Gone to Soldiers (32 page)

Zach ordered two more cognacs and Jeff sipped his. “In spite of what I take are your efforts to sophisticate me, to tarnish the fine glow of my organizational innocence, I want to repeat my gratitude for getting me out of Alabama—and essentially out of the Army. It's not my favorite pastime, being a soldier. I don't know what the hell we're supposed to be, spies or backdoor fighters, but it's easier on my psyche.”

“Look around you. You'll see a lot of fine old names and you'll see the rising cream of the best banks and investment houses in New York, the snazziest law firms, the boys who'll be judges and senators and sit on the boards of the big corporations. You can be bloody sure that they have picked one of the best berths in the war. But field officers are another matter, my dear. That's what I have briefly been, in Greece for the Brits, and once the bloody Brits stop squatting on us and trying to keep us from getting our hands dirty, that's what I shall be again. That's the real fun and games.” Zach leaned forward over the table, his grey eyes glittering. “Then it's you against everything, and you're down to your nerve, your guts, your smarts. It's life, says Mother, on the cutting edge.”

“Sounds better than Alabama,” Jeff said, wondering when he had finished that second snifter of cognac and when he had begun a third. They had killed a bottle of Margaux over supper. He wondered lazily if he would have the guts Zach was talking about. He tried to remember anything dangerous he had ever done, but at the moment his previous life appeared tame in retrospect. He thought of rattlesnakes, fistfights, riding the rails, getting mugged in an alley in Kansas City. But somehow he had walked through all of it. Perhaps as Zach suggested, this would challenge something so far unused, unawakened in him. He hoped so.

Zach gave that short choppy laugh as if reading him. “How the boy cottons up to it, how the boy shines in anticipation. One of the best stimulants—the nerves' own fine high overwound keening. Feeding and watering oneself at a decent table is lovely now and then, but nothing beats fucking and fighting for keeping the whole man fit.”

“I gather the fighting is mostly infighting at the moment. What are you fucking?”

“Anything that moves, dear boy. I remain totally without prejudice and ever ready. My cock knows no frontiers he cannot penetrate.” Zach grinned, wriggling his thumb in a gesture that had since adolescence meant sex to him and thus to Jeff. “Wartime London is a great place for all kinds of ginch. You always did have to fight it off, but here you'll have to wield a club.”

As Jeff observed over the next weeks, Zach seemed to be dividing his sexual favors between ladies and navvies. The ladies were the well-born daughters of country houses, war widows of distinction, cultured and emancipated ladies vaguely connected with SIS or SOE, the branches of British intelligence they had the most contact with. The low-born lads were the rough trade Zach always seemed to find without looking hard.

Neither scene appealed to Jeff, who was sent to a country estate in Sussex for a course in special operations (over here they seemed to assume nothing he had learned in Washington was sufficient) and when he got back to London, Zach was not around. You did not ask, he learned, when someone was suddenly missing.

Jeff was marking time in London. Unless he had a bomb dropped on him or was run over by an emergency vehicle while stumbling home looped from one of the constant OSS parties or a friendly bash in a pub, he was safe while people were dying in great bloody piles everywhere across Europe and Asia. He began to think of painting. One Sunday he went out with his oils and a canvas and worked in a frenzy all day. He turned it to the wall and did not look at it again for a week. Then he turned it back. Yes, yes, it was a jump painting. Something had happened in/to him.

At eighteen, he had begun by imitating the Impressionists and then worked his way into something of his own, harder edged, a passion for the shadows and pits in a landscape where dark hid and welled up, where light bled into darkness, lanced across it. Lately Turner had been on his mind, but Turner celebrated masses of light, light almost as wind, and he felt some different approach working like yeast in him.

Oddly he began sketching the ducks in St. James's Park. He had seldom used animals in his landscapes—occasionally a gull high overhead stylized to a flattened W, except for a dead coyote he had painted at Taos. He began painting water, the ponds, the Thames, and then rain. There was nothing Turneresque in his studies of the grey England damp, yet he knew he was being moved in some new direction and yielded to it. This was real work at last, but slow going except for that first jump painting.

Zach reappeared on a Friday night and invited him to move into his flat, the upper floor in a smallish brick house in Chelsea. It managed to suggest itself as a cottage, in spite of being one of a row of partially bombed houses in a U-shaped street a couple of blocks from the Embankment and Cheyne Walk. Zach had been sharing it with a captain just posted to Stockholm.

The flat consisted of two small bedrooms, a pretty sitting room with a view of a fine old plane tree dropping its leaves without turning any particular color except the brown of paper bags, and a peculiar narrow kitchen. A cleaning lady came in to complain and to clean up the mess Zach mostly created. The flat gave Jeff a peculiar settled feeling, as if he had come to the war and to London in order to find a place he could call home at least temporarily. His bedroom would do as a studio.

Out front a low brick wall set them off from the quiet street. On both sides of the walk to their house were pedestals, with the gate hung between them, and a cement ball balanced on each side. Zach in giving directions always referred to their house as the one with the blue balls, or the cement balls, or he would say, “We have a shopkeeper's sign out front, two big balls, so you can find us.”

Jeff could not remember the last place he had actually moved in, fixed up and lived in for any length of time. Zach relied on him for any nest building that was to occur. Zach had found the captain who had gone off to Stockholm too similar to himself in his bachelor habits, and seemed to expect Jeff to make things nice. Zach's women were no more domestic than Zach and cleaned up by ringing for a maid.

Jeff hung around SO, being given occasional minor assignments, assisting some officer in tasks needing little assistance. In October he was sent off to parachute school for a week, to learn British style. English parachutes opened differently than American and he had learned to jump out the side of a plane, rather than through the bottom. Carey and Aaron from his Washington group turned up to train with him.

As time passed he found himself feeling slightly guilty. Here he was fulfilling his dream, studying art in London—rather than Florence or Paris, unfortunately, but that was a relatively minor complaint—on a government subsidy, with a nice flat in a pleasant part of London, even if it was under siege. He finished two more paintings and enough time passed for the first to begin to look good to him. He took his pay and bought real linen, the last the art supply store had. He had been painting on cotton for years.

Occasionally he ran into someone he had known from before the war, one of The Professor's cronies from the University of Grenoble or Cologne, involved in the research operations for which his side of OSS had such scorn. He wondered. They seemed busy, useful, engaged. He had been prepared and prepared and now lay, a too sharp knife in a drawer quietly oxidizing. At other times he thought, why not? He had lost his youth in poverty and working-stiff jobs. Why not reclaim what the Depression had robbed from him? Why not taste a little of the ample freedom and comfort for which he had envied Zach? If there was anything that war was, besides organized murder, it was organized waste. Let him not waste his time here.

Therefore he painted, fiercely, compulsively. He began what might be a series of rubble paintings, across the river in the industrial, working-class sections always heavily bombed. He had begun to paint rubble in morning light. The tentative period of the water studies was behind him. Painting on the street in his uniform, nobody bothered him. They assumed, perhaps, it was official work, a record for some government office. Sometimes people on the streets would crowd up behind him to look over his shoulder and see what he was getting down and then they'd make some comment he frequently could not decipher, but which sounded friendly, and walk on. He was obsessed with the partially destroyed buildings, what was pulverized and what remained, the rooms blasted open, the tree with half its branches splintered, torn open to the light, the shadow of a chimney standing alone, the tawdry pathos of rooms opened like stage settings to the passerby.

“Don't think we'll be hanging around forever,” Zach said. “We'll be shipping out sooner than you think.”

“I've heard that one before. How was Turkey?”

“I'll take a load of grandmothers with me if I'm sent again. It's certainly the place to sell them. Double agents are a drug on the market. Triple agents, quadruple agents, agents selling back at extravagant prices to the people who first floated the rumors, the rumors they floated. I found it rather smarmy. They say Switzerland is the same scene on a cleaner scale. But you have to rank higher than I do and have more top honchos for your friends to pull that service.”

“Someone said to me last week that Istanbul is where we flirt with the Germans who want to carry on an affair with us.”

“So is Switzerland. There you don't have to worry about bugs in the bed. I thought Istanbul would be exciting, reeking of wild unbridled sexuality and spices. Instead I got a dreadful case of body lice. Don't gape at me—I got rid of them.”

“My dear Zachary,” Jeff imitated his friend's lordly tone, “if you think any parasites you caught would find me a virgin to their teeth or claws, you don't understand how I passed the last few years. I've fed enough lice to populate Istanbul.” Jeff sighed. “I wish I'd gone with you. We never went farther east than Thessaloníki, a city Bernice and I always enjoyed.”

“There are other, more imminent fleshpots,” Zach said with a tantalizing smirk.

He was painting so fiercely he simply drifted socially in Zach's wake until one night the gaunt blonde who had gone to bed with Zach wakened him by climbing on top. “He's too drunk to get it up,” she said in a cold, precise voice, unaffected by the gin she had consumed. “How about you?” She had her hand on his prick as he sat up.

In the morning Zach was annoyed. “Someone is going to wring that tramp's neck,” he announced. “That was sneaky of you.”

“Zach, I was had. I was taken without permission and used like a dildo.”

“You don't adore me enough,” Zach said darkly. “You lack appreciation.”

“I appreciate you all day. At night I sleep. What do you want?”

“More love.” Zach grinned sourly. “Everybody should love me. But you love no one. Not even your inestimable sister. You merely permit those of us adjacent to love you. You take it for granted, like water out of the faucet or the postal service. Your beauty makes you cold and passive.”

That decided him he needed some anchor other than Zach. Jeff accompanied Zach to about half the parties he attended and some of the houses he visited, but when he settled on a steady lover, he chose a fresh-faced art student from Wales who was working in a munitions factory. All English women between eighteen and sixty had been conscripted for factory work, for nursing or the armed forces. Mary Llewellyn had translucent pale rosy skin like fine china and dark brown curls that popped out from under her turban. She was a hefty bottom-heavy girl with well-muscled and magnificently turned and rounded arms and legs. She liked to laugh, in and out of bed, and she could put away a quart of beer without pausing. Zach found her plebeian.

“Really, Jeff, when I consider what Mother has introduced you to. You can lead a horse to champagne but he'd rather drink warm beer.”

“She takes good care of me,” Jeff said honestly. He did not tell Zach the most important attraction, that he could talk art with her. He had not been able to do that with anyone since the group of painters he had met in Taos. She knew about shows and trends and galleries and who was doing what and where. She understood his problems finding the supplies he needed. She was close friends with a one-legged muralist named Tom Knacker and gradually through the two of them, Jeff met painters, now working for the British government. To Zach he said only, “I like her body. And she likes sex.”

“They all do,” Zach said mournfully. “Where are the fainting frigid virgins of yesteryear whose maidenheads could only be stormed by a battering ram? Gone, all gone. War is the most reliable aphrodisiac.” He tossed a letter on the coffee table. “Your fair sister writes. News of the hearthside, apple pie put on hold for those of us fighting for our lives in the wilderness of Mayfair and Knightsbridge.”

Jeff tore open the letter and scanned it quickly. “Bird is trying to fly the coop.”

“About time, poor lass. She's been your father's keeper too many years. Off to a factory job in the wicked city?”

“No. She's trying to join some women's air service.”

“They've had the WAAF over here for three years. Does she really still remember how to fly?”

“Drop that patronizing tone. She has a commercial license. But The Professor doesn't want her to go. She wants me to intervene.”

Zach shook his head. “Poor Bernice. She'll never cut loose. She has too tender a conscience.”

“I suspect so,” Jeff said, feeling the peculiar sense of comfort mingled with guilt his sister aroused in him. “I'll write The Professor, but he has never yet listened to me.”

In the meantime he spent more and more time painting and more and more time with Mary Llewellyn. He liked her crowd, women art students and their boyfriends, Tom Knacker, young painters. Tom had lost his leg in an auto accident before the war, but everyone assumed it was a war injury, he said. Never been a better time for a one-legged man in London. They were in and out of each other's studios and even when they were eating stew on a rickety old table and dancing to a phonograph, wherever he turned, he saw paintings and thought about them. They looked at his work as he looked at theirs, and they saw him as one of them.