Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

In formal beds beside the Serpentine, early tulips stood in tight-lipped rows. Billy Prior spent several moments setting up an enfilade, then, releasing his companion’s arm, seized an imaginary machine-gun and blasted the heads off the whole bloody lot of them.

Myra stared in amazement. ‘You barmy bugger.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘Five months in a loony bin last year.’

‘Go on. ’

She didn’t believe him, of course. Smiling, he came back and offered her his arm. They had been wandering along beside the lake for an hour, but now the afternoon was waning. A coppery light, more like autumn than spring, slanted across the grass, turning the thorned twigs of rose bushes into strips of live electric filament that glowed, reddish, in the dusk.

Prior, always self-conscious, was aware of approving glances following them as they passed. They made a romantic picture, he supposed. The girl, young and pretty, clinging to the arm of a man in uniform, a man, moreover, wearing a greatcoat so grotesquely stained and battered it had obviously seen a good deal of active service. As indeed it had, and was about to see more, if only he could persuade the silly bitch to lie on it.

‘You’re cold,’ he said tenderly, unbuttoning the greatcoat. ‘Put your hand in here. You know, we’d be warmer under the trees. We’d be out of the wind.’

She paused, doubtfully, for by the lake it was still light, whereas the avenue of trees he was pointing to smoked darkness. ‘All right,’ she said at last.

They set off across the grass, their shadows stretching ahead of them, black, attenuated figures that reached the trees and began to climb before they were anywhere near. In the darkness they leant against the trunk of one of the trees and started to kiss. After a while she moaned, and her thighs slackened, and he pressed her back against the fissured bark. His open greatcoat shielded them both. Her hands slid round him, underneath his tunic, and grasped his buttocks, pulling him hard against her. She was tugging at his waistband and buttons and he helped her unfasten them, giving her free play with his cock and balls. His hands were slowly inching up her skirt. Already he’d found the place where the rough stockings gave way to smooth skin. ‘Shall we lie down?’

Her hands came up to form a barrier. ‘What, in this?’

‘You’ll be warm enough.’

‘I bloody won’t. I’m nithered now.’ To emphasize the point she pressed her hands into her armpits and rocked herself.

‘All right,’ he said, his voice hardening. ‘Let’s go back to the flat.’ He’d wanted to avoid doing that, because he knew his landlady would be in, and watching.

She didn’t look at him. ‘No, I think I’d better be getting back.’

‘I’ll take you.’

‘No, I’d rather say goodbye here, if you don’t mind. Me mother-in-law lives five doors down.’

‘You were keen enough the other night.’

Myra smiled placatingly. ‘Look, I had a woman come nosying round. The voluntary police, you know? They can come into your house, or anything, they don’t have to ask. And this one’s a right old cow. I knew her before the war. She was all for women’s rights. I says, “What about my rights? Aren’t I a woman?” But there’s no point arguing with ‘em. They can get your money stopped. And anyway it isn’t right, is it? With Eddie at the Front?’

Prior said in a clipped, authoritative voice, ‘He was at the Front on Friday night.’ He heard the note of self-righteousness, and saw himself, fumbling with the fly buttons of middle-class morality. Good God, no . He’d rather tie a knot in it than have to live with that image. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you to the station.’

He strode towards Lancaster Gate, not caring if she followed or not. She came trotting breathlessly along beside him. ‘We can still be friends, can’t we?’

He felt her gaze on his face.

‘Can’t we?’

He stopped and turned to face her. ‘Myra, you’re the sort of girl who ends up in a ditch with her stockings round her neck.’

He walked on more slowly. After a while, her hand came creeping through his arm, and, after a moment’s hesitation, he left it there.

‘Have you got a girl?’ she said.

A brief struggle. ‘Yes.’

She nodded, satisfied. ‘Thought you had. Lying little git, aren’t you? Friday night, you said you hadn’t.’

‘We both said a bellyful on Friday night.’

At the underground station he bought her ticket, and she reached up and kissed his cheek as if nothing had happened. Well, he thought, nothing had happened. On the other side of the barrier she turned, and looked as if she might be regretting the evening they’d planned, but then she gave a little wave, stepped out on to the moving staircase and was carried smoothly away.

Outside the station he hesitated. The rest of the evening stretched in front of him and he didn’t know what to do. He thought about going for a drink, but rejected the idea. If he started drinking as early as this and in this mood, he’d end up drunk, and he couldn’t afford to do that; he had to be clear-headed for the prison tomorrow. He drifted aimlessly along.

It was just beginning to be busy, people hurrying to restaurants and bars, doing their best to forget the shortages, the skimped clothes, the grey bread. All winter, it seemed to Prior, an increasingly frenetic quality had been creeping into London life. Easily justified, of course. Soldiers home on leave had to be given a good time; they mustn’t be allowed to remember what they were going back to, and this gave everybody else a magnificent excuse for never thinking about it at all.

Though this week it had been difficult to avoid thinking. Haig’s April 13th Order of the Day had appeared in full in every newspaper. He knew it off by heart. Everybody did.

There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.

Whatever effect the Order had on the morale of the army, it had produced panic among civilians. Some women, apparently, were planning in all seriousness how they should kill themselves and their children when the Germans arrived. Those atrocity stories from the first months of the war had done the trick. Rather too well. Nuns with their breasts cut off. Priests hung upside-down and used as clappers to ring their own bells. Not that there hadn’t been atrocities, but prisoners of war were always the main victims, and the guilt was more evenly distributed than the press liked to think.

There were times — and tonight was one of them — when Prior was made physically sick by the sight and sound and smell of civilians. He remembered the stench that comes off a battalion of men marching back from the line, the thick yellow stench, and he thought how preferable it was to this. He knew he had to get off the streets, away from the chattering crowds and the whiffs of perfume that assaulted his nostrils whenever a woman walked past.

Back in the park, under the trees, he began to relax. Perhaps it was his own need that coloured his perceptions, but it seemed to him that the park on this spring evening was alive with desire. Silhouetted against the sunset, a soldier and his girl meandered along, leaning against each other so heavily that if either had withdrawn the other would have fallen. It made him think of himself and Sarah on the beach in Scotland, and he turned away sharply. No point thinking about that. It would be six weeks at least before he could hope to see her again. Further along towards Marble Arch the figures were solitary. Army boots tramped and slurred along the paths or, in the deepest shadow, jetted sparks.