Women's Barracks (19 page)

The brother smoked his pipe, his feet on the table, a glass of whisky at his side, as he yawned through travel magazines.

Lee studied the fire. The fire danced in her eyes. She looked at Ann, and it seemed to her that she had brought her bride home to her house, the ancient house of her ancestors. Every evening, when the three of them were seated like that in front of the rosy fireplace, Lee had the feeling that with the arrival of Ann she had succeeded in making the manor a homestead, and that the only thing now lacking to her was a child, an inheritor: Then she would really have all that a man could have. She crossed her long legs and stroked her short flat hair. If only Ann could have a child! But that was impossible. It was the one thing that she couldn't give her. Every night when she made love with Ann, Lee felt herself thwarted by this sterility, and in her mind, where all values were disoriented, a project was slowly forming.

She reflected on each detail and carefully considered the staging of the scene. After all, it was
her
child that was in question. She spoke of the matter first to her brother.

Her brother had consumed no small quantity of whisky since that morning, and the idea rather amused him. It would be a bit of a change, at last.

Then Lee found Ann, who was walking in the grounds dressed in a thick seaman's sweater and brown corduroy trousers, promenading a pair of spaniels. Lee said to her, "Ann, my darling, you and I must have a child."

Ann looked at her uncomprehendingly. Then Lee explained her plan.

That night all three of them would be together, Ann, Lee, and her brother, Richard. Ann and Lee would make love, and at the last moment Richard would possess Ann, while Lee continued to caress her. The child that would be born would be the child of Lee's blood, conceived in Lee's love; Richard would only have lent the one element Lee did not possess, the seed.

They walked together in the Scottish fog that enveloped the manor. Two women without sex, two women outside of human society, profoundly solitary, even in their love, trying somehow to attach themselves to that life which had no way of continuing beyond them through descendants.

In the evening, before the great fireplace with its crackling logs, Richard watched his sister embrace Ann on the bearskin rug, and Richard was the first and only man to possess Ann.

Two days later, Ann returned to Down Street, her leave ended.

Every afternoon we had tea in the canteen at GHQ. The girls would make bets on whether or not Ginette would arrive before the half hour was over. For Ginette had a lover whom she met every day during the afternoon recess. She would rush off in a taxi to her rendezvous, and she was quite proud of being able to make love and get back by the end of tea. She always managed to arrive in time, a little out of breath, and the bets would be paid while the girls demanded news of the "teatime boy." Mickey found the adventure with the teatime boy absolutely riotous, and laughed over it every day.

Ann also usually arrived late for tea, but only because she was highly interested in her work, and her major often took advantage of this to keep her busy well into the recess. Ann had waited in vain for Lee's baby; the child had not been conceived. This had been a bitter disappointment for Lee, and had seemed to affect their relationship.

Moreover, Petit had arranged a surprise for Ann on her return from Scotland. Petit had managed to get her promoted to master sergeant, and even to get her onto a list of candidates for officer training. Once more Ann and Petit were to be seen leaving the barracks together. Overnight Petit had recovered all of her good humor. She bought rounds of drinks, inviting all the girls, calling out in her deep voice, "Another Dubonnet, Renee, and make it snappy!"

To Claude, Ann had confided that after the war she would probably go and live with Petit and help her with her farm. Claude was still seeing Max, and running around with a variety of officers and women, often taking Mickey along.

Sometimes I thought it was her job that made Mickey more avid than the rest of us for distraction. Mickey typed coded telegrams. For three years, from nine o'clock in the morning until six in the evening, and sometimes much later, Mickey typed all the secrets of the war, with prodigious speed, and without having the slightest idea what she was typing. Only someone like Mickey could have accomplished this task without losing her mind. She had arrived at the point where she could type automatically, without error, all the while chattering with people who passed through the office. The typewriter rattled under her long, strong, agile fingers. She had a well-formed hand, a college girl's hand with flat, clear fingernails, masculine in its length. Mickey laughed, gossiped, called her chief "Uncle Henry," and never stopped typing.

What was extraordinary in her was that nothing touched her, neither her love affairs, from which she never asked the absolute, nor her mechanical labors, which would have driven anyone else crazy, nor the barracks with its intrigues, nor even the fact that the reality of the war had never corresponded to the ideal of the early days that she, like all of us, had felt: to volunteer, to save France, to give all, to sacrifice, to find comradeship. This had become tarnished like all one's ideals, but Mickey had not suffered from the change. She was a realist. That was life—one had to be satisfied with a dead ideal as with an easy love or with a meaningless job. She was, in fact, happy so. She had had fun with Claude, and their parties of three had been amusing, and it was amusing to have new experiences. And after all, it was necessary to type the coded telegrams, numbers following numbers in endless succession; it was an important job.

Sometimes she had her regrets. She would attach herself to a handsome man who made love "like a god," who bought her silk stockings and perfume, and then he would leave her for another woman, or he would go off on some mission and never write to her. Mickey would weep over her typewriter, her beautiful blue eyes, too blue, all drowned in tears. Her fingers continued to type the numerals, her tears fell on the keys, and then Uncle Henry had to take her to lunch at Prunier's for consolation, and this indeed consoled her. She would come back laughing, her little snub nose wrinkled, and she would continue to rattle off the mysterious numbers over which the high commanders pondered in their most secret headquarters. Then she would go out with another young man and go to bed with him because he was handsome and she would discover that he "made love like a god," he too, for life would have been too sad if one couldn't shut one's eyes so as not to see it.

Everybody loved Mickey. Everybody forgave her for being easy and a bit of a liar; everybody forgave her her facile success. Her lovers retained the best memories of Mickey, even though her accessibility in the end proved tiresome. There were so many easy young girls in London during the war. For a while it was relaxing, and then it became monotonous.

Even Mickey finally came obscurely to sense these things. In the bottom of her heart she would have liked to find the strength to become a woman difficult to obtain, one of those women for whom men made an effort. She would have liked to inspire a great love such as one read about, and sometimes for days at a time she tried to stop flirting, to maintain a dignified air, but it never worked. The truth was that what she wanted most of all was to be like Claude. She laughed with gusto, drank a lot, let herself be kissed in taxis, and then it was too late to hold back; the way from taxi to hotel was too short. Once more she would find herself in the arms of a lad who told her that she had a lovely body, and Mickey would think, What good would this lovely body be to me if I didn't use it?

She admired Claude and Claude's success. Claude went to bed with colonels and generals, and with all the women of London. At the barracks there had been Ursula, and Mickey herself, and Renee, and Arlette, and Lucienne, and any number of others, ft was amusing to think about. And when Claude went out, when Claude appeared in the clubs and restaurants, everybody looked at her, people whispered when she passed, and men had a special way of looking at her. Mickey wanted men to look at her that way. And so her good resolutions vanished. She said to herself, Later on, after I'm married...

Uncle Henry put her on the promotion list for sergeant. After all, she had done quite a job for three years, a job that no one else wanted. But for some obscure reason the Captain refused her promotion. The reasons for approving or disapproving promotions were generally obscure in Down Street. Obscure as the war itself.

Nevertheless, in her own way, Mickey had made progress. She had lost her awkward and disarticulated look, her boyish movements and pimples. She had learned how to make up, how to do her hair, and how to look well dressed even in a uniform. She flirted a good deal less. During her career as a virgin and
demi-vierge,
Mickey had found it impossible to remain more than a moment in the presence of a male without beginning to exert herself, flirting with her eyes, her mouth, her smile. This had seemed to her indispensable to every masculine encounter. Now she was much more sure of herself, and put herself out less for the boys.

One evening she went dancing with a young Norwegian paratrooper, and the same night, coming home with him, she suddenly got engaged. She came into the barracks and announced it as casually as she would have announced that she had gone to bed with another date. And three weeks later she was married. We were all astonished, and Mickey more than any of us. She had got married almost on impulse, to a boy she scarcely knew, the only one of her acquaintances with whom she had neither flirted nor made love. And the amazing thing was that the boy, who resembled her physically like a brother, could not have been better suited to Mickey if they had known each other for years.

They found a little apartment in town, and Mickey would go home from work at GHQ to prepare their dinner, like any young newlywed. Peter was in London between assignments, and spent most of his time in the little apartment; all day long the radio blared. Every evening Peter's friends came to talk about Norway and the war. Mickey had so much fun with her young husband, who shared her love of laughter, that she ended by falling in love with him. It was an odd young household, for they had the air of two young wolves, avid for life, carefree.

Ursula went often to their flat, and Mickey tried to marry her off to one of Peter's friends. But Ursula was too silent, too calm, and she still had too much the air of a little girl, with her straight hair and her short fingernails. Peter's friends scarcely knew what to say to her, and, uncomfortable at their attempts at conversation, Ursula would bury herself in a book or magazine.

I went to Mickey's sometimes with Ursula, and once we talked about her meager experiences with men. Although a long time had passed, it was strange how strongly she recalled the soldier Michel. There had been a strange calm, a kind of serenity coming from him, and yet she had fled at the first physical contact. Philippe had not frightened her in that way. From Philippe she had felt a force of life and a healthy equilibrium that had been necessary for her, but in Michel there was something else, something that Ursula had not known how to accept. It was as though Philippe had given her all that he could, while with Michel there had been an incomplete communication.

Philippe was a man, a man of flesh, normal in the measure of men. Michel was made of another substance, more fragile, more mysterious, and also closer to Ursula. She talked of the black eyes of Michel, and how sad and yet childlike they had looked. If she had been so afraid of him, it was perhaps because she understood Michel too well. With Michel it would have been all or nothing, and "all" with Michel was infinity. Michel's kiss, which she had refused, had contained all that infinity she had wanted to escape. It was the whole of Michel she had fled; the kiss had only been the pretext that she had unconsciously needed. But why? Why? She was still perplexed over this. I couldn't help her; my own experience was even more limited than hers. For though I had known more men than Ursula, I was still nothing but a date girl, a good dance partner, a pleasant companion for an evening, but essentially, I suppose, disappointing to men in wartime London. As for Ursula and Michel, I felt somehow that she would see him again, because something of her contact with him was still growing in her.

Jacqueline's baby was to be born in December. Until the very end, Jacqueline confided to us, she hoped something would happen to prevent the birth. So many women had miscarriages. But she continued in good health and the child stirred within her.

Sometimes she placed her hand on her belly and felt the movement of the infant. Then she would think of De Prade, and it would seem to Jacqueline that each of these movements of the baby should have been for De Prade, that he should have been there to lay his cheek against his true wife's body, and hear the beating of the secret heart of his child. Now all these movements were quite useless and lost. And it would always be so. The first smile of the baby and his first steps and his first words, all would be lost, without De Prade.

As for the material difficulties, Jacqueline was not frightened. She came from the sort of aristocracy that took additional pride in being able to do common tasks better than common people; she was an excellent cook, and she knew how to design and sew her own clothes. She prepared the baby's layette.

For a time Jacqueline continued to go out in town with a number of her men friends, all of whom were in love with her, and some of whom would certainly have been willing to marry her, even knowing that she was pregnant. But when her condition became quite obvious, Jacqueline ceased to see them; she didn't want anyone's pity. Actually, she slipped quite easily into the role of the unmarried mother, taking a certain pleasure in playing the courageous young woman, poor and abandoned. The family in whose house she roomed was proud of her. The husband was a bit in love with this pretty and unlucky little Frenchwoman. The ten-year-old son secretly offered Jacqueline his ration of sweets, without saving a single ticket for himself.