He and Sanette went away to the coast, to a tiny fishing hamlet south-west of Calais, where a cousin of hers had a small house.
It was November, hardly the ideal time for a seaside holiday in northern Europe, but Colin couldn’t have cared less about that. As it happened, the weather was unseasonably fine and warm.
Despite having been moved to another part of the line, he had still managed to see Sanette several times since their first meeting. Language was still a problem, but each had learnt a few words and they were determined they’d get by somehow.
‘When we have no words we shall have to use our hands,’ she told him.
Using their hands sounded pretty good to Colin; on that basis he wouldn’t have cared if they’d had no words at all.
The house was nice, with a proper kitchen and even, wonder of wonders, a bathroom. The cousin wasn’t there; Sanette had fixed up with her to go away herself, so they had the place to themselves.
Orders said he had to wear his uniform at all times but he wasn’t planning on doing anything as stupid as that; as soon as they were indoors, he went upstairs to change into the civilian clothes he had bought when they had got off the train at Calais. After his army gear, the new clothes were so light it felt as though he were wearing nothing at all. He pulled his tie straight in the mirror, winked at his reflection and went to look for Sanette.
The orderly had managed to wangle Colin a couple of weeks. They knew that when they went back the future would be as uncertain as it had always been, but for the moment they were not going to think about anything like that. They would make the most of what they had and be thankful.
They walked along the harbour wall past groups of blue-jerseyed fishermen working on long fishing lines with hooks on traces at one-yard intervals. An older man passed them, his wooden clogs clacking on the cobbles. They smiled at him and turned to look at the fishing boats in the harbour. The tide was out and the decks of the vessels were far below them. Most of the boats had their holds open; the air was full of the strong smell of weed and salt and fish. All the boats had their sails furled tightly around their single masts and were snubbing their fenders against the jetty wall in the chop that came in through the harbour entrance. The breeze blew Sanette’s thin dress against her body so that Colin could see the outline of her breasts through the cloth. Suddenly she turned to him and stood motionless, head cocked, hand resting on his arm.
‘Ecoute … Listen …’
He listened, obediently, but could hear only the breakers and the wind. ‘Can’t hear a thing.’
‘That is it,’ she explained, stumbling awkwardly over the words. ‘That what I listen to. No guns.’
It was true; there were no guns, no screams inside or outside his head; there was only Sanette, the warmth of her waist within the crook of his arm as they strolled along the harbour wall, the rumble of the breakers dashing themselves against the shore.
That was all, he told himself. That was everything.
They walked back in a spitting of rain, not enough to worry about or get them soaked, but enough to give them an excuse to stop at a bar where Sanette said she had been in the summer before the war, with her cousin.
‘Before the war you’d have been too young for bars.’
‘I was sixteen.’
Which meant that she must be eighteen now, or perhaps even nineteen.
‘Much too young,’ he said.
She laughed, cheeks bright and spotted with raindrops, and slanted her eyes at him. ‘Too young for bars, or for …?’
‘Too young for bars,’ he told her firmly. ‘Much too young for anything else.’
‘I am older now.’
Which was just as well.
They went into the building and down a flight of stone steps into a whitewashed cellar. There were a couple of fishermen deep in conversation at the far end of the counter, another sitting at a little table with a half-full glass in front of him.
He asked what she wanted to drink.
‘Wine. But let me order. It will be easier.’
He found a table and waited until she came with a small glass of red wine in each hand.
‘It is not very good,’ she told him, ‘but it’s all he’s got. He says it is because of the war.’
As though neither of them had heard of the war before.
They drank; as the barman had warned them, the wine was rough and tasted of tar. It was strong, though, which was the main thing, and after they’d finished they each had another one, not caring in the least about the taste. They began to look at each other across the table. They gulped the wine and got up and half walked, half ran back to the little house and went upstairs and stripped off their clothes and made love in the whitewashed bedroom. The wind blew the sound of the surf through the open window so that, when they shut their eyes, it seemed as though they were making love in the middle of the ocean.
There were no guns, no death or war, and they went to sleep in each other’s arms, at peace together.
Darkness lingered at this time of the year but the sun woke them eventually and, in the flush of early light, they made love again. Afterwards Sanette went to the bathroom. She came back and crossed the room to the bed. She was smiling at him but Colin was looking at something he hadn’t noticed before.
‘Hang on a sec …’
‘It’s cold,’ she protested, wrapping her arms about her body.
Colin took no notice. ‘Let me look at you.’
Slowly she drew her arms back. She lifted her chin and stared defiantly at him while blood stained her cheeks.
‘What’s going on?’ Colin demanded.
In reply she got back into bed and cuddled him close and he felt her skin cold from the early morning air.
‘What’s going on?’ he said again, more quietly.
She looked up at him. ‘I am having your baby,’ she said.
His mind was leaping and surging, trying to come to terms with this new thing. A baby …
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was frightened.’
Her voice was low; she had turned her face away from him so that he was unable to see her eyes.
‘Why on earth should you be frightened?’
Light was surging in his inner consciousness, most gloriously. Light and life …
‘I thought you might be angry.’
He saw that she really had been frightened of how he might take the news. In response he seized her, holding her close, hugging her in his determination to drive away her fear and doubt. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing ever happened to me!’
‘As you are to me.’
It was the truth; she had known it that first night.
When Jeannine had told her that the two soldiers were coming to see them she had thought she would die of embarrassment. Of more than embarrassment. She was ashamed: everyone knew what soldiers wanted. Yet when the two men had come in out of the darkness, so young in their huge boots, she had felt quite different.
Several times during the days that followed she had wondered why she had allowed things to go as far as they had.
She had liked Colin, certainly, had known that in the first minute, but in the old days that would never have been enough to permit what had happened.
It was the war, she thought. The war had changed everything. People of their age were not supposed to think about death but, with battles raging all around them, they had no choice. She, like everyone she knew, wanted to live life to the full while she could, because tomorrow might be too late.
There was another reason, too. To make love was to defy a world where violence, destruction and death had become the only realities. Holding Colin in her arms, she had held truth and beauty. He — they — had become the demonstration of her belief in a world without fear.
She still believed in it, thanking God each day that out of cataclysm had come love.
The news of the baby could have driven them apart, as Sanette had feared. It did not; it brought them closer than anything else could have done.
At first Colin was overprotective.
‘You sure it’s all right for us to go on doing this?’
She laughed at him. ‘Of course it is!’
Just as well; their shared joy made them both as randy as hell.
At first the days stretched before them in a golden eternity. Every day, hour, minute was theirs to do with as they chose.
While the weather stayed fine they slept each night with the red and blue curtains drawn back so that the breeze could blow upon them. The air was chilly but there was a huge white quilt so that they were never cold but lay, and woke, in the deep and cosy bed with their bodies warmly entwined and their faces fresh and bright with the clean and cold and salty sea air. Each morning the whitewashed bedroom welcomed them back. They lay for a time without moving, the light reflecting from the undulant surface of the harbour and shining in ripples across the ceiling.
They made love every morning and, after they had done so, their bodies slack with spent desire, Colin got up and padded on bare feet across the linoed floor to the galley-style kitchen where he stoked the wood-burning stove and sang and clattered crockery. Through the window, he observed the comings and goings in the cobbled street below and listened to the clack of clogs and voices with whose intonation he was already growing familiar.
While he worked he thought of Sanette and himself, the baby, the future. The war he never allowed himself to think about at all.
Sanette’s cousin had left them some of her precious store of coffee and he made it in a tall, blue enamel pot, filling the steaming bowls and bringing them back to the bed where Sanette lay smiling at him from beneath the mountainous white quilt, her face glowing with laughter, and his joy was so great that he could have died of it.
There was a bolster in the bed which Sanette had told him was called a Dutch wife.
‘Why’s it called that?’
She laughed at him. ‘So that Dutchmen who have no woman in their bed have something to make love to when they feel like it.’
Colin thought it was an extraordinary idea. ‘Don’t reckon I’d fancy that …’
‘You do not need one. You have a woman of your own.’
‘Do I? Do I really?’
‘Always.’ She enfolded him with her arms and legs and, later, with the moist depths of her body as they returned once again to the rhythmic language of love which, like the language of words, became each day more familiar to them both. ‘Always and forever.’
Later they got up and the day was theirs. The weather had turned fine and they walked arm in arm along the poplar-fringed roads of the flat country that lay inland from the sea. They roamed the cliffs that were broken at intervals by dunes of marram-spiked sand; they hurled pebbles into the teeth of the breakers that raced each other landwards in explosions of roaring foam. They drank the tar-tasting wine in the smoke-and salt-scented bar. They were happy and the miracle was that their joy in life and each other was so intense that it spilled over onto the people in the harbour streets, so that the locals smiled at them kindly in passing as though they, too, were young and in love.
One wind-free night, halfway through their holiday, the moon was full. They found blankets in a cupboard and, after dark, took them down to a beach a little way out of town. They walked along the moon-washed sand until they reached a stretch of jumbled rocks where the shadows lay dark.
They spread some of the blankets on the sand and lay upon them and pulled the others over them and made love. They knew each other so well now, every nook and cranny, every exclamation of the ardent flesh, yet to Colin it was like exploring an unfamiliar country. The landscape of dark and light, of shadow and moonshining, palpitant flesh, drew him into depths beyond anything he had known before. The surf ran up the sloping beach in tongues of glittering foam and soldier and lover and woman flamed together on the moon-drenched sand.
A night among nights to be treasured, with the memory of wholeness, the culmination of being.
Through it all, the night upon the beach, the other nights and mornings of love, the making of coffee in the kitchen where the iron stove roared above the clog-clacking, cobbled streets, the days ticked one by one, like clocks.
Each day, each hour, each minute.
Inexorably, time spilled like water between their fingers: at first barely perceptibly, then faster, faster still, until it was rushing in a torrent that for all their anguished desires could be stayed no longer.
A week. Three days. One day.
Along the horizons of their minds, the iron and remorseless thunder of the guns had returned.
Sanette’s face, tear-stained. ‘I don’t want you to go! You mustn’t go!’
‘They’ll soon come looking for me if I don’t.’
She was deaf to reason. ‘You mustn’t! I am so frightened …’
‘I’m not so easy to get rid of.’
The clanging boast was empty in the whitewashed room. Against the sun-bright windows, the gay curtains flapped. Life …
There were so many dead.
‘Where could we go?’
The war was everywhere: in France and Belgium and Holland, in Germany and Italy, across the Channel in Britain. There was no sanctuary anywhere.
Sanette was beyond reason. ‘I don’t care where we go. There must be somewhere!’
It was pointless even to talk about it.
‘I’ve got to go back.’
‘No!’ Beating her clenched fists upon the bed in an ecstasy of tears, impotent and agonising. ‘You must not!’
Her English lost to her, she berated him, and fate, in a gush of French and what he knew now was Flemish. ‘Nie! Nie! Je ne le veux pas!’
Her tears were an expression both of despair and helplessness, while Colin knew he had no choice. He knew something else that he kept from her: if a choice had been possible, he would still have gone back. He hated the war, was filled with fear and foreboding whenever he thought of it, but he would not run out on his mates. No man who was a man could do such a thing.
The last day, silence a weight upon them both. They tidied the tiny house, leaving the ashes of their happiness in every room. Colin climbed back into the uniform that enclosed him with the grim finality of a prison. They closed and locked the door. Colin stood in the gull-noisy air, watching the fishing boats unloading their catch, while Sanette returned the key to her cousin’s neighbour. She came silently, face tight and still. They walked to the end of the street without looking back. They returned to Calais and boarded the train. Once again, the war tightened its grip upon them.