Women's Barracks (20 page)

When the final month arrived, Jacqueline realized that she was really going to have this baby, and that she alone would be responsible for it. And then she began to be afraid. She had play-acted all her life. Now suddenly the role she had been acting became terribly real; indeed, she felt that with the child, the role would be beyond her.

The child came into the world in a hospital in London. Jacqueline told us she would have liked to spend all her life in that hospital, for there were nurses to take care of the baby and to bring food to the mother; she had nothing to do, no worries. Everything was sure, simple, and well regulated. And in a few days, she knew she would have to confront life, fight for the sustenance of her child, suffer for her child, and she felt herself absolutely alone and entirely without force in the face of this task.

All of us were struck with the little girl's resemblance to Jacqueline; she had her fresh complexion, her shining eyes, and her soft hair, already quite long. Jacqueline looked as helpless as the baby. With her finger, she opened the fist of her little girl, undoing it as one might a delicate flower.

After ten days she left the hospital with her baby in her arms. A French welfare worker accompanied her. The welfare organization had found a job for her, and a family where the baby could be cared for.

But after a month we heard that Jacqueline had changed her job and found another family to take care of the child. Bit by bit, the little girl became the center of her life. Whenever we saw Jacqueline, she complained that the baby wasn't well enough cared for. And she wanted to have her daughter with her all the time, instead of being able to see her only once a week. Finally she placed the little girl in a day nursery, but only to take her out and leave her with another family. Despite all these changes, the child thrived.

Jacqueline was working in an office. Her job was utterly uninteresting, and she earned very little. But there was an astonishing energy in Jacqueline. After work she sewed clothes for herself and knitted for the baby. She fixed her own dinner when she wasn't going out with some of us. She went to bed late and rose early.

A new fixation began to appear in her. She wanted to find a father for her child. This was now her one idea. Jacqueline was determined to return to France at the .end of the war with a suitable father for her little girl.

But this was not easy. Young officers took her out and treated her with respect, as always, and talked to her of love, as always, but Jacqueline now felt that not one of them wanted to marry her.

It was at this time that Jacqueline met John. I had been doing a good deal of liaison work with the British, and now the American Information Service people began to appear on the scene too. I was invited to a reception for them, at which the guest of honor was to be the famous English conductor John Wright, who .was doing a good deal of cultural propaganda work. I took Jacqueline along. She was excited, for she had often seen his name on posters, and she had watched him conducting the symphony at Albert Hall. He was a man of about fifty, tall, spare, graying, and rather distant with people. His wife was at the reception, but it was whispered that they had not lived together for years.

The guest of honor glanced toward Jacqueline. She gave him one of her ravishing smiles, and they began to talk. His absorption in the beautiful young Frenchwoman did not go unnoticed. A friend of mine told me something I had not known: John Wright had been in love with a young French girl, who had recently died. She had had just such a ravishing smile.

All that evening they remained together. Wright's wife was flirting in another corner of the room.

"What did you talk about?" I asked Jacqueline on our way home. She said, almost reverently, that John Wright had talked to her of the girl he had loved and so tragically lost.

"I
must
see him again," Jacqueline said. I remembered De Prade. She was deciding again that a man, this man,
had
to love her.

One day tickets for a concert at Albert Hall were passed out at the barracks, and Ursula and Mickey and I went together. Mickey's husband was away on maneuvers in Scotland, and was to be absent all week.

It was a beautiful warm day. Once more it was summer. We had been permitted to remove our jackets and to roll up the sleeves of our shirts. On the grass in the park, ATS girls were stretched out beside their soldiers. And again there had been no second front in Europe. No one was even disappointed any more, for everyone had got used to disappointments.

Actually, Mickey preferred jazz to any other music, and classical music generally bored her. But she had come along because in Peter's absence she had nothing to do, and this had seemed to her as good a way as any of passing the afternoon.

At the intermission, we suddenly heard ourselves called. "Tereska! Mickey! Ursula!" We looked toward the boxes and saw the smiling face of Jacqueline. She was signaling to us. We had lost track of her the last few weeks. Now we hurried to her, delighted to see her again. And we found, instead of poor unlucky Jacqueline, an extremely elegant young woman, as fresh and pretty as ever.

She wore high-heeled shoes, which made her seem taller, and her hair was bleached and worn shoulder-length, à la Veronica Lake. Breathlessly Jacqueline demanded, "How did you like John Wright? Isn't he extraordinary?"

Then I remembered the party. So there had been developments.

People came into the box, kissing Jacqueline's hand and congratulating her. "Jacqueline, he was astonishing!"

Ursula stared at this new Jacqueline, who looked so triumphant and happy. Mickey said, "Do you know John Wright?"

"I'm his secretary," answered Jacqueline, with a particularly glowing smile for me.

We asked her about her little girl, and she talked of her daughter as though she were the only beautiful and intelligent baby in the world. The baby lived with her at Wright's house in Surrey. She had a nurse, who was, of course, the best nurse in all London.

After the concert, Wright came to the box. There was something at once brusque and timid in his manner, but when he looked at Jacqueline his expression softened. He scarcely spoke. We all went out through the stage door so as to avoid the crowd, and Jacqueline invited us to come and spend the week end in Surrey.

"I didn't know she was John Wright's mistress," said Mickey when we had left them.

"But how do you know she's his mistress?" Ursula asked, astonished. She would never be able to divine relationships of this sort. "Jacqueline said she was his secretary."

"His secretary night and day," Mickey said, laughing. Ursula managed a small smile. "Well, at last she looks happy," she said uncertainly.

In the car that carried them to Surrey, Jacqueline pressed herself against John. She closed her eyes. Yes, she was happy. She was in a beautiful car that was carrying her toward a house in the midst of a lovely garden, and in the house was her well-cared-for child, waiting for her. She was John's mistress, and all the world was attentive to her. John said he was going to introduce her to his friends in the theatrical world, and that she would certainly become a great actress. Everything in life had become so easy, thanks to him. She was proud of him, and proud also of the role that she played at his side.

Jacqueline studied John's face. His hair was almost white. Her father would have been exactly John's age. And John had given her what a father gives to his child: security.

De Prade had given her passion, and this had hurt her; and then he had left her. But to John she owed nothing but joy. He was nevertheless a strange man, rather unsociable. He didn't like people, and he preferred the solitude of his house in Surrey. But Jacqueline told herself that she would succeed little by little in taming him. After all, he was an artist, a genius, and therefore he had a right to his idiosyncrasies.

John spent all his days working. In the evenings, Jacqueline would come and sit on a stool at his feet. She had told him all about the death of her father, her mother's second marriage, the advances of her stepfather, her broken engagement, the war, her attempt at suicide, the hospital, De Prade, the baby, her solitude, her struggle for life. John stroked her face and told her, "It's over now. You shall never suffer again, my dear. You are with me. Don't worry about anything."

Long afterward, she told me that their sexual contacts were quite rare. John didn't seem to feel frequent sexual needs, and Jacqueline didn't really care for the physical side of love. With De Prade she had experienced the joy of having conquered, nothing more. And physical love-making had always seemed a sort of degradation to her. She felt flattered that John loved her "without that." For "that" was the barracks, the sailors, girls who came home drunk, Ginette and her lovers, everything that was coarse. John gave her music, art, sensitivity, the beauty of this house, and that sufficed.

She knew that there would be no marriage. John had told her that he would never get a divorce. Jacqueline knew this, but she didn't believe it. Nothing had ever withstood her will; whatever she wanted she could obtain, even though she had to pay dearly. And she wanted to marry John, she wanted John to adopt her little girl, she wanted to re-enter France, her head high, with her husband and her child, and with no one knowing anything of what had happened to her.

As she fell asleep that night, Jacqueline thought of us, her friends from the barracks. She was glad to have seen us again. We were her best friends from Down Street, and besides, we were sure to tell everybody at the barracks that she was the mistress of a famous man, and that she was rich and happy. She smiled in the dark. At last she had her revenge on life. She no longer needed anyone, and everybody would know it. She decided to invite us to dinner.

Yes, everything was simple now, and she was happy.

There were many new recruits, and the dormitories were full. In the Virgins' Room, Monique, our chemistry student, finished reading a passionately exciting chapter on enzymes, without hearing what was going on around her. Ursula took a last look, to be sure that her bed was properly made, and went down to her place at the little table in the hallway. She opened the registry to write down our names as we left the barracks.

Claude was not at the switchboard that day, as it was her day of leave, and Ursula was glad of it. Claude had become increasingly irritable of late, seeing nothing but enemies all about her, and it had become quite exhausting to listen to the endless repetitions of her quarrels.

Little by little the house emptied itself. Women came to scrub the hall; they were newcomers, passing their first weeks in taking care of the barracks. A corporal went by, and managed to find an excuse for making them redo the hall, which she considered badly scrubbed. One of the new recruits objected, and the corporal pierced her with a black look and a few well-chosen words.

Ursula recalled her first days in Down Street, three years ago, when she had been so proud of this uniform and had felt that she was surely going to help save France.

Did she still think so? At bottom, yes. She had not yet lost all of her illusions. She realized that most of us no longer believed we were being useful to our country by living in Down Street. And yet we all still believed that after the war everything would change, that the golden age would begin, and that there would be love between nations. The traitors would be punished, the collaborators would receive their due, the United Nations would be created, there would be a world government. New leaders, utterly pure, would emerge from the resistance—that at least was certain. Just as certain as the abundance of oranges and bananas and eggs and milk that one would find again. Ursula closed her eyes and deliciously recalled the distant taste of an orange. A beautiful orange, juicy, perfumed, and sweet.

She was sitting like that with her eyes closed when she heard herself called. "Good morning, Ursula." She opened her eyes.

Just as on that first occasion three years ago, Michel was standing in front of her, with his slightly astonished look, his round face, his full mouth.

"Michel!" cried Ursula joyfully, and she jumped up, reaching her hand to him. An immense happiness flooded her. Michel had returned. Michel was found again.

Michel remembered everyone's name; he asked for news of Mickey, of Claude, of Jacqueline. As for him, he had been in Scotland all this time; now he was stationed in London again, and the Army was giving him free time to attend courses at the university. He was a corporal, he informed her, showing his stripes laughingly.

"Can you come to dinner with me tonight?" Michel asked.

It seemed to Ursula that everything had become the same as before. Once again she would ask for an eleven-thirty pass, she would go to dine in a little restaurant in Soho with Michel, and he would talk very little. She still knew little about him; but there was one differencec—Michel had been so often in her thoughts that he now seemed close to her, and it was almost as though she were recovering a part of her childhood.

Evening came. Ursula found herself facing Michel over a little oilcloth-covered table. Michel spoke more freely than he had before. Suddenly Ursula too had a great deal to say. And it seemed to her now that Michel's replies were real replies. She asked him whether he believed in God. Michel hesitated for a second, and then said yes. He didn't make any imposing speeches, he had the same soft voice, and his eyes were as calm and sad as ever under their look of astonishment, but it became clear that he was interested in a great number of matters about which Ursula had never before thought him concerned.

Michel too believed in the reconstruction of the world after the war and in the United Nations, and when it was Michel who spoke of these things all doubt seemed truly impossible.

Ursula asked him where his parents lived now, and Michel said, "In Palestine." After the war, he said, he would join them there.

Ursula listened with passionate interest as Michel spoke of life in Palestine. It was something new and strange, for she had always believed that Jews were all either shopkeepers or intellectuals, and now it seemed that in Palestine most of them were farmers living a communal life. After the war, Michel said, there would be a new Jewish state in Palestine.