The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield

also that impulsive gesture at the station, when she had seized his hand and pressed it hard against her breasts, and after that the way she had punished the wine and the brandy and then suddenly blundered off to bed before she gave herself away. And now here was a snivelling admission that she had already been to bed with two other men, and, although ravaged by guilt, she was still ready to admit to her terrible need of them. ‘It’s better you than just anybody,’ she had said, and this seemed to clinch the point and, what was worse, leave the decision to him. It was almost as though she thought of him as part of Andy, someone to whom she could turn without disloyalty, not only because he was Andy’s twin but because they had always lived on top of one another, had gone everywhere and done everything together, and he wondered if any kind of case could be made out for either of them in these terms and whether, in fact, it was more treacherous or less treacherous on her part and his. He said, gruffly, ‘Last night … when we came back here … what did you expect, Margy?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I knew Henrietta wouldn’t be back and just hoped, I suppose. That way I could have told myself I was only half to blame for whatever happened and anyway, I’m not pretending when I say I’ve always thought of you as one person. You are, and you always have been. That’s why, the minute I woke up and thought about you in here, I had to come in and blurt it out.’
    ‘Is that all?’ he said soberly. ‘You feel better now that I know about it?’
    ‘In one way I do. I should have gone mad if I had kept it bottled up any longer but just seeing you, and hearing your voice is hell. I couldn’t have got through last evening without all that drink.’
    His instinct was to shy away from involvement. He said, breathlessly, ‘This is crazy, Margy! God knows, I like you a lot, and always have, but you and me—how would it help? You’d feel even worse when I’d gone, and me … I’d see myself as the all-time bastard every time I thought of either you or Andy.’
    She said nothing but under the blanket he felt her body contract slightly and her withdrawal seemed to reaffirm that the decision was his and that she had emptied herself of blame simply by telling him about the medical student and the man from the Embassy. He understood this and resented it but there seemed nothing to be done about it. He said, bitterly, ‘You would feel that way, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘No,’ she said, and he was shocked by the steadiness of her voice, ‘I wouldn’t feel any way, except glad. Glad because it was you and not someone who was out looking for a randy woman!’
    He wanted then to escape from the folds of the blanket and reject her with a laugh or a conventional gesture of sympathy. A sound like a groan escaped him and, without in the least moderating his yearning for her, anger rose level with pity. She knew what he was going through but she didn’t help him, and he knew that it was not from lack of sympathy on her part but because these last few months had robbed her of the power to make an emotional decision.
    He had no idea how long they sat there, her head on his shoulder, her body inclined to him by the angle of the couch and the folds of the shared blanket, but presently she said, in the same emptied voice, ‘Anyway, Andy won’t come back. I knew that the day we said good-bye at Chester Station, and he went off to that Personnel Despatch Centre. Maybe it was knowing it that made me act the way I did. I don’t know, I don’t know a damn thing anymore, except that everything is going to pieces and only you being around keeps me from wanting to pack it in.’
    Her fatalistic acceptance of Andy’s death, and the despair inherent in her voice frightened him as he had never been frightened by physical risks he faced almost every day of his life. He said, helplessly, ‘For Christ’s sake, Margy—don’t talk like