Heart of War (77 page)

A halo seemed to float over 85 Jervis Street as he wheeled Victoria in through the back gate. He had succeeded, and would now reap the fruits.

When Alice reached Laburnum Lodge that evening after work, her head aching as usual, old Parrish the butler met her at the door – ‘Good evening, Miss Alice. I hope the sandwiches were satisfactory?'

‘They always are,' she said, summoning a weary smile.

She moved to pass the butler but he said in a low voice, ‘There's a party here, to see you, Miss Alice … says her name is Mrs Cowell. I put her in the morning room, as Mr Harry's in London. She's been here an hour. I hope I did the right thing, but you working in the shell factory and all…'

‘Who knows what sort of people can now claim acquaintance with you?' the unfinished sentence hinted. Alice's heart sank, and she felt cold in her throat.

She went into the morning room. It was almost dark and
she switched on the lights as she entered. A woman rose from a hard chair, her hands to her eyes.

‘I'm sorry,' Alice said. ‘Would you prefer I left the lights off?'

‘Oh yes … Miss, please,' the woman said in a low trembling voice. Alice switched off the lights and sat down opposite her in the gloomy room, and motioned her to be seated again.

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘I'm Dave's wife,' she said. Alice saw that she was of medium height, plump, dressed respectably but rather dowdily, with greying hair. … ‘I know about you and my Dave.'

Alice thought, I don't want to hurt her, but she said, ‘What do you know, Mrs Cowell?'

‘He's your fancy man,' she said. ‘My brother seen you, with him, in the wood, doing you know what … three weeks ago, it was. Dave doesn't go with no club to watch birds, he told me, but only to be with Miss Rowland. Is it true, Miss?'

Alice said quietly, ‘I'm afraid it is, Mrs Cowell.'

The other woman said, ‘I was in the H.U.S.L. one day and Mrs Goodby said her husband got 'ome from watching the birds at three o'clock the day before, 'cos there weren't no birds out that day, but my Dave didn't get 'ome till seven, so I spoke to my brother about it, and he said he'd follow him, at a distance like, and see what he was up to …'

She droned on. Dave was not a gentleman in the accepted sense of the word, Alice knew; he had had a good education, but of the kind that leaves a man with a certain accent. Mrs Cowell was a simple country woman. So Dave had married beneath him, and now she was afraid of losing him.

Mrs Cowell said, ‘I didn't want to believe it till you told me it was right, what my brother seed.' She whined on, about their daughters not knowing, she not suspecting, nor no one else, neither … Alice thought, she doesn't seem to have any animus against me, at all. Perhaps I can suggest that we share Dave – as we are doing, after all.

Mrs Cowell said suddenly, ‘You ought to get a husband of your own, Miss, really you ought.'

‘I know,' she said sadly, ‘but no one's asked me.'

‘There must be lots of men would want to marry a nice lady like you, Miss, and with plenty of money. You shouldn't
ought to have to come and take my Dave, should you?'

‘No,' Alice said, ‘I shouldn't. But I'm afraid I fell in love … What do you want me to do, Mrs Cowell?'

The woman leaned forward, putting her hand on Alice's knee – ‘If you see him again, Miss, he'll only lie again. Men can't help it, can they? But now you know I know, and you won't like that, will you, 'cause you're a lady, a nice lady. Everyone knows that.'

‘No,' Alice said miserably, her head splitting – ‘I won't like it.' After a time she added, ‘I'm afraid it's impossible.'

‘You can't send him packing?' It was Mrs Cowell's turn to look and sound despondent – ‘He's a nice man, Miss … a good man for me … look at what I am … but he's nothing for you …'

‘He's all I have,' Alice said, ‘but I meant, that it will be impossible for me to see him.'

Mrs Cowell sprang to her feet, ‘Oh, thank you, Miss, thank you. And I'll tell him how wicked he's been to make you unhappy like this.'

Alice started walking to the door, accompanying the other woman. She said, ‘Tell him … everything will always be what it is today, between us … but I can never see him again.'

‘I'll tell him, Miss don't you fear.'

‘You're sure? He must know.'

‘I'll tell him … and may God bless you with a husband soon, Miss.'

Bert Gorse laboriously totted up the totals a fourth time, and made another correction in pencil. He'd hated arithmetic in school, never got farther than adding and subtracting, of course, and every time he'd added up these bloody figures they'd come out different. He started again, licking the point of his pencil, his brows furrowed, and after five minutes achieved the same total he'd had the second time. That would be it, and if it wasn't right, they knew what they could do with it. He pushed the papers away, stood up, lit a cigarette, and began puffing furiously, walking back and forth across the little room like a caged animal, limping, pursing his lips, scowling at the floor, breathing out cigarette smoke through his nostrils. The printing press had broken down again, and he needed a part to fix it, and no one would sell it to him.

The post was in, two letters lying on the mat inside the
front door, having been pushed through the slot by the postman. He picked them up – both for Rachel: one he recognized from her mother in Whitechapel; didn't know the other, an expensive heavy white paper, Rachel's name and address written with a thin pen, like one of those books they taught you to write from, copperplate almost.

He put them on the table and resumed his pacing. Rachel ought to have been back twenty minutes ago … He wished she'd give up the No-Conscription Fellowship and join him in union work instead. When you got right down to it, the Russells and Bentleys and Aliens were the enemy – as he'd told her a dozen times. She used to agree, but now she was all for unity.

He looked again at the letters on the table, picked up the heavy white envelope, and sniffed it. No scent … postmark Winchester, Hants … Hadn't Rachel said that that Bentley lived in Winchester? This might be from him … felt like several pages …

He heard someone outside screeching, ‘Bert Gorse! Bert Gorse!' and went to the door and opened it. An old harridan standing the other side of the street was screaming his name. He said, ‘Shut yer trap, you old fart. I'm working.'

She yelled, ‘The coppers 'ave taken your fancy woman to the station … an' she 'as a black eye and 'er face looks like a piece of mincemeat what's going bad … I seed 'er, heh, heh, heh!' she cackled, moving on along the pavement.

Bert went back into the house. So they'd arrested her again, and probably John Rowland, too; he was going to be at the demonstration. Well, no one should be surprised. The boss class was using every excuse – and making some up – to hit the pacifists, especially in the pocket if they could. The beaks would give her a stiff fine, wanting to drain the Fellowship's funds … but she wouldn't pay, and would go to gaol instead.

He stared at the letters, and after a short moment, picked up the white envelope, opened it, and began to read the beautiful script, ‘Dearest Rachel … the socialist movement … special problems of farming in such a state … must beware of a huge bureaucracy, which would inevitably take the place of capitalism's boards of directors, managers, foremen and so on … not convinced that the State the best entity to run, for example, the insurance business … ' on and on, six pages of it,
then: ‘When will we meet again? There's no central meeting of the Fellowship until September, and that's too long to wait. We have so much to give each other. Perhaps I could drive over to Hedlington one day and take you out somewhere for lunch. I would much like to see you in your natural habitat, so to speak. Give my regards to Bert. Affectionately, Wilfred.'

Give his regards to Bert, the bugger … trying to steal Rachel away from him, with his ‘dearests' and ‘affectionately' … Of course, he might not know that he and Rachel lived together: they were always introduced as Miss Cowan and Mr Gorse … but did he know that he loved Rachel? She used to love him, too, but now she didn't. For how long had that been? Since about the time she met Wilfred Bentley. She must have told Bentley all this, and more, during those endless meetings she went to, while he stayed at home, working for the working man, limping up and down, his missing toe and now his whole foot aching.

He tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the waste paper basket by the printing press. He was going to lose her, and tearing up her letters wouldn't help. But he had to show her that it hurt. Only she'd never see the pieces in the waste paper basket because she was in a police station cell. He'd best go and see her …

Alice Rowland worked steadily and carefully at her bench. You had to have patience, and concentration, in work like this, which the younger women seemed to find very hard. The girl opposite, a pretty eighteen-year-old, was yawning, stealing glances right, left, at the ceiling. Her own eyes held steady on the shell she was filling, but seeing the girl clear beyond with peripheral vision. It must come with age, Alice thought – this ability to maintain concentration at work that by no stretch of the imagination could be described as interesting, and was besides, in its way, an act of murder … or of madness, at least.

‘Old Stratton must 'a got out of bed the right side, for a change,' the woman to her left muttered. ‘Look over there … smiling, he is.'

Alice did not look up, but heard the factory manager's familiar gruff voice, ‘Good work … keep it up, and you'll get a bonus, come Christmas.'

Come Christmas, Alice thought; another Christmas alone with her father in the big house that had once echoed to the laughs and shouts of Tom and John and Quentin and Richard and Margaret and herself … to the sound of music as Mother played the piano after dinner and they all sang from the sheet music set up in front of her … the shrieks of charades … And this last Christmas, a secret meeting with Dave on the Down, in Caesar's Camp Copse, the snow falling lightly and they kissing as though they'd never see each other again, and at last falling to the ground, their intimate bodies finding each other, surrounded by clothes, wind, snow, cold, but there, together, locked, warm, aware only of love. It was such memories that must give her strength to keep her promise to his wife.

Her amatol bucket was empty, and the shell case she was pouring into only half full. She turned to refill the bucket, and suddenly the room was filled with a flash of brilliant light, followed at once by a roaring force that spread, lifted her, hurled her through the air … other women were flying with her in the still glaring brilliance, skirts awry, faces contorted, clothes burning, an arm, a severed head, blood all over. She hit something hard with a crash, and lay stunned, trying to breathe, unaware of any pain, only a dull roar in her ears, and the blinding light … now a smell, strong, sweet, familiar … roasting flesh. She reached out to pull herself upright … the machine she held onto was red hot, her hands sticking to it, skin peeling off, the smell stronger. A weight lay across her legs, the room in near darkness now, filled with choking smoke. She tugged at the weight and forced it free. It was a leg – her own. Her skirt, underclothes, and overalls had gone. She lay naked, burned, one leg gone six inches above the knee, the thigh dripping blood, the leg itself in her peeling hands. She dropped the leg and struggled on, on one knee, through the dark and the smoke and at last, pain now screaming all through her, fell out into the open air.

A thousand yards on the front of a whole Army! Cate didn't know how much that would be, but it must be measured in miles rather than yards. Prisoners streaming in … he shook his head. The 3rd year of the war was in its 52nd week, as the headline showed; and in those years Cate, and everyone else in Britain, had learned to read official military communiqués with considerable reserve. It was wiser, as the saying went, to wait till the other shoe dropped. All one could be sure of was
that the Army was again locked in major battle, which would go on for weeks … months, perhaps.