Marianne lay with her hands folded behind her head, watching the blackout curtains, which they always drew back after lights-out, flapping in the night-breeze. Her bed was beside the window, but even in cold weather the draught was preferable to the liquor fumes her room-mates brought in with them.
Tonight she was grateful for the breeze. The day had been warm and stifling and the tepid shower she’d taken when she got back from Salisbury Plain had not helped her to sleep. It would take more than a shower to cool the fever in her blood and settle the kaleidoscope of thoughts jiggling like varicoloured fragments in her mind.
She could hear Birdie’s porcine snores and see her bony shoulder moving up and down with the rhythm of her breath, in a shaft of moonlight. Joyce was sound asleep, too. How she envied them their casual approach to life; the easy come, easy go attitude that left them unscarred, wnich even in wartime could never be hers.
Joyce’s arm was dangling over the side of her bed, a heavy, silver identity bracelet engraved with her latest GI’s name weighing down her hand. Marianne was the only girl in the unit who didn’t have at least one of these souvenirs d’amour, which some girls displayed like trophies, wearing their whole jangling collection triumphantly together. They stitched US Army emblems to the khaki pullovers they wore over their shirts at dances, too; Birdie’s and Joyce’s by now had so many of these patches sewn on, they looked like collages in which every piece could tell a story.
Marianne had only one emblem, which she kept in her box of treasures. The GI who gave it to her had wanted her to have his identity bracelet, also, but she had refused to accept it. How could she walk around with his name attached to her wrist, as if he owned her? She hadn’t been sure, then, if she loved him. Was she sure now? When he declared his love for her, she had told him it wasn’t possible after such a short acquaintance. Then he had taken her in his arms and kissed her and the fire that had raged in her veins had made her think perhaps it was.
She’d met him the night she went dancing with Birdie and Joyce and there had been no need for them to walk up the hill with her as they’d promised. She had been happy to let Michael drive her to her quarters in his jeep. A nice Jewish boy, she’d thought when he kissed her chastely on the cheek.
His kisses had become less chaste as time went by and they saw each other every night. But she’d wanted them to, she had to admit now, lying in the dark with her face burning with shame. And had not demurred when she felt his hands on her breasts. She allowed the deliriously sweet recollection to swamp her senses, then ruthlessly blotted it out.
She had intended writing to her parents about him, to prepare them for the possibility of their daughter being a GI bride, because he’d asked her to marry him if he survived the war. Not until today, when they were picnicking beside Stonehenge in the sunshine and he’d inquired if she wanted a church wedding, had she discovered that Americans could have surnames like Weiss, but not necessarily be Jewish.
When she told him she was, he’d said his parents wouldn’t mind and had looked offended when she said hers would. Then there’d been an uncomfortable silence and it had struck her that you didn’t have silences like that with someone you knew well.
The moonbeam had moved from Birdie’s shoulder to a picture of Frank Sinatra on the wall and she surveyed the singer’s smiling countenance absently. What had she and Michael talked about during the short time they’d known each other? Books and music. Occasionally about their families, in the superficial way you mentioned your folks to somebody who hadn’t met them. But most of their conversation had centred on the war and everything that went with it. The artificial present they shared, with only brief references to their separate pasts.
She knew Michael was a law student and intended resuming his studies when the war ended. But the student life at Columbia University he’d briefly described was no more real to her than the America she had seen on the cinema screen. Michael himself wasn’t real to her, she’d only seen a single dimension of him. The one clad temporarily in uniform whom she could now see in her imagination.
And it was the same for him, about her. She had tried to explain why she couldn’t marry a Gentile but had failed to make him see that it wasn’t only a matter of adhering to the religious laws. Her reason had begun to question these long ago, but the family aspect continued to hold her fast. And a person from a non-Jewish background couldn’t be expected to understand the powerful force that was inexplicable to Marianne herself.
If she married Michael and went to live in the States, with the Atlantic between herself and the family, would the blood-tie loose its hold on her? she pondered just before she dozed off. Maybe Mam and Dad would forgive her if they didn’t have to actually see her bringing up a family of only half-Jewish children? Then a mental image of her grandmother fingering the little gold brooch she always wore at Shabbos gatherings replaced the one of Michael and her last drowsy thought was that she couldn’t do it.
“When’s the weddin’, cock?” Birdie inquired the next morning whilst they were throwing on their uniforms to get on parade in time for roll call.
“There isn’t going to be one.”
“Well, stone a crow!” Joyce exclaimed, fumbling with her tie. “We fought it was the love match of the century.”
“Turned art ter be ’andin’ yer a snow job, did ’e?” Birdie said, rolling her cigarette from one side of her dry lips to the other. “Them Yanks is very good at shootin’ girls lines abart marryin’ ’em arter the war.”
“Hespecially them whose knickers they can’t get darn any hother way,” Joyce said coarsely.
Marianne blushed to the tip of her fringe. “It might interest you to know I’ve still got my virginity.”
“Don’t look so miserable abart it, cock,” Birdie grinned. “The war haint over yet. An’ there’s that RAF bloke waitin’ in the wings, haint there?” she added slyly.
“Which RAF bloke?”
“The one what turned up lookin’ fer yer yesterday. What yer’d never said a word ter Joycie’n me abart, yer dark lickle ’orse! Left ’er a note, didn’t ’e, Joycie?”
“We heven ’ad ter supply ’im wiv paper’n an envelope. Where did we put it, Birdie?”
“Hon the chest of drawers, I fink. Hif we ’adn’t been boozed up, we’d’ve remembered ter tell ’er abart it larst night.”
Marianne delved into the clutter on top of the chest and found one of the scented pink envelopes in which Birdie sent weekly tetters to her sailor husband. The handwriting on it was Martin’s, as she had known it would be; he was the only airman she knew. But he’d written her he was going home for Shirley’s wedding, what had he been doing here instead?
She stuffed the envelope into her tunic pocket as the whistle blew to summon them on parade and opened it afterwards, on the way to breakfast.
“What’s up, cock?” Birdie asked when she stopped in her tracks.
“Yer look as if yer’ve bin ’it over the ’ead wiv a mallet,” Joyce declared.
Marianne gave them a dazed glance. “Do I?” she muttered confusedly and went to lean on the cookhouse wall with the sheet of notepaper clutched in her hand.
The message was quite clear, but she could not take it in. Her relationship with Martin had always been solid ground, without the shifting sands she had recently learned could exist between a man and a woman; the mood had sometimes changed – they were temperamental people – but never the essence, the comfortable friendship they had shared all their lives. But now it was over. There could be no going back to it after what Martin had written.
Birdie and Joyce were hovering impatiently beside her, watching the rest of the platoon crowd noisily into the cookhouse.
“Hif we don’t get a move on, there’ll be no bleedin’ bangers left!” Birdie exclaimed, prodding her in the ribs.
Marianne folded the sheet of paper and replaced it in the envelope, but the words inscribed upon it were imprinted on her still stunned mind.
When shall we twain
Join hands again
No more to part?
Thou hast my heart.