Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

around twenty-four or five at the outbreak, (as they were pleasedto call it), of the second major war. I was even then at Murchester, although Ihad also done some travelling through Europe, writing essays on my sojourns inRome, Paris, Athens and Vienna. I seem to have been largely oblivious, possiblydue to personally-benign unawareness, of the rising tides of power-hunger andFascism. To start with I, like others, thought – or hoped – no war would occur.When it did I carried on, like countless thousands of others, head firmlycemented in the sand. However, time and evil marched on, and in the end itseemed I should be called up – extraordinary phrase. Called up like thedead, I suppose, from my inertia and cowardice. I did not, needless to say,wish to go. The programme of Army Life and ‘Discipline’ horrified me far more,I have to admit, than the notion of killing, or being killed. I did not besidesthink I could die, at first, which may only have been the euphoria of youth.But I began to be haunted by dreams of my father’s death, mown down on amurderous shore, and also of Eddy’s death, howling at first in agony, and thensedated to a corpse – even through both these events had been somewhatconcealed from me at the time.

An old tale: a friend at Murchesterpulled some strings for me. I had to leave my intellectual work, but ended witha war-assisting desk-job in London. The bombing there was such that I, alongwith others I met, partly believed I would have been safer as a soldier, out ofEngland and in the Thick of It. God knows.

But here now we come to thesalient point. We come to the reason for my new digression. We come to thething I had (resolutely no doubt) ‘forgotten’ all those long, long, long yearsafter, when once peace gloriously returned amid the blasted shells ofbombsites, rationing, sad dark gallows humour and inane optimism, that markedthe late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when I was thirty/thirty-five going onninety-six.

Itwas back in the Blitz night of a particular air raid; I have, now, no ideawhich or even the exact date – a penalty, one sees, for trying to wipe suchmemorabilia from the brain forever.

I was somewhere near The Strandin London, having been lured out by a group of others at the office for anelicit steak of horsemeat, or some such.

When the sirens went, (Sirens!Wails such as Odysseus never heard–), I took off for cover in a shelter nearClamber Row, and was going fast, when I met a man in uniform. A soldier.

He was young, probably about twoyears younger than me, I being then around twenty-six or seven.

He wanted a light for hiscigarette, I recall, and we huddled in the lea of some huge old stone monolithof a building, while a match was struck – no matter the light, the enemy wasalready at work illuminating everything, and needing no extras from thecitizens, for half the city it looked was blazing with bomb-bonfires. The skywas the colour of a blood-soaked pillow, lit up inside by cores of orange. Thecity itself otherwise looked already like a necropolis, the stony buildingsdead, grey and hollow, empty of any living thing, yet glimmering with redstage-light from the incendiary rain. Now and then one of the deadly thingscame down, now far away, now nearer. It was like a storm, where the thunder andthe lightning had married – a crash and flash, a purple blank, the scarletaftershock, the roar and rush of gold and blood. And between each majorconcussion, a sort of silence, filled with roaring and emergency bells andcries and steep collapsing bellows and sighings.

“Busy night,” he said, as weshared his cigarette – all mine were gone – against the wall. “I tell you, it’ssafer where I was, and where I’ll be again, day after tomorrow. You shouldajoined up, Sonny.”

I said nothing. It was a very oddthing. Our shelter, stone and darkness flimsy as tissue paper, seemed safe fornow. As if we had, he and I, entered some integral pocket of space and time,just off the map of existence.

“Why didn’t you then, eh?”

“Why – didn’t I–?”

“Join up, Son. Look at you.Strong young toff like you. You’re about my age, ain’t yer? Bit younger? Sowhat was it? Too scared?”

We were close under the so-wreckableoverhanging portico, against the tissue-paper tomb wall. In the matchlight, andnow in the black redness, I could see his face. A beautiful face, in its ownway, with big narrowed eyes, now dark, now pale, as the bomb-light lit them.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t yer? Well I do. You’re abloody coward. Still. Never mind. You’re my type, you are. I don’t like thegirls, you see,” he said, and I shuddered at it. But then he reached out andtook my penis and balls into his big warm silent hand. And leaning in, hekissed me.

Nothing like that, ever before.Though, if I am honest, hints of it in dreams.

I won’t describe that moment.Please understand, I am not ashamed of it. In my subsequent life I saw andlearned a lot. There was no wrong in my feelings. Only in what came next.

Because, before any proper actioncould ensue, I pushed him off. And such was my false and mindless panic, Imanaged to thrust him off balance too. In my own way I was physically quitestrong, I must think, if mentally a weakling. He skidded back and hit his headagainst the nearness of the wall. I imagine he had been drinking, too. And sohad I, to wash down the horsemeat and the expense of the bill, most of whichhad been allotted to me to pay.

As he let me go I turned and ranaway. He lay on the ground, not knocked out, simply rather stunned, by thewall, and by my refusal – plainly my body at least had evidenced willingness.My stupidity must have been to him a kick in the guts.

Not until I had reached the turnto the next street did I look back to see him thus, lying there, laughing bythen, rueful and – innocent. That beautiful and lost soldier, doubtless