It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene Page A

hour,’ Jules said.
    â€˜I don’t want to go to a cinema or a café or a pub, and I don’t want to go home and I don’t want to walk about in the park.’ The men stood round her with perplexed irritated faces. They ought to understand, she thought, what home will be like with Milly waiting there, not sleeping, not taking off her clothes, hopelessly entangled with a man who is not there, who will never be there again. She wondered with a kind of vexed sensuality what it felt like to be so tied to a man. These were men, standing round her offering coffee and beer and moving pictures, and never dreaming – you could tell from the dull depressed faces – that the only thing she wanted now, this minute, this night, was the knowledge of what it felt to be so tied to a man.
    Jules said: ‘It’s nearly 10.45, Conder, now.’
    She gazed from one to the other of them, from Conder, short, shabby, with a bald head and ink-stained fingers, and nails blunt from a typewriter, to Jules with the lost look she told herself it would be easy to love.
    â€˜Won’t anybody say something funny? I want to laugh.’ She knew suddenly that Jules understood, that if Conder had not been there, he would have made love to her, but this knowledge irritated her and when Conder looked at his watch and said, ‘Yes, really. I must be off,’ she exerted all her charms to keep Conder, smiling and pouting, a faint evocation of a famous film actress in a small part in an early faded film. ‘Oh, but I know you just aren’t interested in me. You’ve not really got an appointment.’
    â€˜Believe me, Miss Kay,’ Conder said, ‘there’s no one I’d rather stay and talk to, and I hope that you’ll let me call around at the works and take you out to lunch one day. If it wasn’t so important –’
    â€˜What is it anyway?’
    â€˜Ah, but ladies can’t keep secrets,’ Conder said, bowing impressively. His personalities flickered so quickly that he was himself confused, uncertain whether he was the revolutionary, the intimate of Scotland Yard, or, a new part this, the master spy. He took off his hat and moved quickly round the corner into Charlotte Street, head a little bent, butting against the cold sweep of the wind.
    â€˜Kay,’ Jules said.
    â€˜Look,’ she said quickly, ‘there’s Mr Surrogate.’ Mr Surrogate came out of the cinema alone, paler than when he entered. He had shut himself into a lavatory until he thought the place was clear, for he was unwilling to encounter Bennett. It would arouse bad feeling, he told himself, the party mustn’t be split into groups; and at intervals, hearing feet prowling round the wash-basins, he had pulled the chain convincingly. His face clouded when he heard his name spoken, but it cleared again at the sight of a girl under the lamp-post. He padded deprecatingly across the pavement. It was quite like the old days of the Fabian Society. ‘Well, Comrade? What about a cup of coffee?’ He looked at her more closely. ‘You are the girl who cried.’
    â€˜Jim Drover’s my brother-in-law.’
    Mr Surrogate was taken aback. Drover was a sacrifice, Drover was a comrade, on Drover’s death the British Communist Party would come of age. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He felt rattled and betrayed by the individuality of men.
    â€˜You needn’t for me,’ she said. ‘It’s my sister who’s hurt. I hoped I’d have some news for her. I don’t want to go home and say there’s nothing going to be done.’
    â€˜The party can do nothing,’ Mr Surrogate said.
    â€˜I’m afraid of what Milly will do. She’s a quiet one. You don’t know what she’s thinking. But I know they were happy. They were so dull together, they couldn’t be anything else but happy.’ Mr Surrogate nearly called to her to stop. Pain was