the cornfields’ she added gaily, ‘I’ll warrant Paul and Claire and the rest of them back in the Valley go to bed on something more substantial than powdered egg and mousetrap cheese.’

‘Claire and others might,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but I can’t see the Old Man using the black market. He’s too damned self-righteous for that!’

‘I like him,’ Margaret said, unexpectedly, ‘I always have, from the moment Andy first took me there. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ he said, pleased with the admission, ‘I don’t think I did. I suppose I thought you took the Old Man for granted like the rest of us. What is it you like about him?’

She considered. ‘His honesty and singlemindedness. That place of his, that funny little Valley, it’s the whole of him and always has been, and I can understand how a man would feel about land he owns. That’s the Celt in me I suppose, even though I’m South-Walesian and that isn’t the same anymore. But my Granfer came from Merionethshire, and that’s about as far Welsh as you can get. Not a soul speaks English up there and they still look on you ruffians as invaders.’ She paused a moment and looked down at her empty plate, so that he thought she was remembering Wales but she wasn’t for when she looked up and smiled she said, ‘He knows exactly where he’s going and so does Claire and that’s rare these days, Stevie.’

It was strange hearing her talk like this about his mother and father, for he rarely gave either one of them a thought, except as a couple of affectionate, sporting old stick-in-the muds, nose-deep in the remote provinces and surrounded by a horde of chawbacons who used a lingo that was standard dialogue between a comedian and his bucolic feed posing as one of the audience. He said, suddenly, ‘Why don’t you go back there, Margy? They’d be delighted to have you for the duration!’ but she shook her head, saying ‘Ah, no! No, no! You and Andy and Monica spoiled me for that kind of thing. There’s no going back, man!’ and before he could question this curious pronouncement she asked if she could have a cognac and he watched her sip it, remembering that in pre-war days she had had to be coaxed to take a second gin and Italian. She said briskly, ‘How about that Coward show? Gaspard could get tickets. Over the odds, of course. Are you flush?’

He asked her if they would take a cheque and she said this was easily arranged, Gaspard, the waiter, padding away like a Mediterranean pimp and returning ten minutes later with the promise of two rear stalls for
Blithe Spirit
that had been drawing London for months. ‘You’ve got the hang of things at last, Margy,’ he said, ‘and Andy would be proud of you.’ Then, realising that it was after seven o’ clock and that he had yet to book in at an Officers’ Club in Piccadilly, he said, ‘I haven’t told you a damned thing about Monica’s blitzkrieg!’

‘It’ll keep,’ she said, lightly, ‘we’re here to relax and you don’t have to trail around finding a bed. I’ve got a perfectly comfortable couch in the flat I share with Henrietta, who works at the Yank Embassy, and you can use it whenever you’re in town. Now give me a minute to fix myself and ask Gaspard to find a taxi. There’s no sense in walking when you can ride. One of Andy’s dictums, remember?’

As he sat waiting for her to rejoin him he began to wonder about her again, pondering her sudden switches from brittle small talk to flashes of nostalgia in which Andy, his parents, and even the Shallowford Valley were involved, almost as though she was putting up a front to prevent her real mood showing through. There was not much doubt in his mind that she was on edge, or that prolonged separation from Andy was having its effect upon nerves already frayed by the Battle of Britain. When she reappeared, however, he thought she looked prettier and saucier than ever and her lively mood persisted right through the comedy and afterwards when they roamed the dark streets in search of a taxi to take them to her flat on the second floor of a tall, Victorian building behind Smith Street. ‘It’s handy to the hospital,’ she explained, as she fumbled for the key, ‘I can pop back here whenever I get an odd spell off duty. There used to be three of us but Vera got a commission in the A.T.S. and now there’s only me and Henrietta. It costs us all getting on for a fiver a week. There’s silliness for you. I only earn about half that, for ten hours a day on my flat feet!’

They groped their way up the broad staircase in the light of the bluish hall-bulb and she told him to wait on the landing while she fixed up the blackout. ‘We’ve got a Nazi air-raid warden round here,’ she said. ‘He calls up the riot squad every time he sees a sliver of light at a range of two feet! There, that’s done. What’ll you drink? I’ve got pretty well anything, Henrietta gets it from somewhere but I don’t ask whether it’s given, bought or earned!’

She brought him a large brandy and another for herself. The flat was comfortably furnished with large, heavy pieces of the kind one might expect to find in a town house owned by one of the Forsytes. It was still spacious in spite of being divided in two by a new-looking partition. In addition to a large living-room and an untidy kitchen there was a twin-bedded room cluttered with feminine odds and ends. ‘We don’t do much housework as you can see,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got a Mrs Mop who comes in once a week but it’s a terrible slut she is and tiddly most of the time.’

‘Won’t Henrietta object to me parking myself in here?’ he asked, when she brought out sheets and blankets and laid them on the leather couch in the bay window.

‘Not her! She’s not the conventional type. One or other of her boyfriends is here every weekend but if she brings one back tonight he’ll have to curl up on the hearth rug.’ She slumped down in the deep armchair after turning on the gas-fire. ‘I feel all cosy inside,’ she proclaimed. ‘It’s the nicest evening I’ve had since Andy’s embarkation leave. I’m jolly glad Monica ran out on you!’

She looked at him with speculative amusement, shooting her legs at the red glow of the gas-fire and cuddling her brandy glass as though it was a kitten. ‘Now tell me your troubles and see that you don’t leave anything out.’

He told her the truth as he saw it, describing the scene in the hotel bedroom in detail and his overall relationship with Monica in the last few months.

‘It all sounds so casual,’ she said, frowning, ‘just a matter of using one another. It was never like that with Andy and me, not since the beginning,’ and before he could probe this unblushing announcement, she went on, ‘Do you think there’s somebody else after all?’

He said, irritably, ‘Damn it, Margy, I told you over the blower …’ but she cut him short, saying, ‘I don’t mean another woman, idiot. I mean another
man
!’

It was a possibility that had not even occurred to him and now that it did it seemed almost an affront to contemplate the fastidious Monica climbing into bed with a stranger.

‘No, that’s way off target!’ he said, ‘and if you think about her a minute you’ll know it is! I haven’t been one hundred per cent angelic but I’ll bet the Bank of England she has. Not out of regard for me but because she’s so damned hygienic’

‘That’s so,’ she admitted, with a kind of reluctance, ‘and for another thing she’d never have the nerve. She probably means exactly what she says about staying away until you change your mind. Will you? As time goes on and things get stickier?’

‘How the hell can I? How would it look to the Top Brass? Just one more L.M.F. using the back door!’

‘What’s an L.M.F.?’

‘“Lack of Moral Fibre”. A crack-up. It happens now and again, particularly in Bomber Command.’

He got up and began packing up and down, ‘You’re missing Andy, aren’t you, Margy?’

‘Like hell I am.’

‘Me too. I was thinking, this is the first time we’ve ever been parted. We’ve always done the same things and wanted to do them at the same moment. We had a hell of a lot of fun in the old days, the four of us.’ He stopped pacing and looked down at her. ‘Did you ever really like Monica?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘and she didn’t like me, but I put up with her for your sake.’ She looked at him speculatively for a moment. ‘Come to that, were
you
all that smitten? It always looked to me as if she married you and then woke up to the fact that she had married two men, not one.’

It was, he thought, a very shrewd assessment but he was not prepared to admit it, or not yet. ‘That’s cock,’ he grumbled, ‘Monica and I hit it off until she got these bloody silly ideas about Service life. She wasn’t upstage when she was in bed!’

‘No,’ Margaret said, ‘I can believe that. The snooty type usually aren’t. But you don’t live in bed, do you?’

She seemed to dismiss the subject and reached out to turn on the radio. Light music dribbled from the set, one of the current morale-boosters about the white cliffs of Dover. She said, kicking off her shoes, ‘I’m a bit tight, Stevie. I keep feeling giggly and then maudlin and anyway, I’ve got to be out of here by five-thirty tomorrow. I’d better turn in now. I’ll brew you a cup of tea and kiss you good-bye in the morning!’

‘Kiss me now,’ he said, for some reason feeling immensely grateful to her.