Reading by Lightning (33 page)

I backed away from the window, afraid to draw the curtain again in case she caught the movement in the corner of her eye and knew I'd seen. I lay back down on the bed and found that I was crying, and I cried for a long time, giving myself over to my tears, drawing them up the way you draw water from a well. I had no idea why I was crying. Then I heard Lois come in, and I got up and wiped my face on my undervest and pulled the curtain across and finally I fell asleep.

The next morning was a Saturday, but Lois had to work and she came down dressed to the nines as usual and stood at the sideboard drinking her tea. I was at the kitchen table in my dressing gown. She finished her tea and set the cup on the drainboard. Then she took a little mirror out of her purse and touched up her lipstick and ran a finger over each eyebrow. I'm off, she said. Feeling better? She put her hat on, a new hat in the design of the artillery caps the lads were wearing,
and clicked down the hall in her high heels without waiting for an answer. On some ordinary day she'd made a leap, an unimaginable leap like the movement of fish to land, and no one had been any the wiser.

Meanwhile Madeleine and I kept going to school. Some of the masters were gone, and some of the girls had left to enlist or take jobs, so our classes were the same size they'd always been. There were never any boys there anyway. Our English literature class was in the afternoon. As it started we'd pull the blackout curtains so that we could put on a light, and in the hiss of the gaslights we would sit and knit, knitting long mufflers of khaki wool, while Mr. Fox read
Don Quixote
to us. Mr. Fox usually read T.S. Eliot to the Sixth Form, but he said the war had rescued us from the twilight of modernism.

By the end of that first nine months, though, it was clear the war was going to be one of those things that failed to live up to expectations. As Jenny said, it was just as dull as peace. Worse, because the lads were gone. Our neighbours who'd moaned about having evacuees in the house moaned now that the ungrateful sods had sloped back to London. Uncle Stanley, however, saw no reason to lower the guard. He came home from an ARP meeting and showed us how to seal the fireplace all around with sticking paper so poison gas couldn't pour down the chimney, although we couldn't keep the seal up all the time because it was cold and we needed the fire.

Who
thinks up
this sort of thing? I laughed. They think German soldiers are dragging ladders up the streets and blowing gas down the chimneys? With no one noticing?

Uncle Stanley took me by the arm and sat me down on a chair. Does this war strike you as a bit of a joke? he said. Do you find poison gas funny? He pressed his face so close to mine that I had a disagreeable view of the inside of his nostrils.
Maybe you should have a talk with some of the lads who were at Passchendaele, he said. They'll tell you how funny it is, that's if they have the breath to talk at all.

He let go of me and turned back to his sticking paper. The Jerries have a chlorine
bomb
now, flower, he said. They've moved beyond canisters. Apparently your intelligence is not keeping you up to date!

What I hated most was the
flower.

By
your intelligence
of course he meant George. Who knows what George knew. His letters had become sporadic and very strange. The censor had finally caught up to him — most of my letters and Aunt Lucy's as well arrived with parts of them painted over. I got one letter that was entirely blacked out, even the
Dear Lily.
Whatever could he have been writing about through the whole letter? Once he wrote to me in Latin, what appeared to be one of his lists. His regiment had finally formed, the 71st Searchlight Regiment of the Royal Artillery. Everyone had leave, but George didn't come home then or at Christmas; Uncle Stanley got notice that he'd been subjected to a disciplinary cancellation of leave. They were outside doing Morse code drills with a heliograph (this was an instrument you could use to signal with flashes of light), and he used his turn at signalling to play the fool. What he signalled was
Gott mit uns,
which was apparently what the Kaiser's soldiers had inscribed on their belt buckles in the Great War. It was considered very serious: he was put on charge for prejudicial conduct. Madeleine found this part out later from George's friend Wilf.

When he finally got leave, when I came in and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with his strange short haircut talking to Aunt Lucy like a sane individual, I almost cried with relief. Wilf was there with him and he got up politely to greet me,
but George didn't get up, he just raised his hand in a two-fingered wave. I swear he was thinner, if such a thing was possible. His hands were chapped raw. He had dark notches under his eyes. I admired the shine on their boots and they told us there were two schools of thought: polish and then water and then polish, or oil, then polish, then Vaseline. George favoured the former and Wilf the latter. On their buttons they used jeweller's rouge. They weren't at Fetlock Fields any more. They'd been at a port somewhere for landing exercises. They'd learned to scurry like crabs down a scramble net. In the dark, everything in the dark. We sat and drank tea, and Aunt Lucy asked George for his ration book and Wilf started to laugh and George told her he'd lost it playing poker. She asked him when he was going to stop being such a silly apeth. This was the sort of conversation George always had with his mother, and I wondered if he seemed the same to her. To me he seemed very different, wary and contained.

Taperlegs,
Wilf called him. While Aunt Lucy was up at the stove Wilf leaned towards me confidentially. He's in Company E, our lad, he said. He's in Company E and still they're calling him Taperlegs.

What's Company E? I asked.

It's a company of ectomorphs, George said. Tall and thin, he explained when I didn't respond.

They assign soldiers to companies by
height?
I asked. What's the point of that?

Wilf leaned closer. Saves measuring, he said, when the coffin makers and diggers are called in.

George jabbed him with an elbow. It's for parade, Lily, he said. We parade by company, and when you're standing on the pavement watching a parade it makes a better show. The whole column swells as it comes towards you and gradually tapers off. Impresses the hell out of the crowd.
Crikey! What a goddamn efficient marching machine!

That can't be true! I cried. The army wouldn't care about something like that.

No? said George. What would they care about?

Why, they care about winning, I said, and they both laughed.

Wilf was the only friend from Durham University that George had in his regiment. He had coarse yellow hair and an impudent face, like a turnip with wedges cut out of it. He was going to stay in Oldham for his leave because he lived too far away to go home. They tipped their kit bags out on the flagstones, and Wilf showed me his helmet, the shiny little mark on its rim from a bullet.

You were
shot at?

In a training exercise, he said. We had to do an obstacle course through Dannert wire. We were wearing full gear, and the goddamn officers were firing on us. Turned out it was live ammo — but we didn't know that at the time, did we, Taper-legs?

Oh, it was cracking, lad! said George. Adventures in the Woods Perilous!

Goddamn Dannert wire, said Wilf.

What is Dannert wire? I asked.

Barbed wire. It's coiled so you can just unspool it, it saves putting up fence posts. It's made in Germany. Nasty stuff. There's Dannert wire full of rotting sheep from here to Bishop Auckland.

Remember Jammer? George said to Wilf. Jammer was down at the Albert Docks in Liverpool and he saw a German merchant ship unloading Dannert wire. This was the end of September.

We were at war in September, I said.

Well done, missy! said Wilf. We were at war. We were well at war and we needed that wire!

They weren't going back empty either, said George. They were loading up with black pudding.

That's just one of the stories people like to tell, I said.

Oh, little Lily, mein Liebling, said Wilf, and they put their heads together and sang a song in German, a song that had my name in it:
Wie einst, Lili Marleen-a, Wie einst, Lili Marleen.
Love, even the Jerries are dreaming about you, Wilf said when they'd wound down.

I cocked my head at George. What was it you sent me in Latin? I asked.

He shrugged. It was just a translation of our DRO. I was confined to barracks for three days. Had nothing to read.

Why? What had you done?

The fuckin' NCO made me do an extra shift in the mess hall. Then he called inspection in the barracks and I didn't have a chance to get my gear ready. The fuckin' fucker fucked me over.

Adjectival's fallen by the way, I see.

Fuckin' right it has, said Wilf humorously. A lad in khaki talks like a toff, they think he's one of them fuckin' plants. Like the nun with the hairy knuckles who was spotted on the Clapham omnibus.

I stood on the flagstones, proud. They'd
never
talk like this in front of Aunt Lucy or Madeleine.

Other mates had the use of a flat in Manchester and came over daily. It was a conspiracy to keep George and me apart, a conspiracy of boys in khaki coming in and out of the back garden singing “Lili Marleen” and flirting with us girls, Aunt Lucy's head moving in the kitchen window, Uncle Stanley standing in the doorway with his pipe, Lois and Madeleine plying George with tea and cocoa. He never has a minute to himself, poor lad, said his mother, but George said he was
used to it. Even if you wanted to go to the infirmary you had to stand for an hour with a dozen other Tommies with the trots. I hung around on the flagstones, brazen as a streetwalker. I leaned against the shed going over what I especially wanted to say to him, which was,
Don't let the war change you. If the war changes you, the Germans will have won, no matter the outcome.
As far as I knew, this thought was original to me. But there was no time for George to work on his Gesner encyclopedia, no time to walk on the moors. The boys in khaki were jittery and badly behaved. In George's shed they tacked a notice stolen from a public lavatory: FLIES SPREAD DISEASE. KEEP YOURS CLOSED. A boy I'd never seen before fell against me in the hall and expertly squeezed my breast, with people not ten feet away. I stumbled into the kitchen and George looked at me with his clever eyes, George, who never had been one for the direct gaze.