Chapter 38
He was the first man Cora ever saw naked.
I’ll give him five more minutes.
She glanced at the lookout. Despite the tangle of camouflage netting she saw it was empty, the gun tilted and unmanned. Well, yes, the guards would be in the pub by now, they weren’t the most diligent and it was chilly out, still wintery, although the buds on the trees didn’t seem to realise it.
The pub, on the other hand, was warm and convivial and the guards could have a moan about women having too much of a good time of it, lording it over them with their jobs and their money and their freedom.
And our yellow faces and green hair, Cora thought bitterly, tucking her hands deep in the pockets of her coat.
She was about to give up on him and go home when she saw through the corner of her eye something pale and amorphous moving in the undergrowth a few yards away from her.
She stood perfectly still, watching. It might be a dog or a badger, it had that snuffling, scuffling look about it. She was trying not to breathe, not to frighten it, curious and happy to be distracted, hoping her presence would be lost in the night.
The pale shape grew out of the ground with quiet grunts, and then she saw it was a man streaked with dirt. And this was the astonishing thing: he was naked.
Two emotions froze her to the spot: joy and fear.
Joy, because it was Frank! And fear because he was a German, escaping; the enemy was only a few yards away from her, brought from battle into the heart of their territory, imprisoned by them behind barbed wire, caged like wild animals. And now they’d got free.
He looked lovely, mind, despite the dirt on his skin and hair. He seemed to be made of mother-of-pearl.
Well now, just a minute, she thought. Whose side am I on? She stared at him, holding her breath so he wouldn’t see it clouding in the cold night air, giving her away.
First man she’d ever seen naked, not counting Dai the Mac who was simpleminded and flashed everyone. You couldn’t take it badly, there was nothing personal about it. But here was a whole naked man, not just a small part of one.
He hadn’t seen her. He looked towards the hills and then he flung out his arms as if he wanted to take them in his arms and hug them, and her heart went out to him in his longing.
Hug me too, she thought wistfully. I could do with a hug.
He was bending over and kicking around in the grass, hunting for something, turning stones. He picked up a large, flat rock, pale muscles bulging with the effort and causing shadows on his skin, and then he caught sight of Cora.
Cora held her breath. ‘Frank, it’s me.’
He quickly held the rock against himself for the sake of modesty.
The gesture was so unexpected that Cora laughed. But she was touched by the gesture, that he had tried to spare her feelings, or her eyes. ‘Too late for that now,’ she said ruefully. Her words carried over to him in the night.
His face was featureless in the dark but she could hear the smile in his voice. ‘You waited for me,’ he said.
‘Yes. I was worried because it’s so quiet.’
‘The guards are doing an inspection.’
He was beautiful, pale as an angel. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and she didn’t want to. She felt the attraction in her stomach, like hunger.
His eyes gleamed, and he was looking at her intently as if she was something interesting he was trying to understand. He was shivering with cold, holding the rock, waiting to see what she would do.
Cora didn’t know herself. She took a deep breath. They both knew she should scream at the top of her voice to raise the alarm, obviously, yes. It was her duty to do that. But she’d also given him the cap back, knowing why it meant so much to him and how he would use it.
Just then, Ein! Zwei! Drei! the singing started up again from inside Hut 9 in a roar of sound and Frank turned to look, his face brightening as if his friends were calling him home.
Cora smiled. They loved their singing! Dew, they made a good, loud noise of it too, rousing she’d call it, the songs of people having a good time. There was something extraordinarily brave and admirable about singing in prison, in her opinion.
No use screaming now, of course. They’d never hear her.
It was only chance that she’d seen him, after all, that’s how she justified it to herself. She could have gone straight home when she saw he wasn’t there. If she’d done that she would have been none the wiser. Chance, that was all it was.
Frank looked back at her, trembling from cold and the weight of the rock.
Cora came to a decision, not the right one, but one she could live with. ‘You can’t just stand here, you’ll catch your death,’ she said to him.
He stared at her. ‘My death?’
‘I mean – go back inside.’ She scooted her hands at him. ‘Quick! Go!’
He looked confused. He dropped the large stone with a thud and kept watching her as he retreated into the hole, wriggling as he lowered himself into the tunnel.
She watched his pale shape dematerialising into the brambles. At the last moment he held himself up awkwardly by his elbows, looking at her through a fringe of black grass.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Cora.’
She saw his pale hand as he dragged the stone across the opening. Gone!
She felt woken up, quick, lively, jittery, excited, as if she’d had a narrow escape from danger – physical or moral, she wasn’t sure which.
Obviously she should report the fact of the tunnel, no question, it went without saying.
She knew where the entrance was, too, because the rock marked it.
But then she thought of the way he’d stretched out his arms to the hills and she was filled with a sense of her own power and her own freedom, something that the war had given her.
There was a difference between what she should do and what she wanted to do.
She waited in the dark as the dew froze on the grass, sparkling in the dim lights of the hut. She stood listening to the singing, and then after quite a few minutes the singing stopped and gave way to rowdy cheers.
He’s back, she thought.