Stella stared hard at the jug, the delicate pattern of flowers engraving itself on her memory for the rest of her life. Such havoc of thought skittered through her mind she wondered if she had heard right, if she was imagining the question. This was so far from the picture of where and how the proposal would take place, she found herself in a silent, desperate struggle to appear composed.
‘I thought,’ said Philip, eventually alerted to Stella’s confusion, ‘if we made it clear marriage was on the books, things would be easier tonight …’
‘How do you mean?’ Tears skinned Stella’s eyes.
‘I didn’t want you to feel any guilt, any apprehension … any nervousness that I might be one of those chaps who makes love to a girl then leaves her.’
‘Nothing like that had entered my mind.’
‘No, well. We don’t know each other terribly well, do we? I wanted you to feel sure. Anyhow, what’s the answer to be?’ He sounded almost impatient.
Stella put down her cup, blinked back the tears. She had only a few seconds in which to straighten out the surge of feeling that had rendered her physically useless. She looked down at her own shocked hands lying dead on the oilcloth, the nails painted a pale pink by the insistent Prue last night. She tried to sort out the muddle in her brain. The main factor was one of relief, an out-of-focus sort of joy that what she had been planning, hoping for, had happened so fast, so easily. But clambering about this main sensation were small, worrying shoots: the profound sense of bathos, the disappointment that Philip had not engineered so important a moment with more skill.
‘You look surprised,’ he said. ‘Surely it’s no surprise. I thought …’
Stella braced herself, managed a small laugh. ‘I’m only surprised by the time, the place,’ she said. ‘Being a hopeless romantic I somehow thought the proposal was bound to happen with champagne and music.’
‘On bended knees, I dare say. You’ve seen too many films. I’m sorry, I don’t work like that.’
Philip took one of Stella’s hands. The electric shock between them revived her. The familiar love that had so consumed her while hoeing fields, milking cows, spreading dung, returned. Ashamed at her sense of disappointment, she gripped Philip’s hands tightly, leaned towards him. The moment of her humility was accompanied by the sickly smell of suet and hot jam sauce.
‘Am I to be turned down?’ Suddenly anxious, Philip’s voice.
‘Of course not. Of course I’ll marry you. I love you.’
‘I love you too. That’s all right, then.’
Philip extracted his hand from Stella’s, pushed away the plate of unfinished pudding. He signalled to the waitress for the bill, pulled a handful of change from his pocket with which he made three small towers of sixpences.
‘When I’m back at sea it’ll be good to know there’s a future wife waiting at home. Sometimes, on the night watch, especially, staring out at those miles of sea, you begin to think nothing else in the world exists. You think you’re the only ship on the only sea. Your mind plays all sorts of funny tricks.’
‘Hope the idea of a wife will make that better.’
‘I think it will. Let’s go.’
Down at the harbour a thin sun was breaking through a taut, colourless sky. Gulls shrilled overhead, their indignant cries dying away into low, tattered, affronted notes. Small groups of sailors trailed back and forth with no apparent purpose. There was a smell of salt and tar, a suspicion of fishy depths to the wind.
Stella and her sub-lieutenant stood looking up at the massive sides of HMS
Apollo
, a powerful ship built with the sharp sleek lines of an attacker. For some reason she reminded Stella of a pointer she had once seen at work when her father was out shooting – nose to the ground, cutting through a field of long grass. She could imagine the
Apollo
scything through the endless waves with the same sleek determination as a hunting dog – but that was a silly thought, not worth putting to Philip. She linked her arm through his, looked up at him, so handsome in his cap, the gold braid gently fired by the sun. His head was back, eyes on the White Ensign fluttering at the mainmast.
‘So lucky I got a destroyer,’ he said. ‘A lot of my friends were appointed to drifters and trawlers. I wouldn’t have wanted that.’
‘You’ll be a captain one day,’ said Stella. ‘Perhaps even a rear-admiral.’
Philip transferred his look of devotion from the White Ensign to Stella. He gave her the friendliest smile since she had arrived.
‘The future wife of the sub-lieutenant speaks,’ he said. ‘Look at those.’ He pointed up to a row of wickedly snouted guns – menace in waiting.
Stella shivered. ‘I can’t really imagine a battle at sea,’ she said. ‘A destroyer of this size snapped in two like a toy, burning, sinking. What I’d like’ – a sudden boldness gripped her – ‘is to know
exactly
what your life is like … I want to know your daily routine, all the details, so that when I’m back at the farm I can imagine you accurately. Up to now, I’ve just been guessing.’
‘I wouldn’t be very good at describing all that,’ Philip said.
They moved away from the shadow of the
Apollo
, walked hand in hand further down the harbour. Several ships were at anchor, unmoving on the flat water.
‘Awesome things, they seem, to someone not in the navy,’ said Stella. She thought that by making any observation, quickly enough, she would not have time to reflect on Philip’s lack of cooperation. ‘Whole, strange worlds.’
‘By the time we get to Hamilton Road,’ said Philip, looking at his watch, ‘it’ll be five o’clock.’
Mrs Elliot, the widow who ran The Guest House in Hamilton Road, was a woman of such deep suspicions that she was not ideal material for a landlady. Her pessimistic imaginings were fired at the very sight of strangers walking up the concrete path, and lingered long after they had gone. Her mind, filled with the possible activities of past guests, was thus always ready to come up with some point of reference. When Philip had come round to book the room, Mrs Elliot was able to inform him that not only had she had many lads from the forces staying under her roof but also, of particular coincidence, a sub-lieutenant from the
Apollo
had once stayed two nights. Her veneer of friendliness was calculated to make the new incumbent forthcoming with the sort of information she could pass on to the guests of the future.
As Stella and Philip walked in uneasy silence up the street of identical semidetached houses, Stella struggled to put aside her picture of a uniformed doorman ushering her through huge glass portals into a hotel lobby of rococo magnificence. Approaching Mrs Elliot’s establishment up the sterile little path, she had her misgivings – but then put them quickly to one side, because nothing, she told herself, now mattered except that she was here
with
Philip at last. While they waited for the door to open, Stella studied the grey stucco walls of the house, the windows veiled with thick net curtains, the highly polished brass knocker on the nasty green paint of the front door. She was aware that a kaleidoscope of material images was collecting in her mind where they would retain a significance for the rest of her life, simply because they were part of the weekend when, as Prue would say, she finally Did It.
The door opened. Mrs Elliot, from her superior position in the hall, was able to look down on Philip and Stella on the path. Her glance told them she was well appraised in all tricks of human nature – there was no point in any pretence. Stella was curious to know how Philip would deal with her censoriousness: silly old bat, she thought – what we are has nothing to do with her. The woman’s silent, instant disapprobation was intrusion into a privacy that meant much to Stella. She felt sudden anger, but said nothing.
Inside, they were greeted by smells that had never escaped the tightly closed windows: years of soup, cabbage, gravy, tea, had combined to thicken the airless atmosphere like invisible cornflour. The place was spotless, immaculate: the front room was crowded with a three-piece suite covered in rust rep, a material Stella’s mother had always sworn she would never resort to, no matter how long the war lasted. Starched white lace antimacassars hung over the back of the chairs and sofas indicating their owner was a connoisseur of such refinements, and woe betide any brazen member of the forces who dared lean his head against them. Despite the warm, claustrophobic air, Stella shivered. What on earth would they do, all evening, she and Philip, in this dead room?
Mrs Elliot was studying an appointments diary. ‘
Sub-Lieutenant
Wharton, that’s right, isn’t it? The two nights.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And …?’
Stella saw Philip turn pale. She saw his hands shake.
‘I’ll soon be Mrs Wharton,’ said Stella.
‘Soon as the war’s over,’ added Philip.
‘That’s what they all say.’ Mrs Elliot snapped shut the diary, waved a grey-skinned hand towards the window ledge. ‘You may be interested in my collection of corn dollies,’ she offered; ‘most of my guests are. You’ll have the opportunity to study them before the evening meal.’ She took them upstairs and delivered a little speech concerning house rules – blackout, locking-up time, essential economy of bath water, and absolutely no alcohol on the premises. Finally, in consideration of others, she would ask that they refrain from undue
noise
. This last rule, calculated further to inhibit young seamen bent on nefarious activities with a future ‘wife’, was accompanied by a bang on the bedroom wall: the dull echo of plasterboard proved its thinness. Perhaps to counteract such fierce warnings, Mrs Elliot pointed out that their window, thickly clouded with netting, overlooked the ‘front’.
When she had gone, leaving them with a knowing smile, Stella went over to the window, pulled back the net curtain. The view was of houses on the other side of Hamilton Road, identical to Mrs Elliot’s.
‘So where’s the promised front?’ she asked.
‘I think she meant the front of the house rather than the sea.’
Stella turned back to Philip who was sitting on the bed. She began to undo her coat. Smiled.
‘Nothing matters,’ she said. ‘Absolutely nothing matters except that we’re here at last.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Philip. He rose and came over to Stella, helped her off with her coat. ‘We’ll eat here tonight, but tomorrow night we’ll go to some big hotel.’
‘That would be lovely.’ Chandeliers began to retwinkle on some faint horizon: the possibility of champagne. Philip looked at his watch.
‘We’ve exactly an hour till Mrs Elliot’s gourmet feast at eighteen hundred hours. And what we’ve got to remember is no noise …’
They both laughed. Philip tipped Stella’s head back into the gathering of net curtains so that it rested against the window pane. He began to kiss her with an eagerness which Stella would have shared had she not been anxious about cracking the glass behind her.
Exactly an hour later they sat at a table in a back room eating corned beef salad and – speciality of the house, Mrs Elliot had assured them – baked potatoes.
The silence was stifling. Fatigue, readjustment and a sudden dread of things to come had deprived Stella of all ideas to entertain the blank-looking Philip. Joined only in mutual hunger, they ate their etiolated salads fast, and spread extravagant amounts of salad cream on their potatoes to counteract the tiny wafers of marge Mrs Elliot had laid on a small saucer. In the quietness, Stella contemplated for a long time the inspiration behind the salt and pepper pots – crude china mushrooms painted with identical spots. Whose idea had it been to create such objects? What pottery had agreed they would catch the discerning landlady’s eye, and set about their manufacture? Stella always enjoyed asking herself such unanswerable questions, and added the mushrooms to her list of memorable things in this unforgettable weekend. She smiled.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was thinking about the salt and pepper pots.’
Philip showed no flicker of understanding her train of thought.
‘
I
was thinking we ought to get out of this place for a drink somewhere. We can’t just sit in that room waiting to go to bed.’
‘No.’ Stella finished her glass of water.
‘There’s a pub just down the road.’
‘There is,’ said Mrs Elliot, coming in from the kitchen, ‘but locking-up time is nine thirty and I’ll not tolerate any incidents of drunken behaviour. They’ve been known to happen in the past, especially able seamen.’ She knew how to fling an insult: watched Philip stiffen. ‘There’s butterscotch shape to follow. They’ve quite a reputation, my shapes. I’ve not had a guest yet who’s not complimented me, that I can tell you.’
Philip and Stella, still hungry, could only accept her challenge. Mrs Elliot fastened the blackout across the small window, and switched on a dim central light. Scene set for triumphant entry of pudding, she brought in a beige mound on a cut-glass plate.
‘You’ll like that,’ she said, ‘or I’ll be blowed.’
When Mrs Elliot left the room, Stella gently moved the plate. The shape wobbled very slightly. They both laughed.
‘Come on,’ said Philip, ‘out of here as soon as possible.’
They smeared a little of the butterscotch stuff on the bottom of their pudding plates, spooned the rest into the two unused paper napkins, and stuffed the squashy package into Stella’s handbag.
Ten minutes later they were back at the harbour. In the winter dusk they threw the pudding ceremoniously into the black water, joined in laughter, relief, sudden new excitement. From now on, Stella knew all would be well. She took her future husband’s arm, rested her head against his shoulder as they walked. A full moon lighted their way to the pub.
It was warm, light, crowded with seamen and their girls. Too noisy for conversation, Philip and Stella had their drinks at the bar. They leaned against each other, the thrill of proximity piercing through their coats. Stella, on Prue’s advice, drank gin and lime. Unused to alcohol, she felt delightfully out of focus after two glasses. Philip chose neat whisky. But even in their alcoholic state of careless rapture, Mrs Elliot’s threats hung over them with a penetrating chill. They left at nine fifteen.