OLIVIA

Other people can love. Katie loves, but I have not learned how. She cries when babies are born. I think that’s a kind of love. She cares for other people’s children. But I have never been able to make things turn out right. Everything I touch curdles. I am like brown spots on apples or the monster skulking under the stairs.

My initial training in the WRNS is at Mill Hill. The Wren officer who interviews me looks as if she is in the wrong place, as if she has just stepped out of her kitchen fresh from bottling fruit.

She asks, ‘What were you up to before the war?’

‘I was a pianist.’ The words stride out of my mouth. I want it to be true. It ought to be true.

She frowns at my forms. ‘It says here you have secretarial qualifications.’

We all hear this regulation: we are to ‘be amenable to naval discipline and put service before family ties’. To me this is beautiful, a kind of psalm. I want it in embossed silver letters across my wall. It makes my life feel narrow and simplified like a nun’s. I am free.

I hope freedom will make me clean. I can be a child and begin again. Like any child I need love.

My first job is at Southampton. I am Personal Assistant and shorthand typist for—. I don’t want to give his rank or write his full name. People can make things out of anything. His wife lives inland in Hampshire. He is Peter. Just Peter. He is strong and lean with a face lined beyond his years, possibly by sea and weather. His nose is large, with character and authority. He has strong, square nails and I watch his hands move over paper, reach for pens, lift the telephone receiver. After days, only, alone in that small square office I know his eyes are on my hands, on my curved body, his eyes piercing me when he believes my attention is away from him. We match each other in our dark blue uniforms. I know we must touch, skin on skin.

I wait a long time because this is different. It hurts me, is fish hooks under my skin. With others it is I who decide, who take charge, because it is nothing. With Peter I am paralysed, cannot flaunt, at times can barely speak. I watch him work so hard. He is very tired and I want to comfort him. The air takes on life between us.

We are forever working late. When it happens he pushes his chair back in a rush and stands behind mine. My hands move like machines on the typewriter until I am trembling too much. My breaths are thin as wafers. My body feels scraped raw, waiting for his touch. I have never felt this before, so tilted and falling.

He says, ‘I can’t get through another day without touching you.’

It is not skin on skin because there’s no time. It’s buttons and layers of clothes and a hard floor. I no longer know what I am doing. I have not known I could want a man, that my body could cry out and hurt until it’s losing me, leaving me behind. I hear myself moaning and my teeth are biting into stiff cloth and flesh and hair and the room is rocking and my head crashes back and forth and more words spill out of my mouth as he does it to me and I am there and not there.