It’s a Battlefield Read Online Free PDF

from a poster at the gates and happiness, excitement and expectation left her; the name of the man she had seen for three years at every breakfast as he cut the loaf of bread or stirred his cup of tea, the man her sister had married, blew out at her from the crumpled paper. She read the poster twice: ‘Drover’s Appeal Fails.’ I ought to go back to Milly, she thought. I oughtn’t to go to the meeting. Peter, Bill, Ginger, Frank. She stood on the pavement and rubbed the kerb with her foot. Terry, Herbert, Arthur, Joe. She had met them all with Drover. I must go home. Milly will be desperate. But another name fell into the balance, ‘Mr Surrogate’.
    Milly never liked Jim taking me to the meetings. Milly loved him. Milly was jealous. A cold wind swept the pavement, bearing a scrap of silver paper from a chocolate box across the lamplight. Milly loved him. Kay Rimmer hugged herself for warmth and thought of love, her orange lips parted, her sister’s misery fighting in her face with excitement, expectation, the touch of a man in darkness. Of course I must go home, but she dropped the last name, ‘Jules’, softly and secretively.
    In the shop windows where a light still burned, her face, as she quickly passed, was momentarily reflected across the bedroom slippers and the ready-cooked meats, fierce in the defence of happiness. There was ferocity even in her tread, light and quick, like an animal pacing the cave-mouth in protection of its young. Milly loves him. But she flashed to the help of her happiness breathing with weak trust in the darkness. The poster means nothing at all. They’ll reprieve him. He isn’t a murderer.
    At the end of the street a man was waiting; she thought at first, because he was in shadow, that he was a stranger. Then she thought that he might be Jules. When she was twenty yards away she recognized Jim Drover’s brother. She watched him with enmity as he stood in his dark clothes, one thin hand holding an attaché case; she knew that he was waiting for her.
    â€˜You’ve seen it?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Where are you going?’
    â€˜I’ve got a meeting, Conrad.’ Hopelessly happiness cried to her, gaiety and amusement. She said weakly: ‘I suppose I ought to go home.’
    â€˜Is Milly alone?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    He said: ‘I don’t see why you need go home. I’ll go. You don’t know my brother as I did. Milly and I can talk.’ He leant against a shop front and behind him she saw disappearing into a dim interior a long avenue of second-hand coats. ‘I was at the court all day.’ She looked at him quickly, for the thought had come to her: he is going to cry. People will stop and stare at us. But his face was no whiter than it always was; the nerves had twitched in just that way as long as she had known him. Pale, shabby, tightly strung, he had advanced from post to post in his insurance office with the bearing of a man waiting to be discharged. While she watched him she lost the sense of his words and she had no idea of his meaning when he said: ‘A stupid joke.’ He asked her: ‘Have you got people to sign the petition?’
    She repeated ‘Petition’ and he became nervously angry, clasping his attaché case. ‘Something’s got to be done. There’s to be a petition.’
    She explained: ‘But I couldn’t ask people at the works. I couldn’t let them know it was Milly’s husband.’ With pale asperity he prepared a dagger thrust: ‘You won’t do a little thing,’ but her appearance daunted him. Behind her were all the machines of the factory. With orange lips and waved hair she fought their uniformity and grey steel, but she was as one with them as a frivolous dash of bright paint on a shafting. ‘The manager wouldn’t like it. He’d sack me when he got a chance.’
    It was not cowardice but realism that spoke.