I had lain down on the bed again, and was on my back, staring at the ceiling, on which the cracks in the plaster showed a world map full of unknown continents.
He picked his belt up off the floor, put in on and sat down on the edge of the bed to put on his lace-up boots. The material of his shirt was pulled firmly round his trunk, so that the bumps of his vertebrae were clearly defined.
I stretched out my arm to him and, as if that gesture contained a magic formula, the sunlight flared strongly behind the net curtains at the foot of the bed, and just above the window sill threw the skeleton of the bare roofs into relief against the clouds.
“We have to go now,” he muttered, without turning round. His fingers tied the laces. “Almost four o’clock… We have-to have-to-go…”
While I got ready, rubbed my thighs clean, put my slip back on, I could follow his tread across the floorboards of the other rooms. The sunlight leaked away again, abandoning the room to a sombre grey.
Outside there was the purr of an aircraft, a little later there was the sputter of artillery. The purring grew fainter, but on the other side of the house, the front, the sound of footsteps swelled, and men’s voices. On top of that a dull sighing, a nasal-sounding hum.
When I went to see what was going on, the English soldiers whom we had overtaken on the way here were walking past; they didn’t notice us. I could only see the top of their headgear, and the chairs with turned legs and velour seats that a few of them were lugging with them in stacks of two.
They were chatting as they walked along. In the middle of their informal procession, four men were pulling a dusty harmonium. Every few steps air puffed through the bellows, so that it sounded as if the instrument was urging them on with grumpy orders.
They disappeared from sight. Farther on, near the corner of the street, the lorry stood waiting for them with engine running. Their fading footsteps were drowned out by the cannon, which seemed to be beginning a new series of salvoes. The small panes in the window of the room gave a soft tinkle of lament, like girls ashamed of their own fear.
“We really must leave,” he repeated. As he walked past, he stroked my hip with his hand and I followed him.
We were driving again. “Everything all right, Guv’nor?” he grinned.
I had turned round in the car to see the contours of the town, merging with the air saturated with damp, disappearing behind the gently rolling hills.
I don’t know if I felt “all right”. I was certainly alive — my body suddenly clearly demarcated in the space around me, well-thumbed by his caresses; his lips in my neck, between my breasts, on my nipples, in my navel. His fingers between my thighs. The fuss with his trouser buttons. The smell of his hair. The pleasure — but wasn’t it more of a throbbing pain, a fist that clenched in my belly? — when his head sank between my legs and he had planted his knees, first the left then the right, on my shoulders. The glorious rawness or raw glory of another body. The rawness of his sex, which if I’m honest I’d never imagined so hard, so covered in blood vessels, and so inclined to turn blue, badly informed as I was by puerile paintings of statues full of pudeur. I had an attack of the giggles when I saw it dangling so close before my eyes, above the balls in their touching brown case under the cleft in his buttocks, where it was enclosed by rough black hair. When I pulled the skin over the head of his penis everything had shrunk — I had a second fit of giggling. The third overcame me when his hips were nestling between my legs and I felt his sex lose its way in the fold of my thigh, until he squeezed a hand between us. “Just a minor inconvenience, happens all the time…” he had grinned, largely to hide his own embarrassment, I saw, before his eyes glazed over and the pain centred on my pelvis — the shivers and spasms. The smell of his seed, at once salty and sickly sweet. And his breath, rushing in my ear.
“You’re staring, love…”—a hint of freckles around his nose, and the deep, glowing, breathtaking black of his eyes.
I had turned round again, and was sitting looking at him as we drove on and the vault of treetops over the road drew a Morse code of light and shadow over the car.
I would have liked to know him as a schoolboy, and as a lad of, say, eighteen, trailing reluctantly to church after the aunt with whom he grew up, a hymn book under his arm. There in the north, where boredom, he said, submerged the days in the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon with showers.
I would have liked to see his room. The long, narrow window that divided the North Sea horizontally into two colours: grey and less grey. Have liked to know his first girlfriends, and also the more serious sweethearts, suitable for dull conversation in aunt’s veranda, the Mauds and Margarets about whom he gave little away — a woman wants everything. I wonder: do men mourn differently? Does the rat of grief gnaw a great hole in their insides too? Why do women double up when they mourn, and men seem to fall apart?
*
It was getting on for evening when he brought me back from the trenches, relieved that nothing serious had happened. I was tired, confused, filled with impressions. In my head the broad strips of colour and buzzing in no man’s land alternated with sudden, almost tactile impressions of his body. His taut midriff. The birthmark on his belly, just below the ribs. The texture of his nipples. His sex, which shrank after the ecstasy between his thighs — then the bright white of the wooden crosses in that landscape of poppies and mud pools. All those impressions seemed to be leaking out of my head, evaporating out of my eyes and mingling with the outside world.
The sun was already sinking deep in the west and colouring the damp in the air bright orange. Thunderclouds which rose from the horizon, with their deep blue tending to black, provided a sharp contrast and laid over the treetops and trunks along the road, over the convoys of lorries and horses and men which again surrounded us, a dull, silvery glow. There was something unreal about it, reinforced by the constant rumble of the weaponry — I was also much too hot. It was oppressively hot and my stomach was playing up.
In the villages a suggestion of night was already roaming around, in which the headgear of North Africans on horseback brought an unexpected ghostly manifestation of colour, which for a moment enlivened the ubiquitous khaki. The swirling of the capes that they had wrapped round their uniforms conjured the beat of bird wings in the dusk. The cadence of the hoof beats left a long echo.
Above the horizon there now hung a long band of copper-yellow evening light, above which the black clouds had gathered. The dull-yellow squares of cornfields absorbed the grey of the sky and were beginning to wrap themselves up in night — and everywhere troops were on the move. The marching songs that they whistled or sang with deep voices floated in snatches on the rising wind.
We reached Poperinge just in time, the narrow streets were as good as deserted, and everywhere there were closed shutters and lowered blinds, because there was an evening curfew. We were audibly closer to the front again. The report of the guns sounded fuller, everywhere houses showed traces of destruction, whether or not patched up without enthusiasm.
He manoeuvred the car through empty streets, narrow alleyways. It had rained, water splashed from under the wheels. Somewhere behind one of the house fronts there was the sound of music, laughter, singing, but apart from that the town seemed dead.
We slowed at a wooden gate. He got out, pushed it open and immediately closed it again after we had come to a halt. The coach house where we now were led to a cloister around a rather fussy inner garden with bolting rose bushes, shrubs and a flaking statue of the Virgin Mary.
“Give us a hand, love,” he called to me; he was unloading.