“Nothing”—bending again to kiss her. I’ll be off tomorrow — a fact that kept hammering at him, wouldn’t let him live out the last few hours with her in peace. It had been in his mind all day, and now they lay silently together it became more painful. Back to prison. I’m free now: I should just piss off and desert. It’d be a few days before they missed me. I wain’t see her for another three months, studying my guts out at radio school to be jumped-up wireless operator. It’s a wonder I passed the aptitude tests for it. His hand touched her swollen breasts and he kissed each of her closed eyelids: the whole of her vision, all that she had seen and would ever see, was beating in the delicate hump under the thin white lids of flesh. And completely in her is a kid I can’t bear to leave as well. We ought to make the most of these few hours — but he couldn’t speak. There’s a time when you can’t do much but talk, and then there’s a time when you can’t do anything but kiss; and the trouble is that you’ve got no bleeding say as to when it will be.
She clung to him: he’ll be off tomorrow, and the fact tormented her, keeping her close to tears the more she thought of it. I shan’t see him for a long while, and she felt afraid of being without him, even though both families looked up to her now and would keep her company. It’s getting dark already, and we’ll have to go soon. “Brian, when do you think your next leave’ll be?”
“Near Christmas.” He raised his head and saw two men walking through the meadow, maybe poachers, though it was hardly dark enough for that, and he was uneasy at the thought that they might be seen. It’d be good to do it out here.
She placed her fingers on his cheek and kissed him. Maybe he will, but I don’t know whether it’ll be all right, though in one way it would be nice, far from people and houses and on our own. He returned the kiss and suddenly there were tears in her throat and she tightened her arms around him. He won’t, she thought, so maybe he doesn’t love me any more.
His arms were cold and he sat up to reach his jacket. A mist was creeping among the far fields, sun descending like a deserter, skulking behind the trees where grey clouds merged. She opened her hand and patted the ground: “It’s damp. You should be more careful.”
He stood. We can’t do it here. “It’s autumn already,” he said. A tree branch swayed nearby and he looked hard but saw nothing, helped her up, thinking maybe it was the prospect of parting that made them such clumsy and hesitant lovers. He lifted his overcoat and put it on. “Look at that mist over there,” she pointed as they walked slowly down. Their attention was caught and suspended by a strange silence. Everything was still and quiet.
“It’s funny,” he said, puzzled by it.
“It’s the harvest machine that’s stopped,” she guessed.
At the foot of the hill they turned for a moment to look into the sun. Why didn’t we? he wondered. It would have been good. The sun was blood-red and misshaped behind the thin trunks of a clump of trees some distance off, and it looked like a premature medal commemorating the winter that was on its way. A sombre crimson light flushed the meadows on either side of the copse.
She wrote once a week, and he worked hard training for his sparks badge, an attainment which would mean more pay and the satisfaction of having a real trade for the first time in his life. Daytime went quickly at class: drawing and describing superheterodyne circuits and transmitter units, studying Ohm’s Law and WT procedure, stepping up week by week to higher speeds of morse practice and teleprinter-operating, to culminate later in out-station exercises. He enjoyed the drawing-in of knowledge and skill, which more than made up for what little parade-ground bullshit there was.
But the long evenings were a yoke that crushed him into a broody silence, so physically strong as he sat by himself in the NAAFI that he grew to feel the resemblance they must have borne to those he had seen his father suffer during the long empty dole days before the war, steeped in vicious bouts of frustrations because he felt he could do nothing about the situation he had let himself fall into. It was a naked agony he couldn’t throw off for weeks after his return from Nottingham. He wrote two letters to Pauline’s one, and was so impatient and disappointed at the inadequacy of hers that he raged and often pulled himself back from screwing them up. But the occasional letter, which was written on impulse and not in answer to one of his, gave out the warm glow of her love in a quickening real sense that his long and thought-out ones rarely achieved. A few words juxtaposed in an unconscious and original way immediately flooded him with the totality of their so-far ecstatic love, drew him right back and painfully into it.
He tried studying, dissected the symbols and diagrams in his notebooks, knowing that if he passed his exams at over sixty per cent he would qualify for more pay, but the pages were too complex to assimilate without further help from an instructor. As the dark frosts of winter came, the unheated billets at night meant sitting permanently in a sub-zero bath of stale air, because for some reason all deliveries of coal to airmen’s billets had ceased. So with a couple of ex-merchant navy roughnecks and an exborstal boy from Glasgow, Brian went on foraging expeditions. They crept silently around with high stockpiles of coal near the well-warmed officers’ quarters, loading sacks and returning black as bandits to set a red fire blazing — to the benefit also of the timid or lazy — in the potbellied stove.
Now and again he went out alone into the white-covered frost fields of a Gloucestershire night and made his way overland to the village, where he threw down a few pints of rough cider and scorched himself by the lavish fire, despite resentful stares from the locals, who felt themselves deprived of its flames by his presence — a mere scab of an airman from the camp which they must have regarded as a blight on the surface of their fair county unless they were tradesmen or shopkeepers. Drank and impervious to the cold, he would weave back to camp, falling like a sack on his bed, to be pulled from sleep next morning by the thick imperative rope of reveille at half-past six.
As Christmas and his next leave approached, he lived with the healthy sound of an express train passing through a station on one of whose platforms he would be waiting. The clean heavy rhythm of its wheels followed him into sleep at night during the last few days, its wheels regular and cleanly solid, evenly beating out a series of V’s, and in the middle of the series, one V coming too quickly on the tail of another and breaking the rhythm slightly — a thrilling and realistic dovetailing of sound. When the end of the train vanished, the noise dragged into a tunnel, and the wind played on the back of his head — because some thoughtless bastard had left the billet window open.
There was a black fog all over the country and the train took five hours to reach Derby. It was crowded, and with a dozen others he found refuge in a luggage wagon, where they spread themselves over sacks, greatcoats tightened in the bitter cold. He reached Nottingham at midnight, a deserted woe-begone station slabbedout on either side of the tracks as he made his loaded way, ticket in teeth, towards the rising steps marked “Exit.”
He took a taxi that purred its swift way through the dead roads of town to Canning Circus, a crest of the tarmac wave then sweeping gently beyond the valley of the Lean and along the wide well-lighted, familiar road to where the Mullinders lived.
His mother-in-law let him in, stood by the stairfoot door saying she’d get straight back to bed because of the cold, and see him in the morning.
“Is Pauline O.K.?” he wanted to know.