After dressing she walked some way through the Anglo-Flemish landscape, at each step experiencing the same struggle to withdraw her by no means exaggerated heels from the grey sand and mangled pig’s-face.
She must have walked for over an hour. A red sun was rising out of a northern sea. At points along the coast one of the dun-coloured figures would train binoculars on the seascape. Obsessed by the prospect of invasion, they showed no interest whatsoever in what might have been a rewarding suspect in their rear.
When she got in she returned to her room to make up her face before going in search of Gravenor. Her natural lips tasted of salt; there were encrustations at the corners of her eyes, a mingling of sea salt, tears, the detritus which dreams leave.
She found him in his room doing press-ups in his underpants: the long form of an almost transparent, pink grasshopper.
‘Why don’t you join me?’ he suggested. ‘The exercise would do you good’ as he went on pressing his chest against the carpet, and up.
‘I’ve taken my exercise. Along the coast. For quite two hours.’
‘What a glutton! You might have been arrested by a captain. Or raped by a sergeant.’
‘I think I’ve learnt enough to hold them off.’
Gravenor carried on with his press-ups. Feathered like a bronze cockerel on the shoulders, the pronounced vertebrae so exposed, the calves and Achilles tendons so strained, the heels polished almost as white as the bone beneath the skin, she was overcome by a tenderness which made her avoid them. She went and looked out the window at a view which was becoming hateful to her, as hateful as the blind room in her dream.
‘I’m going to leave you today,’ she said. ‘It was foolish of me to come. And you to have asked me.’
‘If that’s how you feel, I’ll run you over to the station.’
All the banalities of human intercourse were called into play in the kitchen as he served her with a coddled egg, Oxford marmalade, and burnt toast.
He told her she had made herself look ‘extraordinarily attractive’ and she cackled back at him in self-defence, like an ageing whore who would not have given up doing the boat-trains if the boat-trains hadn’t been taken over.
For all that, he didn’t seem discouraged.
Although unpunctual at the station, they arrived at the moment the train came in sight.
‘I’ll write to you,’ he told her as they broke free from a hurried kiss.
She couldn’t say she would reply because, from the little she had been able to gather, she wouldn’t know how to find him. By the same token, he might never reach her.
She looked back out of the narrow window for a last glimpse of this sandy man, standing in his baggy, wind-blown clothes in a flat landscape.
Tentacles from a frayed and grubby antimacassar were trying for a hold on her hair as she lay back against the upholstery and closed her eyes to the press-ups, the pronounced vertebrae, the tense buttocks trembling inside cotton drawers, images she didn’t succeed in shutting out; they were projected in even more vivid detail on the dark screen her eyelids had let down.
In Beckwith Street the train of events provoked the house’s longstanding patrons to higher flights of lechery. Then there was a newer breed of client, his motives more obscure, often tortuous. If he was less dishonest than the regulars, it was because his unconscious reasons for disguising the truth were usually pure. These survivors of lost battles seemed intent on avoiding any accusation of heroism, let alone experience of transcendence, which some of them had evidently undergone. Those whose prayers had been answered no longer appeared to have faith, as though prayer were a drug which can outlive its virtue and fail to arrest future threats, more especially the constantly recurring disease of recollection. Now the survivors were falling back on brutishness; not only to absolve them of the sins of embarrassing heroism and shameful spirituality, but to dissolve memories of cowardice, authorised murder, dying friends, the faces of unknown families escaping with their bundles from the wreckage of their normal lives, the mummified death-throes of figures in a burnt-out tank, or a form shrouded in a parachute casually hanging from a tree.
In certain circumstances lust can become an epiphany, as Eadith Trist recognised while talking to some of those survivors of Dunkirk who frequented her brothel.
She was reminded of a man long forgotten, an Australian captain, who had met up with Eddie Twyborn during a lull in the First War. The captain was a Prowse before Prowse’s advent, if Eddie had realised. They were sitting together in a poor sort of estaminet some way behind the front, drinking the lees of their watered-down wine.
When the captain suddenly confided, ‘There’s nothing like a good fuck, mate, when the shit’s been scared out of you.’
He rinsed his mouth with the abysmal wine and squirted it out from between his teeth.
Eddie agreed. ‘I expect you’re right.’ As he uncrossed his legs in a delicate situation, he thought he heard the chafing of silk, and blushed behind his dirt and stubble.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ the captain said, ‘I’ve never told it to anyone before — somethun funny that happened to me. We was over there a few weeks ago,’ he pointed with his pipe in a vague direction, ‘enjoyin’ a breather on our way back for a bit of a spell. I started pokin’ around where we’d halted. I was too nervous to stay put — we’d had it pretty tough the last trip. I went over to a farm that was still of a piece under cover of the next ridge. Always take a squint at what they’re up to on the land. Got a place of me own at Bungendore. Well, I was pokin’ round this poor sort of farm. God, it stank! of pig shit, like most of these Frog farms do. When I saw a bloody woman’s face lookin’ out of the winder at me. She’d every right, I had to admit. So I went in to apologise. We stood there sizing each other up. Couldn’t say a bloody word of course. This big, white-skinned, fine figure of a Frog woman — and me. And we started takin’ off our bloody clothes. You couldn’t say which of us started. She took me by the hand and we got on a bed, not in another room, but on a sort of platform down the other end of the kitchen. You could hear the kids playin’ in the yard. Where ’er husband was I couldn’t ask. P’raps down the paddock diggin’ up turnips. Otherwise, I reckoned, she wouldn’t ’uv been so foolish. There was nothun foolish about ’er—it—US. Except that I was pretty feeble. I don’t mind saying I was tremblin’ all over from what we’d been through up the line. But I mounted, and she let me in. An’ then this funny thing happened. It was not like I was just fuckin’ a Frog woman with greased thighs. I reckon we were both carried, like, beyond the idea of orgasm. In my case, I was too fuckun tired. Just joggun along like it was early mornun, the worst of the frost just about over. As you doze in the saddle. The light as warm and soft and yeller as the wool on a sheep’s back …’
The captain spat on the estaminet floor.
‘You’ll think me a funny sort of joker. But that’s how it was as I fucked this Frog. And more. Wait till I tell yer.’ If he could; he’d begun to look so uneasy. ‘It was like as if a pair of open wings was spreading round the pair of us. Ever seen those white cockies pullin’ down the stooked oats soon as yer bloody back’s turned? Then sitting on a bough screechin’ their heads off! Well, like the wings of a giant cocky, soft, and at times explosive. You heard feathers explode, didn’t yer?’
By now the Australian captain had begun looking almost demented.