Summer came, a London summer that lasted about a week. There had been no
second front in Europe. The Red Cross messages took longer and longer to
arrive, and it was said that the people had nothing to eat in France,
that women were wearing shoes with wooden soles, and that layettes for
babies were being knitted out of black, gray, or brown wool from men’s
discarded pull-overs.
In London the men kept looking at the photographs of their wives and
their children, trying to memorize their faces, which must have changed
so much. They spoke less often of France now, because it was painful to
remember, and it seemed now that the exile was to endure for centuries.
And still people continued to arrive from France in fishing vessels from
Brittany or through Spain, and they told the same stories about the
resistance, about the occupation, about the lack of food, and they told
the same jokes about the Boche.
For quite a while now the bombardment of London had almost completely
ceased. People went to visit the ruins in the City as one went to visit
places celebrated in ancient history.
Emerging from GHQ at noon, we girls in uniform walked down St. James
Street arm in arm, despite the fact that this was against regulations.
We studied the shop windows, but could buy practically nothing, for
everything was rationed and we had very few tickets. People counted
purchases in tickets now rather than in pounds and shillings, and it
seemed that this too would go on forever.
The richer ones among us didn’t go to Down Street for lunch, but went
instead to treat themselves to a horse-meat steak with fried potatoes at
Rose’s. Sometimes I permitted myself this treat. After the steak, our
supreme luxury consisted in stopping for _croissants_, real French
_croissants_, in a Soho pastry stop. Then we would go for a walk in St.
James Park before returning to our offices.
Rose’s, the park, the movies, the swank clubs and bars, the concerts at
the National Gallery—all this was now part of our habitude of exile.
Little by little each of us constructed a life for herself in wartime
London. For the years passed, and the war endured forever.
All London was pro-Russian. The theatre where Soviet films were
regularly shown was always filled. The newspapers were filled with
stories of Russian heroism. And the people of London and the Allied
soldiers and the exiles from all Europe believed what was written
everywhere—that this was a holy war, that hatred between nations was to
be destroyed forever, and that a free world was going to be built.
The end of the war appeared to all of us the supreme good. With the end
of the war there would be an end, overnight, to all restrictions, to
hunger, and to cold. The United Nations would arise, there would be
universal brotherhood, there would be a United States of Europe, for all
this had to come to pass, since we were fighting on the side of good,
and we were going to annihilate evil forever, replacing it with the
invaluable qualities of intelligence, love, and order, which we
undoubtedly possessed. But all this was still far away, all this was for
“after the war.”
The individual would take his place in society after the war, his
rightful place. The individual would be respected, safeguarded by laws
conceived for his well-being, for his liberty, and for his moral and
intellectual development. But for three years and more, in the little
world of Down Street, as in all other military barracks, the individual
didn’t exist. And those who rose in authority, those who became the
“cabinet ministers” here, were the people who knew how to get along, the
people with connections, the flatterers. Well, then, I asked one night
when we were debating all this in the assembly room, why were we always
talking of tomorrow, and never of today? What would remain tomorrow of
bleeding Europe? There would be those who returned broken from war and
concentration camps, the sick, and a young generation raised in a world
where heroism consisted of committing sabotage, lying, and killing; and
there would be the collaborators, the cowards, and the indifferent. This
was the world that was to rise from the ruins tomorrow, the world upon
which everybody counted so much.
* * * * *
Late in summer, Ann requested permission to spend her leave in Scotland.
She gave a false address to Petit; actually she left for Lee’s estate.
Petit was not deceived. Seated at the bar in Down Street, she confided
her miseries to Claude and to anyone else who cared to listen. “I know
where they are,” she said. “But what’s the use? If I went after her
there, it wouldn’t change anything.”
She resigned herself therefore to wait for Ann’s return, consoling
herself with a fat blonde who was a waitress in the GHQ canteen.
Meanwhile Petit drank a great deal of beer, and intrigued to get herself
promoted. And despite everything, despite her morals, her swearing, and
her intrigues, we all really liked her. For Petit was a brave soul, not
very intelligent, but fair with the recruits, and she did all that she
could to help anyone who came and asked for aid.
Ann passed the weeks with Lee in Scotland. What happened there, the
strange event that was to be whispered about with a kind of revolted
glee, seemed to me the saddest of all the things I had heard about the
unnatural lives of these women. It was something that happened in the
intimate lives of three people, and yet it came out, as everything had
to come out in that atmosphere of war and of the barracks. Petit pried
it from Ann, and then Petit herself spread the story, in a kind of
vengefulness.
Lee came from a very rich family; not far from Edinburgh they owned a
veritable manor in the style of the Stuarts. Every year Lee passed her
vacation there with her brother, a blond young officer who was used to
his sister’s ways and his sister’s friends. He was a type of young man
who seemed to have emerged from the novels of the Brontë sisters. He
drank a great deal, belonged to an exclusive regiment in wartime, and
spent his leaves in boredom at the ancestral manor in the occasional
company of his masculine sister, who went off hunting every morning.
An ancient servant couple took care of the dwelling, which was situated
in the midst of woods and lakes among the arid Scottish hills. Lee and
her brother found the place tiresome, and went there only through a sort
of sense of duty, but Ann was enchanted and astonished by the
establishment. She had been raised in genteel poverty, and had never
known her father. She had always been attracted by riches. It was her
dream to be wealthy and powerful someday. By instinct, Ann always sought
connections with people above herself. In the barracks she was friendly
with the officers, through her inner need to rise in station; and even
her women friends, her Lesbian lovers, were always rich or in some way
powerful. I don’t think she chose them through cold calculation, but it
always turned out that way.
Every morning she went hunting with Lee, or riding in the immense park.
In the afternoons she visited the countryside, and on returning explored
the innumerable chambers of the manor. She loved to walk barefoot on the
bearskin rugs in the evening, and to watch the immense logs burning in
the fireplaces. The servants had the reserved and dignified bearing of
domestics in a household of consequence, and Ann had the impression of
sharing in all this opulence. When she embraced Lee in her hungry arms,
it was the entire manor that she was hugging to herself.
The brother smoked his pipe, his feet on the table, a glass of whisky at
his side, as he yawned through travel magazines.
Lee studied the fire. The fire danced in her eyes. She looked at Ann,
and it seemed to her that she had brought her bride home to her house,
the ancient house of her ancestors. Every evening, when the three of
them were seated like that in front of the rosy fireplace, Lee had the
feeling that with the arrival of Ann she had succeeded in making the
manor a homestead, and that the only thing now lacking to her was a
child, an inheritor. Then she would really have all that a man could
have. She crossed her long legs and stroked her short flat hair. If only
Ann could have a child! But that was impossible. It was the one thing
that she couldn’t give her. Every night when she made love with Ann, Lee
felt herself thwarted by this sterility, and in her mind, where all
values were disoriented, a project was slowly forming.
She reflected on each detail and carefully considered the staging of the
scene. After all, it was her child that was in question.
She spoke of the matter first to her brother.
Her brother had consumed no small quantity of whisky since that morning,
and the idea rather amused him. It would be a bit of a change, at last.
Then Lee found Ann, who was walking in the grounds dressed in a thick
seaman’s sweater and brown corduroy trousers, promenading a pair of
spaniels. Lee said to her, “Ann, my darling, you and I must have a
child.”
Ann looked at her uncomprehendingly. Then Lee explained her plan.
That night all three of them would be together, Ann, Lee, and her
brother, Richard. Ann and Lee would make love, and at the last moment
Richard would possess Ann, while Lee continued to caress her. The child
that would be born would be the child of Lee’s blood, conceived in Lee’s
love; Richard would only have lent the one element Lee did not possess,
the seed.
They walked together in the Scottish fog that enveloped the manor. Two
women without sex, two women outside of human society, profoundly
solitary, even in their love, trying somehow to attach themselves to
that life which had no way of continuing beyond them through
descendants.
In the evening, before the great fireplace with its crackling logs,
Richard watched his sister embrace Ann on the bearskin rug, and Richard
was the first and only man to possess Ann.
Two days later, Ann returned to Down Street, her leave ended.