“I would if I wanted to,” he said firmly. “But I won’t want to. I love you too much, you know that.”
“As long as I know,” she taunted.
“Well, I’ve told you,” he cried. “I’ve been telling you for a long time.”
“I know you have, duck.”
“You never look as though you believe me, though.”
“What do you expect? We both go as far as we can”—this reference to the just-revealed fact that she was having a baby quieted his shock, and he held her close: “Don’t let’s get mad, love.”
“I’ve been worrying myself blind these last three weeks. Mam’s been on to me as well.”
“Why didn’t you write and tell me?” he shouted in the darkness. “I’d a been out o’ that camp like a shot. Nobody could have stopped me.”
“Well, I don’t know. I thought it wouldn’t be the best thing, to write and tell you it in a letter. Mam said so as well when I told her.”
“You thought I’d run away and never show my face?” he laughed.
Her hard knuckles thumped into his ribs: “No, you leary swine. But you can clear off now if you want to, because I can soon have the baby and keep it myself without your ’elp. In fact, that’s what mam said. ‘Don’t get married if you don’t like him. But if you can, it’d be better.’ So I don’t care how much trouble it is, it ain’t that much of a force-put. I didn’t want to get married as early as this, no more than yo’ did. So I’m not going to marry you just because I’m having a baby. I can allus live at home and stay at work.”
He rubbed the pain out of his bones: her outbursts were the more abrupt and fiery in proportion to her at-times angelic calmness. “You want to keep your temper. I was only having a joke.”
“All right,” she said, “but you ought to be nice to me sometimes.”
“I often am”—he tried to hit off the correct ratio of his good nature — “but I come home on leave, rush straight to see you all the way from Gloucestershire, and this is what you meet me with. You think it i’n’t a shock for me as well?”
“I know it is, but I couldn’t break it any other way, could I? I’m glad you’ve come, though. It feels better for me now.”
They drew into a long kiss by the hedge, stopped only when a car drove by and fixed them in its headlights before turning off at the Balloon Houses. “I don’t feel bad about having a baby,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll like it, and that it’ll be all right.”
“It sounds O.K. to me. I suppose we let ourselves in for it.” He was filled with joy and dread. The first shock had shown the future as a confused black ocean, which had lost much of its alarm, however, in the last half hour because a feeling of having gained some enormous happiness had gradually come into him. They crossed the main road, arms locked around each other, and walked into a wood on the far side.
The day before Brian was due back in Gloucestershire Bert swung up in the yard, resplendent in beret and battle-dress and a couple of campaign ribbons won from the last push over the Rhine. He was quartered in Trieste and had travelled across Europe on a forty-hour journey of wooden seats to get himself — so he joked to Harold Seaton — an earful of Radford, a gutful of Shippoe’s, and an armful of fat tart.
They went out to walk part of the way together: Brian to see Pauline at Aspley, Bert to call on his brother at nearby Cinderhill. It was a dry, baking summer, seemingly endless because it had been on almost a week, and they swapped opinions on life in uniform, Brian disliking his incarceration mainly for a reason as yet unspoken to Bert, and Bert enjoying his experience because he had a marvellous time not having to worry where the next meal or shilling came from. “I might even sign on an extra three years,” he said, “instead of coming out at Christmas. In fact, I’m sure I shall.”
“What do you want to do that for?” Brian asked. “There’s plenty o’ wok.”
“I like it better than wok,” Bert told him.
Over a sandstone wall lay a cemetery, cool grass waving and flowers spread on many graves, colours of snow and blood and mustard against marble. It was Sunday morning, and some people tended stones and urns, busying themselves with hedge-clippers and watering-cans. Brian said to his cousin: “I’m signing on as well in a way, only for life. I’m getting married.”
Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: “You’re not.”
“I am. To Pauline. Don’t you think we’ve been courting long enough?”
“Come off it.”
“What do you mean, come off it?” He wanted more reaction than this, so little not indicating whether Bert thought him a fool or a grown-up, a madcap or a restless layabout who was getting spliced for want of anything new to do, or a shade of every reason. But he underestimated Bert, who looked at him slyly, shut one eye, and demanded: “She’s having a kid?”—at the same time offering a fag from a ten-pack to mollify such outrightness in case he was wide of the mark.
Brian’s first thought was to say no, she bloody-well wasn’t, but who knew how much it would show by the time they were able to get married? And in any case, when she had the kid it would be calculated in simple-finger arithmetic (digit by digit backdated), so that it was better to be thought trapped now than be seen to have been a frightened liar then.
“She’s pregnant,” he said, “and we’re getting married.”
They walked on, out of step now and Bert looking in at him as if to find a trace of lying on his face. “But you’ll be done for,” he raved suddenly. “You’ll be hooked, finished, skewered and knackered. Why don’t you do a bunk?”
“Because I don’t want to. I’d never be able to see her again.”
“Come off it. Sign on, get sent overseas, cut your throat, hang yourself. For Christ’s sake, you’re only eighteen.”
“I’ll be nineteen next year,” he grinned. Bert was grieved: “I know, sure, Brian. You’ll be twenty-one soon as well, and we’ll give you the key to the bleeding door: can’t you wait even that long? It’s batchy to get married at eighteen. Think of all the fun you can still have. Running after all the women your eyes hook on to. I know it wain’t suit yo’ to get married, I do an’ all. You ain’t that sort. You’re too much of a sod, like I am.”
“I know,” Brian said, “but I love her, you see. You think I’m trapped just because she’s having a kid? Well, what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. If I didn’t love her, I might think twice about it.”
“You’ve got to think twenty times about whether you love a tart or not.” Brian had thought a hundred times, and knew his mind by now on that subject anyway. Pauline was having a baby, and because he loved her they were going to get married. There was no need to ask himself what he would have done if he hadn’t loved her, if she’d been little more than a casual acquaintance. “What’s made you get sloppy all of a sudden?” Bert demanded.
He turned on him, fists clenched and ready to be raised: “I’m not bloody-well sloppy, so don’t come it. I’m just doing what I want to do and what I think is right, and I’m not asking yo’ whether it’s good for me or not, because I know it is because I want it.”
“Well,” Bert said, “if that’s the way you feel. All right, all right. Let me be best man, then.” They shook on it and Bert seemed to think it a good idea Brian was getting married by the time they got around to changing the subject.
The cornfield was being subtly reduced in size. A combine-harvester came towards them, went on by, and passed before they were halfway across on their slow walk. The area of high corn seemed no smaller than before, and already the machine was a red beetle turning again towards the far side of the sloping field, its engine noise filling the autumn evening like the leisured omnipresent growling of an invisible mastodon. A few bristles of withered corn lay over the path, like heads at which the big chop of the machine had suffered disappointment.