It was ironic that when we went in together in this mood, Dave and his friend were agreeing that none of us should sleep alone.
Nobody slept alone any more — literally nobody. Parats could always muster fifty or a hundred if some incautious person went to sleep alone, anywhere, at any time. And Dave’s wife hadn’t been the only person who’d been eaten alive by parats. Not by several hundred thousand.
Nobody gave them the chance any more. If some friendless person couldn’t arrange suitable sleeping accommodation and partners, he or she joined the tube crowd — the hundreds of thousands who, following wartime example, slept each night in the subway, which the Londoners refused to call the subway, but always the underground or the tube.
Liverage wasn’t married. He normally slept underground or in his garage, the one place which was safe, but since we were there he welcomed the chance to sleep for once in his own home. It would be better if all four of us slept in the same room, but two each in adjoining rooms would be reasonably safe.
The alternative that faced Ginette was accepting this arrangement or going to Wood Green tube station. Rather surprisingly, she chose to room with me.
It wasn’t so surprising when the change that was coming over ordinary human relations was taken into consideration. Freud’s psychology is based on the idea that sex is the most important human motivation, and in a safe, easy, leisured environment, it often looks even on the surface as if this is so, without having to dig deep into the mysteries of ego, id, and super-ego. Most of the conversation has a sexual undercurrent, and if a girl happens to lose her halter while swimming, that’s the event of the day, and will be referred to with interest and delight for the next five years: Remember that time when Peggy lost her …
But when things get really tough, sex can become so secondary that you wouldn’t cross the road for it. That doesn’t go for everybody, of course; some people would literally die for love. But Hollywood, dime novelettes, and Tin Pan Alley to the contrary, it isn’t praiseworthy to put sensuality before everything else. If a man, or a woman either, does crazy things for love, he or she is crazy, that’s all.
Ginette and I slept together in the same bed, and there were no arguments. We didn’t make peace, nor did we preserve a stony silence. The quarrel earlier wasn’t cancelled, it was suspended. If we were to part early the next day, it could stay suspended forever. We didn’t have to resolve it, or finish it. It could stay as it was, truce, not armistice. We didn’t touch or avoid touching each other unnecessarily. And when we were undressing, we made no ludicrous attempts at modesty. Ginette was inclined to do so at first, but when she saw I was neither staring at her nor falling over backward not to see her, she did as I was doing, which was undressing as if I didn’t give a damn who saw me.
All the same, I noticed that though slight, she wasn’t skinny. I had already seen that she had a bust, if not an overemphatic one. Now I saw, too, that though she’d never be a Gloria, she had a figure that even a dancer needn’t be ashamed of. Ginette was, I thought — I don’t know why I thought so, I just got that impression. She dressed to make the best of herself but honestly thought little of the result. She wasn’t self-conscious, however, which was one of the things which would have made her a good model. Every smart woman must be proud, tasteful, and imaginative in her dress, yet unself-conscious. Ginette was all three.
I thought of suggesting that she let me take off the bandage, clean the wound, and replace the dressing. I didn’t because I saw no hope of her taking that the way it was intended. In the same way, I couldn’t make up the quarrel, not now. Ginette would spurn any such attempt in disgust, certain I merely wanted to seduce her.
The scratches on her shoulder were left open, owing to the difficulty in bandaging them. They didn’t look as if they’d cause her any further trouble, anyway. At the same time I felt a twinge of conscience, realizing for the first time that if I was going to slap Ginette at all, the time to do it was certainly not after she had been seasick and suffered injuries in an attack by a padog.
I had no time to think further about Ginette, for as soon as I was in bed, long before I’d given myself permission to sleep, I was away. If Ginette said good night, which was unlikely anyway, I didn’t hear her.
It didn’t occur to me until later that however sincere Ginette was in her desire to keep her virtue, she couldn’t be feminine at all if she wasn’t piqued a little by such apparent indifference.
I wasn’t conscious of going to sleep, but I was conscious of being wakened, abruptly and violently, in the middle of the night.
Ginette and I sat up together: someone had shouted. We jumped out of bed and rushed through to the other room.
Dave was on his feet, in his shirt, blood streaming from his neck. He was all right, however — the unaccustomed violence of his movements and of the expression of his feelings showed that. His friend was still in bed, looking like a startled rabbit.
“No sign of the parat, I suppose?” I asked, cutting into Dave’s imprecations.
He calmed down. “I saw it dash for home,” he said. “Over there. How did you know there was only one?”
We found the hole and plugged it, not that any of us expected that to do any good. We were all shivering, and I’d have been glad to get straight back to bed, but the others were too disturbed by the incident for that. “Nearly got me that time,” Dave murmured feelingly, peering at the injury in a hand mirror, just able to make it out by the moonlight streaming into the bedroom.
I lit the oil lamp — electric light was almost a thing of the past. Dave was bigger and bonier than ever in his shirt, Ginette in her slip looking almost plump by comparison. Our host stayed in bed, possibly for modesty, certainly very sensibly, for it was the warmest place to be.
“I’ve never known parats to do that, have you?” asked Dave, still clearly shaken. Ginette shook her head.
“I have,” I said.
“Can they — ” Ginette began, swallowed, and asked firmly, “Can they kill you? Before you even wake up?”
I nodded. All the other three began to speak at once, startled. British and French paggets hadn’t generally got this far, apparently. The American parats had been doing it before I left.
“But everything has to be right for them,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this — I thought you all knew. A single parat can sever the jugular, only it must know exactly where to go, and parats aren’t surgeons. Your one was quite a bit off, Dave,” I concluded reassuringly.
I still wanted to go back to bed, but the others wouldn’t let me. They wanted to hear all I could tell them about this development, especially any reassurance I could give. It shakes you to learn that you can be killed in your sleep by a single parat before you can wake up, when you know that there are always bound to be parats around, every time you sleep.
“We’re lucky that parats can’t hand on instruction the way human beings can,” I said, moving about to try to keep warm. “One of them learns this, after a lifetime of experience. Then it dies, and it may be a long time before another parat finds exactly where, how, and when to strike. They’ve got to be standing firmly, your head has to be in just the right position, and the first time they touch you they have to cut the vein. Otherwise they wake you, and you’re quite likely to catch them in your natural, instinctive clawing at your throat. Paggets like to kill people, but they don’t try it if the risks are too heavy and the chances of success too slight.”
“That one tried it,” said Dave grimly.
“That’s all — it tried it.” I didn’t add, since they were all so jittery already, that eventually, if it lived long enough and tried often enough, that particular parat would at length discover what it was looking for and would be able to kill without assistance, at one blow.
Ginette shuddered, and the cold wasn’t the principal reason. “It’s bad enough knowing a hundred of them can kill you,” she murmured, “without being told that one parat can do it, if things are right for it.”
“Look — I knew about it, and I wasn’t unduly worried,” I said. “We know any padog can tear your throat out, if it can get at you while you’re asleep. But parats manage it so seldom you could be wakened like that a hundred times, Dave, before anything serious happened.”
“Can’t we fit up some protection — a wire collar or thick adhesive tape?” Liverage inquired anxiously.
“You could,” I said. “But not tonight. I’m going back to bed.”
My comparative unconcern had its effect. Dave, too, went back to bed, though convinced that he wouldn’t sleep, and Ginette followed me back to the other room. I wasted no time about getting back into the warm bed, but she wandered about uneasily. I watched her rather sardonically.
“Is that what you meant when you said the paggets would learn?” she asked abruptly.
“That and other things.”
She shuddered again. “I hope there aren’t many other things like that,” she said feelingly.
“So do I. But hoping doesn’t do much good. Come to bed, darling.”
She started violently and looked at me doubtfully. “If you’re going to start that — ” she began.
“All right, walk about some more,” I said. “Even in this light I can see you pretty well, and you’re quite passable. Only I haven’t seen your legs yet. I hope they’re up to standard?”
“Don,” she said, half appealingly, half angrily, “please don’t be like that.”
I grinned. “Come to bed, Ginette,” I said softly.
“No!”
“All right, stay up all night.” I turned on my side and shut my eyes.
Presently she got into bed, as far from me as possible.
“Don,” she whispered, after a few minutes. “About the parats …”
“Yes?” I murmured, not moving. “What about the parats?”
“Shouldn’t we sleep … facing each other? They’re less likely to be able to — ”
“It’s better,” I agreed. I didn’t tease her any more. I merely said, unexceptionally: “I don’t think a rat could get onto this pillow without rousing us.”
So we lay facing each other, a decent distance apart. I was rather amused by the fact that Ginette now clearly wasn’t nearly so sure that she could do without me, and half wished that we were on better terms so that she could discuss the matter further.
But I had shut my eyes, and she had to be content with that.
Just before I slept I reflected half ironically, half uneasily, that it would serve me right if, after the disdain with which I had treated this kind of pagget danger, I should be found dead in the morning with my throat torn out.
Not unnaturally, I had bad dreams.