“Then…” He looked up-he seemed to make himself look up-with a familiar crooked smile on his face. “Then I got so sick of playing with myself, I might’ve ended up in bed with somebody a lot homelier than Gladys.”
Peggy knew she couldn’t have picked Gladys out of a police lineup of clerk-typists, assuming there was such a thing. That was probably just as well. She also knew Herb had just handed her the moral advantage. If she wanted to hang on to it, she could. But she realized that was another kind of slow-acting poison. The idea was to air things out on both sides… wasn’t it? That seemed to be their only chance of getting back to where they had been.
And so she let out a sigh of her own. “Well…” she said, and then bogged down. This was even harder than she’d expected. Herb was a man, dammit. How would he take what she was about to come out with? She hadn’t got up on her high horse, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t. If he did… she’d deal with it as best she could, that was all. “Well,” she repeated, and then made herself go on: “Well, it’s not like you were the only one.”
There. It was out. Now-would the sky fall? Herb’s eyes widened. He started to say something, then shook his head and visibly swallowed it. As she had, he tried again a moment later. He managed one word: “You?”
“ ’Fraid so, hon.” Peggy didn’t want to look at him now.
“I’ll be-” Whatever Herb would be, he didn’t want to finish it. Peggy didn’t suppose she could blame him. “How’d that happen?” he asked after a long, long pause.
“It was after the opera in Berlin. I got smashed. I thought the guy who took me was a fairy, but he turned out not to be. Not all the time, anyway.” Peggy still felt like a jerk about Constantine Jenkins, which did her no good whatsoever.
“Only the once?” Herb asked.
“Yeah,” Peggy said, and left it right there. It was true. She would gladly have told him she’d swear on a stack of Bibles, but she knew her man. That would have left him more inclined to doubt her, not less.
“How about that?” he said, more to himself than to her. He looked at his cigarette. Most of it had burned away while they were talking. So had most of Peggy’s. Herb put his out. She did the same. He started to take another one, then stuck the pack back in his pocket instead. He gathered himself. “I guess you’ve got the edge on me, ’cause I did it more than once. Not a whole lot more than once, but I did, dammit.”
“You don’t sound exactly proud of it,” Peggy said.
“Nope.” Herb eyed her. “Neither do you.”
“I was snockered,” Peggy said. “And I was dumb. I don’t want to mess around. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Amen!” Herb said, as if responding to a sermon from Father Divine. He might have had the same thought, for he added, “You can sing that in church.”
Peggy said, “Maybe now we can quit looking at each other out of the corners of our eyes, the way we have been.”
“That’d be good.” Herb lit another Pall Mall after all. Peggy made a small pleading noise, so he gave her one, too. He went on, “I wondered if you’d noticed we were doing it.”
“Uh-huh.” Peggy nodded. This felt like going to the dentist. Any minute now, the novocaine would wear off. And how much would things hurt then?
“It ought to get better now that it’s out in the sun and air,” her husband said. “As long as it stayed covered up, it was going to go bad. And there isn’t much worse than gas gangrene.” Such glancing references were as close as Herb came to talking about things he’d seen Over There.
The only thing Peggy knew about gas gangrene was that it sounded horrible. No. She knew something else: she didn’t want to think about it, not right this minute. She had something else in mind. “We ought to celebrate getting it out in the open,” she declared.
“Celebrate, huh?” Herb gave her another crooked smile. She nodded back. The smile straightened-some. “The wench grows bold,” he said.
“Damn right,” Peggy answered.
Up the stairs they went. Peggy didn’t know if it was a celebration, but it was pretty good. Better than it had been while they both kept secrets? She thought so. She hoped so. She also hoped it would keep getting better again. That was the point to all this, wasn’t it?
She also wondered if she could find some way to do Gladys a quiet bad turn, whoever the round-heeled little chippy was. And there was one more thought Herb didn’t need to know anything about.
Alistair Walsh wanted to fight the Germans. That was the point of putting on the uniform again, wasn’t it? The only trouble was, he-and the rest of the British Army-had no convenient place to do so. Land in the Low Countries or France and they’d get slaughtered. Land in France they couldn’t. England and France weren’t at war with each other-and a good thing, too, as far as Walsh was concerned. Even RAF planes avoided French airspace when they flew off to bomb Hitler’s towns.
Would French fighters really rise to try to help the Luftwaffe shoot down English bombers? If they did rise, how hard would the French pilots fight? Nobody seemed to want to find out, or to have the nerve.
“By God, your Excellency, I wish Churchill were still alive,” Walsh told Ronald Cartland in the pub near Parliament. “He’d make the froggies show whether they meant it or not.”
“Nothing halfhearted about Winston,” the MP agreed, draining his whiskey and waving to the barmaid for a reload. He was catnip to the female of the species, no two ways about it. Walsh knew she wouldn’t have come over half so fast for him. He drank whiskey or brandy or anything else he could find on the Continent. When he could get a pint of decent bitter, he liked that better.
Sooner or later, Parliament would start working again. The provisional government kept promising elections soon, and also kept pushing back the day. People were starting to grumble. Walsh worried lest creeping Chamberlainism reassert itself when the votes were finally cast. If that happened, then what? Another coup d’etat? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
Cartland asked, “Did you catch Musso’s speech on the shortwave last night?”
“Afraid I didn’t,” Walsh admitted. “Wouldn’t have done me much good if I had, either. When I go to one of those restaurants with the red-and-white checked tablecloths, I can tell the dago with the pencil behind his ear I want a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. My Italian starts and stops right there.”
“Ah,” Cartland said politely. “I should have thought of that. Can’t say I ever studied it myself, not in any formal way. But I speak French and I did endless Latin, so I can muddle along after a fashion.”
I’ll bet you can, Walsh thought, without either rancor or envy. The MP would have picked up his education at some posh public school, and then at Cambridge or Oxford. Walsh often thought he’d got his own, such as it was, at a jumble sale. Considering how easily he might have spent his whole life grubbing coal out of a seam, he hadn’t done too badly for himself.
And… “So what did the bugger with the big chin say, then?”
“Called us traitors to the cause of Europe, if you can imagine the cheek.” As any aristocrat might have, Cartland seemed more affronted than anything else. “He said that, since Hitler was busy giving Stalin what-for and didn’t have time for puppies like us-”
“Puppies?” Walsh broke in. “Musso has the gall to call us puppies?” He wanted to laugh and to haul off and punch somebody, both at once. He would have felt that way if a waiter in one of those checked-tablecloth eateries had called him the same thing, too.
“He did indeed,” the MP replied, sipping from his fresh drink. “He said he’d have to go on and let us have a proper hiding himself, since Adolf was busy.”
“And then you wake up!” Alistair Walsh exclaimed. “The Fritzes, now, they’re proper soldiers, say what you will about the bleeding Fuhrer. But the Italians?” It came out of his mouth as Eye-talians, which only made his pique plainer.
“Quite.” Cartland spoke with the same frozen disgust a society matron might have used in carrying a dead rat from the drawing room by the tail.
In his mind’s eye, Walsh studied a map. The clearer the mental picture got, the more it enraged him. “He’s mad as a balloon, he is,” the Welshman said, with the air of a judge sentencing a bungling burglar. “Barking mad! How does he propose hiding us when we hardly even touch?”
“He could cause trouble for Egypt from Libya, I suppose, and for Malta from Sicily. He might even use Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland to go after British Somaliland-assuming he’s balmy enough to want British
