The Lonely (13 page)

Patches was far too honest to make excuses for herself. Her love for Jerry, the depth and power of the emotion, had come to be so much a part of her that she did not even think of it as a compelling reason for what she had done. She knew that she and Jerry and Jerry’s girl at home, people everywhere, were living in a world that was going through a terrible convulsion that affected the lives of everyone.

She knew too that she lived at the battlefront, where living or dying was a daily accident, and that day after day this boy she had grown to love above all else in the world flew away to combat from which he might never come back. The line, “Three of our aircraft failed to return,” had become a part of her habit of living and thinking, for she too was connected intimately with the hazards of an airbase. Week after week, boys with whom she laughed or joked, or even went out with for an evening, vanished from the roster, until the ritual of grief itself became superficial. Menaced by bombs and rockets, the incident of one’s own living and breathing and being was reduced to a matter of luck. One did not want to die, but the chance was ever present, and therefore one lived more sharply, breathed more deeply, caressed the earth more firmly with one’s feet, looked with a more tender and loving eye upon the spring, green grass, a sunny day, children playing in the street . . .

But sitting alone in her room in the early evening the day after her return, Patches refused to admit these thoughts in extenuation of what she had done. Her punishment for her transgression had already begun. It would soon become more severe. For Jerry would be coming back shortly. He would be near by, at Gedsborough. He would be coming in to Kenwoulton. She might meet him on the street, pass him, or encounter him close by in one of the little groups of flyers always wandering about.

It was his nearness or the accidents of encounter that Patches knew she would dread. She had already made up her mind that when he returned she would not see him again. A chapter in her life was closed. She could no longer attend the dances on Saturday night at the officers’ club at Gedsborough, or go to the pictures with him, or spend one of their gay, crazy evenings of pub-crawling. For she knew she did not have the strength to see him or be with him and conceal her love for him.

Downstairs the telephone rang, and Patches noticed how automatically she sharpened her listening, how the old habits and hopes reasserted themselves. This was the hour when Jerry usually called, and she remembered how in the old days she always hoped it would be he who called first rather than one of the other boys from the Spitfire airbase with whom she sometimes had dates.

She heard the high-pitched giggle of one of the other girls speaking on the telephone from below, and disconnected her senses from the sounds as she looked about her room with a kind of desperation and harrowing unease. Her favorite books stood on the shelf by the window, but she did not have the courage to open one. There were photographs of her father and mother looking down at her from their accustomed place on her chiffonier, and Patches thought that she did not even have a picture of Jerry, not so much as a pair of silver wings or a shoulder patch, to remember him by. And with a kind of bitter despair that brought even the shadow of a smile to her mouth, she realized the inadequacy of objects and at the same time the superfluousness of anything needed to remind her of Jerry . . .

She had not known. She had not dreamed what it would do to her, even after the inner struggle that had preceded her so blithely going off with him that June morning.

Jerry was the first boy Patches had truly loved; he was the first man to whom she had given herself. She had made this gift out of love and generosity and the unstilled hunger of youth for youth—the yearning of love that needs an answering love to hush its cries—but she could not in truth have known or suspected what would happen to her because of the giving, the changes that were to be wrought upon her.

She had thought to snatch a moment of happiness in a crumbling world, to give one brief instant of existence to her love for Jerry before she put him forever out of her life. She had known she would not forget him, that he would always be a sweet and tender memory, but she had counted upon time to help dim the dreams she had made around him. She had not foreseen what she now knew, that there was no longer anything in life but Jerry.

She belonged to Jerry, everything that she was—her conscious thoughts, her person, her mind, her heart, the deep, swelling buds of womanhood that were bursting within her—awake, asleep, living, dying, breathing, walking, wherever she might be, to the ends of time, she belonged to him. He possessed her, and it was this knowledge of his possession of her that brought such a terror and trembling to her heart. Nothing was left of her to be recovered. She was utterly and hopelessly lost.

There was now not even, as she had hoped, any refuge to be found in memories. For during the days that they had lived together and grown closer to each other, Jerry had come to be her husband in every sense. All the many attentions and courtesies and protections with which a man surrounds a woman had been hers. Kindnesses, tendernesses, little thoughtful acts of his that grew out of their living together, came to be unbearable to Patches as memories because they mirrored the perfection of their brief and total happiness. It was like the first time that Jerry had registered at the hotel in Inversnaid: “Lieutenant and Mrs. Gerald Wright,” and Patches could not bear to look while he did it. Now there was nothing but pain when she remembered the days and the nights when she had lived with Jerry, passing as his wife.

She fought the past by trying to plan the future, and thought about what she would do if and when Jerry telephoned her. She remembered his smile in the station and his confident “See you when I get back to Kenwoulton . . .” The trip had indeed been nothing more than an episode to him, to be continued thereafter on the careless footing of friendship. She was not angry with him for this. He had never lied to her. But she wondered whether she would have the strength to deny him, when he called, to say: “I’m sorry, Jerry, but it’s best if we don’t see one another any more,” or to refuse to speak to him at all, to make the break clean and sharp.

And yet she so longed to see him once more. The desire manifested itself in the fantasies she threw up against such denial, that Jerry had done nothing to deserve such treatment, that it would be kinder to see him once more, to remind him of the terms of their friendship and to point out that it was best for them both to stand by those terms. And while she was with him again for that last meeting, she could possess him once more with her eyes, see his smile, and hear his laugh, touch his hand, study again the strong angle of his jaw and the shape and color of his eyes that so touched her heart. She would memorize every dear line of his features and inflection of his voice . . . Patches realized that the telephone was ringing again and that she was listening.

She covered her ears with her hands for a moment, so shocked and desperate was she at her own weakness. It was over, over, over! She had no right to think thoughts of seeing him again. She at once resolved that when he returned and called her, she would be out, or busy. There would be—there must be—a clean break. She called upon all the inner strength and dignity that had carried her through life and the bitter, difficult war years, and promised herself this. Her head came up, she breathed deeply, her whole body stiffened with resolve.

“Coeeee, Patches! Are you there?” It was one of the girls calling from below. Patches went to the door and answered. The girl said: “Telephone. It’s for you . . .”

Jerry! Perhaps he was calling her from Scotland. He might even have cut short his leave and come home. All resolves and promises and steeling of herself against this moment were gone. To hear his voice once more, his gay careless, infectious greeting: “Hi, Patches, what’s cooking?” She raced down the stairs breathlessly, in panic, lest something should happen to the connection to break the slender strand that for the moment would bind her to Jerry again.

She picked up the receiver. “Hello, this is Patches . . .”

There was a moment of silence in the telephone while every fibre of her vibrated with the expectancy of hearing Jerry’s voice; in her mind she was already hearing it, and her heart was framing her reply, preparing the softness and tenderness in her voice . . .

“Hello, hello . . . I say, Patches, you’re back, aren’t you? That’s jolly good. What about a turn at the flicks tonight?”

Patches thought she would die from disappointment. It wasn’t Jerry. She knew the voice, but for the moment could not even think who it was.

“Hello, hello? I say, are you there, Patches? This is Allan.”

She knew now and said faintly: “Hello, Allan.” It was one of the RAF pilots, Allan Peters, from the nearby Spitfire base where Patches worked as a radar technician in operational headquarters. He was a nice and rather innocuous boy with whom she had had occasional dates in the past.

He was saying: “There’s a new flick with Lana Turner at the Kensington. I thought we might pop over . . .”

“I . . . I don’t know, Allan . . .” Patches was sick with disappointment and with shame at her own weakness. What had happened to her determination to break off with Jerry? At the first slender hope of hearing his voice she had come rushing to the telephone.

“Quite all right, Patches. I just thought if you weren’t doing anything . . .”

Patches did not want to see Allan or go to the pictures. She could not bear the thought of being with anyone; she did not even wish to leave her room and the safety of its walls and familiar objects. And then the reaction to her own weakness set in. She had always gone with Allan before when he had asked her. Somewhere life must begin again, somehow the old threads be picked up. But it was more to punish herself for having given in to her longing for Jerry so quickly that she said: “All right, Allan, I’ll go with you.”

“Right-o, Patches. I’ll be around for you at the usual. Cheerio . . .”

Allan Peters called for Patches, and they saw the picture at the Kensington and then went for some fish and chips and sat in a booth, where Allan found himself studying Patches with a kind of puzzled interest. He was of the breed—pink-cheeked, with curly sand-colored hair, weak chin and weak mouth, over which he had raised an edge of RAF moustache—one of those boys who looked footling, silly, and rather useless and who was a holy terror in a Spitfire in combat.

Allan had known Patches for some time as a girl who was pleasant to talk to, or take for a walk in the country, or have as a neighbor in a movie theatre. But he had never been aware of her in any sense as a girl who might be desirable. Now he found himself unable to take his pale eyes from her face. Something about her that he did not understand, that he had never noticed before, was stirring him queerly, making him uneasy and yet excited. He sat more closely to her and sometimes carelessly let his hand rest upon the table so that it touched hers. And he kept searching her face, and once when she bent her head to his proffered cigarette-lighter, he quickly breathed in the fragrance from her hair.

He enquired about how she had spent her leave, and when she satisfied him with generalities, he said suddenly: “I say, Patches, what’s come over you? Do you know you’ve changed a lot since the last time we were together?”

“Changed, Allan? What do you mean?” She turned her eyes on him, eyes that were wide with alarm, though he did not interpret the look since he could not know of the panic his confirmation of her fears inspired in her. For a moment Patches had the terrible sensation of being stripped naked and bound hand and foot in the market place to be stared at. Dear God, could everyone now see?

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean you’re quite different, you know. Almost as though you . . . I say, Patches, would you mind very much if I kissed you?”

Patches was feeling sick and dizzy inside and did not know what to do or say. “He knows . . . he can tell . . . he feels it . . .” was going through her mind. This was a part of what was to be from now on, the things she had brought upon herself, things she would be called upon to face. Allan reached over and kissed her awkwardly on the side of the head and took her hand in his. He said huskily: “Damn it all, Patches! Am I going to fall in love with you?”

Patches murmured: “Don’t fall in love with me, Allan,” but did not have the strength or the fight to disengage her hand from his.

But it was on the way home in the dark alley of Bishop’s Lane that Allan suddenly said her name, “Patches,” and turned and took her in his arms, pressing his mouth on hers, keeping it there, holding her imprisoned by the desire of his body.

She did not resist. She let it happen as a punishment to herself. It took all of her courage, but she spared herself nothing. She felt the warmth and rapidity of his breathing, and, in the wan light of the semi-blacked-out street lamp, saw the moist glitter of his eyes, and in the horrible, endless moment of the embrace she came to know the meaning of hell on earth.

He relaxed his hold for a moment to look at her, his throat working, his face pale; then his hands were reaching for her again, crying hoarsely: “Patches . . . I say, Patches, I . . .”

But she was running now, running as fast as she could through the street, her feet barely touching the curved cobblestones, running and sobbing, with the darkness all through her, inside as well as outside, as though she were a part of the heavy blackness that would never know the light again. She heard him cry her name once more, and the heavier drumming of the footsteps on the pavement, before she reached the house and safety inside.

She ran up the stairs to her room, where she locked the door and then threw herself on to her bed and cried terribly for Jerry. Her crying was the miserable, hopeless weeping of the abandoned, of the woman denied the protection of her man.

She spoke his name, calling upon him again and again and again: “Oh Jerry, Jerry . . . Jerry!” Why wasn’t he there to shield her? If he loved her, he would be there with her, and nothing could happen to her. Into her crying crept the hysteria of the fear that had been with her ever since she had come back, when she had known that her security was gone, her safety assailed, her citadel destroyed. Allan had read it on her that she was now prey to all men. There was no one to whom she could turn.