Every afternoon we had tea in the canteen at GHQ. The girls would make
bets on whether or not Ginette would arrive before the half hour was
over. For Ginette had a lover whom she met every day during the
afternoon recess. She would rush off in a taxi to her rendezvous, and
she was quite proud of being able to make love and get back by the end
of tea. She always managed to arrive in time, a little out of breath,
and the bets would be paid while the girls demanded news of the “teatime
boy.” Mickey found the adventure with the teatime boy absolutely
riotous, and laughed over it every day.
Ann also usually arrived late for tea, but only because she was highly
interested in her work, and her major often took advantage of this to
keep her busy well into the recess. Ann had waited in vain for Lee’s
baby; the child had not been conceived. This had been a bitter
disappointment for Lee, and had seemed to affect their relationship.
Moreover, Petit had arranged a surprise for Ann on her return from
Scotland. Petit had managed to get her promoted to master sergeant, and
even to get her onto a list of candidates for officer training. Once
more Ann and Petit were to be seen leaving the barracks together.
Overnight Petit had recovered all of her good humor. She bought rounds
of drinks, inviting all the girls, calling out in her deep voice,
“Another Dubonnet, Renée, and make it snappy!”
To Claude, Ann had confided that after the war she would probably go and
live with Petit and help her with her farm. Claude was still seeing Max,
and running around with a variety of officers and women, often taking
Mickey along.
Sometimes I thought it was her job that made Mickey more avid than the
rest of us for distraction. Mickey typed coded telegrams. For three
years, from nine o’clock in the morning until six in the evening, and
sometimes much later, Mickey typed all the secrets of the war, with
prodigious speed, and without having the slightest idea what she was
typing. Only someone like Mickey could have accomplished this task
without losing her mind. She had arrived at the point where she could
type automatically, without error, all the while chattering with people
who passed through the office. The typewriter rattled under her long,
strong, agile fingers. She had a well-formed hand, a college girl’s hand
with flat, clear fingernails, masculine in its length. Mickey laughed,
gossiped, called her chief “Uncle Henry,” and never stopped typing.
What was extraordinary in her was that nothing touched her, neither her
love affairs, from which she never asked the absolute, nor her
mechanical labors, which would have driven anyone else crazy, nor the
barracks with its intrigues, nor even the fact that the reality of the
war had never corresponded to the ideal of the early days that she, like
all of us, had felt: to volunteer, to save France, to give all, to
sacrifice, to find comradeship. This had become tarnished like all one’s
ideals, but Mickey had not suffered from the change. She was a realist.
That was life—one had to be satisfied with a dead ideal as with an easy
love or with a meaningless job. She was, in fact, happy so. She had had
fun with Claude, and their parties of three had been amusing, and it was
amusing to have new experiences. And after all, it was necessary to type
the coded telegrams, numbers following numbers in endless succession; it
was an important job.
Sometimes she had her regrets. She would attach herself to a handsome
man who made love “like a god,” who bought her silk stockings and
perfume, and then he would leave her for another woman, or he would go
off on some mission and never write to her. Mickey would weep over her
typewriter, her beautiful blue eyes, too blue, all drowned in tears. Her
fingers continued to type the numerals, her tears fell on the keys, and
then Uncle Henry had to take her to lunch at Prunier’s for consolation,
and this indeed consoled her. She would come back laughing, her little
snub nose wrinkled, and she would continue to rattle off the mysterious
numbers over which the high commanders pondered in their most secret
headquarters. Then she would go out with another young man and go to bed
with him because he was handsome and she would discover that he “made
love like a god,” he too, for life would have been too sad if one
couldn’t shut one’s eyes so as not to see it.
Everybody loved Mickey. Everybody forgave her for being easy and a bit
of a liar; everybody forgave her her facile success. Her lovers retained
the best memories of Mickey, even though her accessibility in the end
proved tiresome. There were so many easy young girls in London during
the war. For a while it was relaxing, and then it became monotonous.
Even Mickey finally came obscurely to sense these things. In the bottom
of her heart she would have liked to find the strength to become a woman
difficult to obtain, one of those women for whom men made an effort. She
would have liked to inspire a great love such as one read about, and
sometimes for days at a time she tried to stop flirting, to maintain a
dignified air, but it never worked. The truth was that what she wanted
most of all was to be like Claude. She laughed with gusto, drank a lot,
let herself be kissed in taxis, and then it was too late to hold back;
the way from taxi to hotel was too short. Once more she would find
herself in the arms of a lad who told her that she had a lovely body,
and Mickey would think, What good would this lovely body be to me if I
didn’t use it?
She admired Claude and Claude’s success. Claude went to bed with
colonels and generals, and with all the women of London. At the barracks
there had been Ursula, and Mickey herself, and Renée, and Arlette, and
Lucienne, and any number of others. It was amusing to think about. And
when Claude went out, when Claude appeared in the clubs and restaurants,
everybody looked at her, people whispered when she passed, and men had a
special way of looking at her. Mickey wanted men to look at her that
way. And so her good resolutions vanished. She said to herself, Later
on, after I’m married....
Uncle Henry put her on the promotion list for sergeant. After all, she
had done quite a job for three years, a job that no one else wanted. But
for some obscure reason the Captain refused her promotion. The reasons
for approving or disapproving promotions were generally obscure in Down
Street. Obscure as the war itself.
Nevertheless, in her own way, Mickey had made progress. She had lost her
awkward and disarticulated look, her boyish movements and pimples. She
had learned how to make up, how to do her hair, and how to look well
dressed even in a uniform. She flirted a good deal less. During her
career as a virgin and _demi-vierge_, Mickey had found it impossible to
remain more than a moment in the presence of a male without beginning to
exert herself, flirting with her eyes, her mouth, her smile. This had
seemed to her indispensable to every masculine encounter. Now she was
much more sure of herself, and put herself out less for the boys.
One evening she went dancing with a young Norwegian paratrooper, and the
same night, coming home with him, she suddenly got engaged. She came
into the barracks and announced it as casually as she would have
announced that she had gone to bed with another date. And three weeks
later she was married. We were all astonished, and Mickey more than any
of us. She had got married almost on impulse, to a boy she scarcely
knew, the only one of her acquaintances with whom she had neither
flirted nor made love. And the amazing thing was that the boy, who
resembled her physically like a brother, could not have been better
suited to Mickey if they had known each other for years.
They found a little apartment in town, and Mickey would go home from
work at GHQ to prepare their dinner, like any young newlywed. Peter was
in London between assignments, and spent most of his time in the little
apartment; all day long the radio blared. Every evening Peter’s friends
came to talk about Norway and the war. Mickey had so much fun with her
young husband, who shared her love of laughter, that she ended by
falling in love with him. It was an odd young household, for they had
the air of two young wolves, avid for life, carefree.
Ursula went often to their flat, and Mickey tried to marry her off to
one of Peter’s friends. But Ursula was too silent, too calm, and she
still had too much the air of a little girl, with her straight hair and
her short fingernails. Peter’s friends scarcely knew what to say to her,
and, uncomfortable at their attempts at conversation, Ursula would bury
herself in a book or magazine.
I went to Mickey’s sometimes with Ursula, and once we talked about her
meager experiences with men. Although a long time had passed, it was
strange how strongly she recalled the soldier Michel. There had been a
strange calm, a kind of serenity coming from him, and yet she had fled
at the first physical contact. Philippe had not frightened her in that
way. From Philippe she had felt a force of life and a healthy
equilibrium that had been necessary for her, but in Michel there was
something else, something that Ursula had not known how to accept. It
was as though Philippe had given her all that he could, while with
Michel there had been an incomplete communication.
Philippe was a man, a man of flesh, normal in the measure of men. Michel
was made of another substance, more fragile, more mysterious, and also
closer to Ursula. She talked of the black eyes of Michel, and how sad
and yet childlike they had looked. If she had been so afraid of him, it
was perhaps because she understood Michel too well. With Michel it would
have been all or nothing, and “all” with Michel was infinity. Michel’s
kiss, which she had refused, had contained all that infinity she had
wanted to escape. It was the whole of Michel she had fled; the kiss had
only been the pretext that she had unconsciously needed. But why? Why?
She was still perplexed over this. I couldn’t help her; my own
experience was even more limited than hers. For though I had known more
men than Ursula, I was still nothing but a date girl, a good dance
partner, a pleasant companion for an evening, but essentially, I
suppose, disappointing to men in wartime London. As for Ursula and
Michel, I felt somehow that she would see him again, because something
of her contact with him was still growing in her.