The Children's War (165 page)

Remarks about his appearance, his habits, his marriage, his past, his abilities, his motives—all went in one ear and out the other. Their fleeting presence in his mind left painful dents, but still he was able to brush them off with relative ease. As the days went on though, he grew more and more weary and less and less tolerant, and it was with gritted teeth that he ignored another insulting tirade as he pulled his clothes on in the morning. He glanced at the pair of socks on the bed and wondered if they would not be more usefully employed shoved into Barbara’s mouth, and only that thought prevented him from otherwise reacting.

All of a sudden Barbara sighed and sat heavily on the bed, ceasing her grumbles. She picked at some lint on the blanket, the slope of her shoulders indicating that she felt excruciatingly sad. “Did you dream about the
Kommandant
last night?” she asked softly, the tone of her voice completely different from the strident, angry tone she had just been using.

“I don’t know, why?” he asked warily.

“It sounded like you were enjoying yourself,” she replied with feigned innocence.

It was the last straw. Hurt or not, there was no excuse for her behavior. With a voice that just barely contained his fury, he said quietly, “Enough. It stops today.”

She tilted her head to look at him, then she got up and boldly walked up to
him. She was a small woman, and even standing, she had to tilt her head back to look into his face. He winced as she raised her hands and placed them on his shoulders, but he did not pull away or say anything. He looked at her, resigned to hear yet more shit. Short of gagging her, there was no way he could realistically hope to stop her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Yes, you did,” he replied, unconvinced. “You wanted to hurt me because I’m not what you think I should be and I don’t act the way you want me to. You can join a long line of people who’ve felt that way; I’m not sure it’s a group of people you want to be part of, but you’ve become one of them. Congratulations. You wanted to hurt me and you’ve succeeded. Now can it please stop?”

“It’s only because you hurt me so much.”

“I’m sorry. Now, can we call it quits?”

“I wanted to learn to hate you,” she confessed, “but I’m afraid all I’ve managed to do is make you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.” He wondered how many days it would take until that statement was true. Sweet little Barbara existed no longer in his mind and he was weary of the woman who had replaced her.

“I know you don’t want to leave your wife and child. I understand that now,” she said, assuming a woman-of-the-world stance. Slipping off her blouse, she added in an almost husky voice, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other’s company.” She pressed provocatively against him, but he pushed her away.

“Have you listened to yourself these past days?” he asked, incredulous. With her vindictive and injurious words, she had made herself utterly unattractive to him.

The come-hither look melted from her face and she spun angrily away. “Fine! Have it your way, you self-righteous bastard! You’re so old-fashioned and conventional and tied down, you’ll never know what you’re missing!”

Oh, he had some idea, which was exactly why he had chosen to give it a miss! He watched in silence as she stood with her back to him, furiously combing her hair. He knew exactly the words to destroy her, to take revenge for the verbal abuse she had meted out to him, and he was momentarily tempted, but as she stood only in her slip, he could see the tension in the muscles of her back, and he took pity on her. He decided he would have to do something to rebuild her confidence, even if it meant lying. After all, he could do it for Elspeth, the least he could do was lie as effectively for a friend. It would work well: the words he had spoken to Elspeth, called up from the depths of his spirit by her power to ruin his life, he could use with Barbara. He could let her believe she had the same power, the power of an attractive, desirable, and unattainable woman, the power of denying him what he desperately wanted but could not have.

He took a deep breath and began by telling her how beautiful she was and how much he desired her, how her youth and energy were like sirens to him, calling him to his doom. He told her how each time he had denied himself the
chance to hold her, his body had burned and he had gone nearly mad with frustration. He told her that he knew he wasn’t good enough for her, that he was too old, too damaged by all he had experienced. He knew that she would be extraordinary if only she could fly freely, unhindered by a man like himself. He explained how she would loathe him for his lack of loyalty to his wife, how she would weary of him if he gave in to temptation, and how her rejection would utterly destroy him. He told her how he would have to spend his life watching jealously as other men would notice her and desire her.

“I don’t doubt you’d remain loyal to me,” he explained, “but look at what I would become: an old man whose wife stays with him out of pity, a man who had abandoned his own loyalties, his first wife and child, just to be with a woman because she was so incredibly beautiful and intelligent, but who would then discover that he was the very thing that stopped her from becoming all she could be and doing all that she could do. You would learn to hate me, and with good reason.

“You don’t know how much your presence has helped me over the years. You have no idea how often just realizing that you’re my friend has pulled me out of a depression or seen me through a terrible night. Please, can’t I just enjoy your presence in the world? Can’t I take pleasure in seeing you smiling at me from across the room? Can’t we be friends again and I can be your secret, silent admirer?” he finished on a note of truth. He
had
taken comfort in her, and he would dearly love to do so again.

Barbara looked at him with liquid eyes, then bowing her head, she murmured, “Okay.”

36

“H
EY, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY MARVELOUS!”
Jenny pronounced yet again as she shoveled in the last mouthful.

“Thanks,” Peter accepted the compliment. Barbara and her guest, a fellow named Mark, concurred with enthusiastic nods.

“You always did serve up great meals,” Jenny continued, then wiped her mouth on her napkin and took a sip of wine. “That’s at least one reason I wanted to capture you for my own.” She laughed.

Barbara turned toward Mark. “Can I get you anything else?” she asked solicitously.

Mark eagerly gestured toward the kitchen. “I could do with another serving.”

Barbara smiled charmingly and, picking up his plate, went into the kitchen alcove to refill it.

Jenny winked at Peter. She had not failed to notice Barbara’s snub and she guessed reasonably accurately its source. Asking “Do you mind?” she lit a cigarette
without waiting for a reply. She offered the pack toward both men, but they both declined. Mark was clearly waiting for his next plate of food, but Peter’s refusal surprised her. It was the second time he had turned one down that evening, and such self-denial was totally unlike the man she had known.

It raised a question in her mind, but to ask it she had to regain his attention— he was staring out toward the kitchen. She was momentarily stymied as she wondered which name she should use. He had been Peter Halifax in the NAU and, according to him, that was what he called himself now, but he was Niklaus Jäger here in London, so that would be more consistent, but she could only think of him as Alan Yardley, and though that name was long gone, it was the one that sat on the tip of her tongue. She compromised with “Um . . .”

Peter turned his attention back toward her.

“Have you given up smoking?”

“My daughter asked me to.”

He did not seem to want to dwell on the subject further and Jenny nodded without replying. Everything he said indicated that he had loved the little girl dearly and that her absence still weighed heavily on him. In the face of such sad devotion, Jenny almost felt guilty for having left her two children home alone with her husband. “Business,” she had said to explain her absence, not deigning to tell them that they would be missing an excellent dinner.

She had taken on the role of ferrying information and arranging meetings for Peter and his English contacts, and during one of her trips to the bookstore, he had invited her and her family to dinner and indicated that his colleague would be invited as well. Jenny had accepted the invitation on behalf of herself, but declined for the rest of her family. Although the other woman—he had called her Barbara—would be present, Jenny had hoped to gain some time alone. She had come early, and he had explained that Barbara had in the meanwhile invited a friend as well. “I’ve seen them together in the shop a few times and I know she’s gone out to the pub with him once or twice, but I haven’t met him yet,” he had explained.

Jenny looked at her old lover with a fond smile, but he was too busy studying his other guest to notice. She looked across the table at Mark as he accepted the plate from Barbara, and the three of them sat and sipped their wine while he launched himself into the food.

Hungry, Jenny thought, all our boys seem perpetually hungry at that age. Mark ate as though he had never seen such quantity or quality of food, and indeed he might never have. He was tall and weedy with black hair and extremely pale skin. He said he was English, though Jenny guessed some Irish blood was there. They had learned he was a courier for the Underground, and indeed that is how he and Barbara had met. He had joined at the age of fourteen, following in his father’s footsteps, and had in that way avoided the draft. Now he was nineteen, never married, and still boyish in his appearance. A few years of decent food, Jenny thought, and all of a sudden he’ll be a man. Two or three more years
after that, she mused as she noticed a few wisps of gray in his jet-black hair, and he’ll look old, older than Alan, or Peter or whatever his name was.

She turned her attention back toward Peter. He looked good, really good. If she had not gone back and reread the interviews he had given in the NAU, she would have said that however he had spent his time over the years had agreed with him. Luckily, she knew better than to say something so insensitive, and upon closer inspection she could see hints of an abiding depression. Was it lingering pain or something else that gave him such a resigned and unhappy smile?

Mark finished his second helping and they had their dessert and after-dinner drinks, and then Barbara rose from the table and announced, “Mark and I are going out. See you later.” Mark looked up somewhat surprised.

“Where are you going?” Peter asked. Barbara said something Jenny could not understand, and Peter switched languages to answer her. The tone grew heated, and Jenny and Mark watched in confusion at the incomprehensible argument that passed over their heads.

Barbara crossed her arms, said something with finality, then, switching to German and softening her tone of voice considerably, she said, “Let’s go, Mark. The old folks want to be alone.” Mark stood, smiled sheepishly and said his thanks, then helping Barbara with her coat and grabbing his own off the hook, he obediently followed Barbara out the door.

As the door snapped shut, Jenny burst into quiet giggling. “Poor boy!” She laughed. “He’s already whipped!” She drank some more wine, refilled their glasses, and added between swallows, “I know you would never put up with such a dominant woman.”

Inexplicably, Peter burst out laughing then.

Jenny stayed a long time and they talked about all sorts of things. After sufficient glasses of wine, she even managed to cajole Peter into talking about his marriage and what had happened since his return from America. “The more I try to hold on to her,” Peter confessed about his wife, “the more she seems to slip away from me.”

Jenny gave him a sympathetic smile, encouraging him to continue, far too wise a woman to offer useless insights.

“I don’t know why I feel so tied to her,” he continued, the words spilling out almost uncontrolled. “I think she’s made it pretty clear I’m not wanted anymore. I think it must have been pity all along, and now that’s worn off. I don’t know why I don’t just accept it and get out of her life—you know, make a home for myself here. They’ve given me carte blanche to leave.” He sniffed his derision. Finally freed from his prison, he did not want to go.

“It’s because you love her.”

He nodded, disconsolately. “The problem is, I don’t think she loves me, so everything she does in our marriage seems more like a kindness than genuine emotion. Does that make sense? It’s like it’s all an effort for her. My heart leaps when I catch sight of her and she gives me a courteous smile in return.”

“Maybe that’s just her way of expressing her emotions.”

He nodded, unconsoled. “Maybe.” He sipped a bit more wine, then without meaning to he asked, “Do you know what it’s like to love someone who doesn’t truly love you?” He was so embarrassed by his admission that it took a moment before he noticed that Jenny had not answered.

Their eyes met, but still she did not answer the question. A wan smile played across her lips, then faded again into a memory. “I thought I did once,” she answered at last, “but I was wrong; it was just a childish infatuation.”

“Lucky you.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

As he closed the door behind her, he had a sinking feeling. The wine was beginning to wear off and with it his urge to reveal himself and all his problems, but it was too late. Though she had offered helpful words of advice and seemed sympathetic, he nevertheless felt that he had somehow embarrassed himself and Zosia by being so open to someone who was virtually a stranger to him. It was really quite stupid, he realized that, but there was no way to shake the feeling that he had exposed himself to the whole world and would, as a result, be the butt of jokes and the source of amusement at her next meeting with the Underground.

He rubbed his forehead and wondered if he would have a better chance of sleeping it all off if he had another glass or two to ease his mind. As he stood wondering, he heard Barbara and Mark returning, and he opened the door for them.

“The old bag gone?” Barbara asked in Polish; she was quite drunk.

“Do either of you want a cup of tea?” Peter asked in German. “I’m going to put the kettle on.”

They giggled as if he had said something quite funny, so he turned into the kitchen without waiting for further reply. By the time he had put the kettle on the coil, they had disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door.

He stood seething for a minute, wondering what the hell he should do. He decided to drink his tea and see if they might finish quickly. They were not quiet, and as he sat in silence in the living room, he could not help but hear their noisy lovemaking. It reminded him of all the times Karl would bring prostitutes to the hotel room and he could do no more than stand idly by waiting for them to conduct their business.

Now, of course, he was not so powerless, and he could in theory march into the bedroom and order the lad out so that he could retire for the night, but the common law of cramped living was that such invasions were not acceptable. Mark lived with his parents, Barbara needed her private life, there was nowhere else for them to go. Nevertheless, he was furious. The common law of cramped living also included unwritten clauses about the uninvolved partner: he needed to sleep, it was his bedroom, and there was nowhere for him to go either! They
should at least have asked his indulgence or arranged something in advance. Clearly Barbara was deliberately trying to annoy him and clearly she was succeeding. When, in God’s name, would her petty revenge end?

After a long while the noise died down. After an even longer while, when they had still not emerged, he got up and went to the door. No sound at all. He opened it and saw they were both sound asleep. Without further ado, he shook Mark’s shoulder. The boy looked up at him in confusion.

“Time to go,” Peter announced unceremoniously.

“Whhh . . . ?”

“Get out,” he clarified, and to help matters along he pulled Mark from the bed and sent him stumbling in the direction of the pile of clothes on the floor. Mark dutifully pulled on his clothes and let himself be escorted to the door. Peter snapped it shut just a little too quickly behind the boy and then returned to the bedroom to fall asleep.

When he crawled into the space Mark had vacated, Barbara stirred but did not waken. In her sleep she threw her arm around him and curled her naked, sweaty body next to his. He did not bother to push her away.