“He wore a coat and tie like any man, and received me very civilly.”
“Did you make him presents of colored glass beads?”
“He told me about his life in America.”
“And counted the spoons when you left.”
Mary gave Hilda’s hair a last blast of spray to set it. “Your attitude is just like society’s.”
“Oh good,” said Hilda.
Mary lifted the hand mirror so Hilda could see herself from the back.
“Interesting,” said Hilda.
“What is?” said Mary.
“Nothing,” said Hilda, supposing that it would have to do until she could get to the salon.
May, 1940
IN THE GARRET TOM
lay back against the bolster and drew on the cigarette Mary put to his lips. The cigarette’s pull lit them up, flaring and fading again.
Outside, wardens policed the blackout. Light, which had always united the city in a universal glow, had shrunk back into points. It was its old self again: a privateer, a dweller in nooks. People sheltered flames from drafts. Shadows grew by accretion, thickening nightly, as if the day wouldn’t rinse off the dark.
Tom blew smoke at the ceiling. Mary curled her foot around his. He held back a laugh.
“What?” said Mary.
“Nothing.”
“Tell or be sorry.” She plucked at the hairs on his chest.
“Ow! I was just thinking how different it feels.”
She looked wistful as she tapped ash from her cigarette. “You won’t love me anymore, now that we’ve done it.”
“It isn’t that.”
“What, then?”
“Actually,” he said, “I was thinking how much more I love you.”
In truth, this is what he had been thinking: that from now on—at work, on the bus, in the park—he would have more fellow feeling with dogs who were sexually experienced than with men who were still virgins.
“And what are you thinking?” he said.
Mary was thinking how much she was enjoying the war. The passions, which had been confused against the general glare, could flicker in the blackout. With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now she could feel as she did—happy—as the ancients evidently had and her mother probably hadn’t. The capital’s heart had moved from Pimlico to Piccadilly, where the loud circus of electric bulbs was silenced and Eros, unsighted and teetering on his pedestal, now loosed his arrows into the dark. London lit her up from the inside. The great diurnal city learned the language of the night.
She said, “I was thinking I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“But you’re a man. You’ll move on, to plunder the next settlement.”
He nodded. “Primrose Hill.”
“Or Hampstead.”
“Can’t I plunder you a bit more first?”
She inspected her nails. “From time to time, I daresay. If I have nothing on.”
“I like you best when you’ve nothing on.”
She flicked his thigh. “Dirty old man.”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“Yes. It’s indecent.”
He worried that it was. “I do love you, you know.”
“But do you really?”
“Yes.”
“But do you
really,
Tom?”
“Absolutely. I’d show you the readings on my dials, but we would have to open the inspection hatch in my chest.”
“Could we? I should like to be sure.”
“I didn’t bring the right tools.”
She rolled onto her back and blew smoke in a slow blue jet. “I hate you.”
He frowned. “You can’t prove it.”
“I haven’t got dressed for you. I won’t even get out of bed for you.’
“Not even if I do . . . this?”
“Especially not if you do that.”
She put the cigarette to his lips again and he drew on it. The flare lit up two pale discs in the darkness of the garret: Caesar’s button eyes, watching from the top of the piano.
For god’s sake cheer up,
Tom told himself involuntarily. His muscles tensed.
“What’s wrong, darling?”
“Nothing,” he said, but the moment was broken. She rolled onto her stomach to stub out the cigarette.
Tom realized, with a guilty ache, that he hadn’t thought about Alistair in days. Lately his friend’s letters made him miserable. Of a long march with heavy packs Alistair had offered:
The trick is to wear two pairs of socks, one thin and one thick
. Of life in barracks he had written:
It is gayer if one takes the view that it is Butlin’s with guns
. There was no substance. The last really personal letter had come months ago, in December, when Alistair had written rather rawly about a soldier who had been blown up in training. Since then, the distance between them had started to show in the letters.
Tom tried to put Alistair out of his mind. It was four o’clock on Saturday morning. The wine was nearly finished. They had another hour of darkness before the daylight came. Mary rolled onto her back and lit up again, and he put his hand between her thighs.
She blew a smoke ring. “This war is amazing. Is that terrible to say?”
“Well, I shouldn’t go writing it on the blackboard.”
“I’m nineteen and I have a school of my own. I can teach the children however I like, and I can hug them when they graze their knees.”
Tom thought it was lovely that she was so happy, but it was a shame that she was still talking, given that his hand was where it was.
He said, “You’d have found something terrific even without the war.”
“You and I wouldn’t have been thrown together. Thinking about it makes my head spin. Imagine how many there are like us, at this moment, lying in bed because the war has brought them close. In Cairo. In Paris.”
“Yes.” He moved his hand between her legs.
She said, “In Germany, too, I suppose.”
This caused his hand to stop. The continuation should have been natural. There should have been bliss, and instead here were the Germans.
“Steady on,” he said. “The Hun do not go to bed with one another.”
“ ‘Well then, and how do they make little Hun?”
“In factories on the Ruhr. According to detailed blueprints. I don’t know.”
He wished she would leave it. Beyond the four posts of the bed, the world could go to hell and seemed determined to exercise that privilege. To speak of it was to bring it under the covers with them, into the warmth and the darkness. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of it. Far out there in the night somewhere, his best friend was shivering in a bunk, with bromide in his tea and postcards of Betty Grable. Tom felt guilty again, and sighed.
“What’s wrong?” said Mary.
“It’s just that I feel such a shit.”
“Whatever for?”
“For not joining up. For being here when the world is there.”
Mary stubbed out her cigarette. The movement set the bedsprings quivering. His hand, between her legs, could neither sensibly advance nor retreat now but simply cupped her, foolishly, with its own instinctive tenderness.
She said, “You aren’t meant to be a soldier.”
“Why not? I could fight.”
“You couldn’t shoot someone.”
She stroked his face. It seemed to him that her touch traced his limits.
“I could kill if I had to.” Immediately he felt the absurdity of it as a boast.
She smiled. He flushed. “Well perhaps you don’t believe it, but I could.”
He took his hand from between her legs, propping himself on one elbow in the dark. She flicked on her cigarette lighter. In the provisional light it made between them, she looked at him so calmly that he was ashamed.
“God,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She snapped the lighter shut, and in the quick darkness he saw the bright negative of the flame. She rolled onto her side and took his hand and put it back between her legs. “If they call you up for the war, go. Until then, don’t spoil it.”
“Mary, I—”
“Shh, darling. Let’s not let the war win.”
He moved his face close to hers. “When I said ‘I love you’ before?’
“Yes?”
“I didn’t mean it. But now I think I do.”
“Oh yes. Oh, me too.”
Tom understood why the good actors in the movies never said it with a smile. To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one was ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.
Afterward, she laid her head on his chest and yawned. Her copper hair spilled over him. They shared a cigarette and her face, with its sheen of perspiration, shone orange.
He said, “Do you want to sleep?”
She considered the question as if the idea were new, then shook her head. It was raining and a gray light loomed in the garret, threatening to return all things to their quotidian form. Tom felt the grip of an unnameable fear but Mary lit another cigarette and smiled at him so impishly that it restored his faith. The bright sexual smell of her, her slightly comical frown of concentration, her breasts quivering as she worked the wheel of the lighter. Her slim belly as she sat up in bed to find the ashtray. The rain came in squalls, hard as handfuls of rice against the window.
He made them both tea, in the jam jars they used for cups, and climbed back into bed. They sat against the headboard and leaned shoulders. They were tired, their eyes cast inward. They forgot to sip the pale tea. The steam condensed on the inner rims of the jars.
He said, “Have you ever been . . . you know. In bed with anyone before?”
She blinked. “Oh yes.”
As if it were nothing. Tom’s fear returned. He supposed he had been perfectly prepared for her answer to be yes or no, but this third possibility had not even slightly occurred to him: that perhaps it really
was
nothing. It had seemed the most important thing that had ever happened to him. But of course he had been a fool. He felt as if he could easily cry.
He wouldn’t let himself. He would set his face just like this: in this worldly grin. And when their conversation naturally picked up again he would engage in the new topic with all levity. As if yes, this were nothing, and that therefore this feeling he had—that he had been struck through like the clumsy first draft of a letter—were nothing, too. And still . . . and still.
He realized that he did not mind if she had slept with five men or even a dozen: he just wanted Mary—who had trembled in his arms and crushed her face into his neck—to speak about what had happened as if it were
something
. Tears threatened again and he stopped them.
She was digging him in the ribs.
“Darling?” he said, keeping his tone light.
She prodded him again and he turned to look. She was watching him strangely and he didn’t understand. There was so much, he now realized, that he did not understand. He had lost his virginity—sailed to a place where land had been marked on the chart—and yet here was just more open sea.
He could not decipher her eyes. An anxiety came over him that she wanted them to make love again. He didn’t know if he could. Then he worried that perhaps making love was not what she wanted at all, and that maybe this strange and terrible look she was giving him was something else, a prelude to the sort of conversation where in which she would be serious and kind. She would speak softly, noticing the lateness of the hour, and saying that perhaps they should sleep after all. And then, as soon as the time was decent for young women to take to the streets, she would excuse herself and leave.
He stroked her cheek. How pathetic he was. She had seen his reaction, and she must think him ridiculous. Now that she was certain to leave, he understood that he did not even care if she felt nothing for him, or for any of the men she had slept with. What he could not bear was to be without her. How dreadful the days would be from now on. How empty.
She smiled.
“What is it?” he said.
“I haven’t slept with anyone else.”
“So why . . . ?”
She took his hand. “I wanted to see if it counted for you.”
Above them the dawn sounded with engines. Tom drew the blanket around them. He held Mary close in the improvised darkness. How bedclothes would protect them, he didn’t know. The engine noise drew nearer and increased in volume until it was directly overhead, rattling the windows. Then it faded away to the east. Aircraft were being delivered, or pilots trained—that was all—and afterward they laughed at their own fear.
At sunrise, with the rain blown over and the wet pavements gleaming, they went for a walk. They wore the clothes they had worn to the dance the night before, since Mary had no others and Tom saw no need to let her be the only one. They strolled easily together, holding hands and swinging their arms and making no strenuous effort to avoid the puddles, being both of them protected by love against discomforts of any kind.
The streets were still nearly empty—London was theirs alone—and if from time to time it pleased the lovers that a bread van should drive past on its rounds, or a policeman walk by on his beat, or the last fox of the night nose for scraps in an alley, then they caused it to be so. They strolled until the sidewalks grew busy around them and the traffic began to clot in the streets. They walked and they did not need anything at all, until very suddenly they needed everything. They understood that they were famished and so they ran into a café and ate like wolves. They drank dark stewed tea that made their teeth buzz in their sockets. Afterward he decided that he must absolutely buy her a book, and she decided that she must absolutely buy him a paper knife, and they went in and out of shops until these things were done, and then they were calm again.
They sat together on a bench in Trafalgar Square, holding the new things in their hands and being delighted with them, while Tom also felt solemn in a way that had no limiting degree. They watched the grubby pigeons flock.
She yawned and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Are you tired?” he said. “Shall we go back to the flat and sleep?”
“I ought to get home. Palmer will fret.”
“Your dog?”
“Yes,” she said, and wondered why she had. The distance between them was nothing—and simultaneously it was so huge that, in the moment, she had not found the heart to speak of it. She felt a heavy sadness.