Pat Barker - Regeneration

The girls shrieked with laughter. He looked at them again. The one called Madge was very pretty, but there was no hope of winkling her out of the group, and he thought he might as well be moving on. As soon as his meal arrived, he began stuffing limp chips and thickly battered fish into his mouth, wiping the grease away on the back of his hand.

‘You’ll get hiccups.’

He looked up. It was Sarah, the one who’d been sitting with her back to him. ‘You’ll have to give us a surprise, then, won’t you?’

‘Drop me key down your back if you like.’

‘That’s nose bleeds, Sarah,’ Betty said.

‘She knows what it is,’ said Lizzie.

Madge said, ‘Hiccups, you’re supposed to drink from the other side of the cup.’

She and Prior stared at each other across the table.

‘But it’s a con, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You can’t do it.’

‘’Course you can.’

‘Go on, then, let’s see you.’

She dipped her small, straight nose into her cup, lapped, spluttered and came up laughing and wiping her chin. Betty, obviously jealous, gave her a dig in the ribs. ‘Hey up you, you’re gonna gerrus slung out.’

The café owner was eyeing them from behind the till, slowly polishing a glass on a distinctly grubby-looking tea towel. The girls went back to their tea, bursting into minor explosions of giggles, their shoulders shaking, while Prior turned back and finished his meal. He was aware of Sarah beside him. She had very heavy, very thick, dark-brown hair, but all over the surface, in a kind of halo, were other hairs, auburn, copper, chestnut. He’d never seen hair like that before. He looked at her, and she turned around and stared at him, a cool, amused stare from greenish eyes. He said, ‘Would you like a drink?’

She looked at her cup.

‘No, I meant a proper drink.’

‘Pubs round here don’t let women in.’

‘Isn’t there a hotel?’

‘Well, there’s the Cumberland, but…’

The other women looked at each other. Lizzie said, ‘Howay, lasses, I think our Sarah’s clicked.’

The three of them got up, said a good-natured ‘goodnight’ and tripped out of the café, only bursting into giggles again after they’d reached the pavement.

‘Shall we go, then?’ said Prior.

Sarah looked at him. ‘Aye, all right.’

Outside, she turned to him. ‘I still don’t know your name.’

‘Prior,’ he said automatically.

She burst out laughing. ‘Don’t you lot have Christian names?’

‘Billy.’ He wanted to say, and I’m not ‘you lot’.

‘Mine’s Sarah. Sarah Lumb.’ She held out her hand to him in a direct, almost boyish way. It intrigued him, since nothing else about her was boyish.

‘Well, Sarah Lumb, lead on.’

Her preferred drink was port and lemon. Prior was startled at the rate she knocked them back. A flush spread across her cheeks in a different place from the rouge, so that she looked as if her face had slid out of focus. She worked in a factory, she said, making detonators. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, but she liked the work, she said, and it was well paid. ‘Fifty bob a week.’

‘I suppose that’s something.’

‘Too bloody right it is. I was earning ten bob before the war.’

He thought what the detonators she made could do to flesh and bone, and his mind bulged as a memory threatened to surface. ‘You’re not Scottish, though, are you?’

‘No, Geordie. Weil, what you’d call Geordie.’

‘Did your dad come up looking for work?’

‘No, they’re still down there. I’m in lodgings down the road.’

Ab , he thought.

‘ “Ah,” he thinks.’ She looked at him, amused and direct. ‘I think you’re a bad lad.’

‘No, I’m not. Nobody bad could be that transparent.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Haven’t you got a boyfriend?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think you’d be sitting here if you had.’

‘Oh, I might be one of these two-timing lasses, you never know.’ She looked down into her glass. ‘No, I haven’t got one.’

‘Why not? Can’t all be blind in Scotland.’

‘Perhaps I’m not on the market.’

He didn’t know what to make of her, but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.

‘I did have one,’ she said. ‘Loos.’

Odd, he thought, getting up and going to the bar to buy more drinks, that one word should be enough. But then why not? Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, the Somme. Arras. He paid and carried the drinks back to their table. He thought that he didn’t want to hear about the boyfriend, and that he was probably going to anyway. He was right there.

‘I was in service at the time. It didn’t…’ Her voice became very brisk. ‘It didn’t seem to sink in. Then his mate came to see me. You weren’t supposed to have followers. “Followers” — that’s how old-fashioned she was. Especially soldiers. “Oh my deah. ” So anyway he come to the front door and…’ She waved her hand languidly. ‘I sent him away. Then I nipped down the basement and let him in the back.’ She took a swig of the port. ‘It was our gas,’ she said, red-lidded. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our own bloody gas. After he’d gone, you know, I couldn’t believe it. I just walked round and round the table and it was like… You know when you get a tune stuck in your head? I just kept on thinking, our gas. Anyway after a bit she come downstairs, and she says, “Where’s tea?” I says, “Well, you can see for yourself. It’s not ready.” We-ell. First one thing was said and then another and in the end I did, I let her have it. She says, “You’d be making a great mistake to throw this job away, you know, Sarah.” I says, “Oh, aye?” She says, “We don’t say ‘aye’, Sarah, we say ‘yes’.” I says, “All right,” I says, “‘ yes ’. But ‘aye’ or ‘yes’, it’s still ten bob a week and you put it where the monkey put the nuts.” Same night I was packing me bags. No testimonial. And you know what that would’ve meant before the war?’ She looked him up and down. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Anyway, I turned up at home and me Mam says, “I’ve no sympathy, our Sarah,” she says. “You should have fixed him while you had the chance,” she says. “And made sure of the pension. Our Cynthia had her wits about her,” she says. “Why couldn’t you?” And of course our Cynthia’s sat there. Would you believe in weeds? I thought, aw to hell with this. Anyway, a couple of days after, I got on talking to Betty — that’s the dark girl you saw me with just now — and we decided to give this a go.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

She brooded for a while over her empty glass. ‘You know, me Mam says there’s no such thing as love between men and women. Love for your bairns, yes. Love for a man? No. ’ She turned to him, almost aggressively. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, that makes two of us, then, ‘cause I’m buggered if I do.’

‘But you loved —’

‘Johnny? I can’t remember what he looked like. Sometimes his face pops into me mind, like when I’m thinking about something else, but when I want to see it, I can’t.’ She smiled. ‘That’s the trouble with port and lemon, isn’t it? Truth pours out.’

He took the hint and bought another.

By the time they left the pub she’d drunk enough to need his arm.