when his heartbeat had slowed to normal, and the prickling sweat on his body had dried, he mocked himself: Dom, the great cynic, was on a train going nowhere – oh the potency, et cetera of cheap music.
A pretty WAAF sat opposite him, stockinged legs gracefully aslant, clumpy shoes carefully arranged. She unwrapped a packet of sandwiches and asked if he would care for one. When he said no thank you, she ate hers daintily, and, after wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, asked what squadron he was flying with now.
When he said none as yet, she began a tentative conversation about some friend of hers in 55 Squadron who was flying night fighters over France. Her eyes were questing: Are you enjoying this? Am I going too far? She had a heart-shaped face and auburn hair. Good legs, too. On another day, in another mood, he might have answered her properly. They might have had a drink together later that night, exchanged telephone numbers, gone at some point to bed. That was the way of it now: you took comfort where you could, and she looked like a nice girl, a good sport. He sensed her smile fading as he glanced at his newspaper again.
Half asleep, he heard another soldier talking to her. The scrape of matches as they lit up fresh cigarettes. The pleasant burr of the man’s Gloucestershire accent was telling the girl that this same train had been chased only a few weeks ago by a German fighter plane, and how the engine driver had put his foot down to ninety miles an hour. She replied, pleasantly, ‘Gosh, I hope that doesn’t happen again today,’ with a mildly discouraging conversation-closed thread running through her voice. Who could ever fathom the randomness of human desire? Why him, now feigning sleep behind his newspaper; why not her?
He was thinking of Saba’s eyes now, dark brown or mid brown? They’d gazed at him like caged animals through the veil of that mad little hat; they’d glowed with life. And one of the songs she’d sung, about God blessing the child who’d got it’s own, was a plea for independence, for life, for dignity, but not, now he came to think of it, for a man.
She was pretty, no doubt about it, but he’d had plenty of time in hospital to mistrust mere attractiveness in another human being. He thought about the girls who’d run screaming from the ward when they’d seen the new faces of their former loves. Annabel had at least exited with some degree of decorum, assuring him over and over again it wasn’t him, it was what she’d termed vaguely, her pale blue eyes flickering as they did when she was being sincere, ‘the whole situation’. A thought which led him to Peter, a close friend from Cambridge, a man with a passion for girls, T. S. Eliot and cars. It was Peter who had sat on a bridge near the Cam and read to him aloud from the Four Quartets: Teach us to care and not to care was the line Dom suddenly recalled.
A year before his aircraft had been shot down over France, Peter had bought himself a dazzlingly green Austin 10 for £8 from a local mechanic. He was amazed by his good luck and they’d driven like the clappers through the Oxfordshire countryside in it on one glorious day in summer. The car exploded after a week, and the last time Dom had seen Peter, he was sitting on the grass, its remnants spread around him.
‘It’s my fault,’ Peter said. ‘I was a fool. I was taken in by the colour like a girl with beautiful eyes.’ After a short silence he’d added: ‘It’s a hopeless fucking machine.’
It was still dark in the tunnel. To give himself something to do, Dom read the mother’s letter again by torchlight. When he’d first read it, he’d felt the sting of disappointment – so Saba had definitely and defiantly gone – and he’d been longing in his impatient way to put the thing to rest. But then he’d felt something like relief.
Because what did he know about the girl? Only that she sang, and that he admired her courage, and that for that one moment,
A pretty WAAF sat opposite him, stockinged legs gracefully aslant, clumpy shoes carefully arranged. She unwrapped a packet of sandwiches and asked if he would care for one. When he said no thank you, she ate hers daintily, and, after wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, asked what squadron he was flying with now.
When he said none as yet, she began a tentative conversation about some friend of hers in 55 Squadron who was flying night fighters over France. Her eyes were questing: Are you enjoying this? Am I going too far? She had a heart-shaped face and auburn hair. Good legs, too. On another day, in another mood, he might have answered her properly. They might have had a drink together later that night, exchanged telephone numbers, gone at some point to bed. That was the way of it now: you took comfort where you could, and she looked like a nice girl, a good sport. He sensed her smile fading as he glanced at his newspaper again.
Half asleep, he heard another soldier talking to her. The scrape of matches as they lit up fresh cigarettes. The pleasant burr of the man’s Gloucestershire accent was telling the girl that this same train had been chased only a few weeks ago by a German fighter plane, and how the engine driver had put his foot down to ninety miles an hour. She replied, pleasantly, ‘Gosh, I hope that doesn’t happen again today,’ with a mildly discouraging conversation-closed thread running through her voice. Who could ever fathom the randomness of human desire? Why him, now feigning sleep behind his newspaper; why not her?
He was thinking of Saba’s eyes now, dark brown or mid brown? They’d gazed at him like caged animals through the veil of that mad little hat; they’d glowed with life. And one of the songs she’d sung, about God blessing the child who’d got it’s own, was a plea for independence, for life, for dignity, but not, now he came to think of it, for a man.
She was pretty, no doubt about it, but he’d had plenty of time in hospital to mistrust mere attractiveness in another human being. He thought about the girls who’d run screaming from the ward when they’d seen the new faces of their former loves. Annabel had at least exited with some degree of decorum, assuring him over and over again it wasn’t him, it was what she’d termed vaguely, her pale blue eyes flickering as they did when she was being sincere, ‘the whole situation’. A thought which led him to Peter, a close friend from Cambridge, a man with a passion for girls, T. S. Eliot and cars. It was Peter who had sat on a bridge near the Cam and read to him aloud from the Four Quartets: Teach us to care and not to care was the line Dom suddenly recalled.
A year before his aircraft had been shot down over France, Peter had bought himself a dazzlingly green Austin 10 for £8 from a local mechanic. He was amazed by his good luck and they’d driven like the clappers through the Oxfordshire countryside in it on one glorious day in summer. The car exploded after a week, and the last time Dom had seen Peter, he was sitting on the grass, its remnants spread around him.
‘It’s my fault,’ Peter said. ‘I was a fool. I was taken in by the colour like a girl with beautiful eyes.’ After a short silence he’d added: ‘It’s a hopeless fucking machine.’
It was still dark in the tunnel. To give himself something to do, Dom read the mother’s letter again by torchlight. When he’d first read it, he’d felt the sting of disappointment – so Saba had definitely and defiantly gone – and he’d been longing in his impatient way to put the thing to rest. But then he’d felt something like relief.
Because what did he know about the girl? Only that she sang, and that he admired her courage, and that for that one moment,
Similar Books
