But you’re an artist—you’ve seen all those paintings of love. What do you see there?
Well, nakedness, of course, he said like a schoolboy at last achieving the right answer.
And those army shirts are pretty rough when it comes to texture, she told him with an instructive smile. Unless they’re tailored. And I don’t think yours is.
No sense in getting them tailored, he said. Clothes get ruined up there.
So I’ve noticed.
And you? he asked.
I’ll wear a shift for now, she said with this alien certitude of hers. I’m not an artist like you.
He went behind the screen. In the great ark of the bed she lay on her side in her shift, observing what she had read—in franker romances exchanged between nurses—that etiquette dictated she should not watch him as he emerged. According to these books, if you did not turn away a man might think you were assessing his person, his old fellow, his penis, his prick, his John Thomas—which in any case she was sure he would have covered for now with his hands. She turned to him though as soon as he entered the bed and covered himself with a sheet. Again, it was the question of pace which bemused him. He lay like an untutored log—or nearly so. She realized she might have the jump on him, knowing those technical diagrams from nursing textbooks. She dragged him by the shoulders. His hands with the terror of combats in them went around her as she waited in her shift. She could feel the calluses of his palms abrading her back. She could feel him at her thigh. At once an even more disabling flame and torture entered her body. She knew to part her legs. She never expected to have this instinctive willingness.
Then—as she wanted—he entered her, and that fury she’d been awaiting became possible between them. She had feared this penetration since she’d first been conscious it happened amongst humans. And here it was. It mocked all fear and she felt that marvelous irrelevance of outer worlds and outer populations.
Nonetheless, even now a large part of her mind stood above the bed. It waited just as the courtiers used to hang over the beds of young kings and queens, to make sure that nature—which took its course with peasants and farmers—took its course with Crowns. The point was that to Sally this was not only love. It was also an experiment on the future. This witness in her wished to verify that there was something here—some promise of becoming a single flesh, though not necessarily today. Because today ran the chance of being hit-or-miss. But in a longer run, over time and through regular exercise. He had acquired a more unified mind in the meantime. Large in ambition he now pounded himself into her. There was no end to the profane and delightful simplicity of Charlie as he moved and moved within her.
Oh holy God! he said.
Yes, Sally uttered—but even then she was still the witness as well as the participant.
She heard his magnificent helpless whimper—he could not achieve more than the uttering of animal sounds—and felt the gush of him inside her and heard that strange, boyish laugh as if something difficult had been achieved. Then it was a naked, sated child she held.
Oh holy Christ, he said, to think a bullet could deprive a man of you. Of your magnificent body. And of everything you’ve given me.
She smiled against his face. He kissed her familiarly and at length. All that caution he had shown before had blown away.
She told him with a prophetic certainty, You won’t get any harm up there. Not now I’ve found you.
But she was full of fear nonetheless.
How can you know that? he asked, already three-quarters sunk in belief.
I don’t know how I know.
He kissed her. You have become an oracle, he said.
Her witness—the inner assessor who had hung above this bed—was heartily pleased. Now she had no excuse but to give up mental exercises. Now the witness could withdraw and leave the participants to their chosen sport. Body to body. That, said the departing arbiter, was fine.
Charlie got up and poured some wine. But neither of them drank it. For need had recurred.
Thirty hours later she was in Mellicourt. The question was whether they would recognize the newness in her. But when she went into the nurses’ mess there was another distraction. She found Slattery there—returned—chatting away with Leonora in an easy chair by the stove and giving a good impersonation of never having left.
Ah, Honora said expansively—seeing Sally and standing. She pulled her close. Sally was jolted by a surge of tenderness. Don’t worry, Honora whispered, I know Lionel’s dead. I’ve been working in a head ward at Rouen, and they take so long to die, poor chaps. In the scales of luck or of God’s will, or whatever you may choose to call it, Lionel was lucky.
She said nothing of Major Bright.
After a convoy arrived at six o’clock the next morning, Sally and Honora worked together in the resuscitation ward as accustomed partners.
In that earliest phase of spring, the two great armies were gathered together with such mutual intent that they could not stop even for one night. Visits in force were made to each other across icy ground and thickets of wire. This was a test of blood—apparently the raiders won if they bled less than the raided upon. Prisoners were taken—or if they weren’t, it was considered a failed ploy. And the guns had their own volition with that sound of unceasing hunger for flesh and membrane.
Just as they had over Deux Églises, at night the Taubes came looking for the town of Mellicourt and the ordnance supply depot beyond it. Sally and others knew that one night they would—by accident or malice—find the new clearing station, since it stood near the end of a light railway and close enough to desired targets. The very sound of these machines was a bruise to the soul.
But in daylight and free time, Major Bright and Slattery walked together down the thawing lanes to Mellicourt. Bright was a private man who had to overcome his edginess at being seen as a courter. So he tried to adopt the stiffness of the physician walking the patient. He had led Honora gently to the acceptance of the death of one lover and was probably a bit ashamed to find himself with ambitions to replace him. The sight of Honora and Bright strolling along struck the women as strangely sentimental—a scene from a time before bombardments.
Shirker
From Mrs. Sorley—Naomi could think of her under nothing else but her old name—the sewn parcels full of luxuries continued to arrive at Château Baincthun and lighten the dour cuisine of the Voluntary Hospital. According to a letter she had written the previous autumn, Mrs. Sorley was fretting. Her son Ernest had volunteered that spring and was aboard a convoy for France. It was, she said, not so fashionable to volunteer now that people knew something of the truth of things. “I have been so bold as to give him your address. He is not a bad boy at all. If he should call on you—and if you have the time—I would be very grateful if you could treat him as a relative as I have every confidence you will. I must say you Durances are fine-grained people and he is lucky to have you as a stepsister.”
And so in the first days of spring Ernest turned up at Château Baincthun—a lanky, strong-looking boy Naomi half remembered from the Macleay. He told her he had walked from Boulogne—where he was waiting for the boat to London for leave. He had spent the winter campaigning but as was usual with men he gave few details. In fact, when she was called to meet him, she thought that what he had been through seemed to sit easily with him. Unlike officers he wore no gloves and not even the mittens the orderlies at the château wore. The cold, wet hike from town had not seemed a hardship to him. She took him to drink tea in the room that served as the nurses’ mess.
Sorry if I’m a bit in the way, he said. He did do an impersonation of a clodhopper in his army boots. And when she introduced him to Lady Tarlton, he was shy and spoke carefully, like a questioned adolescent.