He asked, ‘Aren’t you going to undress?’ though still with his back to her.
‘No,’ she replied.
He got into bed, pulling the sheet over his head.
‘We didn’t last night, Mamma and I.’
‘You’ll be smelly if you don’t, two nights running.’
She took off her shoes and stood them together as neatly as Aunt Cleone would have demanded. She pulled off her stockings, rolling each into a ball before sticking them in her empty shoes. She too took off her dress, folded and hung it over the foot of the bed. After this there was nothing to prevent her getting between Mrs Bulpit’s damp grey sheets.
She should have felt safely sandwiched, and the surrounding silence saved her from further depredations, if it had not been for a distant crash.
‘What is it — Gilbert?’ she asked.
‘Possums.’ His mouth made a big round O through the sheet.
‘They must be huge.’
‘Some of them are,’ the sheet veiling his face quivered with suppressed sniggers, before he snatched it off.
‘Gotter turn the light out!’
He tore across the room in the washed-out pyjamas, the legs and sleeves of which were by now too short.
Then darkness rushed at them. It swallowed the leaning warrant officer, the pieces of Bulpit furniture, and anything as personal as the hopes and fears of those temporarily living there.
A violent plunk of springs told Eirene Sklavos that Gilbert Horsfall must have landed back on his bed. The distance separating them stretched even wider than before. The rough sheets were sawing at her. The bloodspot on the finger she had pricked with a fork swelled against the darkness and swelled, becoming — was it? The head of that old man a tank had crushed outside the Royal (or National) gardens. Swelling and spilling. The old man’s bloody brains.
‘Tell us something.’
Gilbert’s voice had roughened in an attempt to become a man’s. She recognised the tone. It was that of the men Mamma enjoyed talking to. Holding her head on one side. You tried out your head in imitation against the rough, damp, Bulpit pillow.
‘I haven’t anything,’ she murmured back across the darkness lying between them.
‘You had plenty when we were talking before.’
‘That was then.’ She heard herself mewing into the pillow.
‘What’s up?’
She couldn’t tell him. She hardly knew.
The darkness was rocking, not so much the boat carrying her back to a war, but the motions of the dance she was dancing in the patisserie in Alexandria. Mamma hated this officer, but her body could not refuse to dance.
‘You’re a sooky sort of girl,’ Gilbert Horsfall was complaining.
All the girls he had known were crowding in on her through the darkness, long-legged yellow-haired English girls, cold and perfect Miss Adams said she loved the daffies in spring time at Home. Some of Gilbert’s girls wore lipstick. They were women in front.
‘I can’t help it,’ she mewed worse than ever.
They entered the worst silence of all. Was any of it happening to them? The war, Australia, this vast Bulpit room with iron beds clamped to opposite walls.
‘Why don’t you come over?’ he twittered.
Why should she? It made her raise her head against the pillow. Others always came to Mamma. This boy with the hoarse voice and shrunk pyjamas. Gilbert Horsfall’s wriggly torso. Who knew about bread and dripping. She snorted slightly, licked her lips. She had never felt so tall and slender. Her strength was returning.
‘Not if you’re afraid,’ he said, ‘but you needn’t worry about her. She’s as safe as a lead sinker once she’s under the brandy.’
‘I’m not afraid. It’s you. Otherwise you’d come over here.’
To demonstrate the truth of her remark and her own superiority, she jumped out of bed before he could, only regretting her recklessness halfway across the gritty darkness, and set up a mewing again on stubbing her toe on a castor. At once the dark was full of threats. It was a comfort to find herself thrown forward, sprawling like a crab on Gilbert Horsfall’s bony chest.
‘Ahoo … it’s cold,’ she moaned.
‘Not where I come from,’ he whinged back.
The temperature was at least an excuse for her to get into bed and pull up the clothes. She would have liked to snuggle, but lay as stiff and straight as he was lying. It seemed there was nothing either of them could do beyond go along with those private palpitations, fluctuating with rubbery persistence, and listen to each other’s breathing.
In the distance there was the sound of a ship, the grumbling of a city’s traffic, farther still the explosions and guns, the cries of those who are wounded, which your blood and your dreams know everything about.
After a while, when they slid into what felt like a shallow backwater, halfway between thoughts and sleep, he thumped his limbs against the mattress and started getting at her again, ‘Tell me about the pneuma.’
‘I told you, I can’t. Not in English.’
‘But you could if you wanted to.’
‘You can’t! You can’t! It’s the sort of thing you can’t talk about.’
‘If I was dying,’ he croaked, twisting his head from side to side, grinding a feverish body against the mattress, ‘you’d hold out on me?’
She could feel her teeth grow very small as she smiled at the darkness.
‘It’s like the moon.’
‘The moon’s pagan, isn’t it?’
‘Not always.’ She was very happy to discover this.
‘I bet you’re not telling me anything of what you know.’ In his expostulation and feverish tossing, his wrist brushed against hers. She was surprised to find it covered with minute hooks.
She would have liked her wrist to give into his but did not dare. Then again, she didn’t want to, did she?
‘Hadn’t we better go to sleep?’ she said, and turned her back on him.
She got a surly grunt.
Not long after she didn’t know what had happened to Gilbert Horsfall. She was sitting by herself at the small round table its top moulded out of pig’s brawn edged with a pie-crust in some kind of metal. Not by herself really there was the small white cup with its sludge of Turkish — no, Greek coffee, and the glass with the half-finished Café Liegeois (more than the solid glass and its half-drunk contents she was conscious of the voice which had ordered it.) Her own consommation was out of focus except as something sweet and sticky. Like your fingers. Mamma hated sticky fingers.
Now it was the music stickily revolving inside the oval of this patisserie that Mamma should have condemned. This Cruel Tango. Like a sticky drum revolving and revolving. Leaning forward chin in hand brought you closer to the dancers, stamping a point into the floor (brawn again). The thick ankles in wartime shoes, Mamma says it is impossible to look elegant in wartime, Maltese, Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Hungarians and Romanians are different, because professional, or dishonest. As she revolves, with the axiomatikos who has brought them to the patisserie. She can’t resist the sticky dance any more than the old lady’s loulou beside her on the gold chain can resist the strawberry tartlet served by the Arab on the surface of the pig’s-brawn table.
As the dancers revolve to the repetitive music of the Cruel Tango, bump and stamp, the Greek, the Maltese, the Armenian, the thick ankles, the short-legged Jewesses, and more professional Romanians and Hungarians. Stamp and swerve. The pistachio eyes of some dancers. Eyes beaded with Egyptian flies. O Cruel Tango.