Ellie had been too young to go out with Americans — Pa wouldn’t allow it; but she had hung about when they appeared (just as in the movies) with an orchid in a square cellophane box, or chocolates, or nylons, had sized them up in her quick down-to-earth way, and afterwards, when she and Lucille, still in her dancing dress, were rolling about on one of their beds, whispering, laughing, comparing, criticising, could catch just the drawl with which this one said, ‘We sure do, ma’am,’ or the self-satisfied sprawl or little military stamp and snap of others, or the boiled look of this one, or the muscle-bound, collar-jerking shyness of another, a certain Virgil Farson Jr of Greenwood, Mississippi, who had not been Lucille’s favourite at the start, not by any means, then was. In the Virge business she had known at every point what Lucille was up to. To the extent that Ma actually blamed her for not telling and had not spoken to her for a week.
When Vic went away Ellie was fifteen. They were friends and she was fiercely loyal to him. She had taken it for granted that in the end Lucille would choose him — there was such a tie between them — and that their other little affairs and flirtations were no more than a kind of teasing play to conceal the inevitability of it.
‘No,’ Lucille told her gravely, ‘that was just kid’s stuff. Don’t you know the difference?’ She was so sure of herself that Ellie wondered what she had missed.
Still, when she got pregnant there was the sense all round, but especially on Ma’s part, that a mistake had been made.
Lucille did not think so. She broke the news to Ellie as a sworn secret, and with so much awed excitement and triumph (Ellie had never seen her at once so elated and sober and overwrought) that Ellie had felt a little thump in her own belly at the immensity, the serious adultness of it.
Lucille, she told herself, was right. She was still a schoolgirl and had no grasp of things. Even in the midst of the war, when so much that was terrible had occurred, she had simply gone on in the old way, believing that life, their life, was a story that could end only one way, according to the rules of the films she went to and the romances she read. Lucille had broken through all that, and for all their closeness she had not seen it.
For the two weeks that she had Lucille’s secret to keep she had looked on her sister as a being transformed, suddenly endowed with urgency and purpose.
The germ of light that with each passing second was swelling and rounding in her had drawn Lucille into the line of life; and it had been put there, amazingly, in such a precise and effective way, though also no doubt in his usual barging manner and with no clear intent, by Virgil Farson, a big slow boy of less than twenty. At that moment three thousand miles away in the Islands he was lounging about an Air Force base reading his Felix the Cat comics, quite ignorant yet of what he had done.
These facts astonished Ellie. She had gone about the house in a dazed state, aware suddenly of how fragile and important things could be and feeling her bond with Lucille immeasurably deepened. Lucille had crossed a border. Ellie felt that she too had come to the edge of it and was shining now and swelling in sympathy.
It was an exaggeration, of course. She had been stirred by her own possibilities, that’s all, had felt the pull in her own nature of the change in Lucille’s. She soon came back to earth.
But the little life she had been so aware of then as a mere floating presence, a new, nameless one that had turned towards them and was starting for a point maybe sixty or seventy years away was no longer nameless. It was this odd little Alexander; who filled the house with his squalls and hungers, his smells too, and was at this moment lying on the bed between them, singing to himself, kicking up his heels, and when she put her face down into his naked belly, uttering squeals of ecstasy.
‘Do you think he’ll be so different, then?’ she asked, lifting her head. She was asking on her own account, rather wary now of what it might be that she had not understood.
Lucille was more upset than she would admit. She made a mouth and turned away. It was too difficult. She couldn’t put it into words.
He would be, of course he would. He must be. Weren’t they all? So much had happened in these last years. But Vic, she knew, had a way of closing himself off from mere happenings. It was a strength; it was also, from another point of view, a weakness. The more he was touched by a thing the more he did it.
He would be changed, sure enough, perhaps horribly, and the possibility of that, however small her own part in it, was painful to her. But he would pretend not to be, and at the same time would want you to see through it and pity him.
So when Sunday came round and he did appear as promised — she heard the bell, then the clamour they were making in the hall, even Meggsie and Aunt James — she did not go down immediately. She took a little extra time, not on herself, she spent no time at all on herself, but on the child. When she came to the door of the front room they were all gathered around him, Ma, Pa, Meggsie, Aunt James (Ellie was still out at her tennis match), in a close family group. He was the lost son come home; they were making a royal fuss of him. She felt shut out. Had she always, secretly, been resentful of his place among them? Was Ellie? But when he turned, and she saw the quick, clenched look of him, she felt ashamed. She went up quickly, holding the child and relying on his warmth and weight to steady her, and kissed him on the cheek. She was shocked. He was no thinner than in the old days but he had a flayed look that went straight to her heart.
The others, Ma, Pa, Aunt James, were watching. She told herself that she had to be careful now of her own emotions. The moment was critical.
His hair, which was brutally short, shaved right up above his ears, gave him the look of a convict. Was that deliberate? She was moved by this but warned herself that she could not trust him. They stood very close, with the child between them, who was crowing and working his fingers in the air.
‘How old is he?’ Vic asked.
He was staring at the child in a perplexed way, as if he had not expected him to be quite real or had underestimated how much innocent energy and egotism he would possess. The child was laughing and looking from one to another of them with no doubt at all that he was the most important person here.
‘Hello, cobber,’ Vic said when the child reached out and made a grab for his shirt.
‘Alexander,’ she told him.
‘So you see,’ she wanted to add, ‘we’re no longer the youngest ones — not any more.’ She thought this might reconcile him a little, make him see things, as she did, in the longer view.
He put his hands out then and took Alexander from her. She felt the weight go, saw how rough and scarred his hands were, and was surprised by his gentleness, but did not lower her guard. The child had knocked him off balance, that’s all. He would be looking now for a way of restoring himself. The child was on his arm and Vic was hefting him up and down as if assessing his weight.
It made her want to laugh, that. He could not enter into rivalry with a fourteen-month-old child. It was too undignified and the odds were too much on the child’s side. He was looking for a way round. ‘What funny creatures we are,’ she thought, and relaxed a little. ‘So transparent.’
‘He’s heavy,’ Vic said, and all the time the others were quiet and watching.
‘Oh, he’s heavy all right,’ she thought. ‘I could have told you that.’
She did laugh then. She was filled with such a wave of joy at the weight he added to the world, which she felt even when she herself was not holding him, and in the rush of it felt an affection for him too, for his hands that were so scabbed and swollen and for the sureness with which they held the child.