Alistair put down the letter and went over to the paraffin stove. His boots steamed. He turned them to let the heel sides dry, and pulled out the tongues. He eyed the boots critically. It would be important to take them off the stove before they were absolutely crisp, or else the leather would ossify. Then he would get blisters on the next march—and the company didn’t slow for blisters. You marched until they burst, and then until the flesh rubbed raw. Blisters were the true reason the men hated the enemy. The invasion of Poland was terrible, of course, but at least it was an event that had taken place on the outside of everyone’s boots.
He returned to his cot and tried to make sense of the letter. He hadn’t slept since reaching the barracks at seven that morning and collapsing at the gate. The high whining sound was still in his ears. He read the first paragraph again. Dimly he understood that his friend, Tom, was writing to him from the point of view of their stuffed cat. Caesar he could call to mind easily, fluid and feline as he stalked the old garret. He found it harder to recall Tom’s face, and when he did so, it was confounded with elements of Duggan’s. The man had been so pale, prone on the red grass in the red bloom of the sunrise. His lips had seemed dark as cocoa, although of course they must have been blue. The red light had been blind to the color. The dark lips had moved for a while—Duggan had said something—but Alistair’s ears were blown. The lips, excused from their color, had formed words relieved of their sound.
He noticed his hands holding the thin blue paper of the letter. Despite the shower he had taken, there was a black residue under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. He had tried to hold Duggan’s head up—he remembered it now. As if we hadn’t all to drown.
Last night Tom took Mary to see a show at the Hammersmith. I wasn’t invited, I must disgustedly observe, but from what ensued upon their return I must conclude that the evening went well. Ah, Alistair, I always said that you were astute, for a human! You noticed straight away, of course, that I wrote “upon their return,” and yes, it is quite true. Abandoning propriety, Tom invited Mary to inspect the old garret, and inspect it she did! You should have seen the scorn with which she surveyed the living arrangements—I am quite sure that she was one of your regimental sergeant majors in a past life. And then, before Tom walked her home, the two of them danced to the gramophone and—oh, I tell you what, I can’t be bothered to be the cat anymore. Mary’s a knockout, Alistair, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, and I’m grateful to you for making me go through with that first dinner.
The residue on his fingers troubled him now. He put the letter down and ran hot water into a washbasin in the row at the end of the dormitory. He dipped his hands and let them soak. The blood dissolved from his fingers. It leached in tiny red clouds, escaping from each fold of skin and diffusing until the water in the white basin turned a pale orange. He dried his hands on his vest.
The thing is, Alistair, I am keener on her than she is on me. I know she wants me to give her a job, and I fear that as soon as she realizes I have no job to give her then she will be off. And then there is the issue of her social standing—
Alistair closed his eyes, thinking of their gramophone—the Columbia portable with its shabby leatherette case. When one opened it up, there was unannounced wonder: the burnished Plano-Reflecto tone arm, the plush red platter that the discs spun upon, glossy debs on a velveteen settee. It was perfectly built for peacetime: the balance of the tone arm assuming a stable foundation, the calm government of its rotation implying an excess of time.
—since she is of an entirely different social class, and I cannot help but think that her interest in me might have more to do with what her family will think than with what she feels. But perhaps I am underestimating her. Perhaps you are thinking that I simply ought to take my courage in both hands and—
Alistair let the letter fall. He wondered what they had danced to. Al Bowlly was the thing that season. “Hold My Hand,” if Tom had dared. Lying on his cot, Alistair heard the music quite clearly in his mind. Hold my hand No matter what the weather Just you hold my hand / We’ll walk through life together . . . He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.
The company stood around Alistair’s cot now. No one spoke. One man brought a blanket and laid it over him. Another took Alistair’s boots from the paraffin heater before they desiccated, and rubbed black polish into them and buffed them up and aligned them carefully on his locker. There was always an inspection at dawn.
March, 1940