Lovely War(8)

She walked home with her father, buttoning her coat collar close around her neck. The night was unusually cold. Her left arm still remembered resting itself upon James’s arm, and her right hand remembered holding James’s hand. Her body remembered moving in time with his, and being pulled closer as the last song ended.

“Did some dancing, did we?” observed her father. Hazel was mortified to discover that she was acting it out, holding out her arms toward an imaginary James. So much for secrets.

“Mrs. Kibbey thought I ought to,” she said. Blame it on Mrs. Kibbey, will you? Weak!

Her father, a tall man with long arms and legs and fingers, and deep grooves carved into his cheeks, put an arm around Hazel’s shoulders.

“Mrs. Kibbey’s right,” he said. “You need to live a bit more, my girl, and have fun. Not just stay cooped up with old folks like your mother and me.”

She leaned her head against her father’s shoulder. “Don’t be silly,” she told him. “You aren’t ‘old folks.’”

“Tell that to Arthur,” her father said. “Arthur” was the arthritis that plagued his wrist and knuckle joints. “I mean it, Hazy. You should spend more time with people your age. Just promise me you won’t fall in love with a soldier boy. You don’t need your heart broken in two.”

She nodded. She couldn’t exactly look her dad in the eye just then. And she certainly wasn’t about to make any promises.

For pity’s sake, she scolded herself once more. You are not in love with that boy. You’ve only just met him tonight, and danced two dances. People who talk of falling in love after just one meeting have their heads full of pillow down.

Why, then, had she kissed him on the cheek?





APHRODITE


     The Kiss (Part II)—November 23, 1917





WHY HAD HAZEL kissed James on the cheek?

This was the question tormenting James as he circled St. Matthias’s block. Up Woodstock Terrace, along East India Dock Road, down Hale Street, along High Street, and back. Breezes off the Thames brought the cry of seagulls and the clang of the dockyards. Up ahead, the lights of Poplar twinkled.

Was it a sisterly sort of thing? Surely that was all the kiss meant: Do not hope for more, you strange stranger. Here is where my view of you begins and ends: platonic goodwill. Patriotic gratitude. Here’s a quick little peck to prove it. Now goodbye.

He groaned. He’d heard of things like that. Girls who went about bestowing kisses on soldiers in their khakis on train platforms, and on new conscripts at recruiting stations.

There was the spot. Right there, upon his cheek. He ran a finger over it.

He passed by a couple that had taken advantage of a deep, dark doorway for some kissing of the type Lois Prentiss would certainly veto. It reminded him of that one smile, lighting up Hazel’s lips, making him wonder how kissing them would feel.

What was the matter with him?

The war, he decided. The war had addled his senses. The war had driven the whole world to the brink of insanity. Hasty war weddings and fatherless war babies and last-minute love. The whole cheap, flimsy spectacle of it.

But he closed his eyes and remembered, once more, the feeling of holding the piano girl in his arms.

He could still see her father holding her coat for her, and steering her out through the throng. Wild horses couldn’t persuade James to shadow their footsteps home. It would be indecent.

Her address. Would she have shared it if she thought of him in a strictly friendly way?

When he’d passed the kissing couple three times, he headed home. He crossed East India Dock Road and came to Kerbey Street, which led to his uncle’s flat. He glanced at theatrical playbills and navy recruitment banners. When signposts revealed that Kerbey Street had met Grundy, he stopped.

The corner of Grundy and Bygrove, Hazel had said. Second floor, above the barbershop.

Surely she’d be home by now. Asleep in bed, no doubt. What harm was a little detour? He’d merely note the location. He ought to get a haircut anyway. Perhaps tomorrow he could return for a trim, and while he was there, he might . . . what? Knock on her door?

The utter impossibility of it all hit him.

He could take a look. His motives were pure. He wasn’t spying. He only wanted to see the kind of curtains behind which the piano girl lived her luminous life. He would innocently imagine her asleep on a soft pillow, her lashes delicately tangled together, her long hair spread about her, her slim hands playing Chopin in her dreams.





APHRODITE


     Sleepless—November 23, 1917





HAZEL WAS FAR from asleep. She’d changed into her nightgown and unpinned her hair. She sat on a low divan beneath her bedroom window, wrapped her arms about her knees, and looked out upon the street. In the upstairs flat, the two spinster Misses Ford played their gramophone recording of “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice.” It was much too late for opera. Hazel didn’t mind.

James Alderidge. A nice name. One could certainly do worse.

Had she danced two dances with a stranger, and kissed him on the cheek?

She pressed her own burning cheek against the cool, damp windowpane.

Who would’ve thought, on this utterly normal day, that before bedtime her brain would be scrambled like an egg? She’d only gone to play as a reluctant favor to Mrs. Prentiss, just as she’d gone that afternoon to the Poplar Hospital for Accidents to play for the recuperating soldiers.