“We started early,” Snowberry said. He slugged his beer.
Robin sighed. Jean sipped the beer. At the bar they were arguing about the quality of the whiskey.
“I guess we’re sort of like what you hear about Americans, huh?” Bryant said.
Robin conceded a small smile. “What do the Americans say about us?” she asked. “We’re curious.”
“There’re two theories,” Snowberry said. “One is that English girls are as loose as a goose, and that they’ll say right out what candy or gum’ll get you. The other is that they’re just like any other girls, and that any guy who thinks differently is a sap. Lewis is always saying that.”
“And to which view do you subscribe?” Robin asked.
“I think you’re the berries,” Snowberry said.
“A third theory,” Jean said disparagingly.
Bryant knew the statement to be only half fraudulent: Snowberry was wild about Jean, probably more than he knew, and had been able to keep his feelings fairly discreet, a trick Bryant envied. But he also had quoted theory number one to Bryant more than once, and liked to say concerning Jean’s response to alcohol that after a few drinks the three inhibitions she did have disappeared. The commonly accepted wisdom around the squadron based on both experience and wishful thinking was that if you wore wings, you were halfway home.
“You shouldn’t flatter yourself, Gordon,” Jean said. “We’re here because you’re entertaining, and every bit as generous as you’re hopeful.” Robin laughed. “And”—Jean touched his cheek—“you’re quite handsome, in a younger brother way.”
Snowberry grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“If you ladies are golddiggers, why not officers?” Bryant asked. “Why not Lieutenant Gabriel, or Cooper?” He was secretly afraid of just that: officers with more going for them stealing her away.
“Don’t give them a choice like that,” Snowberry said. “Make it fair. Isn’t Gable an officer?”
“I think you’ve proven quite nicely that enlisted men, with a bit of jerrying around here and there, somehow acquire all the resources available in your Air Corps to officers.”
“I think we ought to put our cards on the table,” Bryant said. “We think you’re the berries, and you think we’re tops, too.”
Robin smiled. She raised her glass, and they toasted the announcement. One by one they fell to gazing at a poster over the door, of a British Tommy charging forward with a disconcerting ferocity. The caption read, He’s Working for You — Are You Working for Him? The poster had evidently been torn in half and reassembled. Robin mentioned the connection with the pub’s sign. They drank more quickly, looking for the most part at each other, anxious to get out from under the influence of the poster.
On the way back to the cottage Jean and Snowberry held hands. Two children were trying to boot apples soccer-style into a pail. A young woman was peering keenly at the action of a hinge as she swung the door this way and that. It occurred to Bryant as he passed through the village that everyday life was the surprise, not the war: the surprise was in the revelation that all of this life would go on, unconcerned, as he and his friends did what they did every day.
He fancied Robin was thinking the same way. Her eyes were following a low stone wall, and she knitted her brows, as if displeased, the way his father did. Ahead of them Snowberry and Jean were evidently discussing Snowberry’s left hand.
“Why don’t I ever fall in love at first sight?” Robin asked. She looked at Bryant, who was unable to shrug or smile. The comment seemed thoughtless and deflating. “I suppose it has something to do with my father,” she added. “I never knew him very well. Mother used to say he treated us badly when he treated us at all.”
“I was never very close to my father, either,” Bryant said. But your father’s still alive, dope, he thought.
“He was killed in a shipping accident. Did I tell you that?”
“Yes, you did.” He wondered what Snowberry and Jean were talking about. “Though that’s all you said.”
She said, “It all sounds so pathetic and commonplace I suppose I don’t often see the point of going into it.”
He groped for something that would help. He wanted to know more about her, but was retaining very little.
She smiled for his benefit. “It’s funny how everyone agrees on the awfulness of growing up, isn’t it?”
He thought he should say something. He remembered Snowberry. “Gordon doesn’t. He’s always telling me these great stories. I always feel like, God, did I miss the boat.”
She gazed ahead sympathetically at Snowberry’s back. “Perhaps he’s forgotten,” she said.
On a low knoll a terrier watched them with the paranoid expression peculiar to the breed. Another dog lay snoozing with its fur poking through the slats of a garden fence, and before arriving at the cottage, he caught a mysterious and fleeting glimpse down a side lane of a small boy in shorts riding a black dog along a winding path beneath silent and dark trees.
Elizabeth had retired, leaving a pot of tea in its quilted warmer and an overlong note on the dining room table. Bryant had the sudden intuition that she’d been given some sort of instructions prior to their visit. Jean and Gordon went out to the garden despite the dark, and Bryant and Robin tidied up at the strange stone sink. He put away in the cream-colored cupboards dishes or utensils that Robin would then quietly relocate. It began to rain, the sound light on the leaves outside the windows. They heard the heavier sound of running footsteps, and Jean swept back in, with Snowberry behind her. She shook out her hair and Snowberry rubbed his shoulders while Robin circled the room turning out the lamps. Robin kissed Bryant’s cheek and Jean kissed Snowberry on the lips and they said goodnight.
“Aw, Jeez,” Snowberry said, shivering a bit for effect.
“Let us know if you need anything,” Jean whispered.
“I need something,” Snowberry said.
“Goodnight,” she said again, and the two girls ascended the stairs. Bryant said goodnight and Robin turned on the landing and hesitated, silhouetted in a nimbus of light in the hallway.
Snowberry climbed the stairs himself soon afterwards, disappointed and tired. “I think we probably do worse with girls than anybody in the Army,” he said as he climbed. Bryant remained in the kitchen, sitting in the dark and listening to the loud ticking of a clock he hadn’t noticed. There was a faint biscuity smell. The rain had stopped and the cardboard blackout shutters rattled faintly against the window frames. In the bathroom he discovered behind the washstand an old corner of National bread, plush with mold. The loo was a separate room altogether, with a long chain hanging down from a flushing tank set up higher than eye level. Bryant assumed it had something to do with gravity. He dreamed that night about a Bing Crosby record with Jesus Christ accompanying on clarinet, and remembered wondering vaguely how sleeping people got their hands on such recordings.
In the morning when he woke no one was in the house, and in the garden Robin was standing quite still, with a hand cupped and raised over her forearm, her face as placid and beautiful in its absorption as the face of a woman in a painting. Only the tremor of background primroses compromised the stillness. The air above the trees rang with a mysterious bird. The short sleeves of her blouse trembled, and she slapped the insect, and broke the spell.
When he joined her, they sat in wicker garden chairs under the cherry tree she had written him about.
“They’ve gone for a walk,” Robin said.
Bryant rubbed his chin. “Were they trying to leave us alone, you think?”
She sniffed. “Jeannie adores the thought of mad, secret lives of endless trysts and intrigue. I suppose I’ve let her down a bit on that score. The silly thing is, Gordon seems to believe he’s initiating things.”