Key to the Door (57 page)

“Neither can I, in a way”—glad that she also felt the same mixed sensation of it all.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Though I don't see the need for much hurry.”

“Well, we can't dawdle either, can we?”

“I'll see to everything, don't worry. Get special leave and all that.”

“As long as you aren't backing out,” she said, a half-serious caution to see how he'd take it.

“I would if I wanted to,” he said firmly. “But I won't want to. I love you too much, you know that.”

“As long as I know,” she taunted.

“Well, I've told you,” he cried. “I've been telling you for a long time.”

“I know you have, duck.”

“You never look as though you believe me, though.”

“What do you expect? We both go as far as we can”—this reference to the just-revealed fact that she was having a baby quieted his shock, and he held her close: “Don't let's get mad, love.”

“I've been worrying myself blind these last three weeks. Mam's been on to me as well.”

“Why didn't you write and tell me?” he shouted in the darkness. “I'd a been out o' that camp like a shot. Nobody could have stopped me.”

“Well, I don't know. I thought it wouldn't be the best thing, to write and tell you it in a letter. Mam said so as well when I told her.”

“You thought I'd run away and never show my face?” he laughed.

Her hard knuckles thumped into his ribs: “No, you leary swine. But you can clear off now if you want to, because I can soon have the baby and keep it myself without your 'elp. In fact, that's what mam said. ‘Don't get married if you don't like him. But if you can, it'd be better.' So I don't care how much trouble it is, it ain't that much of a force-put. I didn't want to get married as early as this, no more than yo' did. So I'm not going to marry you just because I'm having a baby. I can allus live at home and stay at work.”

He rubbed the pain out of his bones: her outbursts were the more abrupt and fiery in proportion to her at-times angelic calmness. “You want to keep your temper. I was only having a joke.”

“All right,” she said, “but you ought to be nice to me sometimes.”

“I often am”—he tried to hit off the correct ratio of his good nature—“but I come home on leave, rush straight to see you all the way from Gloucestershire, and this is what you meet me with. You think it i'n't a shock for me as well?”

“I know it is, but I couldn't break it any other way, could I? I'm glad you've come, though. It feels better for me now.”

They drew into a long kiss by the hedge, stopped only when a car drove by and fixed them in its headlights before turning off at the Balloon Houses. “I don't feel bad about having a baby,” she said. “I'm sure I'll like it, and that it'll be all right.”

“It sounds O.K. to me. I suppose we let ourselves in for it.” He was filled with joy and dread. The first shock had shown the future as a confused black ocean, which had lost much of its alarm, however, in the last half hour because a feeling of having gained some enormous happiness had gradually come into him. They crossed the main road, arms locked around each other, and walked into a wood on the far side.

The day before Brian was due back in Gloucestershire Bert swung up in the yard, resplendent in beret and battle-dress and a couple of campaign ribbons won from the last push over the Rhine. He was quartered in Trieste and had travelled across Europe on a forty-hour journey of wooden seats to get himself—so he joked to Harold Seaton—an earful of Radford, a gutful of Shippoe's, and an armful of fat tart.

They went out to walk part of the way together: Brian to see Pauline at Aspley, Bert to call on his brother at nearby Cinderhill. It was a dry, baking summer, seemingly endless because it had been on almost a week, and they swapped opinions on life in uniform, Brian disliking his incarceration mainly for a reason as yet unspoken to Bert, and Bert enjoying his experience because he had a marvellous time not having to worry where the next meal or shilling came from. “I might even sign on an extra three years,” he said, “instead of coming out at Christmas. In fact, I'm sure I shall.”

“What do you want to do that for?” Brian asked. “There's plenty o' wok.”

“I like it better than wok,” Bert told him.

Over a sandstone wall lay a cemetery, cool grass waving and flowers spread on many graves, colours of snow and blood and mustard against marble. It was Sunday morning, and some people tended stones and urns, busying themselves with hedge-clippers and watering-cans. Brian said to his cousin: “I'm signing on as well in a way, only for life. I'm getting married.”

Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: “You're not.”

“I am. To Pauline. Don't you think we've been courting long enough?”

“Come off it.”

“What do you mean, come off it?” He wanted more reaction than this, so little not indicating whether Bert thought him a fool or a grown-up, a madcap or a restless layabout who was getting spliced for want of anything new to do, or a shade of every reason. But he underestimated Bert, who looked at him slyly, shut one eye, and demanded: “She's having a kid?”—at the same time offering a fag from a ten-pack to mollify such outrightness in case he was wide of the mark.

Brian's first thought was to say no, she bloody-well wasn't, but who knew how much it would show by the time they were able to get married? And in any case, when she had the kid it would be calculated in simple-finger arithmetic (digit by digit backdated), so that it was better to be thought trapped now than be seen to have been a frightened liar then.

“She's pregnant,” he said, “and we're getting married.”

They walked on, out of step now and Bert looking in at him as if to find a trace of lying on his face. “But you'll be done for,” he raved suddenly. “You'll be hooked, finished, skewered and knackered. Why don't you do a bunk?”

“Because I don't want to. I'd never be able to see her again.”

“Come off it. Sign on, get sent overseas, cut your throat, hang yourself. For Christ's sake, you're only eighteen.”

“I'll be nineteen next year,” he grinned. Bert was grieved: “I know, sure, Brian. You'll be twenty-one soon as well, and we'll give you the key to the bleeding door: can't you wait even that long? It's batchy to get married at eighteen. Think of all the fun you can still have. Running after all the women your eyes hook on to. I know it wain't suit yo' to get married, I do an' all. You ain't that sort. You're too much of a sod, like I am.”

“I know,” Brian said, “but I love her, you see. You think I'm trapped just because she's having a kid? Well, what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. If I didn't love her, I might think twice about it.”

“You've got to think twenty times about whether you love a tart or not.” Brian had thought a hundred times, and knew his mind by now on that subject anyway. Pauline was having a baby, and because he loved her they were going to get married. There was no need to ask himself what he would have done if he hadn't loved her, if she'd been little more than a casual acquaintance. “What's made you get sloppy all of a sudden?” Bert demanded.

He turned on him, fists clenched and ready to be raised: “I'm not bloody-well sloppy, so don't come it. I'm just doing what I want to do and what I think is right, and I'm not asking yo' whether it's good for me or not, because I know it is because I want it.”

“Well,” Bert said, “if that's the way you feel. All right, all right. Let me be best man, then.” They shook on it and Bert seemed to think it a good idea Brian was getting married by the time they got around to changing the subject.

The cornfield was being subtly reduced in size. A combine-harvester came towards them, went on by, and passed before they were halfway across on their slow walk. The area of high corn seemed no smaller than before, and already the machine was a red beetle turning again towards the far side of the sloping field, its engine noise filling the autumn evening like the leisured omnipresent growling of an invisible mastodon. A few bristles of withered corn lay over the path, like heads at which the big chop of the machine had suffered disappointment.

He reached for her hand as they ambled towards the shrub-covered hillside, a rising gradient of amber and bracken. He frowned with concern at her slight limp: “Does your foot still hurt, love?”

“It aches across the top.”

“We wain't walk far, then,” he promised, squeezing her hand tighter, hoping her foot would stop hurting if they ceased to think about it. He fastened the polished buttons of his overcoat, smiled at her long brown hair tied by a piece of ribbon, and noticed the strength in her calm smooth face, her pouting lips, shining forehead—a face resting for the moment from make-up because she had said: “You don't mind me letting my hair down now and again, do you?” Not that she had ever been much addicted to the alchemy of powders and lipsticks. The fresh smell of mown corn sharpened his regret that this would be their last night together for a few months, and he smiled to hide his anguish: “I suppose we should make the best of this evening.”

She pressed his hand: “It worn't a very long leave, wor it?”

“Long enough to get married in.”

It was an' all.

“You don't regret it, do you?” A tractor passed slowly, pulling a dray loaded with the systematic droppings of the combine-harvester. The young driver had a sleeve of his shirt torn, and a farmhand on top of the sacks smiled as they passed.

“We're young, so everybody told me at work. But I think it best to get married young.”

“So do I,” he laughed. “More time for being in bed together.” They'd been married two weeks ago, both families (and the friends of both) crowding the vestibule of the down-town registrar, and packing into the Trafalgar later for a noisy reception.

“Have you enjoyed this fortnight?”

She detected in his voice a sickness at heart simply because he was trying to hide it, at a time when they could hide nothing from each other. “It's been marvellous,” she answered. Her stomach was beginning to show, a slight pushing from under her voluminous coat.

“I'll be in Birmingham this time tomorrow, on my way back.”

“I wish I was going with you. It's not very nice being left behind.”

“I know. I shan't enjoy it either.” She asked why not, knowing the answer, yet still wanting to hear it. “Because you won't be with me,” he told her. “I often think of packing the air force in. Walking out. They'd never find me. We could live in another town.”

“Don't do that,” she said. “You've only got two years to do. It'll be all over then.”

“I might have to go abroad.”

“But you'll soon be back.” He wondered how she could say these things with such an expression of surety, see two years as being but a feminine small wisdom-tooth of time, a nothing that to him looked like a vast ocean with no opposite shore visible. Her love must be deeper than mine, calm and everlasting, if this seems such a normal hurdle to get over before our proper lives start.

But she'll have something to keep her company while I'm away. “Shall we go along here?”—pointing to where the footpath forked, through a meadow and up a hill.

“To the left,” he said, not knowing why. Walking before him, she hummed a tune. There was a low, grass-covered bank on one side and blackberry bushes on the other. The sound of birds and the combine-harvester working below was hardly noticed now, and the sun, soon to fall behind the hill, lay a pale yellow light over the fields. A breeze carried white fluff from seedpods of rose-bay, some settling on to his grey uniform.

“You'll be a snowman in a bit,” she said, finding it easy to laugh this evening.

“You'll be a snowmaiden as well,” he cried, her coat spotted white.

“Tell me another. I'm a married woman now!” She stopped by a bush: “What are these blue flowers called?”

“I don't know,” he teased.

“Yes, you do. You should, anyway. You're the one who's allus telling me about living all that time in the country at your grandma's when you was a kid.”

He knelt to look: “Harebells, I think.”

“I thought they came in April?” she said.

“Bluebells do, but these don't. Where did you go to school?” Three blue heads hung half-concealed under the low leaves of a bush before some ferns. “Faith, Hope, and Charity's what they look like,” she pronounced, brushing her fingers across them.

“And Hope stays still,” he said, when one didn't move.

She touched it, made it sway with the others: “Easy, you see.” They sat on the bank and she emptied soil from her shoes. “I don't want to go home tonight, do you?”

“It'd be nippy,” he said, “kipping out in the fields. It's nearly October. You'll be better off in bed wi' me, duck.”

“You're allus on about
that,”
she cried. “We shouldn't do it so much now I'm pregnant.”

“Hark at who's talking!” He laughed, walked to a bush and picked a cluster of blackberries, then went to another until he had gathered a handful. “What are you doing?” she called out, unable to see. He came back: “Open your mouth.”

“What for?” She picked the juiciest to eat, until a pang of conscience showed in her eyes, and made her feed him some. “I had a few already, when I was collecting 'em.” Hands empty, they looked at the vulnerable tenderness behind each other's eyes: “Why have I got to go off tomorrow? It's useless and crazy.” She couldn't reply, but held him and took his kisses.

They walked on, becoming more and more white from rose-bay. It even settled on the blackberries, had to blown off before they could eat them. They found raspberries also, and pink juice ran like blood to his hands: when they kissed he joked about tasting raspberry flavour: “I thought it was your lipstick,” he said, taking her arm so that she faced him. He saw the tremor of her mouth and they kissed passionately. “I love you,” she said. “Darling Brian, I I love you”—almost inaudibly. “I love you, sweetheart”—such committing words no longer unreal or out of place, not scoffed at as they might have been, had either used them a while back. He supposed such words were only embarrassing when the meaning of them had been forgotten or wasn't known; when spoken with reason, their sounds were as intense and sexual as the kisses that flowered at the same time.