For King and Country

Neil Rafferty had been lucky with his connection at Bletchley, and the sun was just clambering above the houses beyond the sidings when his train drew into Cambridge. There were no buses in the station forecourt but the house he and Beth had rented for the past two years was only a twenty-minute walk away, and it felt good to be stretching his legs after such a long journey.

Even as a child he had loved this time of day, and the grandparents who had brought him up had never had any trouble getting him out of bed, or at least not when the sun was shining. He had never known his father, who had died on the Somme before he was born, and he had no memories of his mother, who had succumbed to the postwar flu epidemic. His father’s parents had taken him in and he had grown up in their Cambridge house, surrounded by his professorial grandfather’s books and the model cars and ships which his father had once laboured to construct.

He would visit them later that afternoon, after spending the morning with Beth and the baby.

The thought of his wife made him lengthen his stride. He hadn’t seen her for more than a month, and there hadn’t even been a letter for over a fortnight, but he was hoping that this visit would be special. It could hardly turn out as badly as the last one, which had coincided with her time of the month. In two days she’d hardly let him touch her.

This time they had a whole week, and he felt better already. The last couple of months hadn’t been easy, but as he walked through the Cambridge streets in the early morning sunshine Italy seemed a long way away.

Rafferty was not a man given to introspection – his mind gravitated to the practical, to problem-solving – but he had spent quite a lot of time trying to understand why those few days in Italy had affected him so deeply. No simple explanation had occurred to him – it had, he decided, been a combination of factors. The brutality of the Germans had shaken him, and he supposed that the deaths of the four SAS men had brought home his own vulnerability. Jools Morgan had always seemed so indestructible, then bang, he was gone. Somehow it had all become real in that moment – not only the war and soldiering but the life he lived outside all that. Beth and the baby. England in the sun.

He passed the end of the road where his grandparents lived, resisting the temptation to drop in for just a few minutes. Another two turnings and he was approaching his own front door. The house was nothing special, just a two-up two-down, but the ivy they had started was already threatening to engulf the front room window. Too impatient to rummage through his bag for the key, he banged twice with the knocker.

Beth opened the door with a smile on her face, and he reached forward to take her in his arms. She backed away, the smile gone, replaced by surprise and something else. ‘Neil,’ she said instinctively. ‘Don’t…’ And then she saw the expression on his face. ‘What are you…didn’t you get my letter?’

There was suddenly a hole where his stomach had been. ‘What letter? What’s happening?’

She just stared at him, as if she didn’t know what to say.

‘What letter?’ he repeated.

She gulped. ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else,’ she said, the words spilling out in a rush. ‘I wrote and told you. I’ve been waiting for a letter. I didn’t expect…’

‘Who?’ he asked, as if it mattered.

‘An American. His name’s Brad. I told you everything in the letter.’

‘I never got a letter.’

She stood there in her dressing gown, a piteous look on her face. ‘I’m sorry, Neil. I couldn’t help it. It just happened.’

He stared at her, and in the silence heard someone move upstairs. ‘He’s here?’ he said incredulously, anger rising in his voice.

‘I had no idea you were coming. I was waiting for a letter,’ she said again.

They both heard the feet on the stairs, and Rafferty felt his anger spread through his limbs like a hot flush. As the uniformed legs came into view he took a step forward, fist clenched, impervious to reason.

The American was built like a tank; but that wouldn’t have stopped him. What did was the child in the man’s arms, his own child, its tiny hand caressing the American’s cheek. The child looked at him as if he was a stranger.

Beth’s small voice broke the silence. ‘Neil, this is Brad. Maybe we should all sit down and have a cup of tea.’

Rafferty looked at her as if she was mad, and she thought better of the idea.

‘I think maybe you two need to talk,’ Brad said, handing the baby to Beth. For one minute Rafferty thought he was going to be offered a handshake, but the American must have seen the look in his eye. ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he told Beth. They didn’t kiss each other but they didn’t need to. Brad nodded at Rafferty and walked out through the still-open front door.

Beth walked over and pushed it shut. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen,’ she said quietly.

He followed her through in a daze, and sat down heavily on one of the chairs they’d found in a flea market just before their marriage.

She was putting on the kettle. ‘I am really sorry, Neil,’ she said, her back turned away from him, and for one mad moment he felt like leaping up and hitting her, hitting her till she changed her mind.

‘I didn’t want to put you through this,’ she went on, turning to face him.

He tried to think. ‘How long have you been…how long have you known him?’ he asked, wishing he could think of something to ask which would make a difference.

‘We met at Christmas, but nothing happened until March, after your last trip home. I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,’ she said. ‘I tried not to, but…it just happened. And once it had happened…’

He understood the words, but he still couldn’t take it in. ‘Do Gran and Grandad know?’ he asked. Another meaningless question.

‘They may have guessed something was wrong, but I haven’t told them. I thought you should.’

He looked at her, shaking his head. ‘Why?’ he asked, and she knew he wasn’t talking about his grandparents.

She put a hand over his. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just happened.’

He shrugged off the stranger’s hand and got to his feet. His son, now ensconced in the high chair, was looking at him with an anxious expression. ‘We’ve got to talk about Ben,’ he said.

‘I know…’

‘But not now. I need…’ He needed to get away, to run, to cover his head and howl. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he told her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

He grabbed his bag, yanked open the door and stumbled out into the sunshine.

Ian Tobin walked through the door of the family shop in Landore, Swansea, soon after eleven, having spent half the night on the platform at Crewe and another frustrating couple of hours waiting for a replacement engine at Llandrindod Wells. In retrospect this journey would come to seem like practice for the week ahead, most of which he would spend hanging around waiting for people.

He had known that his parents would be busy in the shop, but he had not expected to find Megan with a job, much less one in an engineering factory, and his disappointment at not having her to himself during the days was tinged with a disapproval which he did his best to keep to himself. They spent every evening together, sitting in the pub on Monday and Tuesday as the rain came down, then cycling out to Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower Peninsula when the weather cleared up on Wednesday. There they walked hand in hand on the empty beach, interrupting her stories of the working world every now and then for a lingering kiss. After an hour of this she seemed to suddenly notice that the beach and the grassy valley above were still too wet for lying down, and the disappointment in her voice made him feel hot all over.

It seemed to him that she’d grown up a lot in the past few months. She was more assured, she dressed more daringly, she even argued with him. And her language had certainly grown more colourful. Her brother Barry, who had been in Ian’s class at school, had always sworn like a trooper, but Megan’s newly expanded vocabulary had more likely been learned from the women she now worked with.

Tobin told himself that he liked the changes, that she had always been a bit too worried about what other people thought, but a feeling of ambivalence persisted. And when, on the following night, in the back row of the cinema, she not only let him put his hand up her skirt but also stroked his cock through his taut trousers, he was almost as surprised as he was excited. Back home he jerked himself off and lay there panting, wondering if she really wanted to go all the way.

For his last night of leave they had planned another trip to the beach, but in her lunch-hour she called him and said they’d been invited to a party. He had been looking forward to having her to himself, but she was so obviously excited at the prospect that he found it impossible to object. ‘It’s in Danygraig,’ she said. ‘Barry’ll take us in the car.’

They arrived soon after eight, having driven through the blacked-out streets in Barry’s decrepit Austin Seven. She had told him not to wear his uniform – ‘Let’s pretend there isn’t a war on for a few hours’ – and he had been forced to wear a pre-war suit that still, despite his mother’s best attentions, smelt of mothballs.

The party was being held in one of the few standing houses on a bombed-out street. Its owners had obviously long since vanished, taking their furniture with them, but the increase in dancing room more than made up for the lack of places to sit down. There were already about thirty people crammed into the two downstairs rooms, and more continued to arrive as the night wore on. There seemed no shortage of records to play on the precariously perched gramophone, but whoever was in control of the selection obviously liked Duke Ellington.

In the kitchen there was more food and alcohol, both in quantity and variety, than Tobin had seen since the beginning of the war, and later, while he was waiting for Megan to return from the toilet, he saw fresh supplies arrive in a plain Morris van. The deliverers all seemed close friends of Barry’s, and Tobin thought he recognized a couple of them from schooldays. An hour or so later he found himself talking to one of them. ‘What’s your unit?’ he asked, just to make conversation. The man gave him a surprised look, then burst out laughing.

Tobin watched him walk away, wondering what he’d said. He had to admit that he felt pretty drunk, but…

‘Why don’t we go outside for some fresh air?’ Megan suggested, appearing at his shoulder. Her face was flushed, and he thought she looked very lovely.

They went out the back door, and she pulled him through the yard, where several couples were happily groping at each other, and into the alley which had once run along behind a lively street. Despite a clear, starry sky, the night seemed warm, and they walked arm in arm past the strange wilderness of broken houses to the edge of the docks. In the distance the black shapes of ships and the angular silhouettes of the serried cranes were clearly visible in the darkness.

Megan turned with her back to the wall, pulling him to her, and they kissed for a while, tongues entwining. He cupped her right breast and gently kneaded it, and after a while she undid the front buttons of her blouse, deftly loosened her bra, and let him get his hand inside. Her nipple grew nearly as hard as his cock, which she was rubbing up against as they kissed.