That night while we lay in the dark together we heard the sound of artillery, and jet aircraft roared overhead. The night was lit by brilliant flashes from explosions to the north of us. We heard troops marching along the road a quarter of a mile from us, and a stray shell exploded in the woods behind us. Sally clung to me and I tried to comfort her. The noise of the artillery itself remained constant, but the explosions from the shells varied considerably between being very close and very distant. We heard small-arms fire from time to time and the sounds of men’s voices.
In the morning it drizzled again, and the countryside was still. Reluctant to move, as if the act of doing so would re-initiate the violence, Sally and I stayed in our bivouac until the last possible moment. Then at ten o’clock we packed our gear hastily and set off towards the station. We arrived at just before eleven. This time there were no soldiers. The station had been bombed, and the railway track itself had been blown up in several places. We looked at the ruin in desolate horror. Later, I threw away the receipt.
That evening we were captured by a detachment of the Afrim forces and taken in for our first session of interrogation.
Isobel and I lay together in the dark. We were on the floor. In the room above us her parents were asleep in bed. They did not know I was there. Though they liked me, and encouraged Isobel to see more of me, they would not have been pleased if they were aware of what we had been trying to do in their sitting-room.
It was after three in the morning and therefore essential we made no noise.
I had removed my jacket and shirt.
Isobel had taken off her dress, her slip and her brassiere. At this time our relationship had developed to the point where she allowed me to remove most of her clothing while we kissed, and to fondle her breasts. She had never allowed me to touch her in the region of her pubes. In the past, most of the girls I had known had shown a liberal attitude towards sex, and I was puzzled at Isobel’s apparent lack of interest. Her reticence had been alluring at first — and continued to be so — but now I was beginning to see that she was genuinely frightened of sex. Although my interest in her had been initially almost entirely sexual, as we grew to know one another I had developed a deep liking for her and had made my sexual advances to her more and more gently. The combination of her physical beauty and her gaucherie was a continual delight to me.
After a prolonged session of kissing and petting I lay back on the floor and allowed Isobel to run her hand lightly over my chest and stomach. While she did this I found myself willing her to slide her hand into the top of my trousers and caress my penis.
Gradually her hand moved down until it was rubbing lightly against the cloth of the waistband. When her fingers did eventually explore the cloth, they came into contact with the end of my penis almost at once. Evidently unaware to that moment of my tumescence, she snatched her hand away at once and lay at my side, facing away from me, trembling.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered to her after a minute or two, knowing both that I would get no reply and that I already knew what had happened. “What’s the matter?”
She said nothing. After a while I put my hand on her shoulder and found her skin to be cold.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered again.
She still made no reply. In spite of what had happened, I remained erected, unaffected by the trauma she experienced.
In a while she rolled back towards me and, laying on her back, took my hand and placed it on her breast. Like her shoulder, it was cold. The nipple was shrunken and lumpy.
She said: “Go on. Do it.”
“Do what?”
“You know. What you want.”
I didn’t move, but lay there with my hand on her breast, not wishing to create a positive movement by either doing as she said or taking my hand away altogether.
When I made no response, she took my hand again and thrust it down roughly to her crutch. With her other hand she dragged down her pants and laid my hand on her pubes. I felt warm, soft down. She started shaking.
I made love to her at once. It was painful for both of us. Pleasureless. We made a lot of noise; so much so that I was scared her parents would hear us and come to investigate. As I climaxed, my penis slipped from its place and my semen went half inside her, half on to the floor.
I pulled away from her as soon as I could and lay away from her. Part of me remained detached, seeing wryly my experienced sexual artistry reduced to fumbling adolescence by the encounter with frigid innocence; part of me lay curled up on the floor, unwilling to move. .
In the end it was Isobel who moved first. She stood up and switched on the low-powered table-lamp. I looked up at her, seeing her slim young body nude for the first time, denuded for the first time of sexual mystery. She pulled on her clothes, kicked mine across to me. I put them on. Our eyes didn’t meet.
On the carpet where we had laid there was a small patch of damp. We tried to remove it with paper tissues, but a faint stain remained.
I was ready to leave. Isobel came over to me, whispered in my ear that I was to push my motorcycle to the end of the road before starting it up. Then she kissed me. We agreed to see each other again the following week-end. As we walked out into the hall we were holding hands.
Her father was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs dressed in his pyjamas. He looked tired. As I walked past him he said nothing to me, but stood up and held Isobel tightly by her wrist. I left, starting the engine outside the house.
We had not used any form of contraceptive. Though Isobel did not become pregnant from that intercourse she did conceive a few weeks before we were married. From that time we had sex together very occasionally, and to my knowledge she attained orgasm only rarely. After Sally was born, what sexual dependence on one another that we had ever had grew less, and in due course I found myself turning to other women who were able to give me what Isobel couldn’t.
In the good times, I would gaze at Isobel across a distance, seeing again the pale blue dress and the youthful beauty of her face, and a bitter regret would well inside me.
As the days passed since the abduction of the women by the Afrim soldiers, it seemed to me that while my own quest grew stronger that of the other men diminished. I found myself questioning whether we were moving on in the eternal search for a safe place to camp and somewhere that we may obtain food, or whether we were still pursuing our search for the women.
They were mentioned less and less frequently, and since the visit to Augustin’s brothel it was sometimes as if they had never been with us. But we were reminded forcibly of what might have happened to them on the day after we met the African guerrillas.
We came to a group of houses that were marked on the map as being a hamlet called Stowefield. At first sight it appeared to be no different from any one of a hundred others we had come across in the past.
We approached it with our customary caution, determined that if the hamlet were barricaded we would retreat immediately.
That there had at one time been barricades became apparent at once. Across the road at the side of the first house there was a pile of rubble, which had been pushed aside to make a gap wide enough for a lorry to pass through.
With Lateef, I inspected the ground behind where the barricade had been and we discovered several dozen empty shotgun cartridges.
We investigated every house in the hamlet and within half an hour had established that it had been evacuated. We were fortunate in finding canned food in several of the houses and were thus able to replenish our supplies.
We speculated as to the identity of the men who had raided the village. It was probably prejudice which prompted the majority of us to assume it was the Afrims, but it had been our experience that this was the kind of action they would take against small settlements that they found barricaded.