He met her gaze, and blew out his cheeks. He said, tiredly and simply, ‘I’m sick of being an old man, Viv. I’m sick of this bloody war. I’ve been on the move since Wednesday morning; I’m going to go home now and see my wife, we’ll just about have time for an argument before I’ll have to turn round and come back. Her sister’ll be with her; she hates my guts. Her mother doesn’t think much of me, either. My little boy calls me “Uncle”; he sees more of the air-raid warden than he does of me. I wouldn’t be surprised if my wife does, too…The dog, at least, will be pleased I’m home—if the dog’s still there. They were talking of having it shot, last I heard. Said the standing in line for horse-meat was getting them down…’
He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes again, and passed his hand over his chin. ‘I need a bath,’ he said. ‘I need a shave. Next to those lumberjacks out there, I look like Charlie bloody Chaplin. But somehow—’ He hesitated, then began to smile. ‘Somehow I’ve got myself locked in a room with a glamour girl; the most gorgeous glamour girl I think I ever saw in my life. Let me enjoy it, just for a few more minutes. Don’t make me open that door. I’m begging you. Look—’
His mood was lifting again already. He moved forward and gently took hold of her hand, raising her knuckles to his lips. The gesture was a corny one, yet had an edge of seriousness to it; and when she laughed, she laughed most in embarrassment, because she was over-aware of his hand around hers: the maleness of it, the niceness of it, the squareness of the palm, the tufted fingers and the short, hard nails. His chin was rough as sandpaper against her knuckles, but his mouth was soft.
He watched her laugh, as he had before; and smiled with pleasure. She saw again his straight white teeth. Later she’d say to herself, I fell in love with him teeth-first.
When she tried to think of the wife, the son, the baby, the home that the train was speeding him towards, she couldn’t do it. They might have been dreams to her, or ghosts; she was too young.
Tap-tap-tap, there came, outside Duncan’s bedroom window. Tap-tap-tap. And the strange thing was, he’d got used to sirens, to gunfire and bombs; but this noise, which was so little, like the pecking of a bird, woke him up and nearly frightened the life out of him. Tap-tap-tap…He put out his hand to the bedside table and switched on his torch; his hand was shaking, so that when he moved the beam of light to the window the shadows in the folds of the curtains seemed to bulge, as if the curtains were being pushed out from behind. Tap-tap-tap…Now it sounded less like the beak of a bird and more like a claw or a fingernail. Tap-tap-tap…He thought, for a second, of running to his dad.
Then he heard his name called, hoarsely: ‘Duncan! Duncan! Wake up!’
He recognised the voice; and that changed everything. He threw off the covers, clambered quickly across the bed, and pulled back the curtain. Alec was there, at the next window—the window of the parlour, where Duncan slept at weekends. He was still tapping at the glass, still calling out for Duncan to wake up. But now he saw the light of Duncan’s torch: he turned, and the beam of it struck his face, making him shrink back, screw up his eyes, put up his hand. His face looked yellowish, lit like that. His hair was combed back, greased flat to his head, and the fine, sharp lines of his brow and cheeks made hollow-looking shadows. He might have been a ghoul. He waited for Duncan to lower the torch, then came to his window and gestured madly to the catch: ‘Open it up!’
Duncan lifted the sash. His hands were still shaking, and the sash kept sticking as it rose, the glass rattling in the frame. He moved it slowly, afraid of the noise.
‘What’s the matter?’ he hissed, when the window was up.
Alec tried to see past him. ‘What are you doing in there? I’ve been knocking at the other window.’
‘Viv’s not back. I’m sleeping in here. How long have you been there? You woke me up. You scared me to death! What’s going on?’
‘I’ve bloody well had it, Duncan, that’s what,’ said Alec, his voice rising. ‘I’ve bloody well had it!’
There was the bursting of flares in the sky behind him, and a series of crackles. Duncan looked at the sky, growing afraid. He could only think that something dreadful must have happened to Alec’s family, Alec’s house. He said, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘I’ve bloody well had it!’ Alec said again.
‘Stop saying that! What do you mean? What’s the matter with you?’
Alec twitched, as if forcing himself to be calm. ‘My papers have come,’ he said at last.
Duncan grew frightened, then, in a different way. He said, ‘They can’t have!’
‘Well, they bloody well have! I’m not going, Duncan. They’re not going to make me. I mean it. I mean it, and no one believes me—’
He worked his mouth. There was the flash of another bomb, and more explosions. Duncan looked at the sky again. ‘How long,’ he asked, ‘has the raid been on?’ He must have slept right through the Warning. ‘Did you come through the raid?’
‘I don’t care about the bloody raid!’ said Alec. ‘I was glad when the raid started. I was hoping I’d get hit! I’ve been all down Mitcham Lane, right in the middle of the road.’ He leant over the sill and caught hold of Duncan’s arm. His hand was freezing. ‘Come out with me, too.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Duncan, pulling away. He glanced at the bedroom door. He was supposed to wake his father when a raid started up. They were supposed to go down the road to the public shelter. ‘I should get my dad.’
Alec plucked at his arm. ‘Do it in a bit. Come out with me first. I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘What? Tell me now.’
‘Come out.’
‘It’s too late. It’s too cold.’
Alec drew his hand back, raised it to his mouth, and started biting at his fingers. ‘Let me in, then,’ he said, after a second. ‘Let me in, with you.’
So Duncan moved away from the window and Alec hoisted himself on to the sill, working his knees and his feet over it and dropping into the room. He did it awkwardly, as he did anything like that—landing heavily, so that the floorboards thumped, and the bottles and jars on Viv’s dressing-table rattled and skidded about.
Duncan drew down the sash and fixed the curtains. When he turned on the light, he and Alec blinked. The light made everything seem weirder. It made it feel later, even, than it was. There might have been sickness in the house…Duncan had a sudden vivid memory of his mother, when she was ill: his father sending out for his auntie, and then for a doctor—people coming and going, murmuring, in the middle of the night; the excitement of it, turning to disaster…
He started to shiver with the cold. He put on his slippers and dressing-gown. As he tied the cord, he looked at what Alec was wearing: a zip-up jacket, dark flannel trousers, and dirty canvas shoes. He saw Alec’s bare white bony ankles and said, ‘You haven’t got any socks on!’
Alec was still blinking against the light. ‘I had to get dressed really fast,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘I’ve been going mad, wanting to tell you! I went to Franklin’s this afternoon, looking for you, and you weren’t there. Where were you?’
‘To Franklin’s?’ Duncan frowned. ‘What time did you come?’
‘I don’t know. About four.’
‘I was taking some parcels for Mr Manning. No one said you’d been.’
‘I didn’t ask anyone, I just looked. I just walked in and looked around. No one stopped me.’
‘Why didn’t you come after tea, tonight?’
Alec looked bitter. ‘Why do you think? I got into a row with my bloody father. I got—’ His voice grew high again. ‘He bloody well hit me, Duncan! Look! Can you see?’ He turned his head and showed Duncan his face. There was a faint red mark, high on his cheekbone. But his eyes, Duncan saw now, were redder than anything. He had been crying. He saw Duncan looking, and turned away again. ‘He’s a bloody brute,’ he said quietly, as if ashamed.
‘What did you do?’
‘I told them I wasn’t
going to go, that they couldn’t make me. I wouldn’t have told them about the papers at all, except that the postman made such a thing out of it when he brought them. My mother got hold of the letter first. I said, “It’s got my name on it, I can do what I want with it—”’
‘What’s it like? What does it say?’
‘I’ve got it, look.’
He unzipped his jacket and brought out a buff-coloured envelope. Duncan sat on the bed beside him, so that he could see. The papers were addressed to A.J.C. Planer; they told him that, in accordance with the National Service Acts, he was called upon for service in the Territorial Army, and was required to present himself in two weeks’ time to a Royal Artillery Training Regiment at Shoeburyness. There was information on how he should get there and what he should take; and a postal order for four shillings, in advance of service pay. The pages were stamped all over with dates and numbers but were creased dreadfully, as if Alec had screwed them up, then flattened them out again.
Duncan looked at the creases in horror. ‘What have you done to them?’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘I don’t know. They might—they might use it against you.’
‘Use it against me? You sound like my mother! You don’t think I’m going to go, do you? I’ve told you—’ Alec took the papers back and, with a gesture of disgust, he crumpled them up and threw them to the floor; then, like a spring recoiling, he pounced on them again, unscrewed them, and tore them right across—even the postal order. ‘There!’ he said. His face was flushed, and he was shaking.
‘Crumbs,’ said Duncan, his horror turning to admiration. ‘You’ve done it now, all right!’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You’re a bloody lunatic!’
‘I’d rather be a lunatic,’ said Alec, tossing his head, ‘than do what they want me to do. They’re the lunatics. They’re making lunatics of everybody else, and no one’s stopping them; everyone’s acting as if it’s ordinary. As if it’s an ordinary thing, that they make a soldier of you, give you a gun.’ He got up, and agitatedly smoothed back his already greased-down hair. ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’m getting out of it, Duncan.’
Duncan stared at him. ‘You’re not going to register as a conchy?’
Alec snorted. ‘I don’t mean that. That’s as bad as the other thing. Having to stand in a room and say your piece, in front of all those strangers? Why should I have to do that? What’s it to anybody else, if I won’t fight? Anyway,’ he added, ‘my bloody father would kill me.’
‘What do you mean, then?’
Alec put his hand to his mouth and began to bite at his fingers again. He held Duncan’s gaze. ‘Can’t you tell?’
He said it with a sort of suppressed excitement—as if, despite everything, he wanted to laugh. Duncan felt his heart shrink in his breast. ‘You’re not—you’re not running away?’
Alec wouldn’t answer.
‘You can’t run away! It’s not fair! You can’t do it. You haven’t got anything with you. You’d need money, you’d need coupons, you’d need to buy food. Where would you go? You’re not—you’re not going to go to Ireland, are you?’ They’d talked, before, about doing that. But they’d talked about doing it together. ‘They’ve got ways of finding you, even in Ireland.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Alec, suddenly furious, ‘about fucking Ireland! I don’t care what happens to me. I’m not going to go, that’s all. Do you know what they do to you?’ He turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘They do filthy things! Handling you all over, looking at you—up your arse and between your legs. A row of them, Michael Warren said: a row of old men, looking you over. It’s disgusting. Old men! It’s all right for them. It’s all right for my father, and your father. They’ve had their lives; they want to take our lives from us. They had one war, and now they’ve made another one. They don’t care that we’re young. They want to make us old like them. They don’t care that it’s not our quarrel—’
His voice was rising. ‘Stop shouting!’ said Duncan.
‘They want to kill us!’
‘Shut up, can’t you!’
Duncan was thinking of the people upstairs, and of his father. His father was deaf as a bloody post; but he had a sort of radar in him, where Alec was concerned. Alec stopped talking. He kept on biting at his fingers, and started pacing around the room. Outside, the sounds of the raid had grown worse—had drawn together into a deep, low throb. The glass in Duncan’s window started, very slightly, to vibrate.
‘I’m getting out of it,’ said Alec again, as he paced. ‘I’m getting out. I mean it.’
‘You’re not running away,’ said Duncan firmly. ‘It’s just not fair.’
‘Nothing’s fair any more.’
‘You can’t. You can’t leave me in Streatham, with bloody Eddie Parry, and Rodney Mills, and boys like that—’
‘I’m getting out. I’ve had it.’
‘You could—Alec!’ said Duncan, suddenly excited. ‘You could stay here! I could hide you here! I could bring you food and water.’
‘Here?’ Alec looked around, frowning. ‘Where would I hide?’
‘You could hide in a cupboard, somewhere like that, I don’t know. You’d only have to do it while my dad was here. And then on the nights when Viv was away, you could come out. You could sleep in with me. You could do it, even while Viv was here. She wouldn’t mind. She’d help us. You’d be like—like the Count of Monte Cristo!’ Duncan thought about it. He thought about making up plates of food—keeping back the meat, the tea and the sugar, from his own ration. He thought about secretly sharing his bed with Alec, every single night…
But Alec looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know. It would have to be for months and months, wouldn’t it? It would have to be till the end of the war. And you’ll get your papers, too, next year. You’ll get them sooner, if they put the age down. You might get them in July! What would we do then?’
‘It’s ages till July,’ answered Duncan. ‘Anything could happen between now and July. We’ll probably get blown up by July!’
Alec shook his head again. ‘We won’t,’ he said bitterly. ‘I know we won’t. I wish we would! Instead, it’s kids and old ladies and babies and stupid people who die—stupid people who don’t mind the war. Boys who are too stupid to mind being soldiers, too stupid to see that the war’s not their war but a load of government men’s. It’s not our war, either; we have to suffer in it, though. We have to do the things they tell us. They don’t even tell us the truth! They haven’t told us about Birmingham. Everybody knows that Birmingham’s been practically burnt to the ground. How many other towns and cities are like that? They won’t tell us about the weapons Hitler’s got, the rockets and gas. Horrible gas, that doesn’t kill you but makes your skin come off; gas that does a thing to your brain, to make a sort of robot of you, so that Hitler can take you and turn you into a slave. He’s going to put us all in camps, do you know that? He’s going to make us work in mines and factories, the men all digging and working machines, the women having babies; he’ll make us go to bed with women, one after the other, just to make them pregnant. And all the old men and old ladies he’ll just kill. He’s done it in Poland. He’s probably done it in Belgium and Holland, too. They don’t tell us that. It isn’t fair! We never wanted to go to war. There ought to be a place for people like us. They ought to let the stupid people fight, and everybody else—everyone who cares about important things, things like the arts, things like that—they ought to be allowed to go and live somewhere on their own, and to hell with Hitler—’
He kicked at one of Duncan’s shoes, then went back to walking about and biting at his hands. He bit madly, moving his hand when one patch of skin or nail was gnawed, and starting on another. His gaze grew fixed, but on nothing. His face had whitened again, and his red-rimmed eyes seemed to blaze like a lunatic’s.
Duncan thought of his father again. He imagined what his father would think if he could see Alec like this. T
hat boy’s bloody crackers, he’d said to Duncan more than once. That boy needs to grow up. He’s a waste of bloody time. He’ll put ideas in your bloody head, that boy will—
‘Stop biting your fingers like that, will you?’ he said uneasily. ‘You look dotty.’
‘Dotty?’ hissed Alec. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if I go off my bloody head! I got so worked up tonight I thought I was going to be sick. I had to wait for them all to go to sleep. Then I thought there was someone in the house. I could hear men, moving about—footsteps, and whispers. I thought my father had fetched the police.’
Duncan was appalled. ‘He wouldn’t do that, would he?’
‘He might. That’s how much he hates me.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘Of course then!’ said Alec impatiently. ‘That’s just when they do come! Don’t you know that? It’s when you least expect them to.’
Abruptly, they stopped talking. Duncan looked at the door—remembering his mother’s illness again; feeling weird again; half expecting to hear the sound of people creeping about in the hall…What he heard instead was the steady throb of aircraft, the monotonous crump-crump of bombs, followed by the slither of soot in the chimney-breast.
He looked back at Alec, and grew more unnerved than ever. For Alec had lowered his hands at last, and seemed suddenly unnaturally calm. He met Duncan’s gaze, and made some slightly theatrical gesture—shrugged his narrow shoulders, turned his head, showed his fine, handsome profile.
‘This is wasting time,’ he said, as if casually.
‘What is?’ asked Duncan, afraid. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I told you, didn’t I? I’d rather be dead than do what they want me to do. I’d rather die than have them put a gun in my hand and make me shoot some German boy who feels just like I do. I’m getting out. I’m going to do it, before they do it to me.’