Clemmie (4 page)

The third time he danced with her he grew impatient with the triteness of their conversation and said, “I can’t talk to you in front of them. Gould we go?”

She pushed back and looked up at him rather gravely. “Wouldn’t that be rude?”

“Yes, it would. Do you really care?”

They apologized to Hallowell and Ella and left. She came alive when they were out in the night. “That was horrid,” she said. “I never felt such a fool. As if I were on display.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I suppose. Ella has been so anxious for me to go out. Could we walk for a bit?”

“Of course.”

They took long strides. Her wrap blew in the wind. The sky was bright enough over the blacked-out city for him to see her shy and questioning glance when he took her hand. It was near the end of 1943 and the few air raids were nuisance raids, one or two bombers slipping in to drop a random death on the dark sprawl of the city.

When the sirens whooped they hurried to the nearest entrance to the underground. They stood close together, leaning against a dank wall, facing each other, and listening to the chugging of the guns. Faint light from a weak bulb touched her cheek and shadowed her eyes. He slid his hands inside her wrap, clasped the slim waist in his hands and pulled her close and kissed her. There was no response in her lips. She endured the kiss and pushed him away quite gently.

“Not like that,” she said.

“Then like what?”

“Did they tell you about me?”

“About—the pilot?”

“Yes. I’m vulnerable, Craig. Craig. That is rather a nice name. I’m vulnerable. I don’t want to get all emotionally involved. With anyone. Ella says I should have an affair. She’s quite taken with you. She thinks you would be good for me. I can’t be that cold-blooded. Do you see?”

“I think so.”

“Poor Captain Fitz. Don’t pout, darling. Please. It would be nice to have someone to walk with and talk with. But without any of—the other. Would you mind terribly?”

“I guess I wouldn’t.”

“Then could you get an auto on Sunday and could we go into the country and walk? I ache for a walk in the country.”

And that was the way it started. When she began to trust him, she lost her reserve, and he found her delightful. They had good times together and he told himself it was enough for him. But, quite slyly, he managed to find a rather shabby little flat and get permission to move from the hotel to the flat. When he told her about it, she was angry that he had done it, and they quarreled.

It was weeks before he could entice her to come to his flat. Her reluctance had made him feel as though he should be twisting the ends of his mustache and leering. Finally he said, “Damn it, Maura, this is one hell of a cheerless town in the winter, and I’m damn sick of wandering around freezing. I liberated a tricky field stove from stores, and I’ve got fuel for it, and PX groceries. As near as I can tell, it’s one of the few warm, comfortable places in London. I’m not about to bite you.”

She agreed then, but she seemed strained and shy at the flat. She did not seem herself. He made no advances. By the fifth visit, she began to seem at home. After several ineffectual kisses, he had learned with the greatest difficulty to adjust himself to the fact of her physical coldness. It seemed grotesque that there was no physical warmth to match the provocative contours of her lovely body. There were ways she would stand, and ways she would turn, and the wanting of her, the pure physical need of her, would be like something closing around his throat.

On one Sunday he had to go back to headquarters, leaving her there. He had worked longer than he had anticipated, and it was dusk when he returned. He let himself in quietly. The stove was a red glow in the gray shadows of the room. He looked into the small bedroom. She was asleep on the bed, on her back, her head turned to the side, fine blonde hair spilled across the pillow. He went in on tiptoe and, with the greatest of care, sat down on the edge of the bed, shifting his weight a little at a time so as not to awaken her. Her leg touched the side of his hip, and he felt her warmth. She breathed slowly and deeply, placid as a child, and the gray light from the window was across her.

He sat for a very long time, until it was almost dark, just watching her sleep and getting pleasure from looking at loveliness and utter repose. She was dressed in a thing she had brought to the flat the last time she had come, something to give relief from the ugliness of the uniform. It was a one-piece outfit, not unlike coveralls or battle dress, with long sleeves and trouser legs. But it did not have the bagginess of coveralls. It was fitted to her, and it was of a soft gray-green, with knitted cuffs and anklets. She was sprawled there, looking leggy, almost boyish. Her breasts rose and fell with her soft breath.

On impulse he put his hand on her waist, and as she came awake, he bent over her and kissed her. She flung her arm up and tightened it around his neck, and her lips were electrically avid, her body, straining up for a moment to meet his. She made a sound like a sob and pushed him away, roughly and strongly, and moved around him with agility and fled to the other room. He followed her closely and, when she stopped, he took her shoulders and turned her around.

“No!” she said sharply.

He kissed her. Her mouth was lax and unresponsive. But he held her closely, caressing her as he kissed her. He felt the beginnings of response, and then she began to fight him with strength and violence. It was all he could manage to hold her, to keep his lips on hers. She stopped fighting suddenly, and her hips thrust strongly forward and her arms were strong around him, and her lips were alive. She sobbed again, and flung herself a bit to the side, sagging in his arms, head drooping, hair falling forward,
breathing hoarsely. In time her breathing quieted and she straightened and said calmly, “Let me go now, Craig. Please.”

He released her. She walked over and sat near the stove.

“I think I should explain something to you.”

“I guess you should.”

“It was a promise I made. After I found out. That in all the rest of my life there would never be anyone else. Rather like a shrine, I suppose. And rather foolish, I imagine. But there it was, and it was a sacred promise. I had promised God. Jeff and I had made love together, and it was all the love I ever wanted. But I’m so desperately weak. I’ve sensed that. When you kissed me, I tried to make my mind and my heart nothing but a great empty coldness.”

“I think I understand.”

“Thank you, Craig. Was it so childish?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll never really love anyone else. Is that clear too?”

“Yes.”

She turned toward him, and the only light was the red glow of the stove highlighting the curve of her cheek, glowing darkly in one eye.

“Do you know how weak I really am?” she asked.

“How weak?”

“I know you. I could ask you to help me. But I shan’t. I—want you.”

On that Sunday their life entered another dimension. Their physical need of each other was great, almost obsessive. They learned each other and became so perfectly attuned that each could be aroused by a word, a gesture, a glance. Her body was long and firm and rounded, and her skin texture almost unbelievably smooth. It was not long before the artifices and devices of physical modesty no longer existed between them. They took uncomplicated pleasure in the sight and touch of each other. And the compulsive frequency of their love-making seemed to renew rather than exhaust them. His capacity for work seemed to increase, and in her stride there was a new resiliency and energy.

There was a curious flavor to her love-making. She was not a creature of theatrical frenzies, of nails and teeth and whinings. She was earth-mother. She was like sunlit earth, like sea tides, like a slow wind in fields of wheat.
She was a deeply primal rhythm, clasping and enclosing, a rocking strength that underscored release with a long sighing breath, half-articulated, a sweet moist warmth against his face with that prolonged exhalation. In love play she delighted in tantalizing absurdities, in a childlike frankness of experimentation—yet always at one certain point she would revert to the primal woman, and it would be the same for them, always a renewal, a pledge, an unspoken statement of faith.

They never had a guest at the flat. It was their special and private world. As the weather improved, Craig managed to acquire two khaki and cumbersome G.I. bicycles. These could be stowed on a toy train and taken out to the country lanes when there was the rare coincidence of their days of freedom. But always, late in the afternoon, there would be a time when he would look into her eyes and both of them would be filled with a fevered impatience to return to the flat.

As June came closer, the tempo of staff work increased. They both knew D-Day was imminent. The symphony was building to a prolonged climactic coda. But the very intensity of the affair with Maura made the preparations unreal. They never talked of what could come afterward. He tried to tell himself this was just an exceptionally fortunate interlude and, after it was over, they could both forget it. But whenever he thought of never seeing her again, a coldness came into his mind.

On the fourteenth of June he received orders to go to France the next day. He was with Maura until three in the morning on the fifteenth. Their talk had a curious, electric emptiness about it. There were too many things unsaid. They agreed to say their final good-by the next day at eleven near her headquarters. He was to leave for the airport at noon.

As he walked toward their corner where they had met before, when she could leave her work for a few moments, he heard an odd thrumming, wobbling sound as though some fast-flying aircraft was passing overhead with something wrong with the motors. After the sound faded he heard a distant, deep-throated, smashing explosion.

He wondered if it was possible that the Germans could have rigged up some fantastic long-ranged gun to bombard London the way they had Paris in the first war.

When he was a half block from the corner, he looked
far ahead, trying to spot Maura. She was usually prompt, and he was several minutes late. There were quite a few pedestrians, not much vehicle traffic.

And again he heard the sputtering, thrumming noise, much louder than before. He looked up. A curious thing with short stubby wings moved into view. The sky was clear for a moment and it was outlined against the blue. It trailed puffs of white vapor. It seemed to be traveling slowly. The thrumming sound of propulsion died and at once it nosed over and came down like a stone. He saw that it was coming directly at him. He heard harsh shouts of alarm, heard women scream. There was a shop beside him, below sidewalk level, with three wide, stone steps leading down to the front door. He hurled himself down, banging his bad leg painfully against one of the steps, and huddled at the bottom, cheek against dirty concrete. Seconds later the crescendo of explosion seemed to lift him off the earth and drop him back. There were long seconds of dazed deafness during which he heard nothing. Then sounds came back. A prolonged tinkling of falling glass. A rumble of masonry. Something that cried hoarsely in a deep bubbling voice, endlessly, “Naaaa Naaaaa Naaaaa.” Over and over, then it weakened and was silent. Cries and moanings mingled in atonal chorus, like an experimental choir.

When he got up, slowly and unsteadily, he found that there had been a short piece of wrought-iron railing lying across his back. He had not felt it fall. As he got up, the clerks came out of the shop. Their faces were gray.

“What was it?” a man demanded.

Craig walked up to the sidewalk. The thing, which had seemed to be aimed directly at him, had hit at the base of the building on the corner where they had usually met. The building and those near it had tumbled into the street. A bus stood half engulfed by the torrent of stone. The street was hazy with cement dust held in lazy suspension. Near the crest of the wave of stone by the bus protruded, horribly and ludicrously, a pair of naked, unmarked legs.

The dead lay smashed, and the wounded lay bleating. Now he could hear the other sounds of the city, the constant daytime roar. And he heard sirens, close by and coming closer. He saw flames begin in what was left standing of the big building.

He moved slowly and felt he was in a dream. This was the dramatic ending. This was inevitable, and it had been the result of his refusal to say last night what he should have said, and what she did not expect him to say. He knew the other portions of the script. It might be the ludicrous beret he would find.

There were so many dearnesses, now gone. From the small of her back to cleft of buttocks, the patch of palest down. A time of staring at a distance of inches at one gray eye until in semi-hypnosis, the whole world became one great gray eye, pupil like oiled and polished obsidian, and tiny flecks of tan and green pigmentation very near the pupil. Wide separation of breasts, so that in nakedness there was a heroic flavor to her stance, a reminiscence of the Greeks. Color of nipples—neither pink nor coral nor orange nor brown—but a special tawny shade of their own, without name. The one crooked tooth, this one here on the bottom, turned so that in one kiss too harsh it had made a cut on the underside of her lip. Tiny star-shaped scar on the knuckle of the little finger of her left hand, souvenir of a boy in Long Melford, a buck-toothed boy with what she had termed “a lewd and carroty smile.”

He knew how she lifted her head when you reached to light her cigarette, how, after putting a shilling in the geyser for the privilege of sitting in the great stone tub in four inches of tepid water, she would come in and scrub with marvelous energies and sigh and say, “Oh, you have such a lovely, lovely back, my dearest.”

“Leave some hide on it.”

How she held a teacup in both hands, and rather than looking coy or consciously childlike, it had suited her. How she felt sternly disapproving of her own toes. “They’re rather nasty, actually. Poor bent, pinched little things, always crouching in the ends of boots.”

How once she had come up behind him and, catching him entirely by surprise, had locked her arms around him, around his middle and lifted him completely off the floor, all hundred and seventy pounds, holding him for poised moments after his whoop of surprise, then dropping him back on his feet. He turned and she, flushed with exertion, tapped herself on the chest and said, “Observe, you have a husky peasant wench, suited for heavy duty.”