Women's Barracks (18 page)

We hurried downstairs and encountered Mickey, with a stack of files under her arm, on the way to the elevator. "I have to talk to you," Jacqueline whispered, and Mickey understood.

"I'll meet you in the washroom at ten-thirty," she said. The washroom was the one place where the secretaries could meet and chatter in peace.

At ten-thirty we found Mickey there. Fortunately, no one else was in the room. Jacqueline explained her predicament. Shouldn't she do something about not having a child? It might be dangerous to do nothing. But what should she do?

For all her experience with men, it seemed that Mickey actually knew very little more than we did about such things. Her lovers always took care of everything. Mickey would simply leave all the precautions to them, and nothing had ever happened. But she was quite sure, she said, that it was too late for Jacqueline to take any effective measures now. She could do nothing but wait and see, and hope for the best. If it developed that she
was
pregnant—well, it was too early to think of doing anything about it now. "You'll just have to wait and see," Mickey repeated.

Jacqueline started to laugh. Leaning against the washbowl, she laughed until I was afraid she was becoming hysterical. "How can it be too late and too early at the same time?" she gasped.

It was spring. A wonderful English springtime, with the park covered with crocuses, with blossoms, with sheep, a spring that sent mounted amazons with their cavaliers onto the bridle paths, and sent couples rowing in the Serpentine.

Once more people were talking of the invasion. It was surely going to take place this year, and at night all of us dreamed that we were back in France.

We girls were being photographed in Down Street. One of the propaganda services was making a short film about the life of the feminine volunteers in the Free French Forces. The dining room and the dormitories were cluttered with spotlights and cables.

Jacqueline was filmed taking a bath, dressing, making up, and getting in the truck to go to work. The sentinels on the roof were filmed, and the little Brittany girls, enveloped in immaculate white aprons that had been borrowed for the occasion, were shown preparing our meals under the smiling supervision of a Machou transformed into a tender, motherly soul. The infirmary was decorated with tricolors for the occasion. The nurse, a dirty girl with greasy hair, who usually left the sick ones to take care of themselves, was photographed in the act of bringing a tray of food to a fake invalid. Vases filled with flowers were all around the room, and the place was hardly recognizable. In order to create an atmosphere of evening diversion, the film-makers perched a couple of girls on the piano and had them put their arms around each other and sing
"Aupres de ma blonde."

It was during the time when Down Street was revolutionized by these motion-picture activities that a new crisis arose around Jacqueline. Ursula was the first to learn of it. One day after we had all gone off to our duties, she found Jacqueline crying on her bed. Ursula tried to console Jacqueline, without quite knowing what to say.

Jacqueline raised a ravaged face to her. "I'm going to have a baby," she said, and she began to cry again.

Ursula looked at her mutely, not knowing whether she should believe this, whether it was meant as playacting or as truth.

Then, realizing it was serious, she felt filled with respect for Jacqueline, and looked at her as though the child were already in her arms. It seemed to Ursula a thing that was strange and sacred and rather impossible, like a miracle. It was something that could happen to women—to real women, married, older—but here in Down Street, and to one of the "Virgins," it seemed to touch on the world of unreality.

"Are you sure, Jacqueline?" she said in a low voice.

Jacqueline nodded. She had seen a doctor, and he had told her that the baby would be born in December. It was now May.

Ursula remained seated on the bed, completely incapable of offering any advice. Jacqueline repeated, "I don't want a baby. It mustn't be born. It can't. What am I going to do?"

At first only a few of us knew the secret. Mickey was again consulted. After reflection, Mickey said that she believed there was a drug that was remarkably effective in producing abortion, but she had never heard its name. A pharmacist would know.

Presently half the dormitory was aware of the situation, and a great variety of advice was offered to Jacqueline. Ginette made her take a series of baths in practically boiling water. She was induced to jump from her bed fifty times.

After much searching, Jacqueline found a pharmacist who was willing to co-operate, but the stuff he sold her had no effect. Neither did the hot water or bicycle riding or jumping. And time passed.

Jacqueline never wrote to De Prade to tell him what was happening—perhaps because everything then might have been too simple. De Prade would have sent her money, would have helped, perhaps would have been able to return. Perhaps he would have promised her to get a divorce after the war. But Jacqueline would take only the most morbid view of the situation. The conception of the child was entirely her own fault, she insisted, and De Prade would never get a divorce. If she told him what had happened, she would only make him desperate. De Prade had been filled with remorse when he left. But he had probably gone to confession, done penance, and promised to forget her. She was certain that he would never write to her. On returning to France, he would probably confess their night to his wife, begging her forgiveness, and that would be the end of it.

Perhaps, I thought, she was right in her understanding of him. He was from her world. She had selected him because of that. And she insisted that she simply could not inform De Prade of what had happened. Besides that, she had a sort of presentiment that this affair could not end for her otherwise than in still another catastrophe. Catastrophes were the order of her life. Therefore, in the end, she accepted her situation as part of this established order.

After her pregnancy had become officially noted, Jacqueline once again left Down Street. Once more her bed was taken over by a new recruit. A welfare organization of Free France busied itself with finding a room for Jacqueline in the suburbs of London, and providing her with subsistence funds. It was not the first case of this sort at the barracks, and it would certainly not be the last. But officially, no one knew the identity of the father. For once, the few girls in our little circle seemed capable of guarding a secret. It was of course generally known in the barracks that Jacqueline had passed her week ends in Kensington, but three or four officers lived in the house, and besides, they were always changing, and Jacqueline was known to have a great quantity of admirers.

One morning a little notice was pinned up in the hall in Down Street among the announcements, sentences, and regulations. This stated that Jacqueline had been "discharged for reasons of health."

Summer came, a London summer that lasted about a week. There had been no second front in Europe. The Red Cross messages took longer and longer to arrive, and it was said that the people had nothing to eat in France, that women were wearing shoes with wooden soles, and that layettes for babies were being knitted out of black, gray, or brown wool from men's discarded pull-overs.

In London the men kept looking at the photographs of their wives and their children, trying to memorize their faces, which must have changed so much. They spoke less often of France now, because it was painful to remember, and it seemed now that the exile was to endure for centuries. And still people continued to arrive from France in fishing vessels from Brittany .or through Spain, and they told the same stories about the resistance, about the occupation, about the lack of food, and they told the same jokes about the Boche.

For quite a while now the bombardment of London had almost completely ceased. People went to visit the ruins in the City as one went to visit places celebrated in ancient history.

Emerging from GHQ at noon, we girls in uniform walked down St. James Street arm in arm, despite the fact that this was against regulations. We studied the shop windows, but could buy practically nothing, for everything was rationed and we had very few tickets. People counted purchases in tickets now rather than in pounds and shillings, and it seemed that this too would go on forever.

The richer ones among us didn't go to Down Street for lunch, but went instead to treat themselves to a horse-meat steak with fried potatoes at Rose's. Sometimes I permitted myself this treat. After the steak, our supreme luxury consisted in stopping for
croissants,
real French
croissants,
in a Soho pastry stop. Then we would go for a walk in St. James Park before returning to our offices.

Rose's, the park, the movies, the swank clubs and bars, the concerts at the National Gallery—all this was now part of our habitude of exile. Little by little each of us constructed a life for herself in wartime London. For the years passed, and the war endured forever.

All London was pro-Russian. The theatre where Soviet films were regularly shown was always filled. The newspapers were filled with stories of Russian heroism. And the people of London and the Allied soldiers and the exiles from all Europe believed what was written everywhere—that this was a holy war, that hatred between nations was to be destroyed forever, and that a free world was going to be built.

The end of the war appeared to all of us the supreme good. With the end of the war there would be an end, overnight, to all restrictions, to hunger, and to cold. The United Nations would arise, there would be universal brotherhood, there would be a United States of Europe, for all this had to come to pass, since we were fighting on the side of good, and we were going to annihilate evil forever, replacing it with the invaluable qualities of intelligence, love, and order, which we undoubtedly possessed. But all this was still far away, all this was for "after the war."

The individual would take his place in society after the war, his rightful place. The individual would be respected, safeguarded by laws conceived for his well-being, for his liberty, and for his moral and intellectual development. But for three years and more, in the little world of Down Street, as in all other military barracks, the individual didn't exist. And those who rose in authority, those who became the "cabinet ministers" here, were the people who knew how to get along, the people with connections, the flatterers. Well, then, I asked one night when we were debating all this in the assembly room, why were we always talking of tomorrow, and never of today? What would remain tomorrow of bleeding Europe? There would be those who returned broken from war and concentration camps, the sick, and a young generation raised in a world where heroism consisted of committing sabotage, lying, and killing; and there would be the collaborators, the cowards, and the indifferent. This was the world that was to rise from the ruins tomorrow, the world upon which everybody counted so much.

Late in summer, Ann requested permission to spend her leave in Scotland. She gave a false address to Petit; actually she left for Lee's estate.

Petit was not deceived. Seated at the bar in Down Street, she confided her miseries to Claude and to anyone else who cared to listen. "I know where they are," she said. "But what's the use? If I went after her there, it wouldn't change anything."

She resigned herself therefore to wait for Ann's return, consoling herself with a fat blonde who was a waitress in the GHQ canteen.

Meanwhile Petit drank a great deal of beer, and intrigued to get herself promoted. And despite everything, despite her morals, her swearing, and her intrigues, we all really liked her. For Petit was a brave soul, not very intelligent, but fair with the recruits, and she did all that she could to help anyone who came and asked for aid.

Ann passed the weeks with Lee in Scotland. What happened there, the strange event that was to be whispered about with a kind of revolted glee, seemed to me the saddest of all the things I had heard about the unnatural lives of these women. It was something that happened in the intimate lives of three people, and yet it came out, as everything had to come out in that atmosphere of war and of the barracks. Petit pried it from Ann, and then Petit herself spread the story, in a kind of vengefulness.

Lee came from a very rich family; not far from Edinburgh they owned a veritable manor in the style of the Stuarts. Every year Lee passed her vacation there with her brother, a blond young officer who was used to his sister's ways and his sister's friends. He was a type of young man who seemed to have emerged from the novels of the Brontë sisters. He drank a great deal, belonged to an exclusive regiment in wartime, and spent his leaves in boredom at the ancestral manor in the occasional company of his masculine sister, who went off hunting every morning.

An ancient servant couple took care of the dwelling, which was situated in the midst of woods and lakes among the arid Scottish hills. Lee and her brother found the place tiresome, and went there only through a sort of sense of duty, but Ann was enchanted and astonished by the establishment. She had been raised in genteel poverty, and had never known her father. She had always been attracted by riches. It was her dream to be wealthy and powerful someday. By instinct, Ann always sought connections with people above herself. In the barracks she was friendly with the officers, through her inner need to rise in station; and even her women friends, her Lesbian lovers, were always rich or in some way powerful. I don't think she chose them through cold calculation, but it always turned out that way.

Every morning she went hunting with Lee, or riding in the immense park. In the afternoons she visited the countryside, and on returning explored the innumerable chambers of the manor. She loved to walk barefoot on the bearskin rugs in the evening, and to watch the immense logs burning in the fireplaces. The servants had the reserved and dignified bearing of domestics in a household of consequence, and Ann had the impression of sharing in all this opulence. When she embraced Lee in her hungry arms, it was the entire manor that she was hugging to herself.