Sleep in Peace (47 page)

“It came since left, expect. It'll be waiting for me when I get back,” said Ludo.

“But, Ludo,” began Laura, puzzled. She was forced to conclude that if Ludo had been absent from France several days, he was by no means at the beginning of his leave; yet if he had not heard of Mrs. Hinchliffe's death, it was equally clear that he had not recently visited Hudley. “When do you return to France?” she asked, to be certain.

“To-morrow morning,” said Ludo.

Laura exclaimed. “And you haven't been home?” she said.

Ludo's face at once took on the closed, sullen look Laura knew so well.

“But
why
, Ludo?” pleaded Laura.

“Ah,” said Ludo, putting his head on one side in an attitude of childish mystery: “That's a question,” He hesitated, gave his dry little cough, then added with an air of closing the matter: “I daresay I'll go to Hudley next time.”

Laura sighed.

Over dinner Ludo talked freely, but not of what Laura wanted to hear. He did not, for instance, mention his reduction to the ranks, or Laura's loving letter to him on that occasion, passionately affirming her belief that he was not guilty of anything disgraceful. He did not discuss the changed nature of his military duties, or the military situation in general, though he abounded in cheerful anecdotes of the pluck, humour and resource of his present companions in the ranks, and depressing anecdotes of the ignorance, “side”, tendency to cushy jobs and general idiocy of staff officers. “They make us advance over ground they've never seen, and then weep when they find it's two feet deep in mud,” said Ludo sombrely. “You won't see
me
in a decoration,” said Ludo scornfully. Indeed he seemed to have a contempt
ipso facto
for any officer of higher rank than captain, and it was clear that he valued his corporal's stripe more than his second-lieutenant's star, because he felt he had really earned it. This was a feeling with which Laura deeply sympathised, and she would have been glad to hear the circumstances in which he secured this promotion. But Ludo did not mention them. Nor did he mention Mr. Armistead, nor Blackshaw Mills, nor Gwen, nor his nephew and niece; more especially he did not mention Eva Byram.

“I haven't been to Ashworth to see Grandmamma since 19x5,” said Laura meaningly.

“What have we here?” said Ludo, examining his plate with exaggerated relish. “That's the stuff to give the troops.”

It was evidently impossible to break his reserve, and from that moment Laura gave it up as hopeless.

After their meal—the most satisfying Laura had eaten for several months, since she accompanied a soldier—they went by
Ludo's preference to one of those new entertainments called revues, where nothing was connected with anything else, but almost every scene was either funny or striking. In one scene especially, where women in multi-coloured sequins promenaded up and down a colossal staircase beneath dazzling light, so that vivid scintillations pulsed over the whole auditorium, the effect was thrillingly beautiful.

“It seems a shame that the commercial people should have learned to produce these brilliant effects, and use them for their own purposes, while the artistic people are never wealthy enough to command them,” remarked Laura, who had not received a very lofty impression of revue.

“How do you mean?” said Ludo, coughing.

After the theatre, Ludo took her to the hostel in a taxi. As usual nowadays, the taxi-driver had to be promised an exorbitant bribe before he could be persuaded to go as far out as Kensington, and Laura did not wish Ludo to spend this sum on her, but Ludo insisted. As he stood in his ill-fitting private's khaki, counting out coins in a slow, sober way, while Laura awaited him on the hostel steps, he seemed to her deeply pathetic, and she had great difficulty in controlling her grief at their parting. She wished to see him off in the morning, but Ludo would not allow it, and declined to tell her the time of the train.

“I shall be all right,” he said.

They parted, and Laura trailed upstairs.

On an impulse she took out her drawing-board, pinned on a fresh sheet of paper, and began a sketch of Ludo. The drawing gave her pleasure; it seemed to her that she had caught the likeness well. She had often drawn Ludo before, and presently she rummaged through her portfolio for two or three of these earlier productions. As she laid them beside to-night's sketch she gave a start of dismay. How Ludo had aged! The comparison of the drawing showed how his shoulders had thickened and sagged, how his smooth black hair had thinned and dulled. It showed,
too, the setting, the intensifying of all his characteristic traits; the weak though stubborn mouth, the reserve round eyes and lips which had deepened to an obstinate secrecy, become an unnatural obsession.

And suddenly a deep dejection imposed itself on Laura's heart. Here it was the fourth year of the War, and victory further off than ever; everyone knew that the Germans were breaking through, and doubted whether they could be held. (How armies “broke through”, what it implied, how exactly it was done, Laura simply could not ascertain, and her ignorance was an added exasperation, an added trouble; it seemed to her that the nation could not stand firmly behind its soldiers unless it knew in what their difficulties really consisted.) England, then, was in danger; while Ludo was not, perhaps, very strong or wise. Perhaps he was even what most people called a fool. Laura winced; a noble fool, she added hastily. But what was the meaning of his preposterous behaviour about Eva Byram, his preposterous refusal to spend his leave in Hudley? There was a reason, doubtless, but it was a reason, Laura felt sure, which ordinary sensible people would think absurd. This essential perversity was marked all over Ludo's good, loving, weak, stubborn face, as Laura had just drawn it.

England, then, was in danger; Ludo was a fool; and Laura herself was desperately weary. She now suddenly allowed herself to perceive that for several months she had consistently overworked and undereaten; her salary did not allow her to spend more than ninepence daily on her canteen lunch, and the hostel meals, though appetisingly served, quite lacked nutrition. Often when she had crawled home after an exhaustingly long day's work, and thrown herself into bed too tired to eat, she was woken an hour later to sit in the cellar through an air raid. These were not hardships, of course, as nurses and munition workers, not to mention soldiers, knew hardships, but their cumulative effect was somewhat exhausting. Laura now admitted that for the last few weeks her spine had ached with a perpetual burning ache; her face, as she
looked at it now in the mirror, appeared pale, old and haggard. And for what, after all? “Card-playing,” as Ludo called it. Had her work in the M/M really any value? Probably not, she thought. Could the British Empire depend on sorting cards? Did the cards, when at last they were typed and filed, even provide an up-to-date and accurate record? Was that huge staff necessary, in any case? People said that the French laughed at our huge swollen ministries. Was England going the right way about winning the War? Laura now permitted herself strongly to doubt it.

She stuffed the drawings of Ludo away and threw herself into bed.

Next day Laura felt so strongly in need of some antidote to her depression that she spent more on her lunch than her budget allowed. That night, still yearning for stimulation, all the more because her lapse from discipline at lunch-time vexed her, and infected by the pleasures of the previous evening, she dined out and took herself to the lights and colour and easy melodies of a revue. The following day she was ashamed of her extravagance, and for a time kept herself sternly on the rein. But soon she fell from grace again over her lunch menu, and thereafter fought a losing battle with herself over petty luxuries.

“Armistead's
morale
is sapped,” they said gleefully at the hostel.

She spent too much on lunch, promising herself to economise over tea, and too much on tea, promising herself to economise on lunch. She sent clothes to the laundry instead of washing them herself in the hostel bathroom, and bought new stockings to save mending the old ones. She jumped on a bus for a distance which in Yorkshire she would most certainly have walked, and bought more expensive tickets for the theatre than of old, so that, she need not stand in a queue. As a result, she presently had to appeal to her father for a little help with her monthly account at
the hostel. Mr. Armistead promptly sent her a cheque the size of t which amazed her, and urged her to enjoy herself; it seemed they were making lots of money at Blackshaw Mills. After that Laura did not trouble to be self-supporting, but accepted a cheque from home every month, and on the pretence of keeping up that
morale
which the hostel rightly judged to be weakening, bought herself some charming new clothes. Led on by the joys of a colour scheme and the urgent temptation of the shops, she acquired a whole new outfit of clothes, including a suit of light fawn gabardine, a turquoise blue hat with soft blue flowers, fawn suède shoes, a turquoise blue blouse of the new georgette, and a camisole to match, with wide satin ribbons.

For everything about her urged her to clutch feverishly at life, luxury, enjoyment, and her resistance to these urgings was exhausted by fatigue.
Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die
—it was natural that soldiers should feel like that, natural that the women who loved them should feel it too. So, to experience, to enjoy, to taste everything while there was yet time, became the prevailing mood of War society. To live decently and soberly, allowing oneself a few occasional pleasures, was all very well when you had forty or fifty years left to live in, but to deny yourself to-day pleasures for which there would probably be no tomorrow, was simply silly. Cowardly, indeed. It was a duty which one owed oneself, to see that one had every experience life had to offer, before one died. For if one did not experience all that there was to experience, while there was yet time, then one was incomplete, imperfect, atrophied; one had not fully lived.

Especially was it necessary, of course, to experience the supreme adventure of sex. Aphrodisiac suggestions beat upon Laura's mind from every direction, in talk, stage, and print. The fiction magazines were full of stories about quiet ugly ducklings of girls who, never having previously attracted men, took to cosmetics, scent, smoking, red velvet cloaks and very low dresses, and at once became beautiful and greatly sought by officers in marriage. Or
about the wives of temporary officers, “temporary gentlemen”, who, at first afraid of their husband's promotion, presently flung a fox-stole lavishly about their shoulders and made an impression on the Colonel himself. Or if the heroines were in uniform, WAACs or WRNs or on the land, they simply relaxed their previous austerity, with the same lovable effect. Sometimes these duckling heroines, thus gloriously transfigured, were sought in sexual relationships other than marriage, and though they did not of course yield to such blandishments, they clearly regarded them as the supreme tribute to their new status as swans. Besides, judging from the number of war-babies and hasty marriages of which one heard, in real life they yielded more often than in fiction.

The effect of all this, on Laura's weary mind and underfed body, grew increasingly strong, and presently she began timidly to try to learn how to “pick up” an officer, “get off with” a man, as the phrases went, for she now longed to make the sexual experiment; she was sternly determined not to lag behind her contemporaries in knowledge of life, sophistication. Her bashful and totally inexperienced glances and smiles were at first quite unsuccessful, which was only what Laura had expected. However, as they said in that exciting play
The Luck of the Navy: you cant keep a squirrel on the ground
, which was interpreted to mean that you could get anything you wanted if you wanted it sufficiently hard. So Laura went on wanting.

One evening when she was at the theatre in the fawn suit and the blue blouse, watching a spy-play with another girl from the M/M, she became suddenly deliciously conscious of the lad sitting beside her. He was in officer's uniform, with a captain's stars and bands; a handsome, florid youth, with a fine large body which spread over into the space allotted by the theatre authorities to Laura. At first she thought this accidental, but after a time decided otherwise; she blushed, and turning away, began to talk with great animation to her companion. The captain's companion, a young officer, seemed to have dined not wisely but too well,
and the captain, whose name appeared to be Charles, busied himself in the intervals with restraining him. At some of his more outrageous sallies Charles looked to Laura for sympathy, cocking a humorous eyebrow; his wide smile was infectious, and Laura timidly returned it. When next the lights went down Laura found her hand enclosed in a warm, capacious grasp; her half-hearted attempts to withdraw it proved quite unsuccessful, and she was glad that it was so. I shan't look at him in the next interval, though, decided the fluttered Laura.

But the War decided otherwise. In a moment the curtain unexpectedly came down and the house-lights up, and the principal actor, appearing alone, in his calm, pleasing voice announced that an air-raid warning had been received, and nobody was to leave the theatre until the maroons gave the all-clear. A hum of discussion at once arose among the audience, and Laura, the captain and their respective companions naturally leaned forward and exchanged excited surmises about the direction and duration of the raid. The curtain then rose, and the performance was resumed at the point where it had been broken off for the announcement. Laura's hand was grasped again, and this time her fingers were forced apart by strong male ones. Laura's cheeks turned scarlet, and she shuddered with delight.

The play proceeded, at first normally, presently to the accompaniment of distant bombs and less distant anti-aircraft guns. The actors continued their performance with perfect sang-froid, the audience, too, gave an excellent performance; both sides of the footlights sustaining to admiration the role of British courage, British phlegm, British indifference to the enemy's childish attempts at “frightfulness.” The captain's arm was now about Laura's soft blue waist, and his breast behind her shoulder; once when a particularly loud report startled her a-quiver, his lips touched her ear. She turned from him, but only sufficiently to provoke pursuit.