Greece, weren’t you, dig?”
“I heard the bugle when they blew it the first time.” Joe Brennan had gone to the Middle East with the first convoy of Sixth Division troops in January 1940, and had transferred to this Seventh Division battalion after the Greece and Crete campaigns. He was the only man in the battalion who had tasted the sobering bitterness of defeat, and he was that much a better soldier because of it: he would never again underestimate the enemy. “They didn’t have to send me an invitation like they did you mugs.”
“They didn’t invite us, they advertised. It was in the Positions Vacant column in the Herald. Good jobs, it said. Five bob a day and all found. Pensions if you survive, it said.”
“I’d of been in sooner. I was looking around for a good job on the home front, that was all. But I was too late. All the bookies and jockeys had ’em.”
“I was making three thousand quid a year, meself, at the time. But I chucked it all up——”
“Bull, you were on the dole like the rest of us!”
The chi-acking went on, anything to fill in the waiting minutes, long and unsettling as the minutes just before an attack. It was all the same, Radcliffe thought: farewell, war, return, all of it waiting and very little else. He had the sudden feeling he had been waiting all his life, that to-morrow was the only real ambition; from the slapping palm on the new-living buttocks to the gentle fingers on the new-dead eyelids, one spent one’s time in waiting. He moved uneasily, all at once feeling impatient and a little afraid; then seeking reassurance, he leaned across Greg Morley and looked down at Jack Savanna.
“How do you feel?”
“Like a girl on her wedding night.” Savanna’s face, though long and bony like his body, was not unhandsome; when he smiled it was surprisingly boyish. The smile belied the eyes and the drawling voice; a natural faith struggled hard against an acquired cynicism. He had seen too much too young: the cruelty in the dormitory, the stranger rising confusedly from his mother’s bed, his dead and bloody father; but some relic of childhood struggled through and made him liked even by those he insulted. “Although, being a bachelor, I can only use my imagination in choosing such a simile. You married wrecks would know better than I.”
“Christ, I wish they’d get a move on!” Morley’s voice was petulant with impatience.
“You expecting Sarah to be at the station?” Radcliffe was asking himself the same question: would Dinah be there, would she have changed? It was their first time away from each other and he was surprised how, now at the time for reunion, it had frightened him.
“Oh, she’ll be there, all right.” The petulance was gone from Morley’s voice immediately: any mention of his wife could only have the effect of wiping out the mood of a moment before. He had always been ready to talk about her and she was as well-known as any film star or racehorse to his many friends in the battalion. Her photo had occupied pride of place in the pin-ups in the tent he had shared with three other sergeants, above a line of anonymous nudes and between Rita Hayworth and, the choice of the orderly-room sergeant, Tamara Toumanova. “She hasn’t failed yet.”
“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” said Savanna, and only Radcliffe detected the faint bitterness under the banter. “The conceit of the married man.”
“The poor kid’s probably been waiting there an hour,” Morley said.
“God, listen to him!” said Savanna. “It’s only you married bastards who believe women are so faithful.”
“It’s only we married bastards who know,” Radcliffe grinned.
“How far out are we?” said Morley. “Can you see the platform from here?”
“Better strap him down.” Savanna sat up, then slowly got to his feet, untangling his length. He was several inches over six feet and seemed to be all bone, though broad and heavy bone. Then one looked again and noticed there was also a good deal of muscle, and realised here was a man tough enough to battle a team of bullocks or a whole company of men. It was a shock to learn that in civilian life he had been only a radio announcer. He affected a thick Air Force type moustache and his blond hair was long enough to have begun to curl on his neck. He was a mixture the men had never understood. Several of them had seen him in civilian clothes while on leave before they had gone overseas, and he had been wearing suède shoes; but as Basher Hanna had said, there was no accounting for taste, for he had once known a bloke who wore gloves even when it wasn’t cold. The men had never understood him, but they liked and admired him.
Not that Jack Savanna cared much what people thought of him. He stretched himself now, his bones cracking, then slapped Morley heartily on the back. “We don’t want you jumping out the window and galloping up to the platform.”
The carriage had quietened down. Some of the men had begun to put on their webbing and packs as long as twenty minutes before, and now they were beginning to feel the effects of trying to move in the cramped space with such awkward loads. Their kit bags, packed with souvenirs for the kids and dirty clothes for the wife to wash, added to the congestion. The men sat uncomfortably in the seats, squatted on the floor, leaning back to back against each other like native porters.
Then the train began to move again, easing forward and moving quietly into the platform, as if it had pulled up to collect its breath and make a composed entrance, like a woman checking on her looks before going in to meet some old lover. Steam blew past the windows, then it had faded and there were the laughing, tearful, frightened faces. Fear hung on every face like a veil, only to be lifted when the man was seen to be unmaimed and unchanged as his letters had claimed. Relatives stood like customs agents along the platform, searching for the contraband of war: the hidden wound, the undeclared change of feeling. The train ground to a stop and this stage of the journey was over.
The men fell, were pushed, were pulled from the carriages. Bodies clung with the adhesion of passion and gladness; mouths closed on mouths with long hunger; tears mingled on cheeks. Somewhere a child cried, but no one heeded it; an old woman walked the platform looking for someone, unable to see him for the blindness of tears; a girl laughed hysterically, then screamed aloud as if the climax of ecstasy had been reached ahead of schedule. Four women stood apart, widows smiling bravely, drawn there by a woman’s affinity for grief: their husbands would never be buried, for they hadn’t seen them dead. The smoke of the engine hung in the air, smudging the skin, watering the eyes and bitter on the tongue, a reminder of the farewell of two years before, a warning that another farewell lay just ahead. The waiting wasn’t over, just changed in character.
Vern Radcliffe saw his wife and two children and dived towards them through the bewildering crush of reunion, aware of how small and precious was his world. Jack Savanna looked about him, smiling at nothing, wearing a disguise he hadn’t realised he had adopted; then he turned away, feeling lost and envious and more angry than he had been since his father’s death. And Greg Morley, clutching his wife and besieged by photographers, enjoying both experiences, laughing his head off at the wonder of it all, shouted something to Radcliffe and Savanna that neither of them heard nor cared about.
The crowd began to move towards the platform gates, towards the laden table, the passionate bed, the real welcome home.
“WE HAVE a few battles of our own.” Happy Fredericks laughed and would have blushed if he hadn’t given up blushing twenty years before. “But I guess you’ve been hearing that ever since you landed back.”
“A bit,” said Vern. “My wife’s brother told me I didn’t know how lucky I was. He’s in wholesale groceries. Says it keeps him awake at nights.”
Happy Fredericks rolled back in his chair and laughed at full blast, his vast bulk shaking like a mountain about to fall. “Well, if you’re so lucky, you wouldn’t want to come back to us, eh?”
“Come back?”
“Be a