A Soldier's Tale (15 page)

Pauvre vieux
, she murmured against his cheek,
pauvre p'tit soldat
.

Her voice was blurred, close to sleep. He shifted slightly to make them both more comfortable and as he did so he felt her body relax itself completely as she slept.

He lay there for some time staring up into the dark, and I know no more than you do what was going through his mind at that point. I see him clearly enough, as he lies there in the faint reflected sky-shine of a summer night, his left arm beneath her shoulders as she lies half-turned towards him, his right arm bent up, supporting his head. The sheet and the faded coverlet have been carelessly drawn up, leaving bare his wide flat-muscled chest and the curve of her arm across it. Her hair spills down opulently upon his body and her. He turns his face slightly to check on his sten gun and short knife laid handy on the rush-bottomed chair beside the bed, and his eyes seem to glisten in the dark like a hunting animal's. Then he stares up again, reckoning over the sounds of the night, distant planes, lazy gunfire, ours, theirs. He lowers his free arm on to the coverlet. Calmly, lightly, he falls asleep.

What is he thinking? He knows there is no help, but he has entered so whole-heartedly into the fantasy of domestic life and contentment which has been played out to comfort the woman that he almost believes it, wants it. For the first time in his hard, self-sufficient life he wants something for another. Tenderness begins to grow in him like green fern chance-dropped
by birds on a rocky slope. Yet his face in sleep has its old sardonic look, his hand twitches on the coverlet, he moves his head from side to side and murmurs in his throat.

I held this double image of him in my mind—him there smoking and looking down at the hot blue glow of the burner, him in the imagined past, doubly screened from me by time and sleep. I held it there while he politely topped up my mug before going out for a leak.

When he came back into the barn he said, Getting quiet up at the mess, I reckon your bloke'll be moving pretty soon now. You want to hear the rest of this, or you had enough of it?

Tell me how it finished, I said. I've got to know that now.

Sure you're not bored, Bom?

No fear, I said, I can't wait. (But all the time I had a foreboding about how it was going to end.)

Well, said Saul, I woke up with the sun still pretty low in the sky, and I decided I'd better get cracking. So I roused up Belle and she was sleeping sound. I says to her, Time I was going, girl, but no worrying, mind, because we got it all fixed up.

All she says is, I will get you your breakfast.

She got naked out of the bed and pulled on her old purple wrap. I watched her as she walked out of the bedroom, with the wrap half off her shoulders, yawning and brushing her hair back with one hand. Soon I could hear her rattling about in the kitchen, drawing the grate.

We shall need some more wood very soon, she says.

I'll get some, I says, I'll bring you in a good pile before I go off.

I shall need some now, for the breakfast, she calls.

Right, I says.

Now, I didn't want to waste a lot of time at this stage, so I slipped on my trousers and I went quickly round the back where I'd left the wood ready chopped. Not much mist about today, but low cloud. The early Spitfires seemed pretty busy and there was a local barrage going in over on the left. I hauled in a big armful of wood and dropped it with a crash in the woodbox. It startled her where she stood there in a brown study. She turned round with a sort of troubled look.

Saul, she says, Saul, tell me again, will it be all right?

Belle, I says, Belle—supposing—would they really harm you?

Yes.

How d'you know?

I shouldn't have said it really, because I wasn't sure. Something made me want to know. She was close to the edge, it was as if her face broke up, she sat down in a chair.

Bon dieu
, she says (again I'm helping out Saul's French), oh yes, there was another woman, they say she had—
on dit qu'elle avait chanté
—

Then she lost her English, like she did when she was moved or frightened—in bed sometimes too, when she had her climax.
Ils l'ont violée, puis crevé les yeux, enfin fusillée à la mitraillette
. And although the foreign words were too slurred to follow, there was no mistaking the pantomime that went with them. She mimed with little fierce gestures, clenched fist thrust at crotch, thumbs stabbing at eyes, the ritual gesture of traversing a Schmeisser. Rrrrudududuh. A kid's game gone bad.

I'd made a mistake (went on Saul) so I took her quick into my arms and kissed her.

Don't worry, sweetheart, they shan't touch you, I says, and I put up my hand and touched that marvellous red-gold hair. They shan't touch a hair of your head, I says, because even the hairs of thy head are numbered.

I'd seen to it that the water-barrel in the wash-house
was topped up and the buckets were full. I stripped off and went in there with just a towel around me. The sun had begun to creep out and I unlatched the top half of the Dutch door and set it wide open so as to let a bit of light in.

Then I called out to Belle.

Belle, I says, excited-like, come here quick.

What is it? she says.

Come and see, I says, I told you we'd be all right.

So she came hurrying in with her wrap still loose about her.

Look there, I says, and I set her so that she was looking out of the half-door across the garden.

Where? she says.

I put my arms around her and slipped her wrap down, leaving her bare. I slipped my left hand and arm under those beautiful charlies and gave them a last loving squeeze. She made a surprised sound, pleased too, and twisted her head back to kiss me. With my right hand I loosed the towel and reached for the long knife which I'd strapped to my thigh, under the towel.

At the last minute she must have sensed it. Her eyes went wide and wild like a frightened horse that smells death in a knacker's yard, but she pressed back close against me and clenched her mouth against
mine like an iron gag. Then I went down and in with the long knife behind the collar-bone. I loosed my left arm, she groaned and fell on the cold flagged floor and began to kick and scrabble like an old dog dying in the road, but I knew that it was as good as over.

I knelt beside her and took her hand in mine while she died to comfort her, like, if she could still feel anything, but I don't think they can, not at that stage. Then I got to work with the buckets and the barrel and sluiced all down. I washed the blood off me and off her and watched it run all pale pink and gurgling down the drain-hole in the centre.

In the bedroom the big bed was still all rumpled up just as we'd got out of it, and when I felt it it was still warm from our bodies. That gave me a queer feeling, I can tell you. I stripped the bed off and laid it with a clean sheet from the linen-press. There was a big fluffy towel there too, which I took to dry her and wrap her in as I carried her back to the bedroom and laid her in the bed. But there was still some blood and water on her, which stained the clean sheet like a girl had lost her maidenhead on it.

So I laid her on the floor and pulled off the sheet, because I wanted everything done proper for her. I put a second sheet on the bed and laid her on it, covering
the wound in her throat with a clean folded hankie.

Now I needed another sheet to cover her with. There wasn't one and this vexed me, until I found a fine old damask tablecloth, worn but good, so I laid that over her and covered her up to the chin. I smoothed out her long red hair, all dark from the water, and I closed her eyes. Then I took down the crucifix and the candles from the dresser where they'd been put against the time came for someone to die. I put the crucifix on the little shelf above the bed, and I arranged the two candles in the brass candlesticks, one on a chair on each side, and lit them.

I was sorry when it was done, because she was beautiful and she'd been good to me, in bed and out. But she'd got mixed up with the Jerries and she done them blokes to the Gestapo, however you look at it. Or so they said, and they were beyond listening to reason. Like I said, it was her story she told me, and I mayn't have taken it all in. It sounded fair enough, but it was her words against theirs, all the way. I don't even know if they'd've done all what she said, but I think she might have copped a bad time. That weekend we'd come pretty close. I wanted to help her any way I could, because she was mine now. So I suppose it was all right, and anyway what else was I supposed to do?

After a while I finished cleaning the place up. I shaved and dressed and got my gear together. I stood one last time in the bedroom and looked at her lying there. The low sun was striking in and bringing back the shine to her hair where it spread out on the pillow, but her face was white as the sheets. Then I went out and shut the door.

Up the road, it was like a reception committee. Old Wolf-face and the Brat and Big Stupid were there, unshaven and puffy-eyed, hunched up in their old coats, with their armbands and their old Lee Enfield rifles. I think they'd been waiting all night for me to go. And here was the Yank, all spruce and smooth-shaven, with his uniform pressed and smelling nice, and with a gun on his hip like a cowboy. I could see that the froggies were put out by it, because they could see themselves having to stand outside the door, as it were, like three poor ponces, all over again.

Hi fella, says the Yank, and he offers me a Camel and a light.

Ta very much mate, I says, you can have her now, and good luck to you, I says. And I walks off up the road. I never looked back.

After a few minutes I heard him open the front door—it was a summer morning, remember, and sounds carried. Then I heard him holler out, and
then the other three running down the road gabbling at one another.

I went on walking over the hill and I didn't turn round. All the same I'd like to have seen their faces, first his and then theirs, when they bust in and found her lying there in state like a dead empress. Like an imperial whore. Which she was.

Well, that's Saul Scourby's story as I've retold it and stretched it and filled it in and padded it out and no doubt put down more falsehood than truth. I'm finishing it towards midnight on Bastille Day nineteen-seventy-three, whatever that may mean. I've written it out in sadness and in anger, both for the bleak time when it happened and for the squalid age in which we now live. In all the time between, nearly thirty years, this story has haunted me, to the point where I've set it down unwillingly, doubtfully, in spite of myself. I've written without planning and with little revision. Often I've been on the point of chucking the whole thing in the fire, but I haven't. It's been like a tough old ugly cat that won't drown and won't go away. So let it live.

Sometime it appals me, and sometimes I think it's the finest love-story I know. Cruelty and mercy share the same human heart.