An Awfully Big Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page B

frontiers disguised as postmen, limped home across the Channel on a wing and a prayer. The commercial travellers pushed back sleeves and rolled up trouser legs to point at scars; they tapped their skulls to show where the shrapnel still lodged.
    George’s chief officer had collapsed in the boat. They tried to lay him flat, but he was so badly burnt he was trapped upright with his fingers stuck to the gunnel. George had scraped the skin free with his teeth. The cobweb of a hand, like a woman’s lace glove, clung to the wood until the salt spray dashed it away.
    ‘How awful,’ said Stella dutifully. George was rocking over the fireguard and smiling. It was astonishing to Stella how fondly men remembered their darkest hours.
    P.L. O’Hara had risen to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. In 1944 he’d sent George a postcard of an old man tapping his way up a village street somewhere in the Cotswolds. The card was pinned to the wall beneath the moose, alongside the yellowing cutting of the review of Richard II .
    ‘I wish I’d seen the play,’ said Stella, kindly.
    Geoffrey said it was absurd to think the designer had taken the slightest heed of any suggestion put forward by the likes of George. And furthermore, if Captain Bee’s Knees O’Hara was the great actor he was cracked up to be, why hadn’t he been snapped up by Hollywood instead of returning year after year to the provinces?
    ‘Why don’t you like George?’ asked Stella, when they were upstairs, on the third floor, cleaning out the extra’s dressing room.
    ‘But I do,’ he protested. ‘He has considerable native intelligence.’
    ‘He’s not a nigger,’ she said, and noticed how he winced. He was wearing a pair of woollen mittens discovered in a cupboard; he was afraid of dirt. He was washing the long mirror with a scrunched-up page of the Evening Echo dunked under the running tap of the basin and his mittens were sopping wet.
    ‘You’d be better off without them,’ she advised. Her own hands were black with newsprint. She couldn’t quite reach the corners of the glass and was stretching on tiptoe across the dressing-table when Geoffrey put his arm round her shoulders. It wasn’t an accident; he was breathing too hard. She was about to shrug him away when she thought of Meredith. Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn’t done either. Despite his Gestapo monocle, Meredith, as a man of the world, might be put off if she screamed. Hastily swallowing the liquorice George had given her earlier that morning, she swivelled round, eyes shut, and waited.
    Ignoring her lips, Geoffrey nuzzled her ear. Even if it had been Meredith she didn’t think she would have found it very exciting. She was reminded of the time she’d taken part in Children’s Hour and they’d showed her how to simulate a rising storm by panting sideways into the microphone.
    She began to stroke Geoffrey’s harsh hair. It was a womanly gesture witnessed often enough on the screen at the cinema. She supposed it was maternal rather than sensual; it was what women did for babies, to make them feel secure and stop their heads from wobbling.
    She was glad her ears were clean. Every fortnight, on bath night, Lily probed them with a kirby-grip. Uncle Vernon said it was a dangerous thing to do. Stella could be perforated. Squirming, she left off cradling Geoffrey’s head and brought her hand down to separate her stomach from his. It was disgusting really, linking men with babies.
    Something with the texture of an orange, peeled and sticky, bumped against her wrist. She couldn’t suppress crying out her distaste, any more than she could help envying Geoffrey his lack of inhibition. On occasions, when visiting the doctor for some minor ailment, she had even felt it immodest to