So there is no reason why I should be writi …
Mrs Golson’s pen faltered, and the next moment she had seized the sheets containing so much that was deplorable, emotional, naked, and was attempting to tear or worry her shame apart.
She had only to some extent succeeded when she heard, ‘What are you up to, treasure?’
She turned, the nightdress slithering off one shoulder; she must have looked — womanly.
‘Trying to write to Eadie, darling — the letter I’ve owed her all this time.’
Showing her the most forgiving smile, he advanced and covered up the naked shoulder, when she could tell he would rather have undressed the other.
‘Silly old thing! If we take the Simla at the end of the week — as I’m sure you’ll have the good sense to agree to — we’ll be back as quick as any letter.’
‘I expect we shall,’ she admitted, fumbling with the bits of paper torn as small as they would ever be torn.
She laughed up at him. And while still holding this confetti of a letter, she accepted with the other hand the one her husband was offering. It had a strength for which she was grateful; she accepted even the hairs on the wrist below the freshly laundered cuff.
(Only to be rid of this ‘clever’, this ‘literary’ letter. Eat it? Too constipating. Throw it down the lavatory then. Or would it return to shame her before they left at the end of the week? Scatter it on a walk through the town. Oh, no, a trail for Miss Clitheroe to follow and piece together.)
‘My nerves are to pot,’ she groaned. ‘It’s this war they never stop talking about.’ She held the back of his hand against her cheek. ‘How lucky we are to be Australian!’ It thrilled her husband’s hand to detect this uncharacteristic enthusiasm. ‘I shan’t be happy till we’re back having breakfast together — in the morning-room — above dear old Parsley Bay …’
Part II
It was his habit to walk the deck before its holy-stoning, while the last wet kisses and the smell of sperm were evaporating. For miles he tramped, up and down and round the corner. He would have liked to think it an exorcism, whereas it was a repetition: he was accompanied by the same, dun-coloured, laden figures returning to the front line; from whatever distance he was still aware of the stench of death. He kept it up hopefully however, all along the choppy periwinkle waves of a Mediterranean on which he was also turning his back, the scents he could recollect, of thyme, pine, carnation and rose, as opposed to the synthetic perfumes of recklessly expectant human beings in the first stages of a long voyage. He liked to think he was reserving himself for something ahead, and that he would emerge at last from the bombardment, not only of a past war, but the past. Unless perhaps, exorcism is a conjuring trick which does not work for those born without the requisites for grace.
At least his clothes were beginning to feel easier on him. He could face faces, the sound of quoits splattering around him, the exaggerated heartiness of returning colonials, and the patronage of the English who were going out to teach them something.
But from most of it he remained aloof, and they wondered why.
They discussed him outside the purser’s office, and more brutally, over cocktails in the Smoking Room, investigating the credentials of this possibly regrettable, while desirable young man, this Eddie Twyborn.
Two young women were at it by the rail, one in the authoritarian, English county voice, the other in the loose, but no less assured accent of the established Australian rich. It was an acquaintanceship formed partly out of boredom, partly for mutual protection, somewhere off Crete, on one of the chillier, choppier afternoons of a periwinkle Mediterranean.
‘I adore the Med, don’t you? It makes me feel I’m abroad at last.’
‘I only know it from passing through.’
‘Oh well—now—so am I — perhaps for ever.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘Well, you see, I became engaged to an Australian. That’s why I’m going out,’ the English girl explained, while looking at a rather small sapphire exposed before her on the ship’s rail.
‘You won’t regret it,’ the Australian said without hesitation. ‘By the way,’ she added, as though offering her immigrant acquaintance a stanchion. ‘I’m Margaret Gilchrist. My close friends,’ she giggled, ‘call me Margs.’
‘Oh?’ the county one returned. ‘Well, I’m Angela Parsons. But answer to Angie.’ She too threw in a giggle.
So the relationship was established, as much as anything through confidence in each other’s high-lit teeth, of which Angie’s were only very slightly buckled.
‘I’m so glad we’ve met,’ she said. ‘So far it’s been a tremendous bore — so under-populated — any way with men.’
Margs glanced at the small sapphire on the hand grasping the varnished rail. ‘What does your fiancé do?’
Angie grew serious. ‘He farms,’ she said. ‘I believe he has,’ she manipulated her buckled teeth, ‘what is called a sheep station.’
‘Oh yes, that’s what it’s called!’ Margs giggled approvingly. ‘You’re all right there.’ But paused. ‘Daddy’s a doctor — a specialist in diseases of the heart.’
They both looked appropriately grave, steadying themselves on the rail and rocking with the motion of the ship.
Margs told how she had been nursing a bit at the home of her aunt Lady Ifield, in Sussex. (‘Not really? I believe Mummy knows her!’) Angie had been driving an ambulance, which was how she had met Doug when he was returned wounded from the trenches.
The girls agreed the War had been simply ghastly, though not without its rewarding moments.
‘Weren’t you ever engaged?’ asked Angie.
‘Not actually, but almost,’ Margs confessed.
‘Did you sleep with him?’
‘You have to, haven’t you? when there’s a war on.’
‘Exactly! That’s what I felt about Doug.’
It was fascinating for the two friends to be thus engrossed in moral issues.
Angela looked round at a husband helping a queasy wife erect a reluctant deck chair. ‘Have you ever seen such a collection of pot-bellied men?’
‘Every one of them hairy, I’d say.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘By what’s missing on top.’
The two young women shrieked at the waves.
‘But hair can be rather fascinating,’ Angela said when she had subsided.
Margs looked round. ‘There’s a smooth one, though — have you come across him? Eddie Twyborn.’
‘Oh yes. Lieutenant Twyborn.’
‘Is he a lieutenant?’
‘Was, I’m told. Decorated too.’
Margs looked ready to gobble up, not only the smoothness, but the decoration.
Furtive in their confidences, they both looked round to see the object of them approaching.
He passed by.
He was walking stiffly, his bearing tentative for a man, holding with Gothic hand against his chest the book he had been, or intended, reading. He was certainly not ‘pot-bellied’, and his well-covered skull, the hair of a cut to suggest an army officer, should have exempted him from accusations of hairiness by those who supported Margs’s theory.
It was the face, however, which fascinated, not to say awed, the two observers. It had about it a detachment which could have passed for purity, which each of the girls must have sensed, for Angie said, after he was out of earshot, ‘Do you think a man can be naturally pure? I don’t mean monks and priests and things — and even those;’ to which Margs, struggling with the proposition, replied, ‘I’d never thought — but I see what you mean. Oh, yes!’