Colonel Julian and Other Stories Read online

‘I wouldn’t be knowin’,’ Miss Burke said. ‘We’ll get there when we’ll get there.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be knowin’ that either,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’re taking you to Comilla. Maybe we’re not.’

  He moved restlessly, troubled, turned his head towards her, and then, seeing the window, turned it abruptly back again. She knew then that he was afraid of looking out of the plane; she knew that he had never flown before. Of course that was idiotic too, and she wasn’t going to have any unprofessional nonsense about it. ‘All you have to do is shut your eyes and get some sleep,’ she said. ‘The other boys are asleep. Now come along.’

  ‘I can’t,’ the boy said. As he shook his head she saw how deeply the eyes had receded through shock and exhaustion and pure pain.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ she said. ‘Of course you can. If you can’t sleep you can shut your eyes.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t do,’ the boy said. ‘I can’t shut them. They won’t shut. They won’t stay shut.’

  She swallowed hard and did not answer. Really it was very exhausting talking like this against the noise of engines; it couldn’t go on. She looked down with severity at the agitated face, with its dark eyes so sharply impelled by shock that they had become frozenly transfixed, but for some reason or other she did not know what to say. And while she was trying to make up her mind the boy began talking again, this time not exactly to her, not in continuance of anything that had been said before, but simply in pure aimless relief and excitement. She had sense enough to let him go on. And after a moment or two, hearing all the time less than half he said, she sat down on the seat again and rested her head back against the metal of the fuselage, in a pretence of listening. She realized then that all he needed was an object of reception for the things he had to say, and that its identity did not matter much, nor what it said in answer. And so she let him go on, while the plane flew steadily on its level course at about four thousand feet, over the green-encrusted contours of jungle and palm-fenced strips of water glittering in the white heat of afternoon.

  For the next half hour she caught at intervals some intelligible phrase in the jumble of things he had to say, and now and then she would nod automatically in reply, as if to indicate that she was still listening. She was not so much bored as very sleepy herself. She expected him at any moment to talk about his mother. For God’s sake, she thought, they’re just like babies. The more you sympathize with them the more you may. She was determined not to hear any nonsense like that; she never did. But twice in quick succession the aircraft suddenly gave a violent bump in the heat. It was nothing serious, but it threw her about the seat with a jerk, and she saw the boy’s hand flung out as if to save himself from falling. She stretched up and caught it and held it in hers. The palm was clammy with sweat.

  ‘We’ll be all right when we’re over the sea,’ she said. ‘It’s just the heat. That’s all.’

  He turned to her and gave her a slow and possibly apathetic smile. For God’s sake, she thought, I hope he’s not going to be sick. Not that I ought to pander to any of this emotional nonsense at all. Not that I should be doing it. I shouldn’t be doing it. What in the name o’ God would Johnson say if she could see me? Johnson was a sister up at Comilla. They shared a tent and called each other Johnson and Burke, as if Christian names were a soft concession not to be tolerated. In three years they had watched a constant stream of mutilated men come down from the front, in heat and in rain, at all times of the year, from every quarter from Imphal down to Akyab and Mandalay. It was one of her ambitions to see Mandalay.

  ‘Did you come down from Mandalay?’ she said to the boy.

  ‘That’s where I got it,’ he said, and pointed down to the leg.

  ‘Ah,’ she said.

  ‘Two days ago.’ His face was restless with fresh anxiety, the lids of the eyes stiffly held open. And then suddenly he came to the point of it all; he made a sudden wild grab as it were at the hot core of his own personal catastrophe: the thing that had been troubling him all the time. ‘I was time-expired,’ he said. ‘Time-expired. Three more days and I’d have had this bloody country.’ He grew for a moment or two pathetically excited. ‘I’d have had it. I was going home.’

  Weak and immobile, his eyes held in them the smallest of solitary tears, so that even Miss Burke was for a moment or two touched by them in spite of herself. Now she knew why he could not shut his eyes. She did not know what to say, and suddenly the boy was silent too. She waited for some moments for him to speak again, but he was still quiet, and at last she said: ‘Well, you’ll be going home now. It’s all the same. You’ll be going home, anyway.’

  He did not answer even that. Now that at last he had been able to disclose the pain that really bothered him, it was as if it had never existed. It was not the wound but the circumstances that seemed to be destroyed by the wound that troubled him. He seemed quite at rest because of Miss Burke’s understanding.

  Miss Burke looked out of the small round window of the plane. Below, the jungle was breaking up, and rivers in which she could see shadows of pale brown sand-like muscles under the transparent blue skin of water were beginning to appear and broaden among the mass of trees. She knew that they were coming to the sea.

  She sat thinking about the boy being time-expired. Yes, she understood that. There was no one in the whole country who would not understand it. To be going home, to be at the end of exile: for God’s sake who didn’t know? One day she would be time-expired too. It was only at the rarest moments that she could think of it. But one day it would happen. She would be time-expired and there would be an end for her of the heat and sweat and the dust of summer and the miserable steaming nights of the monsoon, and the callous clash of death in every part of her life. There would be an end of the grey vultures feeding on the dead. They said time went quickly in the East, and that after a while you could not separate the memory of one individual day from another. But what happened really was that time built itself up into a mass of hard white light behind you, like an impersonal and glittering wall that cut you off from the shadowy remembrances of all your life behind it. That was what she hated; she knew that that was what the soldier hated, what they all hated. To be time-expired meant that you were going to break down that wall, break through it, break out into the resurrected memory of a sort of life that mattered.

  She had worked through the heat of the plains for three steaming summers without trying to think of it too much. They used to say that it was not the climate for white women—no, it was certainly not the climate. Nor was war exactly their destiny either. But there you are: in time you took the heat and the dust and the war and the blood and all the lunatic filth of India because there was nothing else you could do. You were caught in a violent trap. You had to stay. And your only hope of escape from it was that somewhere, some time, if you were lucky, and if you could outlive the heat and the cancer of your unshed tears, you would become, at last, time-expired. You would be going home.

  She looked down out of the window and there now, breaking in a series of glistening lines of white contour that seemed transfixed against the strip of yellow sand, was the sea. Did anyone at home, she thought, understand what it meant?

  There were times when she thought that the whole front—all of them, the men, the pilots, the nurses—had been forgotten. They had sometimes said it themselves: a forgotten army of forgotten men. They had been overshadowed—oh yes, she knew that; but the shadow of it did not darken the heat or diminish the glassy impact of their time in exile.

  For God’s sake there was no use thinking about it. ‘We are over the sea now,’ she said to the boy. ‘Going up the coast.’

  He smiled. ‘First time I’ve flown,’ he said.

  And God knows, she thought, you’re a lucky man to be able to fly. Do you know where you’d be if it weren’t for the Daks, coming to fetch you out? You’d be time-expired all right. You’d be rotting forgotten somewhere up in th
at God-forsaken jungle because there’d be no way of getting you out. You, and the Lord knew how many more—you’d have just died up there, wherever you lay. You should all of you go down, she thought, on your bended knees and thank the stars of heaven there were enough Daks to feed and water and supply you, and then when you were wounded bring you out again.

  She rested her head against the fuselage and shut her eyes for the first time. Her ears had become slightly blocked by the noise of engines and she had forgotten to swallow and it was quite quiet in her head. Shut away into her own world, she gave herself up to a momentary contemplation of things that were not real. She began to allow herself to think that she, too, was going home. There were no longer any blistering dusty airstrips, no longer any hordes of vultures pouring like bloated grey beetles over the carcasses of the dead, no longer any savage steaming days when you hated the sun. There was no longer any exile, no longer any of that arid female life in transit camps, or of a life with men who, because they were fighting or tired or occupied elsewhere, did not want you. There was an end of all the callous futility of war. She was going home to a place where rain fell deeply and quietly on green grass, not with the madness of the monsoon, and where the pure light and penetration of it would wash the dust for ever out of her bones.

  She held on to these thoughts for the remaining half hour of the flight. The wounded all about her were very quiet. The boy made no more attempt to speak to her until the aircraft, banking, began to make its circuit of the field. Even then she did not open her eyes, but clung on a little longer to an inner world remote from everything she knew to be real. She even shut her eyes a little tighter and held her hands painfully on the edges of the metal seat and thought: ‘God, how much longer? How much longer? How much, much longer?’

  And then her eyes were open. She made them open with brutal suddenness. She stood up on her feet and saw that the boy’s stretcher was swaying slightly as the aircraft turned. She held it still again, with instinctive efficiency.

  ‘Coming in to land,’ she said, and stood looking down at him. Once again he smiled, and once again she was aware of his helplessness: that same childish masculine helplessness that was always drawing forth her contempt. But she was not contemptuous now.

  ‘Where’s your home?’ she said.

  ‘Shropshire,’ he said.

  ‘Nice there?’

  He nodded and smiled, but did not speak. She saw a small glint of tears in his eyes again and thought: ‘For God’s sake, any moment now, and he’ll be asking me for my address.’

  And I am not, she thought, having any of that.

  She turned away and looked out of the window and saw the landscape below coming to life: palms beyond the black runway, bright fronds of banana trees drooping in the heat, a mass of crimson bougainvillea flaming by a long cane basha, some coolies running. In a few moments it was all flattening out and seeming suddenly to take on its own speed, and presently she knew by the bump of the wheels that they were down.

  As the Dakota taxied to dispersal she turned for the last time to look at the boy. He was relieved and glad that the flight was over. It would be a long time before he was well, but before long, if he were lucky, he would be going home. He at least was really time-expired.

  ‘Shropshire for you,’ she said, and then walked briskly back through the aircraft just as the pilot cut the engines. There was no sense waiting for an answer.

  She stood by the big double doors of the Dakota, and in a moment or two, when they were opened, all the heat and glare of the afternoon rushed in and oppressingly dazzled her face. She helped get the steps out herself, and was the first person to go down them.

  She jumped down on the hot sandy concrete and looked about her. For God’s sake, nothing but men. All helpless as usual. All standing about and gaping as if they’d never seen a man on a stretcher before. Two clots of Indian drivers were propping up the two ambulances, and two British boys, bare to the waist and brown as burnt butter, were not much better.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Miss Burke said. ‘Come on!’

  She stood in the fierce sunlight waiting for the stretchers to come out of the plane. To her they came out as they had gone in: a series of anonymous oblongs, plaster-encased, like lumps of nameless statuary. She did not even know which of them differed from another. Even when the boy from Shropshire was brought out, last but one, eyes fixed upon her as if either searching for a sign of friendliness or as if she were something very wonderful, she did not glance at him in return.

  Instead she walked deliberately away from the plane to where, by the ambulances, there was some confusion now. The clots couldn’t count the ambulance capacity and were trying to get in more men than the vehicles would hold. For the love of God, for God’s sake, she thought, just like men. As helpless as babies. Just like men.

  ‘Can’t you count now?’ she said, raising her voice. ‘It’s the bunch of wetheads you are, isn’t it? You clots, you deadbeats! Can’t you see there’s a man lying in the sun? Is it round the damn bend all of you are? Get that man out of the sun!’

  She marched about among the men and the waiting stretchers with intense impatience, her voice hard and strong and her eyes impersonal as last again in the deadly glare of light.

  ‘Do you think we’ve got the whole of life to spend here?’ she said. ‘Do you think we’ve nothing else to do?’

  The Lighthouse

  The thin tongue of coast was so flat that it was like a scar on the sea. Nothing rose above the level of the one-storeyed shacks scattered about it like cubes of sea-worn wreckage except a lighthouse, standing up like a vast white candle in a wide lofty sky, so that from a distance it seemed to float in air.

  By the end of September, after the heat of summer, the sea-flowers were dead. A long flat tide floated in, almost limped in, washing over and over again the same wide salt-grey waste of sand, the same bright fringe of shingle, black with fresh-strewn seaweed and sprinkled with pretty white and rose and turquoise shells. Salt dust blew on small winds from one side of the road to the other, rattling harshly on steely patches of sea-thistle and dune-grass, and then blew back again. It drifted finely against the shacks, with their sun-spent flowers, that would soon be closed for winter, and buried the steps of their porches a little deeper every day.

  From the end of the peninsula it was a two-mile walk for Brand to get the papers. Every morning he walked along the cracked concrete road and bought the papers and perhaps a magazine from the shop where squat black plaice-boats, curtained about with kipper-coloured netting, were beached from the bay. The air was always thick with the smell of sun-dried sea-fish and gangs of swooping gulls crying about the boats, and he was always thirsty by the time he began to walk back along the shore.

  Half-way back was a shack, facing the sea, that had tin-plate advertisements nailed over one side of it so that it glittered harshly, blue and green and white and red, in the sun. He noticed it first not because of the advertisements but because it had outside it a square of grass. This grass, watered all summer, was vivid green in the desert of beach and sand. In the middle of it was a white flag-pole and at the top of the flag-pole was a triangular scarlet flag, with ICES sewn across it in white letters.

  He had been there nearly a week when he first went in. Sun and sea-air had warped the jerry-built glass door so that he had to push it violently before it would open. Before he knew it he was half-thrown into the small café, against the counter.

  Behind the counter stood a woman in a black fur coat and a green scarf on her head, and through a window behind her he could see the sea.

  ‘And about time too,’ she said. ‘I thought you were never coming.’

  She was smoking a cigarette and she did not take the cigarette from her mouth when she spoke to him. It was burning short and the smoke was curling up into her big face, crinkling the pouches under her eyes.

  Suddenly, looking at him again, she burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh! God alive, I thought it was th
e taxi.’

  He smiled and she began coughing violently from smoke and laughter, so that grey ash spilt in a fine cloud on the black fur coat. She laughed again and did not shake it free.

  ‘Hear that?’ she called. ‘Gentleman came in and I thought it was the cab.’

  Behind the counter was a door and he could see a kitchen beyond it, but no one answered.

  ‘Terribly sorry, sir.’ The cigarette smoke burned straight up into her baggy colourless eyes. ‘Very rude of me.’ She let the ash drop on to her coat again. ‘Something we can get you?’

  ‘Glass of milk?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, no milk. It’s the drought. They cut us down.’ She took the cigarette out of her mouth, coughing ash on the counter. ‘Excuse me. Cuppa tea?’

  ‘Cup of tea.’

  ‘Haven’t seen a taxi anywhere, I suppose, have you? What do you make the time?’

  ‘Just after eleven.’

  ‘Supposed to be here for eleven. Puts years on you.’ She looked beyond him, irritated, through the glass door. ‘Same with everything.’

  He did not answer. She took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her fur coat and lit a fresh cigarette from the old, coughing again.

  ‘Gentleman’d like a cuppa tea,’ she called. ‘Got one on?’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Whyn’t you sit down?’ she said. ‘On holiday? Got a beach-hut here?’

  ‘Up by the lighthouse.’

  ‘Getting a bit late in the season. What d’you do with yourself all day?’

  He did not know what to say; there was no point in telling her he was bored all day. Then suddenly she began coughing again, this time with excitement, spilling ash on her coat, the coarse skin of her face and neck creasing and flopping up and down; and in the same moment he heard the taxi on the road outside.

  ‘God alive, I must fly!’

  She came from behind the counter, waddling and coughing, picking up her handbag from the corner of the counter as she passed him.