Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I) (20 page)

             
The next morning drug slowly, despite the Saturday paper, breakfast and an early lunch.   After a slow hot shower, she applied her makeup and finally began dressing.   She had wanted to delay this as long as possible, lest the emotions of the clothes peak too early.   The black bra, panty and garter belt set were luxuriously lacy and soft.   She stood in front of the mirror and smiled at her image.  She half wanted Captain Jack to see her in this outfit.  She wanted him to feel defeated in his effort to make her feel less powerful with the pink dress and skimpy underwear.  The bra barely covered her nipples, and the narrow sided bikini panty allowed the slightest little tease of her ass cheek to peek out.  But instead of feeling nearly naked, she felt a swell of pride and a glow of confidence.  She slid the pink dress coat on, fastening the four lowest out of the five rows of buttons.   The lowest button left nearly a foot before the mid-thigh hem.  As she walked around, the dress opened to show a bit more leg.  The open top button, fortunately, did not threaten to show her bra strap as the collar lay flat with a slight ‘vee’ neck, and the shoulders gathered into a blossom under a looped epaulette, before descending to a long sleeve, with a black square buckle on the wrist.  The pink belt both wrapped casually around the waist and sported a matching black buckle.  The effect was a feminine short skirt with a military neck and shoulder.   Over her sheer stockings, the shoes were black with a huge cuff around her ankle, locked in place with two straps buckled on the side.   An open toe, midfoot and heel left a two to three inch toe box on the thick soled, five inch heel.    With a short skirt and tall heels, she felt quite satisfied with herself and less at a disadvantage than the other events she had attended with him.  The chauffer showed up at her door, precisely, at 2 and escorted her down and into the limo.   Captain Jack was in the back and had her turn and hold her hair up as he re-applied her diamond and platinum circle collar and she felt all her confidence drain away.

   "Are you wearing everything?" He asked as she pirouetted about to take her seat across from him.   She blushed as she nodded.  She now admitted to herself that she felt very much in the man's grasp and did not feel as upset about it as she believed she should.  She was not outraged at his impertinence at asking what lingerie she was wearing, nor was she bothered that she had told him.  She almost felt owned by him, almost felt like she wanted him to know her, to run his hands over her like he would a prize thoroughbred that she imagined he owned.

              They went to the Imperial War Museum.  It was off the Lambeth North tube station.  The town was well bricked and, while clean, there was a rather sterile feel to the place.  An entire block of brick apartments had pretty much the same architecture, rather than the uniqueness normally seen in the city.

             
The museum was set in a middle of a small park with two 15 inch guns pointing out from the entrance.  These guns were from two battleships, now retired.  They fired a 1900 pound shell 16 and ¼ miles.  Inside they had tanks and planes and guns from World Wars one and two in the main floor.  Stories on each brought the human side to the equipment.  The Mustang was not a favored plane until they changed the engine and then it became much loved.  Other planes and tanks and guns had their stories.  They were like people, too short, too slow, or too fast to turn, not enough power, too vulnerable.  A recurring theme in the discussion of weapons was the flaw in the designs.

             
At four O’clock, two older gentlemen in uniforms, with full military ribbons on their chests spoke, one at a time, into a microphone as they sat before a table, a semicircle of 3 or 4 rows of chairs looking in.  They spoke of joining up during World War II as they came of age.  Catherine back calculated their ages as being about 84.  They spoke with only a little hesitancy, apologizing for their age, but they spoke of human things like being sea sick and claustrophobic and instead of dreading hitting the beach, looked forward to it as a better, but riskier place.   Then they spoke of seeing all the bodies stacked up for recovery, or serving as a corpsman and seeing the pain and blood.

             
Captain Jack opined that it is perhaps that conflict of young boys not knowing what is ahead that makes war possible.  The buildup of the imperative to stop an evil and the feeling that the righteous will always find a way to defeat the bad.  But the other side feels the same way.  He told her of a story of the unofficial 1914 Christmas truce where the German and Allied troops came together in the middle of the bloody war and toasted Christmas with each other.  It was considered noble and wonderful and it was forbidden from ever happening again.  The Generals could not have the soldiers thinking of the enemy in human terms.

             
The audience sat and waited out the two gentlemen.  It would not be many more years before there will be no one to tell the story, the human story of the smell, the thoughts and the memories of that war.

             
Captain Jack mused that war takes an everlasting toll on those who serve in them.  The sight of death, he claimed, marred the ones who had no physical wounds as well.   "It was the same or something like it from everyone who ever survived the war.  I don’t think anyone ever escapes from war uninjured.  Guilt or the denial of a portion of their memory always tainted their lives.  It is no wonder so many of them display aberrant behavior."

             
Catherine wondered what war he had survived, for she had no doubt that he was a veteran of some battle.   The faraway look in his eyes, the quiet firmness in his anger towards war had to come from someone who had seen it.   He was not here to celebrate war.  She wondered why he brought her here.  He seemed less powerful, less capable in comparison to the momentum of war. The War Museum added to her knowledge of him.  She watched his rage at the senselessness of the events.

 
He opined that the economies and vision and anticipation were out of balance.   The cost of wars was phenomenal.  The greatest costs were in human lives.  "To me, not that any war made it to my list of  favorites, World War I was the most terrifying of all the wars.  It was then that the technology of weapons exceeded the strategy of the generals and vulnerability of the soldiers."

              He pointed out the displays documenting how machine guns kept men penned in the trenches until strategic needs demanded a charge.  For four years men died in machine gun fire, poison gases, diseases and barbed wire while the lines hardly moved at all.  In single battles, 600,000 casualties resulted on a side.

             
One quote from 1995 said that since World War II, only one year occurred when there wasn’t a single British fatality due to military action.  The museum did not glorify war as much as it documented it. 

             
He shook his head slowly, “The horrors of war are balanced by the need to reduce the chance for worse.  But when you see the failed strategies of battles, you begin to worry about the strategies of the wars themselves.   When you see millions of men and women and children on death rolls, you worry about how many Einsteins and James Joyces died in all these wars and how much less our world is for all the deaths. "

             
He continued in a low sad voice, "The economies, visions and anticipations of wars are out of balance, too.  The costs of wars have taken King and Party out of power and drained the enthusiasms for war.   It requires only no memory of war to propel a conflict into another one. 

             
"The visions of wars are imaginations that some better thing will result.  Yet, it may never be so.  Even in victory, the losses seem excessive.  The losers find resentment in the result, becoming the seed for the next war.”

             
"The beginnings of wars find braggarts and anthems, quotes and vows.  Victory, total and decisive is the only acceptable result.  Then the black bags and boxes, dirges and elegies begin.  Then peace becomes a desire rather than a result."

             
Catherine, once again, wondered why he brought her here.  He seemed finally ready to let her inside his soul.  She smiled inwardly, with the opening he seemed to be offering.  Women share with each other, she knew, and a woman opening up her feelings was a matter of course, where a man who opened up, was looking for a connection.   She thought he was showing his soft side.  She already believed him to be a man of a varied past.  Now she was convinced he was an ex military man and he was showing his doubts about his company, his history, the very thing that made him who was.  No man did this without feeling safe with who they were conversing.  Now, she felt, was the time for her to move up the ladder in his eyes.   She would show him she was more than a pretty escort.  She would be someone to be his confidant.   She would now take this little chink in his wall of distant power and open it up to a world of endless interplay and sharing.  She would take a harder feminine stand with him and pull him from his self protecting, self absorbed shell.  She would show him what an intelligent, vibrant woman could do.

             
As they exited the museum, through the garden and past the ice cream shop where little children licked their sticky fingers and mothers ran for napkins, she asked him, "Is there another name other than Captain Jack that I can call you?  It seems terribly formal.  Especially after all of that." She swung her long, slender arm back towards the War Museum.

             
He stopped and looked at her.  His eyes looked through her as he paused to consider her request.  "No," he replied, "Not just yet.  But soon, I'll have something else you might call me."  He smiled and turned back towards the waiting limo.  And she knew, just knew, she had miscalculated horribly.  Captain Jack, the unattainable, was still here.  She was not his match, and never would be.   She felt, more now than ever, a bought thing, a purchased date.  She wanted to be more than that.  While normally she would be furious with a woman feeling this way, she was not at all incensed at her feelings.  She felt a desire to make herself more in his eyes.  She wanted him to pay attention to her, to care for her as much as he cared for those poor soldiers in the trenches.  She knew now the power of a leader such as Captain Jack, why the soldiers would go over the top of the trenches to fight a nearly impossible battle, for she felt she would do the nearly impossible for his attention.

             
In the car, he turned to her and asked, "Is there something else I should call you?"  She hesitated, trying to figure out what he wanted.  Had she misunderstood the intent of her own question?  Was it not clear that she hoped to be less formal with him?  Should she try to be more formal in return?  Was he asking her to be Mrs. Peel to his Mr. Steed?  Or was he expecting her to be even more informal with him, in exchange with his offer to "soon" have something else to call him?  Eventually, she said, "My husband calls me Cat."

             
Captain Jack smiled at that and mused, "Cat, a name of softness and yet a threat of claw and strength and independence.  Hmmm, but I see a Kitten, not yet a Cat.  Soft and vulnerable, but feisty.  Yes, I shall call you Kitten.  It would amuse me to do so."

             
Catherine just stared at this affront.  She was angry at his cockiness and wanted to knock him down a peg.  But then she realized she was paid to take this arrogance and it did not reduce her, but merely it reduced her in his eyes.  It was his loss, she thought.  If he has to think of me as a soft little kitten to be protected, then he will not be able to enjoy the confident, complex woman that she was.  She vowed to enjoy the meal, the day and re-consider ever going out with him again.   She also considered that she did not need to feel great self esteem on these dates.  It was a job, and her job was to make this man feel like a powerful man who deserved to have a beautiful woman on his arm.  It was about his ego, not hers.  In this way she calmed herself and dialed her mind back to focus on his narration of the various neighborhoods they were passing through.  Eventually, he had the driver stop the limo at a corner and they got out. "The restaurant is this way." He gestured in response to her bewildered look at the surroundings.

             
"I prefer to walk a bit to this restaurant.  It is a lovely place with narrow streets and I don't like to take a large vehicle into the area.  It ruins the spirit of the place."   They walked a block and turned on a lane named Half Moon Street.   She fell in love with the name, romantic and filled with a promise of a story.  And the promise was fulfilled.  The streets were narrow and seldom ran straight. The cobblestones that filled the road were handset, how many years ago, and made walking in heels a perilous event, and sang beneath the tires of the rare car that ventured the twisted paths the roads afforded.

  They walked past small shops and restaurants.  Here a mass of people stood in the street drinking beers, the pub too small to hold them all, and their voices too loud to stay inside.
Here was a pastry shop, and another.  Over there was a small shop selling tin hand painted soldiers and horses.  She wondered how these businesses fared.  Like many places in London, people actually lived nearby, sometimes a block over, sometimes over the storefronts.  Was it local traffic that supported the shops, or word of mouth that attracted people from far and wide?  And here was a Polish Mexican fusion restaurant.  Her imagination lit up less based upon the potential recipes that must fulfill the promise of such a fusion; and more on the story of how two lovers must have shared their dreams, leaving practicality behind.  And she almost, but not quite, hoped that it would be the destination that Captain Jack was leading her, but it was not.  When they stopped, it was at a cafe named "Le Boudin Blanc."  It was a French restaurant two arm lengths across the street from an Algerian cafe.