“Voilà, Tommy; encore du thé?”
“No, no thanks.” I gestured outside. “Une minute. Parler?”
She glanced at me quizzically. Then looked round the room, her top lip held between her teeth. It made her look faintly simian.
“Pourquoi pas?”
We went out through a side door into a small sad courtyard. Some lank hens scratched. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a narrow sunny lane, unused, weedy. Over a brick wall I could see the slab back of the tobacco factory and its rows of grimy windows. Huguette led me down the lane to a shed and we went in. I saw an old machine, a turnip mincer, rusted and useless. A clean scythe hung on the wall. At the back was a dank hump of turnips. A pile of jute sacks was on the floor. An earthy root-vegetable smell in the air — wet, organic, dark.
Huguette leaned against the wall. I tried to kiss her. I was trembling and sweating. She pushed me away.
“Baiser, c’est dix francs!”
I emptied my pockets and gave her ten francs. I held her big face between my hands. Slowly, tenderly, I touched my lips to hers.
Her squirming agile tongue almost made me shout with shock. It was like a live leaping eel in my mouth. I felt I had a piston in my chest compressing the air of my lungs. It was astonishing. Then she pushed me away again.
I had six francs and a few sous left. All my money had gone on her filthy tea and eggs and chipped potatoes. I held the money out on a slick and jittery palm. She scooped the coins up.
“C’est pas beaucoup,” she said, counting, somewhat sulkily. She put the money in a pocket, shrugged, took my hand and thrust it up under her skirt. I felt her thighs — warm, soft — and moved my hand upwards. Fingertips touched hair — curled, springy, dry — just like my own. I gently cupped her groin. I seemed to have stopped breathing. I will show you fear in a handful of fuzz. My eyes were fixed on a knot in the wood of the plank wall before me. Huguette shifted slightly.
“Fini?”
“Yes. Oui.”
I stepped back. She looked faintly surprised.
“I love you, Huguette,” I said, hoarse.
“Oh, pouf, oui.… ‘I loave you,’ ça marche pas!” She shook her finger grimly. “C’est une question d’argent.”
She opened the door. I walked out into the palpitating dusk. The sun hit the tall windows of the tobacco factory, turning them to fabulous golden mirrors.
At least I had said it. A man to a woman. I had kissed. I had touched that secret place. I felt buoyant, strangely calm. On the train back to the railhead at Coxyde I sat on the floor of the truck beside Leo Druce. He had his cap off; it was sitting balanced on one of his knees. A faint sweet smell came from the oil on his hair. His kind, delicate features seemed at odds with the crude cut and serge of his battle-dress coat. He twirled his cap on his knee.
“Where do you think we’ll be going?” I asked.
“Don’t know. The Somme? Arras? Louise hasn’t told me.”
“Is there a push on?”
“Looks like it.”
I felt a stomach-churn of alarm.
“I shouldn’t worry, Todd old fellow. They’ll probably forget about us.”
I was grateful for his words of reassurance, however unrealistic they might be. I wanted to tell him why I was so apprehensive, indicate the true nature of my fears.
“I’m just worried that I — you know — haven’t done enough.” I smiled faintly. “In life, as it were.” I paused. “I mean I’ve never really even been in love. Properly.”
“Well, imagine if you were. You might feel worse.”
“I suppose so. I …”
“What?”
“You know that girl in the estaminet?”
“The one that serves the tea or the one that washes up?”
“The tea one.”
“What about her?”
“What do you think of her?”
“I don’t know … obliging enough. Pretty cheap. Thirty francs isn’t bad for a roger.”
“Huguette?”
“Is that her name?” He turned to Kite. “Hey, Noel, that bint in the estaminet, Todd says she’s called Huguette.”
“Ah … Huguette,” Kite said, tasting the name. “Did you shaft her, Todd?”
“Yes … oh yes.”
“She’s Bookbinder’s favorite,” Druce said. “Noel and I prefer the washer-up.”
“Ah.”
“I should give her a go if we ever get back there.”
“Good idea. I will.”
* * *
I think my health began to give way round about then. Suddenly I felt ill all the time, laden with apathy. It was not so much my health declining, perhaps, as my well-being. I held myself in low esteem, disgusted at my naïveté, not so much because I had made such a banal romantic error, but for what it revealed to me about my own conceit. This made me even less prepared for our transfer, and more fearful of this “push” that everyone was discussing. I was determined somehow to get out of the front line.… If I could just get sent back to reserve, back to Dunkirk even. I would happily work in fatigue parties for the duration.
I began to think wildly of desertion, or even a self-inflicted wound, but I knew I had not the courage for such a course of action. This was the source of my apathy. I wanted to act but had no guts for the effort required.
It was Pawsey who gave me the idea. Ever since he had vomited during the false gas attack, he had looked wan and peaky. The alarm had unsettled him. He claimed the urine made him sick, but it was the fear. He was generally regarded as a malingerer, especially by Teague and Somerville-Start. I watched Pawsey closely, and after a while I began to suspect that he was half-trying to poison himself. Whenever we were outside he chewed grass constantly and I never saw him spit out the pulp. He looked anemic and thin and was never out of the latrines.
Then we heard that our move was to be three days hence — destination a secret. More importantly, for my purposes, the entire battalion was to parade in companies for an inspection by the brigade medical officer the day before our departure. From somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled an old goldbrick’s trick (I cannot remember who told me this — possibly Hamish), the gist of which was that heavy smoking on an empty stomach forced the heartbeat up dangerously high. I reduced my eating to a minimum and started smoking as much as I could bear.
This regime did indeed have a curious effect on me. At first I experienced a palpable euphoria. I felt light-headed, strangely taller. After forty cigarettes a dull headache set in and I began to feel queasy. The morning of the inspection found me etiolated and bilious. I lit a cigarette immediately on waking and managed to smoke three more before my rising gorge demanded a cup of tea.
Druce remarked on my addiction to tobacco.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be going back to reserve. We’re quiet-sector material.”
I smiled weakly and set fire to another cigarette.
D Company were called for inspection at 11 A.M. As we filed into the tent I noticed a sign saying FFI INSPECTION. I asked Druce what the letters stood for.
“Free from Infection,” he said.
“But what exactly does that mean?”
He said he had no idea.