Staring at the Sun (9 page)

Father’s summary of the facts to Mother was rather different: I always knew your brother was a bit of a spiv, too old for the army stuff and nonsense what’s wrong with the Home Guard or firewatching or working in a munitions factory, not that your brother ever liked getting his hands dirty or using a spot of elbow grease, just because he sends food parcels he thinks that makes it all right, what’s for dinner tonight Mother a little bit of Conscience Pie followed by a slice of Conscience Pudding, well we may as well eat the stuff it’ll only go bad, but what does he mean by sending our Jean fancy underwear she’s only just had her plait cut off, I won’t see my daughter wearing things like this when the bombers are coming over it’s not decent, if he joins the American army I’ll
swim the North Sea, perhaps our Hero of the Stratosphere on my right would like another slice of Conscience Pudding, it may taste sour but there’s no point letting it go to waste.

In the first two years of the war they ate a lot of Conscience Pie. Father confiscated the underwear but handed it over to Jean when she married. This was Uncle Leslie’s only wedding present; she had written to give him the news, but he didn’t reply. Uncle Leslie went silent for the rest of the war. Father’s speculations on the reason were not always well received by Mother.

When she married, Jean knew the following things:

how to make beds with hospital corners;

how to sew, patch and knit;

how to make three sorts of pudding;

how to lay a fire and blacken a grate;

how to make old pennies bright again by soaking them

   in vinegar;

how to iron a man’s shirt;

how to plait hair;

how to insert a Dutch cap;

how to bottle fruit and make jam;

how to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling.

She was proud of these accomplishments, though she did not consider them an entirely adequate dowry. She wished, for instance, that she knew the following:

how to dance the waltz, quickstep and polka, for which there had been little call so far in her life;

how to run without automatically folding her arms across her chest;

how to know in advance whether her remarks were stupid or intelligent;

how to predict the weather from a hanging piece of seaweed;

how to tell why a chicken had stopped laying;

how to judge when people were making fun of her;

how to be helped into a coat without getting embarrassed;

how to ask the right questions.

Michael fiddled some petrol and they spent their honeymoon at a pub in the New Forest which had a few rooms above the bar. They drove down late on the Saturday afternoon. As they neared Basingstoke it began to get dark, and they proceeded on sidelights because of the blackout. Jean wondered how good Michael’s night vision was; he hadn’t been trained like Prosser. She felt frightened: in the first months of the war, she remembered, more people had been killed on the roads than by the enemy. She laid a hand on Michael’s arm at one point; but he seemed to misinterpret this and went faster.

When they were shown to their room, Jean was daunted by the size of the bed. It looked enormous, threatening, active. It was telling her things, mocking and scaring her at the same time. Sporadic murmurs rose through the floor from the bar beneath. She turned her head into Michael’s shoulder and said, “Can we be friends tonight?”

There was a pause, and a slight stiffening of his hand on her neck. Then he said, “Of course. It’s been a long drive.”

He stroked her hair a little, then went off for a wash. Over dinner he was jovial and relaxed; he had telephoned his mother and asked her to pass on news of their arrival to the Serjeants. Jean rather wished she could have talked to her mother—a final briefing before the op—but what Michael had done was obviously for the best. She loved him very much, told him so, and asked if she could get into bed and turn out the light while he was in the bathroom. She lay between the sheets with a laundry smell in her nose and wondered what lay ahead. Outside it was a cloudless night and a full summer moon hung in the sky like a pathfinder’s flare; a bombers’ moon, they called it.

The next day they went for a walk in the morning, because it wasn’t right to waste petrol even on their honeymoon, came back to the pub for lunch, walked again in the afternoon, washed and changed; and as they were going down for dinner, Jean asked, “Can we be friends tonight?”

“I’ll have to rape you if this goes on,” he replied with a smile.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Well, you’ll have to let me kiss you tonight. No rolling over.”

“All right.”

“And with the lights on.”

The third evening, Jean said, “Perhaps tomorrow.”

“
Perhaps?
For Christ’s sake, we’re halfway through our bloody honeymoon. We might as well have gone hiking or something.” His face seemed very red as he stared at her. She felt frightened: not just because he was angry, but because she realized he could get angrier. She also thought: hiking, that sounds nice.

“All right, tomorrow.”

But the next night she developed a stomach cramp shortly after dinner, and the matter had to be postponed. She could sense Michael getting crosser. She had heard, somewhere, that men needed physical release more than women. What happened if they were denied it? Did they blow up, like a car radiator? On the fifth evening, they talked less over dinner. Michael ordered a brandy. Suddenly, Jean whispered, “Come up in twenty minutes.”

She collected the box and went to the bathroom along the passage. She lay on the floor with her heels on the edge of the bath and tried to insert her cap. Something was wrong with her muscles. She wondered, briefly, if she should turn out the light and think of Prosser in his black Hurricane with a red glow on his face and hands; perhaps that would relax her. But she knew it was wrong. Instead, she tried squatting; but after some initial success the cap shot out of her and messed the bathmat. She tried again with her legs up; now it was beginning to hurt. She washed the black rubber monster, dried and powdered it, then put it back in its tin.

She lay in bed and listened to the rumble of voices in the bar below. Michael seemed to be taking a long time. Perhaps he was having another brandy. Perhaps he had run off with someone who wasn’t defective.

He didn’t bother with the bathroom, just stood in the dark discarding his clothes; she tried to guess from the noises which items were being unbuttoned and pulled off. She heard a drawer squeak and imagined him putting on his pyjamas. There was a whoop of conversation from the bar below. He climbed into bed, kissed her on the cheek, rolled on top of her, pulled up her flannelette nightdress and tugged at the pyjama cord he’d only just tied.
Sex-hyphen
, she suddenly remembered.

The lubricating jelly had given her a surrogate wetness, which seemed to flatter him. After some hunting around, he pushed into her with less difficulty than either of them had imagined. Even so, it hurt. She lay there, waiting for him to say something. When, instead, he began to move up and down inside her, she murmured, very politely, “I’m afraid I couldn’t get my thing in, darling.”

“Oh,” he said, in a curious, neutral voice, a voice from his job. “Oh.” He didn’t sound cross or disappointed, as she had expected him to. Instead, he began pushing harder into her, and just as she was starting to panic at the assault, he gave a high nasal wheeze, pulled out and ejaculated on her stomach. It was all very unexpected. It was like someone being sick over you, she thought.

When he half rolled away, she said, “I’m soaked. You’ve soaked me.”

“It always feels as if there’s more than there really is,” he replied. “It’s like blood.”

They were both silent at that sentence, at its implications as well as its mention of blood. He was panting slightly. She could smell brandy. She lay there with the bar talk rumbling on below as if nothing at all had happened anywhere in the world; she lay there in the dark, thinking about blood. Black and red, black and red—the colours of Prosser’s universe. Perhaps they were the only colours in the world when you came down to it.

“I’ll get you a handkerchief,” Michael said eventually.

“Don’t put the light on.”

“No.”

Another drawer squeaked, and he passed her a handkerchief. It felt the size of a head scarf. She laid it over her stomach, put her hand on it, and rubbed gently in a circular motion. The gesture children use to indicate hunger. Except that someone had just been sick over her. She screwed the handkerchief into a ball, threw it out of bed, pulled down her nightdress and rolled over on her side.

The next morning she kept her eyes closed when she heard Michael wake. He came back whistling from the bathroom, dressed, gave her a shake, slapped her chummily on the hip and murmured, “See you down there, darling.”

Perhaps it was all right. She dressed quickly and hurried down. Yes, it did seem to be all right, or so she judged from the way he kept passing her too much toast and topping up her cup before it was empty. Perhaps he didn’t think she was defective; perhaps he wouldn’t send her back.

She had to say something about it, though. This was what happened in marriage, after all. That evening, as they changed for dinner. She found courage when his back was turned. “I’m sorry about last night.”

He didn’t answer. He probably was cross. She started again. “I’m sure … I’m sure next time …”

He came around to where she was sitting on the bed and sat half beside her, half behind her. He put a big finger to her lips. “Shh,” he went. “It’s quite all right. It’s natural you’re highly strung at this sort of time. I won’t make a nuisance of myself again before we leave.”

That wasn’t what she wanted to hear at all. It was kind enough, but it seemed almost to be changing the subject. She had to try again. They weren’t like their parents, after all, were they: they had read books, and Michael, presumably, had been to the brothels in London. She took his finger from her lips.

“I’ll manage next time,” she said, beginning to shake a little;
though perhaps this was because Michael was gripping her shoulder rather hard.

“We aren’t talking about it,” he said firmly. “That’s enough now. You’ll do.” He placed both hands over her face in a soap-smelling caress. One covered the top of her face down to the tip of her nose; the other covered her mouth and chin. A little light peeped in between two of his slightly parted fingers. He held her there for a while, in the soft cage of his hands.

For the last two nights of their honeymoon he didn’t trouble her. They returned to live in the two rooms Michael’s gaunt mother had allotted them in her square, cold house. The first week was not a success. Either she had a sticky-fingered struggle with her diaphragm, only to find that Michael stayed up late talking to his mother; or she didn’t bother and found him pressing up hard against her. She would go off to the bathroom, struggle and panic, then return and find him asleep, or feigning sleep.

“Michael,” she said, the second time this happened. He grunted. “Michael, what is it?”

“Nothing,” he said, in a voice that meant: Something.

“Tell me.” No reply. “Go on.” No reply. “I can’t be expected to guess.”

Eventually, in a weary voice, he replied, “It’s meant to be spontaneous.”

“Oh dear.”

The following night, with help from a little drink, Michael elaborated. It’s no good if it isn’t spontaneous; and for want of better, or any other, information, she agreed, It’s awful if everything’s cut and dried. There’s something sickening about getting on the boil, pardon the expression, and then having to go off the boil for ten minutes or so; she agreed, blushing inwardly and wondering how long other women took. They couldn’t go on having this charade, never coinciding, like the weathermen on a cuckoo clock; she agreed. It would probably help matters—just to begin with, just until they knew one another better—if they decided on certain days when she would … put her thing in; not, of course,
that this necessarily …; she agreed. It seemed to him, thinking it over, that Saturday was one obvious time, because there was always Sunday morning as well if he was too tired on Saturday night; and perhaps Wednesday as well, at least as long as his current shift pattern continued. She agreed, she agreed. Saturday and Wednesday, she said to herself, on Saturday and Wednesday we shall be spontaneous.

The system worked quite well. She got better at handling the box; Michael didn’t hurt her; she became used to the noises he made—the sort of noises you normally associated with small mammals. There was something distinctly nice about sex, she decided, about having your husband’s sex-hyphen joined to you, about feeling him turn childish in your arms.

Even so, it did leave her with quite a lot of time for thought. This wasn’t, after all, the time when she most loved Michael; she wished it were, but it wasn’t. As for the feelings she had in what Dr. Headley would have referred to as her nether regions … well, where were all these interlocking crosscurrents she had been led to expect? Where was the honk of gulls and that pure stretch of sand now bearing a single trail of footprints—footprints whose toes pointed outwards? It wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced before. Or was it? Slowly, a memory clarified itself. Yes, that was it: down at the Old Green Heaven with Uncle Leslie, playing the Shoelace Game. That’s what it was like: ticklish, and nice, and a bit funny, and different.

She began to laugh as she remembered, but this disturbed Michael, and she turned the laugh into a cough. What a coincidence. But then she’d always known that sex was funny. It was what she had told Dr. Headley. Silly Dr. Headley.

And that was it, she supposed, lying there one night beneath Michael. That was her life. She didn’t feel self-pity about this, merely recognized it. You were born, you grew up, you got married. People pretended—perhaps they really believed—that when you got married it was the start of your life. But it wasn’t like that. Getting married was an end, not a beginning: why else did so many films
and books finish at the altar? Getting married was an answer, not a question. This wasn’t a matter for complaint, simply a matter for observation. You got married, and that was you settled.