Chapter Forty-Five
Forty-five
The Germans slept. The camp quietened. We met in the storeroom. It was inevitable, I wrote.
I made a nest of sheets and blankets, whites and greys. They were clean, but still. I knew what they had witnessed and thought I could smell it.
I removed my cap and hung my apron on the back of the storeroom door, as if my shift were over.
I unhooked the front of my dress and stepped out of it.
I eased off my shoes, released my stockings from their stays and rolled them down.
I removed my corset. I slid my chemise from one shoulder then the other and let it fall to the floor.
I stood before him with my breasts bare and my arms by my sides and he did not move away.
I loosed my petticoat and then my drawers. They fell and gathered around my feet.
I stepped towards him. There were three buttons on his doctor’s coat. I undid them, slowly, as if they were hooks on a woman’s corset, I wrote.
He stepped out of his clogs and shrugged off the coat as I peeled it over his shoulders. I should have hung it, but I let it fall. And there we stood, in a circle of discarded clothes. Did I imagine it might protect us, like a circle of stones? That it would make the moment sacred?
PG29 on the front of his jumper. The enemy, I thought.
I began to pull it up and he raised his arms, like a child, so I could lift it over his head.
His arms, pale as clotted cream, lightly muscled and golden haired.
I ran my fingers down their length and felt his goose flesh rise.
He was responsive and alive, and without the jumper he was just a man.
His undershirt was grey and worn. It had belonged to someone else before it belonged to him.
Someone smaller, and it stretched over his chest. I untucked it from his trousers and again he raised his arms. I pulled it up and it caught the curls of his fringe.
When the undershirt was removed the curls flopped forward.
I pushed them back, away from his eyes, and for a moment his eyes were cloudy and dull and I felt the shiver begin in my belly and I put my hand to his throat and felt his pulse, fast and strong.
When I looked again at his eyes they were a kaleidoscope of moving colours.
I noted the detail: burnished orange, yellow, flecks of black and segments of green.
There was brown there too but of polished wood, not dirt.
His pupils grew large to take me in and the colours flared, golden.
When it was all over, I didn’t want to forget.
The shiver subsided and I took my hand from his throat.
We stood, not touching, just looking. Breathing but saying nothing. He did not rush and it was a long time before we moved. Our breathing was uneasy, audible, out of sync. We stood until it wasn’t. We stood until we were breathing in together and out together.
Then he took my face in his hands and kissed my mouth. My cheeks in his palms, his fingers in my hair, each follicle rose beneath the pressure of his fingertips. I took the pins from my hair and let the plait fall and come loose.
There is a moment, in the liminal light before dawn, when time can stop. It is where birth dwells, and death. First breaths, and last. It is the beginning and the end.
He’d seen me before, just once. Enough for imagination, and now he was comparing me to memory. I wondered how he’d improved me and what might disappoint. But I was wrong to think like that. He was a man who had forgotten and I was familiar. He’d been lost and I was the one to find him.
And in my head it has become a scene in a play, repeated night after night with minor variations. Like all these moments it takes up more time now than it ever could have then.
My hair fell down my back and his hand stroked it then twisted it then brought it to his face.
He breathed in the scent of lavender and began to cry.
I felt his tears on my skin. I kissed his lips and tasted salt.
I found his tongue and he found mine and each was yielding.
We turned on the spot and lowered to the ground.
I put my hand on his chest and pushed him back against sheets and blankets, whites and greys.
The rest was inevitable. It was urgent and quick but I have imagined it otherwise.
I have imagined we had time to love like two people who’d loved a thousand times and knew where to touch and when, and how much to give before pulling back so the loving could go on and on.
I have imagined we had time for tenderness.
The end, though, is always the same. My cry, then his, then a sound from the ward – the men were stirring, like birds. The dawn was rousing them. If there’d been other sounds before that, we would not have heard them.
He sat up and held me, his arms firm around my back, his fingers in my flesh, his face buried in my breasts.
‘I can’t let you go,’ he whispered, over and over, and his words became hot against my skin.
I felt him twisting my hair into a rope and wrapping it around his wrist, as if it might bind us. As if I were Rapunzel and he my prince.
‘I would cut it all off if it meant we could stay like this,’ I whispered. ‘I would not be ashamed.’
Then the sound of the ward door and footsteps on the wooden boards – a woman’s heel, a short gait.
‘Iso,’ I breathed. We heard the door again and assumed she was leaving, that she’d seen or heard and was being discreet. He unwound my hair from around his hand and kissed the space between my breasts. He grew soft inside me.
And that is where I want to stay, in our nest of sheets and blankets, whites and greys. Our hour for loving stretching into a future. But Iso hadn’t left and I heard her voice, too loud for her quiet nature.
A warning. But too late.
A heavier tread, a longer gait. It stopped at the storeroom; the door was ajar.
I straightened my spine and held him tighter between my thighs and arms and I felt the strength in his hands, grasping.
His fingers sinking into the flesh of my back.
I thought I might absorb him. I think, now, that I did.
‘Find me,’ I whispered. But it is a detail I never wrote down and over the years I’ve wondered if I simply wished I’d said it.
I turned.
‘How unfortunate,’ Alison said.