Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“My God, I’ve never been so—” Richard began, but was unable to finish, so flustered, he forgot to depress the hand brake button and pulled the ratchet right through. “Damn!” He turned angrily to Rosemary. “I don’t pretend to know what’s going on between you and your sister. But if you’re not up to it, I strongly suggest we turn around right this minute and—”

“I’m all right,” said Rosemary evenly. “I’ll talk to him.” But she didn’t move.

Richard glanced at Georgina in the rearview mirror. “I think perhaps you ought to stay with—”

“She can come in,” said Rosemary. “I’m sure young Wilkins could do with some Marx. I imagine attempted suicide’s another bourgeois tool to oppress the masses.”

“Look here,” said Richard firmly. Georgina sat still, refusing to move. He opened his door and pushed up the umbrella. “Are you coming, Georgina?” The rain was drumming on the umbrella, his brogues straddling a puddle.

As she got out of the car, Georgina, still visibly shaken by Rosemary’s attack, forgot to lock the door. Rosemary was already shaking her umbrella, the headmaster, a small, stocky man in his late sixties, approaching her from the entrance hall.

“I think,” Richard told Georgina as Rosemary walked ahead, “she’s been under an awful lot of strain.”

“She’s terrified,” said Georgina. “I think she’s pregnant.”

Richard Spence stopped abruptly.

“She’s with child, Father, and the father is gone. Like our William has gone. And now this Williams—”

“Wilkins—” corrected Richard, though still in shock at what she had said, his umbrella still up, though they were inside. The prefect politely offered to take it for him.

“Er — what — oh, yes, yes, of course,” said Richard. He felt utterly lost — the twentieth century and its sexual revolutions and all its other revolutions had passed him by in Surrey. It had taken him twenty years to use the word “period” instead of “that time” in front of his wife, Anne. Everything was falling down about him.

“Ms. Spence?”

It was the headmaster greeting Rosemary but in a second making it clear that her father and sister were not exactly welcome. How long, wondered Georgina — how long to wait until she was needed. If only Rosemary knew how much she wanted her love, how much she needed love. And here was Rosemary needed, called for.

The war was a bitter disappointment for Georgina. It had failed her utterly so far. With the entire planet in conflict, one was supposed to see the relativity of one’s own unimportance — to lose oneself and ergo one’s problems, one’s loneliness absorbed by the larger struggle. In fact, Georgina discovered that one’s problems were only exacerbated. From rationing to unquestioned patriotism, like Rosemary’s, the commonality of everyone’s shared experience only made one’s unorthodox views more private, making one feel even more of an outsider from one’s own family. Rosemary had touched a raw nerve, suggesting Georgina couldn’t give herself to love, only to the love of an idea.

Now Georgina herself wondered if her flirtation with Marxism was, in reality, nothing more than an act of sublimation on her part, an avoidance of the real problem — that she was afraid of men. So long as her undergraduate enthusiasm had to wrestle with the pressing attack of hitherto totally alien ideas, she didn’t have the time to wrestle, figuratively or otherwise, with sex, with her failure to find a man who would fit her ideal. Someone whose wit was matched by his sexual presence, at once alluring yet not chauvinist, considerate yet not effeminate. An “English and American literature” graduate, down from Oxford, had almost made the grade. In a rare moment, as unexpected as Rosemary’s outburst, Georgina had let her passion override reason. But her tentative, nervous foreplay ceased when, flustered by not knowing some of the terms he was using, but clearly understanding his intent, she panicked, becoming all superior, demanding all but a declaration of her rights from him. To which he, not yet successful in getting her pants off, replied — and now the words rang in her ears — that what she needed was “a feminist with a big cock!”

“Well, you’re neither!” she had shouted back, slamming the door. Despite her parting shot, which she harbored as one of her snappier ripostes to male chauvinist vulgarity, the adolescence of it all appalled her, only reminding her once again that age was no gauge of maturity. Look at Rosemary’s outburst. But Rosemary was engaged. It had been the final blow. Rosemary, who had always been thought of as the one least likely to marry — lost to a world of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, so shy she might have been permanently lost in the forest of Arden.

“Would you and Mr. Spence like to wait here?”

It was the headmaster, diplomatic but making it quite clear that only Rosemary had been requested to come and talk some sense into the boy.

When she entered the commissary room on the second floor, the first tiling Rosemary saw was a lemon-colored screen. For what purpose, seeing there was no one else in the room, Rosemary didn’t know. Inside the screen, his mother, a pretty, dark-haired woman, short, in her mid forties perhaps, mumbled a greeting that expressed both gratitude and resentment, then left Rosemary alone to talk with the boy.

The boy Rosemary looked down on was not the callow youth of her Shakespeare class. Gone was the smart-alecky sneer of the sixth form clown. It might have been another boy altogether, for though he answered to the physical description the ambulance had given — a youth six feet in height, black curly hair, dark brown eyes — the eyes that were once full of rebellion and trouble were now doelike in their shame.

He had looked at Rosemary only once — the moment she had opened the door — but then had turned away. Rosemary almost wished for a return of his callow bonhomie of the past months; at least there had been some semblance of courage. Still standing by the bed, she was about to soften her rather formal stance and forced smile in order to ask him why he did it and whether or not she could be of help. But against this was her impulse to tell him off, to scold him for not being brave, whatever his problem was — pray God he wouldn’t tell her — to tell him that other young men, like her brother, like her dead young brother, with God knew what fear all around them, had shown better mettle than he. But either tack seemed pompous and absurd. What did she know of the causes behind his attempted suicide — what did anyone know of anyone else’s inner life anyway, the hidden and secret places, at once banal and terror-ridden, so often given in their public semblance to mistaking magnetic north for true? And what was true anyhow? Even the beginnings of such a concrete event as the war now seemed obscure. Even historians, if they survived, if anyone survived, would only do more to obscure it.

“Why did you want to see me?” she asked Wilkins. For a second, try as she might, she could not think of his Christian name, or, as Georgina would insist, his first name. He had only ever been Wilkins. G, she thought — Gerald?

He was still staring ahead, his eyes avoiding hers, his voice that of a whipped puppy. “I don’t know, miss,” he replied.

She didn’t know what to say other than to tell him the headmaster gave her the impression he wanted to see her. He sneezed, and when he reached from under the sheet for a tissue, she saw his bandaged wrists. It surprised her. For some reason she had expected him to have tried it with pills— that was usually the way these days. Might well have been pills that caused it in the first place. Her anger with the boy was difficult for her to contain. She knew it unworthy of her, but here was this callow youth slashing his wrists for attention when young men like William had willingly suffered the slings and arrows of the worst fortune there was — yet was it their worst or their best? He looked a bit like William. She wondered how Robert’s sister, Lana, had talked to William. Had she been so cold? Of course not, but then, William had fought bravely. Though even that, she didn’t know for certain. It struck her with some force that she knew very little, in feet, about how William had been wounded and even less about the circumstances of his time aboard the hospital ship-only that Robert’s sister had somehow given him the gift of love. God forgive me, thought Rosemary, but she wasn’t up to God’s love for Wilkins.