Lulu

December 1943

(Scotland)

Mornings are terrible. I can just about keep the thought of Thorpe at bay during the day, what with all this business of staying alive in a foreign country, and at night, I summon memories—by force if necessary—that have mostly to do with making love to him. But when you wake, you have no discipline, nothing to distract you. You lie vulnerable. You open your eyes and there he is.

Sometimes he’s lying on some cot or pile of straw, thin blanket, bowl of maggoty gruel, guards shouting. Sometimes I see him injured, his wounds untended, blood and pus, his skin hot with fever. Sometimes I see him parched with thirst while the guards taunt him through the bars of his cell. Now, it’s true, I don’t know this place, Colditz. It’s a castle, that’s all, so what I see—and it changes, from morning to morning, it’s never quite the same cell or the same jailers—what I see is like a medieval dungeon, like something the brothers Grimm might conjure up. Maybe the reality’s different. Maybe they’re playing checkers with the guards before a nice toasty fire. But that’s not what I see. I see him suffering. The anguish fills my chest and leaks from my eyes until I throw off the covers and rise, shaking, to meet the day. And the next.

Only two weeks remain until Christmas, but nobody on the train displays much holiday cheer. Margaret and I share a compartment with a woman and two young boys, aged perhaps three or four, and it says something for our state of gloom that even the tots are subdued. We’re traveling north, you see, and if London was dark and bleak, the landscape now clattering past the window seems to have been cast in iron.

Margaret catches my expression and checks her watch. “Only another hour or so,” she says, hushed voice, because the boys have piled up asleep on the seat, like puppies. The single lamp casts an anemic glow, and the air smells of stale cigarettes and an intractable damp. At our feet, Tuxedo lets out an anxious miaaaow from his wooden box.

I return to my newspaper. By now, I’ve read every story twice, and I’ve started on the personals. Widow, aged 26 with one child, experienced nurse, seeks elderly gentleman for purpose of companionship and matrimony.