Nuns and Soldiers

  Anne, now nearer to the shore, had also begun to understand the strength of the waves, their great size and how violently they broke. Their deafening noise, which she did not apprehend as sound, but as some deadly terrifying vibration, was overwhelming. She looked behind her. The sun must be clouded as the high backs of the incoming rollers were now almost black. Her courage failed, and she began to swim to and fro parallel to the shore, unable to decide to attempt the ordeal of return. She felt in her body, mingled with the chaotic roaring of the broken water, the tremendous force of the oncoming waves, now sweeping her shorewards, so that she had to resist their power in order to stay where she was. She tried to swim out to sea again. She must not become conscious of the cold. She was the helpless plaything of great mechanical forces which could kill her in seconds. She tried to think.

  The problem was this, that when she came in, carried by a wave into the area of the breakers, she would not have sufficient strength to scramble out quickly enough or stand up firmly enough not to be knocked down by the next wave which would then pass over her and draw her back in the undertow. She had not noticed in her former exultation, but she could see and feel now, how steeply the beach shelved, so that where the waves were actually breaking she might scarcely be able to touch the bottom. She could also now discern, amid that unbridled complex of forces, the terrifying clatter of the grey stones as the receding waves drew them down and back into the sea.

  Oh my God, oh my God, help me, thought Anne. She thought, I have got to chance it, and now. Already in her weakness she was scarcely swimming but simply fighting with the sea, losing her breath and gasping and swallowing water in the attempt to keep her head up. She did the only intelligent thing open to her. She turned again to look at the huge black-backed waves that were coming in behind her, and chose one which was a little smaller than the others to carry her, now swimming furiously, right in towards the beach. She saw, close to her now, the slope of dark shifting stones and the spread of the creaming raging foam. As the wave with which she was travelling began to break she ceased swimming and tried to touch bottom. The foaming white water rushed past her and over her, then her feet touched, deep down the shifting sloping race of the stones, drawn by the force of the water which was already beginning to flow back. She could see, half-turned, the high just-curling crest of the next wave. She attempted to leap so as to keep her head above it, but it was impossible. She could not gain footing, the water was too deep and too fast as it retreated beneath the incoming roller which now leaned over Anne like a translucent black-green wall. She lost her balance, her strength was gone. The wave crashed down over her engulfing her completely. Her head was below the water, her breathless mouth was open.

  Gertrude, paralysed with terror, had seen and understood her friend’s dilemma. She too had estimated the mechanical forces of the waves, the point of breaking, the slope of stones, the sucking speed of the undertow, the impossibility of standing erect. She saw exactly what Anne was trying to do, and how difficult it was. She saw her friend’s body, helpless, struggling, naked as the damned consigned to hell, about to perish utterly; and at the moment when Anne’s head disappeared from view under the crushing curling descent of the second wave, Gertrude entered the water.

  Anne, as she saw the vast size of the wave above her, and as she lost her footing and descended into a dim cave of swirling foam, and as the sea entered her mouth which had opened to gasp for breath, thought, I am drowned, this is the end. Oh forgive me, forgive me. The next thing she knew was daylight and the sight of a human arm, and the brown material of Gertrude’s dress, darkened by the water. Anne’s feet were again upon the stones and she had taken another breath. She breathed, she took two stumbling agonizing steps, gripping the arm, the brown material. The two women fell and the foam raced about them. Then they rose again and Gertrude pulled Anne into the shallows and then up beyond the water on to the land.

  They sat down on the stones, Anne choking, gasping, spitting, then breathing more quietly.

  Gertrude said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks for rescuing me.’

  ‘I thought you were a goner.’

  ‘Me too. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘You really are a prize idiot.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

  ‘Look, put my coat on. Can you walk?’

  Anne put on Gertrude’s coat and picked up her own clothes. Arm in arm, shuddering with cold, they climbed up on to the grass below the cottage. Then suddenly they stopped, holding on to each other and laughing, laughing their old laugh, but with a touch of hysteria.

  ‘All the same,’ said Gertrude, ‘you looked rather lovely dressed in your cross.’

  It was the day of Gertrude’s return to London, and the Count was sitting in a refreshment buffet in Victoria Station. He had ordered a cup of coffee, but could not drink it. He had spilt a little upon the plastic surface of the table and now sat with glazed eyes moving the liquid about into various patterns with his finger. It was a quarter past five in the afternoon. The Count’s heart was beating violently. The heart is a strong machine. The Count’s was now like some terrifying thing in an iron foundry. He put his hand to his side, to still the pain and as if to prevent his frenzied heart from hurling itself out of his body in a sheer despair. For despair was what he felt now. Or was it hope? How could such fierce despair seem to be identical with such fierce hope? He was consumed by a vast emotion which had taken over every mental and physical cell of his being. He knew one of its names for certain. He was in love. He could not stop trembling. He watched his trembling hands with fascination.

  Last night he had dreamt about his mother. He was with her in a big dark church. She was praying aloud and he wanted to pray with her but he could not understand the words. He thought, it isn’t Polish, what is it, what language is it? His mother was wearing a dark veil over her head, embroidered with red and blue flowers, and he thought suddenly, how strange, I never realized it, she is Jewish. Then he thought, no, she is not Jewish, she is dead.

  The area of the Warsaw Ghetto became smaller and smaller. People went away and never returned. But those who remained, except for a few, would not believe that those who went away were being murdered. Even when they half-believed it each one felt, it will be different for me. The Count had read in books that many Poles, in the midst of their own misery, still hated the Jews, pointed them out to the Germans, glad to have someone more wretched, more defeated, more in peril than themselves. Yet there were also Polish Gentiles who helped the Jews, even died with them in the final battle when the false hopes ended in the frightful holy courage of despair. Troy is burning, Warsaw is burning, they have burnt the Ghetto and flooded the sewers. The Count knew that if he lived in Poland now he would be automatically transforming the past in his heart to make it bearable. Was this his past, his past? What was it to do with him? Sometimes it all seemed ‘literary’, as remote as an epic poem, as remote as Thucydides. What ought Bor-Komarovsky to have done when the Red Army reached the Vistula? What ought Nicias to have done after the defeat in the Great Harbour of Syracuse? Surely Justice must hover over the misery and humiliation of men to clarify and purify, not as vengeance but as truth. Sometimes this awful past which was his and yet not his was a subject about which he could almost calmly reflect. Sometimes it came upon him suddenly as a painful incomprehensible jumble against which he had no natural defence; it penetrated into his body, making him feel fear and remorse and shame, and mingled, as it did now, with some quite other anguish.

  The period after Guy’s death had been a dark time for the Count. He had given himself up with a kind of strange relief, almost gratitude, to mourning for Guy. He was more affected even than he had imagined beforehand by this death. He had got used to Guy’s absence from the office. It was a different matter to get used to Guy’s absence from the world. Guy had been not only a wise and benevolent companion but a figure of authority. Guy was one of
those who inspired in those about him a confidence in morality, in continuity, not drawn from any theory but inferred somehow from Guy himself, as from something monumental. (The Count knew how Guy would have derided the notion of such an ‘inference’.) With Guy gone, the Count felt, anything could happen. He had lost his best friend, the one with whom he could always talk, to whom he could always turn. Now the ghost of his own awful loneliness rose the taller, stalked the closer and now at times the Count saw a mark of madness upon the face of that ghost.

  Mourning for Guy had mercifully postponed the other and more terrible frenzy. The Count tried not to think it, not to feel it, yet. He knew it would rage before long in all its force, it would prowl like a tiger unconfined. He tried in the interim to think of himself as a servant, Gertrude’s servant, as it might be her footman or her groom. He was, indeed, serviceable. He helped in the funeral arrangements. He made a list of Guy’s office friends who should be notified. He helped to move the furniture in the flat. He was continually, deferentially, available. But he was not, as it turned out, in proportion to his dreams of servitude, actually necessary. Other, more useful, helpers excluded him, and he had to admit himself to be, in Gertrude’s extremity, of less value than they. Manfred and Manfred’s big car were in Ebury Street every day. So, after the funeral, was Moses Greenberg, attentive, important, laden with vital incomprehensible papers. And the place of chief consoler and chief confidant, which the Count had occasionally dared to hope might be his, had of course been taken by Anne Cavidge. It was true that Gertrude was ‘safe’ with Anne. The Count liked Anne very much and felt a sort of reverent admiration for her as an unworldly person; yet he could not help resenting the fact that Anne, appearing suddenly out of the blue, had stolen his role.

  At times, sitting alone late at night and listening to the gale warnings, for Fastnet, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faroes, the Count had sometimes upbraided himself for wanting so ardently to console his beloved. Did he then want her to suffer so that he could comfort her? He was indeed appalled by her grief, her awful public tears. He had his own tears too, strange Polish tears which he shed meagrely in those late nights, sitting beside his radio set or over his history book. (He could read Proust no more.) He had quaked before Gertrude’s weeping, his whole body wrung by a violent response of sympathy, the more terrible in that he could express so little of it openly. He wanted to cry aloud and fall down and embrace her knees and kiss her feet, but all he could do was to stand awkwardly about, mumbling; senseless words of consolation and feeling that he was in the way. He told himself many a story about false hopes, including some terrible ones. But he had not been able to stop himself from thinking: my time will come.

  But in that ‘later on’ when he would perhaps be able more fully to play his part as Gertrude’s sympathetic friend and helper, what else would be? Moses Greenberg’s task would be done, Anne would go away, Manfred’s big car would be less often seen in front of Gertrude’s door. What then, between himself and Gertrude? The Count knew perfectly well that if he had not chanced to overhear those fateful words uttered by Guy, he would be feeling very different now. Of course he had been in love with Gertrude, in love with her, for years. But this love had been kept easily within bounds by reverence for her marriage, friendship with Guy, the impossibility of any change. It had been contained too by the Count’s faith in its perfect secrecy. But they had both guessed! So even the past was now charged with a new and strange causality. Of course with Gertrude a widow he would have hoped, but it would have been a moderate and sober hope, wherein too he might more easily have calmed himself with the thought: of course, after Guy, she will never marry. But now, with Guy’s words ‘marry Peter’ lodged in his soul forever, how could his hope not be uncontrollable, tigerish? And bitterly lacerating himself into a further frenzy he would think, after he had turned off his radio and lay in the darkness of his bed: she could marry any of them. He had never been jealous of Guy. But how could he bear it, how could he live, now, if she were to marry somebody else? He saw her as surrounded, besieged, by suitors, all of them interesting, attractive, possible. The line stretched out to the crack of doom. He thought, Guy told her to be happy. She will choose her happiness, why not? She could marry any of them. Gerald, Victor, Moses, Ed, Balintoy, Manfred.

  The Count looked at his watch. Hours had passed but it seemed to be only five-thirty. Gertrude had written to him from Cumbria to say that she would be back in London that afternoon. (Precious tiny kind uninformative letter, it was in the Count’s breast pocket.) Would Anne be with her? The Count ardently hoped not. The Count had written (briefly, soberly) to say that he hoped he might see her for a moment that evening, and would ring up at six to ask if he might call. He had (impelled by that terrible hope) taken two days off from the office. He leapt up now in a sudden anxiety. He must find a telephone box, a box unoccupied and in working order. He could not wait till six. He had to see her, he had to be in her presence. What would he do with the evening if she would not receive him he did not consider. He would have to go to Ebury Street, even if it were only to walk up and down and look at her window. The merciful interval of her protected absence was over. He thought, I will wait a year and then ask her to marry me. Dreadful seeds of insane happiness were stirring in him. He found a telephone box.

  ‘It was the Count,’ said Gertrude to Anne. ‘He wants to drop in for a drink. I said OK. You don’t mind do you?’

  ‘No, of course not, I’d love to see him.’

  ‘I’ve had such a nice letter from Rosalind Openshaw, you know, Stanley’s daughter.’

  ‘Darling, I’m so glad you want company. You must be so tired of seeing just me.’

  ‘I don’t want company. I don’t want anyone but you. And I’m not - oh don’t be silly-I can’t argue with you, I’m too tired.’

  ‘Manfred drove too fast.’

  ‘He always does. And you said so before. And you still wouldn’t drive.’

  ‘I’m not used to a car that size.’

  ‘Oh God, Anne, it’s so strange to be back here. You aren’t going away, are you, ever, you will stay always, always?’

  ‘I’ll never be far away, how could I be. Shall I cook my own dish for supper, just to show you I still remember it?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve forgotten it, I can’t think why I bothered to teach you, you didn’t want to learn. Hang cooking, let’s go out for supper.’

  ‘And the Count?’

  ‘No. Just us. Now we’ve put our suitcases in through the door I just want to get out of this flat again.’

  Gertrude looked about her. Putting the key in the door she had felt sick, ready to vomit, ready to faint. It was really beginning now, her life without Guy. The rest had been an interlude. She had, with quiet self-regarding prudence, changed the flat a good deal before she left for Cumbria. She did not want to come back to the exact scene which she had made and lived in with Guy. She did not want that terrible absence to spring upon her once again. But what struck her now was how unchanged it all was, and the absence, it was there: that special form of Guy dead which belonged in the flat and now appeared again, claiming its tribute of a grief renewed. The furniture had been shifted in the drawing-room. The marquetry table still supported the drinks, but now stood near the door instead of between the windows. The vase of flowers (fresh narcissus, Janet Openshaw must have been in) was perched upon a bamboo stool beside the fireplace. A Spanish rug from Anne’s room had replaced the golden mathematical rug, which had replaced the long animal rug which was now out in the hall. But the orchestra of china monkeys had stood their ground upon the mantelpiece because Gertrude had not been able to think where else to put them. And the pictures, Guy had arranged them. Gertrude had not the will to touch them. They were so heavy, so confidently established in their positions. She looked at the ancestral faces. Guy’s ancestors not hers. How alien and remote they seemed, as if only now they too had died.

  To stop the wretched tears from rising she thought, the Count is comi
ng, I shall be glad to see him. Gertrude had not forgotten Guy’s words about Peter, but she had not, during the first mourning time, reflected on them. They were words, wrapped up, stowed away in her mind. She would not marry. She must not cry. The Count was coming and she would be glad to see him. The door bell rang.

  ‘Oh hello Count, how nice to see you, do come in.’ Gertrude led the way through the hall and into the drawing-room. The cold sunshine of the April evening had a dim clear light, faintly gilding the calm clever Jewish ancestral faces. The room smelt of narcissus and the uneasiness of spring. Gertrude had changed her dress and combed and patted back her thick curly brown hair in honour of her visitor. Now they turned to face each other, both in a state of extreme agitation, Gertrude suddenly so, the Count as the climax of a long and agonizing expectation. The Count felt that he was face to face with the new, the possible Gertrude for the first time, and it was like meeting a strange woman, who was yet so dear, so familiar. He felt it would have been natural to take her in his arms. His pale snake-blue eyes glared down at Gertrude, his pale face was distorted into a mask of piteous intensity. His lips were wet, and he looked in his pain almost ferocious. He was visibly trembling. Gertrude felt, with the quick shock of his emotion, her own. Suddenly alone, she was confronted with a man who desired her, who loved her, and to whom she would have in some way to respond. Her heart accelerated and she put her hand to her throat.

  Anne came in carrying a tray with glasses.

  ‘You’ve changed the room,’ said the Count. He knew this since he had helped Gertrude to move the furniture, but he needed something to say.

  Anne, seeing the last seconds of the encounter, thought to herself, the Count in love, how odd, how improper! She had, she realized, thought of him as somehow, like herself, isolated, separated. And Gertrude is moved, yes, she is moved, she is blushing. Anne felt suddenly sad.