“In the meantime,” Brian said, “the poor bastards are hanging in the trees, bleeding to death.” He lifted a Bible from the locker of the next bed, opened it, and put his finger on a random verse to find what the future held, a trick he’d seen in a film a few nights ago: “And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.” Among the people. What people? A loony game. I can’t make head or tail of it, and in any case I’m not superstitious. His filled pack lay tilted by the bed, this time weighing no more than forty pounds. He was also to collect a medium-range TR, if the mechanics could get it working before they left, for it was the only one at the camp. He flicked open the Bible, again thrust his finger on to a verse: “And they cut off his head.…” It kept opening at the same place because the binding was faulty, and would open there till the cows came home — unless he deliberately avoided it, which somehow he didn’t want to do because the more he read it, the more some hidden truth seemed to lurk at the heart of it. He half-understood its meaning by the time the driver poked his head in and bawled out that they were ready to go.
CHAPTER 26
On his first leave from square-bashing, Brian had got into Nottingham at eight of an evening, having taken most of the day to travel from the back-end of Gloucestershire. Reaching the wide green flatlands of the Trent beyond Brum, he felt so much excitement that he couldn’t eat the sandwiches and cake dashed out for at the last stop. Cows were dotted by peaceful and diminished streams and sunlight still burned into the packed corridor, and he felt himself being channelled nearer to Nottingham with every circling clatter of the wheels. The excitement in him was not so much at seeing Pauline as at the sensation in his stomach of being lost once more in the vast familiar spider’s web of Nottingham and all the comfortable meaning of it.
After a hello cup of tea with mam and dad in Radford, he hopped a couple of buses to see Pauline on the estate out at Aspley. Perhaps by some fluke the house would be empty and they’d be able to love each other on the settee or roll about in one of the made beds upstairs; or if not that, then happen they could go for a walk beyond the Broad Oak and snug down in some dry field of sweet summer grasses.
Everybody was in, at supper, as if they’d been waiting especially to greet him after his first ten weeks drilling like a brainless ragbag for his king and country. You never got what you hoped for, so he might have known it would be like this. Mrs. Mullinder poured him tea in the pint-sized mug that used to be old Mullinder’s favourite — a gesture indicating that Brian was already part of the tribal loot. Fourteen-year-old Maureen sat reading Oracle by the fire, all self-conscious with her small high bosom and trace of lipstick, her face the spit-image of Pauline’s when he’d started courting her at fifteen. They’re a good-looking family, he thought, though feeling uneasy at the mother’s gaze and the comparative silence in spite of the fact that there were five people in the room. “You look a bit as if you’ve had a hard time in the air force,” Betty said with a sly grin. “Do you get good grub?”
“Not bad. Sometimes it’s pigswill, though.” Pauline didn’t say much either, face half-hidden by the hair as she opened a tin of fruit on the other side of the table. However, he was too involved eating his way through the still-lavish supper to let the atmosphere disturb him. Not that he expected them to put the flags out.
Afterwards he suggested a walk. “You’d better tell him while you’ve got the chance,” he remembered Mrs. Mullinder saying. “And come to some arrangement.”
She broke it on Coventry Lane: “I’m having a baby.”
They stopped by a gate, leaned on it so that he could take the shock. Even going into the air force hadn’t wrenched the nuts-and-bolts of his world as loose as this piece of information. The picture of his life was shaken, sent spinning like an iron Catherine-wheel in front of his eyes. He closed them tight, knew that this wasn’t the way to take such news, so opened them on green fields rolling up to the tree-trunked bastion of Catstone Wood, a mist-green spear-blade of sky above, which, he realized through his shock, was coloured by the sun going down. “Roll on,” he muttered with a long-drawn-out whistle of breath. “This is a stunner.”
“That’s nowt to what I said when I found out, I can tell you,” she retorted, pale and firm-lipped. She was half a stranger after ten weeks’ absence, and he felt this wasn’t a good way to get to know her again. He remembered how Joan and Jim had got married: it began a mere three months ago by Joan telling Jim that she was pregnant, and by the time she was able to say it was a false alarm, they were engaged and didn’t think it worth the fuss and bother to put off the tentative wedding-date already fixed. Jim told Brian at the time that being engaged made people look up to you, treat you with more respect, like an adult at last. But Brian didn’t feel he needed that sort of respect, though he wondered whether Pauline had taken a tip from Joan and was only saying she was pregnant to get him on the tramline to matrimony.
“Mam caught me being sick one morning and I said I had a bilious bout, but when it went on for a week she made me go to the doctor’s with her. I already knew, though, in a way, because I’d missed a period. I kept hoping it wasn’t true, that’s all.” She smiled, and he saw she wasn’t concerned — like Joan had plainly been — to trick him into an engagement.
“It’s a sod, i’n’t it?” he said, half-smiling back. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, was gripped by a hot-aches of the heart and brain.
“It is, if you look at it in that way,” she answered. They walked arm-in-arm along the blue-blackness of the lane, a cold wind blowing into their faces. His next statement came almost without thought — at least, he had wondered whether or not to say it, and decided he would before too much consideration stopped him: “We’ll think about getting married.”
“Do you want to?” she asked, in a dead-level inconsequential voice. He squeezed her arm: “I do, if you want to know. If you’ll ’ave me, that is.”
She laughed: “Maybe it’s a case of having to!”
“We’ve been going out with each other long enough.”
“In a way, though, I’m sorry it had to be a bit of a force-put. I don’t like having to, if you see what I mean.”
He was offended. “Why not then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It would have been better the other way.”
“I suppose it would.”
“Not that I want to get married in church or anything like that,” she said. “It’s old-fashioned now. As long as you’re married, what does it matter?”
“That’s a good job,” he agreed, “though I don’t expect it’ll make your mam and Betty very happy.”
“Well, it’s us that matter, duck, i’n’t it? Not many people bother wi’ church nowadays.”
“They don’t,” he said. “We should be in the Broad Oak knocking it back now, celebrating. It’s supposed to be good when two people get engaged.” He was fighting away from the part of himself that felt bear-trapped, leg-caught, and pulled into the earth-pits of responsibility.
“I’d love to have a drink, but I can’t face it just now.”
“Neither can I, in a way”—glad that she also felt the same mixed sensation of it all.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Though I don’t see the need for much hurry.”
“Well, we can’t dawdle either, can we?”
“I’ll see to everything, don’t worry. Get special leave and all that.”
“As long as you aren’t backing out,” she said, a half-serious caution to see how he’d take it.