CHAPTER TWO THE END AND THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER
TWO
The End and the Beginning
Roscoe wasted no time. He caught a train to Wales and hitchhiked, then walked to Megan’s, arriving just after ten o’clock at night, far too late to knock on someone’s door, but he did it anyways.
‘I’m sorry to come so late, sir,’ he said to Megan’s father, who opened the door. ‘I just got back from France. Today. I ship out again the day after tomorrow. To the Pacific. And I didn’t want to leave without … I just wanted to …’
‘Roscoe?’ Megan called from the top of the narrow flight of stairs. She raced down and flew into his embrace.
‘I had to see you,’ he said.
She pulled his face to hers and pressed her forehead to his as her parents looked on.
‘Let the young people have a minute to themselves,’ her mother said.
‘Alone? But—’
‘They’re engaged, Colin.’
Roscoe looked down shamefaced.
‘And he’s going back to the war. Let them have a little time to themselves.’ She hugged Roscoe and kissed him lightly on his cheek. ‘We’re so glad you’re back. Even for a day.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
She smiled at him. ‘Always so respectful.’ She kissed her daughter, then took her husband’s hand and tugged him out of the room.
As soon as they left, he pressed his lips to hers and drank her in. She ran a hand over his face, his neck, his chest. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’
‘I couldn’t stay away.’
They made up a bed for him on the sofa, his feet dangling over the end, but sometime in the night, Megan came to sneak him out to the shed. She moved hoes and rakes and laid blankets on the ground. Then she undressed in front of him, shivering in the cold air.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, although his body was already responding and he moved to her, running his hands along her soft, smooth skin, dipping his head for a kiss.
‘Tell me you love me,’ she said against his mouth.
‘I do. I love you like crazy.’
‘What else?’ She pulled his shirt off and pressed herself against him.
‘You’re so beautiful.’ He kissed her shoulders, her collarbone, her chest. ‘You have no idea how beautiful you are.’
‘What else?’ She pushed against him, and he moaned.
He eased her to the blanket on the ground. ‘I don’t want to get on that boat.’ He pulled off his drawers and fitted himself to her. ‘If I could quit the army and stay here with you, I’d do it in a heartbeat.’
‘Roscoe,’ she cried, as he pushed into her.
‘I love you, baby. I love you.’
It was all true. He hoped it was enough.
They spent the next day clinging to each other like drowning people, and when he left, he gave her five months of his army pay and promises he didn’t know how to keep.
The crossing was quiet, but Roscoe became more out of sorts with every mile he put between himself and Wales. In two weeks, they landed in New York, and instead of feeling glad to be back on American soil, Roscoe felt sick.
While the others took leave in the Big Apple, he stayed behind and wrote letters to Pontypool.
He told Megan he missed her more than he’d thought possible, and that he thought of her every day and night.
He told her he’d like nothing better than to board the next ship bound for Britain and come back to her, that the days he’d spent with her were the happiest of his life. All true. Just not the whole truth.
He didn’t write to Cora. He didn’t know what to say.
Two days after Christmas, Roscoe arrived in Camp Stewart, Georgia. There his training included lessons on jungle living and tropical diseases, and he was reintroduced to the degradation of living in the American south. He hated every minute of it.
He should have tried to see Cora while he was stationed in Georgia, or at least let her know he was close by, but he couldn’t bear to think of her when missing Megan hollowed him out.
Eventually, they deployed to Hawaii, stepping onto the island of Oahu on 6 May. The next day Germany surrendered, but Japan fought on.
If you ignored the sunken tankers poking half submerged out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was a paradise, with white-sand beaches and palm trees, dolphins and seals.
Roscoe waited on Oahu for his deployment until, one fine summer’s day in early August, America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and then, three days later, dropped another on Nagasaki.
The destruction was beyond horrific. Japan surrendered and the army returned Roscoe to a place he no longer considered home.
On the journey back, he could feel himself tensing. He took a segregated train to a segregated bus that dropped him off at Mangrove Bay, his gut knotting into an ever tighter fist.
He’d given up his room at the boarding house when he joined the army, so he went to the place his paperwork said he belonged.
He walked in an unhurried plod, trying to force Megan out of his mind.
Before the war, he’d believed the crush he felt for Cora would do for a marriage.
Now he knew better, and the fact that he felt like a cheater by going to see his legal wife was no one’s fault but his own.
He told himself it was just as well that he couldn’t afford a ticket back to Wales. In wartime, people threw caution to the wind and lived in the moment, but now that the war was over, Megan would find a respectable Welsh man, back from the front, and forget all about Roscoe.
Megan was a dream, but Cora was right here. He had to at least try to do right by her.
Roscoe stood for a solid minute in front of Cora’s door, taking long, steadying breaths before he knocked. She opened it and gaped at him in a kind of disbelieving shock. She did not fling her arms around his neck or bury her face in his chest.
‘Evening, Cora,’ he said.
‘Roscoe.’ She reached for him, held his shoulders and kissed his cheek, like Megan’s mother had done, and led him into the house.
Lee poked his head out from the kitchen where something sizzled in a pan. He wore an apron matching Cora’s. He looked completely at home.
Lee pulled Roscoe into a bear-hug. ‘Welcome back,’ he said, thwacking him on his back. ‘Good to see you safe.’
Roscoe should have felt happy, not empty. He looked at Cora, willing himself to want her the way he used to.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Cora said clutching herself around her stomach. ‘None of your letters have been getting through for more than a year now, and there’s been no news from the army either. We thought you might be injured. Are you all right?’
Roscoe’s skin felt too tight. ‘I’m fine. It just got to be a lot over there.’
She nodded, as if she could possibly understand what he meant, and patted his back. ‘Well, you’re home safe now.’
‘I want to hear everything,’ Lee said, taking a seat on the sofa. Then he perked his head up. ‘Oh, hell.’ He hopped up and dashed to the kitchen. Roscoe heard pans shifting from the stove.
Cora followed Lee, leaving Roscoe standing alone in the living room.
‘Just add some of the sauce and mix it like this,’ she was telling Lee.
‘What about this one?’ he asked.
‘You put that in at the end.’
There was a familiarity to the way they spoke to each other that put Roscoe on edge and made him remember how comfortable he’d once been in this house.
Now he didn’t belong but had nowhere else to go.
When he walked into the kitchen, they stood close to each other, peering into three pots on the stove, with a bowl of chopped herbs to the side.
Lee looked up and noticed Roscoe standing at an awkward distance. ‘I should probably go,’ he said. ‘Leave you two to catch up.’
‘No, of course not,’ Cora said. ‘We all need to catch up, and you made the dinner, Lee.’
Lee chuckled. ‘That’s giving me way too much credit. I just followed orders.’
‘You’re the one she meant to be feeding tonight,’ Roscoe said. ‘I’m the unexpected guest.’
‘A little more than a guest, I hear,’ Lee said. ‘It all happened so fast after I left, I wasn’t around to congratulate you.’ He stepped up to Roscoe and stuck out his hand. ‘You’re a lucky man.’
Roscoe thought he registered a hard-edged stiffness under Lee’s ease, and when his friend glanced back at Cora, he thought he read desire in his eyes. ‘When did you get back?’ he asked.
‘End of May,’ Lee said, sticking his nose back in the pot.
A man could catch feelings in four months.
It had taken him far less time with Megan, but Lee would never make a play for a friend’s wife.
Just because Roscoe had stumbled, it didn’t mean everybody else had.
Being here with Cora felt all kinds of confusing, making him invent looks and crushes where there were only friendships and goodwill.
Feeling wrong-footed translated into a surly gruffness he carried throughout the meal.
He wished Benny was home to help him get things back on track.
Momma North came in as they were finishing up eating and let out a shriek of excitement to see him sitting there. She wrapped her short arms around him with a ‘Praise Jesus,’ and had him turn around for her with a ‘Let me look at you.’
She wanted him to tell her about being over there, so he repeated the same safe stories he’d just told Cora and Lee.
‘I better get going,’ Lee said, as Roscoe started in again on a story about a confusion between cookies and biscuits.
He reached over to Roscoe, and they performed their old elaborate buddy handshake as naturally as if they’d done it yesterday.
It seemed strange to Roscoe that they could fall back so easily into their life from before, as if nothing had changed when everything had.
When he left, Cora excused herself to go make up the bed. The comment sat heavily in the room. They had never talked about their expectations for this marriage. They’d just rushed blindly into everything, figuring they’d work the rest out later. Now it was later, and nothing was clear.
He stumbled through his biscuit story, and when she came back, she told him it was all set.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said, ‘I’ve made up Benny’s bed for you. You must be worn out.’
He went into the bedroom and, sure enough, she’d put fresh sheets on Benny’s bed as well as on her own, and she’d hung a fresh curtain between them down the middle of the room.