‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.
‘No, the terrible thing was that when I got the second telegram, I was so muddled in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must be still alive. For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was - disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought ‘now the anxiety begins, and the pain’, but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.’
‘Have you forgotten her?’
‘I don’t remember her often. You see, I escaped seeing her die. My wife had that.’
It was astonishing to him how easily and quickly they had become friends. They came together over two deaths without reserve. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
‘Everybody would have looked after you.’
‘I think they are scared of me, she said.
He laughed.
‘They are. Flight-Lieutenant Bagster took me to the beach this afternoon but he was scared. Because I’m not happy and because of my husband. Everybody on the beach was pretending to be happy about something and I sat there grinning and it didn’t work. Do you remember when you went to your first party and coming up the stairs you heard all the voices and you didn’t know how to talk to people? That’s how I felt so I sat and grinned in Mrs Carter’s bathing-dress and Bagster stroked my leg and I wanted to go home.’
‘You’ll be going home soon.’
‘I don’t mean that home. I mean here where I can shut the door and not answer when they knock. I don’t want to go away yet.’
‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’
‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.
‘Do you dream about it?’
‘No. I dream of John sometimes - that’s worse. Because I’ve always had bad dreams of him and I still have bad dreams of him. I mean we were always quarrelling in the dreams and we still go on quarrelling.’
‘Did you quarrel?’
‘No. He was sweet to me. We were only married a month you know. It would be easy being sweet as long as that wouldn’t it? When this happened I hadn’t really had time to know my way around.’ It seemed to Scobie that she had never known her way around - at least not since she had left her net-ball team; was it a year ago? Sometimes he saw her lying back in the boat on that oily featureless sea day after day with the other child near death and the sailor going mad and Miss Malcott, and the chief engineer who felt his responsibility to the owners, and sometimes he saw her carried past him on a stretcher grasping her stamp-album, and now he saw her in the borrowed unbecoming bathing-dress grinning at Bagster as he stroked her legs, listening to the laughter and the splashes, not knowing the adult etiquette ... Sadly like an evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore. ‘You’ve written to your father?’
‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’
Scobie read. Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’
‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’
Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’
He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the
A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes ... compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute and the influential escaped in war. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’
It was impossible to think of her being saved from the sea and then Sung back like a fish that wasn’t worth catching.
He said, ‘Can you type?’
‘I can get along quite fast with one finger.’
‘You could get a job here, I think. We are very short of secretaries. All the wives, you know, are working in the secretariat, and we still haven’t enough. But it’s a bad climate for a woman.’
‘I’d like to stay. Let’s have a drink on it.’ She called, ‘Boy, boy.’
‘You are learning,’ Scobie said. ‘A week ago you were so frightened of him...’ The boy came in with a tray set out with glasses, limes, water, a new gin bottle.
‘This isn’t the boy I talked to,’ Scobie said.
‘No, that one went. You talked to him too fiercely.’
‘And this one came?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Vande, sah.’
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘No, sah.’
‘Who am I?’
‘You big policeman, sah.’
‘Don’t frighten this one away,’ Helen said.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I was with D.C. Pemberton up bush, sah. I was small boy.’
‘Is that where I saw you?’ Scobie said. ‘I suppose I did. You look after this missus well now, and when she goes home, I get you big job. Remember that.’
‘You haven’t looked at the stamps,’ Scobie said.
‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats’ tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed face. It seemed to him that he had not felt so much at ease with another human being for years - not since Louise was young. But this case was different, he told himself: they were safe with each other. He was more than thirty years the older; his body in this climate had lost the sense of lust; he watched her with sadness and affection and enormous pity because a time would come when he couldn’t show her around in a world where she was at sea. When she turned and the light fell on her face she looked ugly, with the temporary ugliness of a child. The ugliness was like handcuffs on his wrists.
He said, ‘That stamp’s spoilt. I’ll get you another.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘it goes in as it is. I’m not a real collector.’
He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word ‘pity’ is used as loosely as the word ‘love’: the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.
She said, ‘You see, whenever I see that stain I’ll see this room...’
‘Then it’s like a snapshot.’