Archie called, his battledress bearing the shoulder flashes of the REMEs. Near the end of his leave and halfway bored, Herbert was glad to see him, and sat him down in Mrs Denman’s parlour. ‘Have a fag.’
‘I will but I’ve got this terrible thirst.’ He was slimmer, and there weren’t so many blackheads on his skin. In spite of his grousings about going into the forces he was as smart a soldier as drab khaki would allow. ‘The sooner we whistle up a drink the better.’
‘How you getting on in the army?’
‘Army? I’m back at school, learning how to mend fuses and roll telephone wire all over the shop at Catterick. I took a test to go on the course, and somebody said I must be intelligent when I passed. Me! Well, it ain’t too bad, a bit of a skive, though it might be useful later. There was nowt doing in camp this weekend, so I flitted for thirty-six hours. As long as the redcaps don’t stop me on the street and ask for my pass.’
Herbert hoped he was wrong in assuming that Archie had gone AWOL. ‘You’re going back, though, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I bleedin’ well am. King George wouldn’t like it if I didn’t.’
They went to Yates’s Wine Lodge and found a table in the gallery. Archie fished for his paybook and unfolded a paper. ‘I’ve got a leave pass, because I slipped one o’ the bone idle orderly room penpushers half a crown for it. But it needs somebody’s signature, otherwise it ain’t valid.’ He passed it across. ‘Just sign it for me, Bert. I’d do it myself, except the red caps ’ud spot the writing of a numbskull like me straight away. Any road, you’re a lance-jack. You know how to do it.’
Herbert drained his jar to gain time. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll get stopped. It’d be a million to one chance. Another pint?’
‘Yeh. But it’ll look better if it’s signed. Just put RSM somebody or other. I’d never nark if it got twigged.’
Herbert came back with the drinks, set them down, and took out his pen to scribble his father’s name on the form, demoting him to the rank of captain. ‘How’s Sheila, these days?’
‘Sheila? Going back a bit, aren’t yer? I’ve got somebody else now.’
‘How’s that?’
‘She wanted to get engaged. Went all mam and dad on me. So I towd her to piss off.’
Herbert laughed. So that was how you did it.
‘She said she’d wait till I got out of the army, but I towd her I worn’t interested. What’s the point gerrin’ married?’
‘None at all,’ Herbert agreed. ‘Let’s ’ave another.’
‘Any time. But drop me a line now and again.’
‘Sure. I’ll do that.’
The names of wild flowers came back to him from school, but there weren’t so many around Nottingham, being shy in chill July. He told Eileen what some of them were, when she asked because she didn’t know what else to say as she warmed her failing spirit by pressing against his shoulder. They walked down a lane and into a field, on the last day of his leave.
‘It ain’t the end of the world, duck.’
Nothing he could say would help because for her it was, or she thought it was, which must be the same. She had hardly noticed flowers before except poppies, which wanted to reach out to her from an age when she had caught sight of them with such delight on a school outing ten years ago, and had run from the bus to pick one by the head, blood red and fragile till blown into the grass where she let it be. ‘I could kill myself, I feel so rotten.’
We’ll go back to the river, then, and you can jump in, if I don’t throw you in first. I’ll light a cigarette, and stand under the trees to watch you sink. Why can’t you live from day to day like me and just enjoy the good fucks we have now and again?
A carpet of morning glory covered a hedge with white trumpets, some open and others closed, so maybe there’s a chance of no rain, he thought, if that’s what it means. The edge of the field was their horizon, but they stopped under a great elm. ‘Don’t think like that,’ he said. ‘You’ll have me crying in a bit, and soldiers aren’t supposed to.’
‘But I love you,’ she told him, ’and soldiers go away, and get killed.’ A lime-green and black dotted ladybird settled on her lip. She brushed it away. ‘Or summat else ’appens, and they don’t come back.’
Here’s one that won’t, if you go on like this, and if I have any say in the matter. ‘Of course, soldiers come back. I will, you can bet, and you know why I will?’
‘No, I don’t.’
He unbuttoned his battledress and lay it on the grass for this princess of the workbench. Walter Raleigh had nothing on him. ‘Because I love you, that’s why. You mean more to me than anybody else in the world.’ Pushing out all the pretence of Bert Gedling, he gave in to a feeling of luxury, and spoke as the words came out of his heart. ‘I’ve never been as close to anyone as I am to you, and I never will be. I know that. You’re the best person in the world, not one better anywhere.’ He couldn’t stop himself, didn’t see why he should, because every word was true. ‘I loved you the first minute I saw you in the factory, and I love you now a hundred times more than I did then, if that’s possible.’
No effect. It was a more solid sign she wanted, a tawdry pawnshop engagement ring sliding on to her finger. Even if he had one he wouldn’t know which one to put it on, thought of walking away, the tragic swain rejected though all his poetry had been spoken. His feet wouldn’t move, and he didn’t want them to. ‘I love you. I can’t say any more than that.’
So many tears that the shoulder of his shirt was wet. The tap runneth over. Her eyes were illuminated with misery and determination. ‘If you love me. Is that all?’
‘I’ll be back, you know that.’
She sat down, her legs shaking, the skirt lifted to show shapely white ankles. ‘I took the day off work specially to be with you.’
The ultimate sacrifice. He passed a clean handkerchief. The ring could wait. Words would be enough. No one was going to control his fate — if he could help it. ‘I’m glad you did. I appreciate it.’
A fist struck at his leg, hurting her more than him, he was sure. ‘Don’t talk like that. Appreciate! Appreciate! You don’t mean it, I know you don’t, using words like that. Who are you, anyway? You don’t talk like anybody else. There’s summat fishy about you.’
Not me, duck. You’re Pisces, and I’m Taurus. He wondered if she hadn’t cooked all this up as a way of getting shut of him, a cunning route through the jungle of her self-preservation. The thought chilled him, for a moment. To tell somebody to push off for good all you had to do was disagree on a basic issue, such as liking a different film star, or another sort of food, or saying you didn’t care for a certain place, or even a particular colour in a dress. That way you also gave whoever it was a reason to get rid of you. With primitive people of inferior intelligence you had to agree with everything, otherwise the union wasn’t viable.
If he sank himself into the foreordained scheme of marital captivity he would give her a few kids and abandon her in five years, really ruining her life. The very picture made him want to say yes, let’s get engaged and then married and we’ll find a room, a flat, a house with a garden, and after the army I’ll pack it in at the factory and get a cleaner job elsewhere and in a few years I’ll love you even more and you’ll change so completely by being with me that people will think we came out of the same drawer. Then I’ll light off, beat it with spectacular suddenness, utterly unexpected, and it’ll be a lot worse if we’ve had kids because you’ll never hear from me again and you’ll be scrubbing floors to feed them.