‘How’d you like to see me in nothing at all?’
‘Horatio, what do you mean?’
‘Stripped for action!’
‘Ooh, we’ve got a right one here!’ she told Ann.
Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a glass in her hand. ‘Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn’t let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!’
‘I only just came over—’
‘Circulate, dear – And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!’ These family pleasantries all sotto voce.
If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in Wake Island, which I had seen five times in the camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father’s instinct to have no booze during the evening. ‘It only spoils the party.’ No, come on, he didn’t really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother’s sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green glasses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old turd he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.
‘See you later,’ I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting sexual innuendo they would take.
I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.
The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake – vests, spencers, brassieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my sexual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey vulvas. The prick gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.
Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her – more for the sake of ‘A’ Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surreptitiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my arse.
‘So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta – and your mother. Didn’t have any trouble getting here in the blackout?’
‘So you’ve just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?’ That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.
‘That’s right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.’
‘Just two days, in fact.’
I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath … ‘Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight …’ ‘Yes, that’s right, just two days, in fact!’ said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.
‘And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?’
‘First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.’
‘Well, that is the Army, isn’t it? Where are you going to go?’
‘That’s a military secret, Mrs. Crane, which I am unhappily unable to reveal.’ A military secret securely kept from me, I might have added. While we talked, Henrietta Crane kept looking at her mother, rather than me, her fat little lips glistening as she sipped the burgundy. There was a faint hope that if I waited long enough (say five days) she might get pissed and shed all her moral standards; if her moral standards were in proportion to the number of her underclothes – I was convinced that such a relationship existed – then the hope was faint indeed, and more than one bottle of Church’s burgundy would be called for.
‘Will you be fighting then?’ Mrs. Crane asked. Her thin Midland accent made the verb sound the way Southerners say ‘farting’, while her tone suggested that, whatever I was going to do, it was best I did it quietly in a back street.
‘Aye, I expect I’ll be doing a bit of farting,’ I replied.
More in stupor than in anger, I said to Henrietta, ‘It’s getting stuffy in here with all this fag smoke, and the room starts to stink of beer when it warms up. Would you like to come and see our air-raid shelter out the back?’
The Old Enigma gave me a waxworky look before her eyes slid to mum.
‘We’ve got an air-raid shelter too, you know,’ she said, in a tone suggesting she thought she was committing repartee. ‘I keep my collection of little vases in there, don’t I, mother?’
‘That’s right, dear.’ Smiling at me in elucidation. ‘She keeps her collection of little vases in our air-raid shelter.’
‘Mmm, I suppose that way they don’t get broken if there’s an air raid.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Henrietta said. She uttered a short laugh as if it was a prearranged code meaning NO SEX TONIGHT.
‘Let me re-fill your glass,’ I said. Dog’s urine or horse piss?
Ann was still working away at the gramophone, flipping the ten-inches on one after the other. She was swigging sherry with Sylvia and giggling. Jeremy Church was hovering about as if he fancied them both, while Mrs. Church listened in agony to the Mole aunt’s account of her bombing-out. Most of the records were the sentimental tunes that Ann adored. How Green Was My Valley, Room 504, Whispering Grass, You Walked By, My Devotion, Yours, and one that she kept slipping on in my honour, You Can’t Say No to a Soldier. Christ, she was the only one who had said yes to me; the other bitches here assembled did not even appear to know what the question was!
I evaded old Church, who was anxious to talk about The Agony of the Great War (‘You don’t remember it but things were very much harder then!’), and commenced to flirt with Sylvia again.
‘You didn’t have much luck with Henrietta then!’ she said, and she and Ann and I burst out laughing.
Her arms were rather spotty, but we were getting on quite well when I noticed Nelson preparing to slip out with Valerie. He winked at me, a slow thorough wink that must have bruised his eyeball. Dirty bastard! Jealousy seized me. Valerie wasn’t bad, a bit hefty owing to her involvement in the Women’s Land Army, but very cheerful – and everyone understood that Land Army girls needed it regular; the contact with agriculture made them that way. They would be going to the pub for a pint and afterwards Nelson would get her against our back wall for a knee-trembler. I knew this because he had told me about it in a humble but proud way. He claimed that knee-tremblers were the most exhausting way of having sex. I longed to have a try, longed to be really fucked out.
‘Like to come and see our air-raid shelter, Sylvia?’
‘What’s so special about your air-raid shelter? We’ve got one too!’
‘Ah, but has yours got hot-and-cold running water in it?’
‘No, and I bet yours hasn’t!’
‘It’s got a bit of a puddle in one corner! No, look, see, I keep my collection of small vases in there. You’d be interested.’
‘You keep your what?’
At that point, when the battle to get Our Syl into a suitable knee-trembling position might have gone either way, enter my father! He had finished his warden’s parade, looking for chinks in other people’s blackouts. He carried his gas mask and his torch, and was careful not to remove his