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His smile faded as Max returned with the cleaned mess cans and put them away.
Max didn't say anything, just nodded obsequiously and then went out again.
"Son of a bitch," the King said.
Grey had not yet recovered from the day Yoshima had found the radio. As he
walked up the broken path towards the supply hut he brooded about the new
duties imposed on him by the Camp Commandant in front of Yoshima and later
elaborated by Colonel Smedly-Taylor. Grey knew that although officially he was
to carry out the new orders, actually he was to keep his eyes shut and do
nothing. Mother of God, he thought, whatever I do, I'm wrong.
Grey felt a spasm building in his stomach. He stopped as it came and passed.
It wasn't dysentery, only diarrhea; and the slight fever on him wasn't
malaria, only a touch of dengue, a slighter but more insidious fever which
came and went by whim. He was very hungry. He had no stocks of food, no last
can and no money to buy any with. He had to subsist on rations with no extras,
and the rations were not enough, not enough.
When I get out, he thought, I swear by God that I'll never be hungry again.
I'll have a thousand eggs and a ton of meat and sugar and coffee and tea and
fish. We'll cook all day, Trina and I, and when we're not cooking or eating
we'll be making love. Love? No, just making pain. Trina, that bitch, with her
"I'm too tired" or "I've got a headache" or "For the love of God, what,
again?" or "All right, I suppose I'll have to" or "We can make love now, ifyou
want to" or "Can't you leave me in peace for once," when it wasn't so often
and most times he had restrained himself and suffered, or the angry "Oh, all
right," and then the light would be snapped on and she would get out of bed
and storm off to the bathroom to "get ready" and he would only see the glory
of her body through the sheer fabric until the door had closed and then he
would wait and wait and wait until the bathroom light was snapped off and she
came back into their room. It always took an eternity for her to cross from
the door to the bed and he saw only the pure beauty of her under the silk and
felt only the cold in her eyes as she watched him and he could not meet her
eyes and loathed himself. Then she would be beside him and soon it would be
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silently over and she would get up and go to the bathroom and clean herself as
though his love was dirt, and the water would run and when she came back she
would be freshly perfumed and he loathed himself afresh, unsatisfied, for
taking her when she didn't want to be taken. It had always been thus. In their
six months of married life twenty-one days of leave, being together they
had made pain nine times. And never once had he touched her.
He had asked her to marry him a week after he had met her. There had been
difficulties and recriminations. Her mother hated him for wanting her only
daughter just when her career was launched and she was so young. Only
eighteen. His parents said wait, the war may be over soon and you've no money
and, well, she's not exactly from agood family, and he had looked around his
home, a tired building joined to a thousand other tired buildings amid the
twisted tramlines of Streatham, and he saw that the rooms were small and the
minds of his parents were small and lower class and their love was twisted
like the tramlines.
They were married a month later. Grey looked smart in his uniform and sword
(hired by the hour). Trina's mother didn't come to the drab ceremony,
performed in haste between air raid alerts. His parents wore disapproving
masks and their kisses were perfunctory and Trina had dissolved into tears and
the marriage license was wet with tears.
That night Grey discovered that Trina wasn't a virgin. Oh, she acted as
though she was, and complained for many days that, please darling, I'm so
sore, be patient. But she wasn't a virgin and that hurt Grey, for she had
implied it many times. But he pretended that he didn't know she had cheated
him.
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