The Honeyed Peace (16 page)

'I imagined Kate Merlin would be older,' he said, thinking aloud.

It was only then that she realized how young he was, twenty-four or perhaps even less. His silence and his assurance and his closed dark second face had made him seem older, or else she had not thought about it at all. She was appalled. What am I becoming? she wondered. Am I going to be one of those women without husbands who hunt young men?

'I'm old enough,' she said curtly.

He turned and smiled at her. His eyes said, I know about you, don't tell me; I know how you are. It was the man of last night again, the certain one, the one whose body spoke for him. This talent he had when he was silent worked on her like a spell.

He seemed to understand this and he reached his hand over and rested it on the back of her neck, where her hair grew up in short curls. She surrendered with joy to this owning hand.

'Yes, I am,' she said dreamily, as if he had contradicted her, 'I'm thirty-seven.'

'Are you?' he said. She could feel his hand change. It was a hand that had made a mistake and did not know where it was. It was a hand that would soon move away and become polite.

The man was thinking, thirty-seven - well, that is old enough. That makes it something else again. And being an artist, he said to himself uneasily. It seemed to him that there was a trick somewhere; he had gotten into something he did not understand. She probably knew more than he did. She had perhaps been playing him along. Perhaps she was thinking he was pretty simple and inexperienced and was amused at how he came up for the bait.

The woman felt that something very bad, very painful was happening but she could not name it and she held on to her plans of last night because they were happy and they were what she wanted. She said, in a tight voice, and mistrusting the words as she spoke them, 'Will you be staying in New York?'

'I don't think so.' Talking gave him a chance to take his hand away and light a cigarette. It might be fun in New York, he thought, meeting all those famous people she would know. He could go with her to El Morocco and the Colony and those places and see her kind of people. She would be something he hadn't had before, thirty-seven and a celebrity and all. It might be fun. But he felt uncertain about it; this was not his familiar country. This was not how he saw a fine time, exactly. It was complicated, not safe, you would not know what you were doing. And how about her husband?

'Don't you know?' she said. He did not like that. That sounded as if she meant to take him over. He was suspicious of her at once.

'No,' he said. His face wore the shut-in, indifferent look.

'What might you be doing?' she insisted. Oh, stop it, she told, herself, for God's sake stop it. What are you doing; do you want to prove it to yourself?

'I'll be going home first,' he said. He didn't like her bossy way of talking. 'Springfield,' he added. She would be thinking now that he was a small-town boy from Massachusetts, and that was all right with him. Then he thought with sudden pleasure of Springfield; he would have a fine time there for a while, a fine time that he understood. He would take it easy and enjoy himself. He might go on to Boston, where he knew his way around. Later, at the end, he would go to New York for a few days but by himself, on his own terms. He did not want to get mixed up. He did not want anything that he could not manage. He just wanted to have a good easy time with nothing to worry about. She wasn't in his league; he didn't know about married rich famous women of thirty-seven.

The woman felt so cold that she had to hold herself carefully so that she would not shiver. A middle-aged woman, she told herself with horror, hounding a young man. That was what he thought. She had offered herself to him and he had refused her. He did not want her. She was too old. If only the plane would move faster; if only they would get there so she could hide from him. If only she did not have to sit beside him, sick with the knowledge of what he thought, and sick with shame for herself.

The plane flew north along the East River and in the fresh greenish-blue light the city appeared below them. It looked like a great ancient ruin. The towers were vast pillars, planted in the mist, with sharp splintered tops. The squarish skyscrapers were old white temples or giant forts, and there was no life in the jagged quarry of buildings. It was beautiful enough to rock the heart, and the woman imagined it would look like this thousands of years from now, enormous and dead.

The man leaned forward to look out the window. 'Pretty, isn't it?' he said.

He had really said that and he meant it. That was all he saw. Whatever he thought of her did not matter; he was too stupid to care about. But she knew this was a lie; nothing had changed. There was the fact and there was no way to escape it; he could have had her and he simply did not want her.

They were the last people off the plane. The other passengers had seemed to block their way on purpose. The man carried the woman's dressing-case to the taxi rank; she could think of no way to prevent this silent endless walk through the crowded terminal building.

'Good luck,' he said, shutting the taxi door behind her, 'hope I'll see you again some place.' It was a thing to say, that was all.

'Good luck to you,' she said, and hoped her voice was light and amiable. She did not actually look at him.

It might have been fun, the man thought, as he watched the taxi turn and head towards the highway. Oh no, hell, he told himself, complications. It was better this way. He thought about Springfield, and his face was oval now, smiling. He would not let himself consider the good time ahead in numbered days: he was thinking, Now, now, now. He had erased the woman; she was finished and gone.

After the cab passed the gates of the airport, the woman leaned back and took a deep breath to steady herself and to ease the pain in her throat. She covered her eyes with her hand. It's just that I'm so tired, she told herself. This was what she would have to believe. It's nothing to feel desperate about. It's just that I'm so tired, she thought, forcing herself to believe it. It's only because I've been sitting up all night in a plane.

LE VOYAGE FORME LA JEUNESSE

Mike Marvin stood at the bar of the Grand Hotel, waiting for his girl friend. She was called Contessa Valdini, but he did not believe she was a countess. She was, he thought, a very well gotten-together, canny, passionate tart. He did not mind what she called herself if it made her feel any better. In Rome, since the arrival of the American Army, almost everybody was a
contessa
or a
marchesa
or a
principessa
.

Two Polish officers drank beside him. Mike Marvin listened with wonder to the unlikely sounds of their language. It seemed very clever of them to be able to talk that difficult stuff so fast. He was thinking that one of them was a handsome man and the other looked tough enough to be American.

The tough officer turned and said, in a beautiful voice, 'You are American. You know what happen in my country?'

'No,' said Mike.

'I will tell you.'

The handsome officer gave warning in Polish.

'My friend remark that I am drunk,' the tough one said. 'Possible. This changes nothing. May I present my friend, Lieutenant Count Tzchernski?'

Count, Mike Marvin said to himself, the Poles have caught it too.

'Glad to meet you. My name's Mike Marvin.'

The handsome Pole gave Mike his hand. He saw no badge of rank on the American's uniform. 'Fifth Army?' he asked.

'No.' Mike showed them, on his right arm, the identification patch which always embarrassed him; embroidered in yellow (and the resulting jokes were unlimited), on billiard-table green, stood the inscription: U.S. WAR CORRESPONDENT.

'I'm a photographer,' Mike said, 'I'm accredited to the Fifth Army.'

He thought: I ought to be used to saying that by now, I've been saying it to foreigners for two years. But he was not used to it; and he avoided looking at them to see what they might think of a young man, evidently healthy, who was a photographer and not a soldier.

It was all right with Americans. The G.I.s thought he was a lucky bastard and if they knew how to work it, they'd do the same. The officers either did not care what he was, as long as he didn't ask a lot of favours and bother them, or they realized that publicity is always useful.

'Aha,' said the tough one.

'May I introduce my friend, Lieutenant Radin of the 14th Lancers?' Count Tzchernski said.

Mike shook hands again.

'Have a drink?' he offered.

The mahogany bar was hidden behind a row of military backs. There were the porous cotton khaki bush-jackets of the British summer uniform, and the satiny khaki shirts of the Americans, or that pale musical-comedy gabardine which was the American dress uniform. By now, the Americans had broken down and also wore foulards around their necks, though they had not given in to the brown suède short boots of the British. Every man looked pressed, brushed, shaved, sunburned, and self-confident. In the raised corner of the hall, which formed the bar-room, other officers sat at small tables with girls; a few American nurses or Red Cross girls, but mostly Italians. The Italian girls, that summer, wore very short skirts and sandals with thick wedge soles. Their hair rose in front, like the false façade of a house, and fell down behind like a river of curled liquorice. They were fresh and free in their light clothes, and a pleasure to everyone. By simply not wearing khaki, a woman gave men hope for the future.

In the great hall, under the chandeliers, the civilians sat more sedately and drank less. There were rigid old ladies, trimmed in black lace, and elderly gentlemen with that corseted look ageing upper-class Europeans have in their clothes. The gentlemen moved about on small pointed polished shoes, bowing over acquaintances at the various tables. A few couples talked together as if each cared what the other was saying.

Mike Marvin and the Poles were drinking cognac. In Italy, cognac was the cheapest, most plentiful, and unpredictable of drinks, but at the Grand Hotel one could assume it would be safe.

'Well,' Mike said, 'to Poland.' All foreigners seemed to have a fierce love affair with their countries. To France, you said, and the guys' faces changed and got terrific sort of drawn and noble and tearful at the same time. To Czechoslovakia, to Holland, to Norway ... it was like a funeral and a love affair, and so personal that you almost did not want to look at them. Even the English, in a sly and dishonest way, had a love affair with England; they did not speak of it, though, as if you were not good enough to hear or understand. The English love affair made you feel sore, but the others made you feel sorry for the poor guys because they had so little to look forward to and their passion was so great.

The Poles drank the toast to Poland in deep seriousness. With equal solemnity, they proposed, 'To America.'

'To America,' Mike said cheerfully and swallowed his cognac in one gulp. The taste was nothing to linger over. Now America, he told himself, we don't have a love affair with America.

Our guys brag about their states as if they were bragging about different makes of automobiles; for Ohio read Buick, for Texas read Packard. Say, I got a state like nobody's state, eight-shift super-silent self-greasing, self-propelling solid platinum gears, ninety-nine hundred racehorse power motor built of non-warping non-heating million carat diamonds. The guys never spoke of America really, they spoke of their states; and they spoke without tenderness. None of them pitied anything, none of them had the pain or the wisdom which came from seeing your country in trouble. There was nothing to pity; they owned, they boasted, everything was fine where they came from. I guess you have to be invaded a few times, Mike Marvin thought, before you get this love-affair angle. It was something the Europeans had and it was their business and okay by him; but like practically everything else about Europe and Europeans, he could not quite believe it. He always expected a whistle to blow and everyone would relax and become normal again, taking their countries in their stride.

The Poles had been talking to each other, in their astounding language, for they seemed to realize that the American was busy with a reverie of his own. Then the handsome one said, 'Would you honour us by dining with us? Lieutenant Radin and I know a restaurant on the Via Borgognona.'

'I'm waiting for a girl,' Mike said, 'I'd like to.'

'So,' said Lieutenant Radin. His face looked briefly disappointed, as if he were sorry that an American would always have a girl, any girl, and this made the normal traffic between men impossible.

Mike thought, irritably, it isn't as if I wanted to talk to the Contessa, talk is not the important feature.

'Could we take her along?' he asked. 'She doesn't say much.'

'A pleasure,' Count Tzchernski answered. What else can I do? he thought, noting the glum reproach in Radin's eye. Americans were hopeless about women. The women they acquired, with such speed wherever they went, were hopeless. Americans could apparently tell nothing about women, beyond the fact that they were constructed differently from men. This was of course a true, even vital, observation; but then one must choose one's time, conserve and direct one's effort, and surely not dine with the lady. The Americans were capable of driving their girls around all day in carriages, taking them to the movies or the opera, paying for their shopping, eating with them, actually listening to them, while waiting with a patience which could only be considered heroic or insane for the moment of going to bed.

'A pleasure,' Count Tzchernski said again.

'Have another drink,' Mike suggested.

Lieutenant Radin leaned against the bar, listening to his friend Stas Tzchernski tell the American about their armoured cars, an English invention named Staghounds. He enjoyed this because Stas, who had been in the regiment since the beginning at Tobruk, refused or was unable to learn anything about armoured cars. Stas commanded one, and rode in it armed only with an aluminium water bottle, but he did not understand the mechanism of a Staghound and he had no confidence in them. Now Stas was saying to the American, 'You must come and visit us and study them yourself. They are grotesque. They will not go anywhere except on roads. The Germans put 88s in farmhouses, in the barns simply, and they shoot down the road and then the Staghound burns like a piece of bacon. We are very fond of them because they were useful long ago, in the desert.'