fic: GLORIANA
GLORIANA
the hour, ensemble; pg-13
this country is at war with germany.
Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against - brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution - and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. - NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 11.15am 3rd September 1939.
PROLOGUE.
To be at war: to be between: to be lost.
Eventually, every character herein will be found. This though, is not certain. Nothing is certain.
Hear the wireless crackle -
This country is at war with Germany.
1939.
HECTOR.
Hector sleeps through the proclamation. He awakens to Marnie rapping on his bedroom door. It’s September, three weeks yet ‘til he returns to Cambridge.
Maybe he’ll go shooting.
“Hector,” his fiancé’s voice permeates the wood. “Hector, are you awake?”
He grunts his ascent, buries himself beneath his duvet when he hears the door click open. “Hector,” Marnie rolls his name around her mouth again, as though she is trying to tire of it. “We’re at war.”
Hector rolls onto his other side. “Is that so?”
Hector: the greatest warrior of Troy, his grandmother reminds him when he waits in line to enlist. He looks at her and wonders what his mother would look like in her place: would she, who named him for a soldier, crease her face with the same worry lines?
He straightens, “Let me not die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter,” he recites.
“Let you not die at all,” his grandmother frowns.
“Forget your toy soldiers, lad,” his Corporal tells him and he does. They lie forgotten in a box underneath his bed, rickety and small beneath his and Marnie’s weight when he returns on leave.
“I love you,” she breathes into the skin on his face, his neck, his arms and he can just about bring himself to say it into her hair in return.
Afterwards she lights a cigarette, dangling it above the ashtray on his bedside table. “What’s it like?” She asks, earnest, “to fight?” Her shoulder digs into his ribcage and when he shifts away from the pressure she only moves closer.
He shrugs, again attempts to move away from her over-warm body. “I’m only in training, darling.”
Marnie smiles. “Do tell me, when you find out.”
He’s knee deep in mud and blood and Christ knows what else on the border of Germany when he remembers that conversation.
It’s Laurie he turns to - Laurie the faithful man over his right shoulder. Sergeant Lawrence Stern who goes by Laurie now Hector has christened him so. “My fiancé wants to know what this feels like.”
“Does she want to come and find out for herself?” Comes the dark reply, and Hector finds himself chuckling for the first time in days.
“You’d be a terrible influence on her, I’m afraid, old pal.”
Laurie grins. “Then she definitely ought to enlist.”
It’s Christmas when he next returns to dear Blighty - two weeks of leave, try not to get bladdered every night of it, Captain.
Marnie catches him when he enters the house. She’s been waiting for him, with rouged lips and kohl around her eyes. “You’re home.” She mews, her hand settling over his heart and her kiss landing on his cheek rather than her lips.
“I’ll always come home.” He says, more to his grandmother than to her.
1940.
FREDDIE.
It is Freddie alone who stands at the railway station. “I don’t want to go,” he says, by parts petulant and by the rest wise. “I want to stay.”
His mother sighs and smooths his hair. “I want you to stay too,” she whispers, conspiratorial. “But the clever men have decided that you need to go to the countryside, just to be safe.”
“They’re not clever, Mummy.” He retorts, and she laughs.
“No, darling. They’re not.”
Freddie doesn’t notice the tears in her eyes when he finally boards the train. His mother doesn’t either, until they begin to fall. “Stay safe, Freddie!” She shouts.
He doesn’t hear her.
Ruth’s funny, in the girl sort of way. She’s bright and blonde and smiles too wide. “Ruth Elms,” she introduces herself as, a hand thrust his way.
“Frederick Lyon.” He says, clumsy. “Call me Freddie.”
Her smile grows toothier. “Alright, Freddie Lyon.”
He tags behind her on the walk up to his new bedroom. “Mummy says you’re from London,” Ruth chatters, “We have a house in London but I’ve never been to it. I think Daddy uses it when he’s away on business. Are you alright? Would you like me to carry anything?”
“It’s fine.” He says, too quickly, and stumbles over his shoelace. “Sorry.”
Little Ruth frowns through her fringe, “What’s to be sorry about?” Her voice is earnest and precise. “You’re family now.”
He sits opposite Ruth at dinner. “It’s OK if you don’t have the foggiest, I’ll help. Though I’m no guide, of course.” She explains, plaiting her hair without even looking, “I only eat with the ‘rents at the weekend.”
“Why?”
Ruth eyeballs him, “What a queer thing to ask, Freddie Lyon.” And then she pauses, drops her hair. “Though come to think of it, I don’t think I know the answer.”
Lord and Lady Elms are nice people, Freddie finally decides. His mother coos over the china when she visits in the autumn, and they are kinder to her still.
“Can I come home?” He asks her, when he readies herself to leave.
“Soon, Freddie.” And then, “Ruth seems nice.”
Freddie smiles despite himself. He’s lost his front tooth, you see, and though the tooth fairy left him three shillings he prefers to keep it hidden until the new one’s grown in. He shrugs, “She’s alright, I suppose.”
The familiar touch of lips on his hair, “I bet you she is, little man.”
1941.
BEL.
There’s a barracks now, at Brasenose College. It takes Bel three weeks to woo the General to bed, another month to have three Corporal’s lapping at her every word.
How do you do it, the other girls ask, and Bel taps her nose and says: why, that would be telling.
That’s not it at all, and everyone knows it. She sings to the soldiers one evening, and the next they await her siren song.
In the meantime, Bel studies English. She reads Hugo and Flaubert, Orwell’s essays and Huxley’s treaties and all along she applies her lipstick just so.
Her cheek rests in her hand, “When do you return to the front line?” She asks. It’s a feigned interest, at best. At least: there is no front line in this dirty, filthy war.
“Three weeks,” the American replies. His lips curl when she sidles closer to him and he gestures to the barman for another. Beer is not rationed, and for that Bel is certain this gentleman is thankful.
“So soon?” She exclaims and if it’s mocking he doesn’t notice. And so she adds, “You must be careful, “ for nothing more than sport.
The setting sun dapples in her hair as they stumble home, him calling her petal and she calling him leaf in return. He buys her nylons and Vogue and in return she affords him her time and his hand around her waist. “Steady there, sailor,” she breathes as it slides lower.
“I’m a soldier, darling,” he replies.
Bel steps back. “Punching above your weight then, aren’t you Sir?” She teases and the girls in the rooms above giggle. She’ll recount the tale to them later, over a warm bottle of wine and boot-legged crimson nail varnish.
Of course, this is how they come to know her. She is Bel Rowley: Head Girl, Captain of the Hockey A-Team. Or maybe, Bel Rowley: First Class English (Honours). Or if you’re in possession of a penis, Bel Rowley: the one and only.
1942.
LIX.
It’s three years to the day since war was declared. Not that Lix is counting: nobody ever bothered to pretend that this one would be over by Christmas.
She roams Vichy France with her camera and her Christian nose and only sometimes thinks of her daughter.
A Nazi captain greets her as Mademoiselle and she can’t help but smile before she turns it into a sneer. “Your business in France.” He says. It’s not quite a question, despite demanding an answer.
“I am French.” She replies. Her accent is pure and even enough to settle the man, and she sets about resuming her vigil at the bar until he pulls up a stool.
“Oh? Where from?” He asks, with broken French and a drunken, cracked, grin.
“You wish to see my papers?” Her hands shake as she pulls them out of her trenchcoat. He notices. “Forgive me, Monsieur, I find myself nervous.”
“Why so?”
Her back arches against the mattress when he comes inside her, shouting a name that is not hers. She understands, of course, and stifles her own cry.
She photographs him while he is sleeping. The marker on the negatives reads unnamed nazi soldier, september 1942.
1943.
MARNIE.
Marnie spends her days waiting for a telegram -killed in battle. stop. her majesty’s condolences. stop. - she’s seen it enough times to dream of it.
Once, not a long time ago, she dreamt herself a widow, leaving poppies on her husbands grave, and it was only when she woke that she recalled she was not yet married.
She struggles to decide if that’s for better or for worse, until the irony catches.
Hector returns on leave twice a year: once at Easter and again at Christmas. It is his Easter week when she smiles into his embrace. “We should get married,” she says.
He shrugs in his favourite noncommittal way. “We will.” He murmurs, deepens the kiss. He has missed her this time, it would seem.
She breaks off. “No.” She says, “What is a widow if not a wife?”
1944.
RANDALL.
Randall once said, to Lix nonetheless, that war was the making of a man.
As he reports from Russia, he finds he is wrong.
Russia is cold and unforgiving, so the cliché goes. He lives in isolation, in Moscow, far from the Eastern front and part of him is glad for it. He remembers the last time he lived on a battle line, the intensity of emotion and he remembers most of all how he lives with the consequences of that fact.
Most of the time, he feels like a fraud. He can hear her in his ear: you are a reporter, for god's sake, go and report.
His desk is tidier than ever of late.
A Russian soldier offers him a vodka. “It is good for you,” he explains. St Peter’s square shimmers: Moscow does not care for a blackout.
“It isn’t,” he assures the younger man.
He takes the shot anyway. Russia is not forgiving.
A prostitute stands outside the Kremlin walls, a bowler on the floor to collect change. “You look cold.” He says, offers her his coat.
Her hair is brown and curly, cut short and his chest pangs. “Please,” he says, and the wind carries the sound until her eyes meet in his.
He fucks her against the wall there and then, her fingers braced against the back of his neck and the dip in the curve of his spine. His own hands press into the brick either side of her head, staining his fingers red and rubbing the tips of them raw.
Her lips find his earlobe. “What shall I call you, Sir?” She breathes in accented English.
“Call me nothing at all, my dear.”
1945.
EPILOGUE.
To be at peace: to be sure: to be found.
On the Eighth of May the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Forty-Five Germany signed a treaty of unconditional surrender and so a victory in Europe was won.
Hear the wireless crackle -
Advance Britannia.
end.
the hour, ensemble; pg-13
this country is at war with germany.
Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against - brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution - and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. - NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 11.15am 3rd September 1939.
PROLOGUE.
To be at war: to be between: to be lost.
Eventually, every character herein will be found. This though, is not certain. Nothing is certain.
Hear the wireless crackle -
This country is at war with Germany.
1939.
HECTOR.
Hector sleeps through the proclamation. He awakens to Marnie rapping on his bedroom door. It’s September, three weeks yet ‘til he returns to Cambridge.
Maybe he’ll go shooting.
“Hector,” his fiancé’s voice permeates the wood. “Hector, are you awake?”
He grunts his ascent, buries himself beneath his duvet when he hears the door click open. “Hector,” Marnie rolls his name around her mouth again, as though she is trying to tire of it. “We’re at war.”
Hector rolls onto his other side. “Is that so?”
Hector: the greatest warrior of Troy, his grandmother reminds him when he waits in line to enlist. He looks at her and wonders what his mother would look like in her place: would she, who named him for a soldier, crease her face with the same worry lines?
He straightens, “Let me not die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter,” he recites.
“Let you not die at all,” his grandmother frowns.
“Forget your toy soldiers, lad,” his Corporal tells him and he does. They lie forgotten in a box underneath his bed, rickety and small beneath his and Marnie’s weight when he returns on leave.
“I love you,” she breathes into the skin on his face, his neck, his arms and he can just about bring himself to say it into her hair in return.
Afterwards she lights a cigarette, dangling it above the ashtray on his bedside table. “What’s it like?” She asks, earnest, “to fight?” Her shoulder digs into his ribcage and when he shifts away from the pressure she only moves closer.
He shrugs, again attempts to move away from her over-warm body. “I’m only in training, darling.”
Marnie smiles. “Do tell me, when you find out.”
He’s knee deep in mud and blood and Christ knows what else on the border of Germany when he remembers that conversation.
It’s Laurie he turns to - Laurie the faithful man over his right shoulder. Sergeant Lawrence Stern who goes by Laurie now Hector has christened him so. “My fiancé wants to know what this feels like.”
“Does she want to come and find out for herself?” Comes the dark reply, and Hector finds himself chuckling for the first time in days.
“You’d be a terrible influence on her, I’m afraid, old pal.”
Laurie grins. “Then she definitely ought to enlist.”
It’s Christmas when he next returns to dear Blighty - two weeks of leave, try not to get bladdered every night of it, Captain.
Marnie catches him when he enters the house. She’s been waiting for him, with rouged lips and kohl around her eyes. “You’re home.” She mews, her hand settling over his heart and her kiss landing on his cheek rather than her lips.
“I’ll always come home.” He says, more to his grandmother than to her.
1940.
FREDDIE.
It is Freddie alone who stands at the railway station. “I don’t want to go,” he says, by parts petulant and by the rest wise. “I want to stay.”
His mother sighs and smooths his hair. “I want you to stay too,” she whispers, conspiratorial. “But the clever men have decided that you need to go to the countryside, just to be safe.”
“They’re not clever, Mummy.” He retorts, and she laughs.
“No, darling. They’re not.”
Freddie doesn’t notice the tears in her eyes when he finally boards the train. His mother doesn’t either, until they begin to fall. “Stay safe, Freddie!” She shouts.
He doesn’t hear her.
Ruth’s funny, in the girl sort of way. She’s bright and blonde and smiles too wide. “Ruth Elms,” she introduces herself as, a hand thrust his way.
“Frederick Lyon.” He says, clumsy. “Call me Freddie.”
Her smile grows toothier. “Alright, Freddie Lyon.”
He tags behind her on the walk up to his new bedroom. “Mummy says you’re from London,” Ruth chatters, “We have a house in London but I’ve never been to it. I think Daddy uses it when he’s away on business. Are you alright? Would you like me to carry anything?”
“It’s fine.” He says, too quickly, and stumbles over his shoelace. “Sorry.”
Little Ruth frowns through her fringe, “What’s to be sorry about?” Her voice is earnest and precise. “You’re family now.”
He sits opposite Ruth at dinner. “It’s OK if you don’t have the foggiest, I’ll help. Though I’m no guide, of course.” She explains, plaiting her hair without even looking, “I only eat with the ‘rents at the weekend.”
“Why?”
Ruth eyeballs him, “What a queer thing to ask, Freddie Lyon.” And then she pauses, drops her hair. “Though come to think of it, I don’t think I know the answer.”
Lord and Lady Elms are nice people, Freddie finally decides. His mother coos over the china when she visits in the autumn, and they are kinder to her still.
“Can I come home?” He asks her, when he readies herself to leave.
“Soon, Freddie.” And then, “Ruth seems nice.”
Freddie smiles despite himself. He’s lost his front tooth, you see, and though the tooth fairy left him three shillings he prefers to keep it hidden until the new one’s grown in. He shrugs, “She’s alright, I suppose.”
The familiar touch of lips on his hair, “I bet you she is, little man.”
1941.
BEL.
There’s a barracks now, at Brasenose College. It takes Bel three weeks to woo the General to bed, another month to have three Corporal’s lapping at her every word.
How do you do it, the other girls ask, and Bel taps her nose and says: why, that would be telling.
That’s not it at all, and everyone knows it. She sings to the soldiers one evening, and the next they await her siren song.
In the meantime, Bel studies English. She reads Hugo and Flaubert, Orwell’s essays and Huxley’s treaties and all along she applies her lipstick just so.
Her cheek rests in her hand, “When do you return to the front line?” She asks. It’s a feigned interest, at best. At least: there is no front line in this dirty, filthy war.
“Three weeks,” the American replies. His lips curl when she sidles closer to him and he gestures to the barman for another. Beer is not rationed, and for that Bel is certain this gentleman is thankful.
“So soon?” She exclaims and if it’s mocking he doesn’t notice. And so she adds, “You must be careful, “ for nothing more than sport.
The setting sun dapples in her hair as they stumble home, him calling her petal and she calling him leaf in return. He buys her nylons and Vogue and in return she affords him her time and his hand around her waist. “Steady there, sailor,” she breathes as it slides lower.
“I’m a soldier, darling,” he replies.
Bel steps back. “Punching above your weight then, aren’t you Sir?” She teases and the girls in the rooms above giggle. She’ll recount the tale to them later, over a warm bottle of wine and boot-legged crimson nail varnish.
Of course, this is how they come to know her. She is Bel Rowley: Head Girl, Captain of the Hockey A-Team. Or maybe, Bel Rowley: First Class English (Honours). Or if you’re in possession of a penis, Bel Rowley: the one and only.
1942.
LIX.
It’s three years to the day since war was declared. Not that Lix is counting: nobody ever bothered to pretend that this one would be over by Christmas.
She roams Vichy France with her camera and her Christian nose and only sometimes thinks of her daughter.
A Nazi captain greets her as Mademoiselle and she can’t help but smile before she turns it into a sneer. “Your business in France.” He says. It’s not quite a question, despite demanding an answer.
“I am French.” She replies. Her accent is pure and even enough to settle the man, and she sets about resuming her vigil at the bar until he pulls up a stool.
“Oh? Where from?” He asks, with broken French and a drunken, cracked, grin.
“You wish to see my papers?” Her hands shake as she pulls them out of her trenchcoat. He notices. “Forgive me, Monsieur, I find myself nervous.”
“Why so?”
Her back arches against the mattress when he comes inside her, shouting a name that is not hers. She understands, of course, and stifles her own cry.
She photographs him while he is sleeping. The marker on the negatives reads unnamed nazi soldier, september 1942.
1943.
MARNIE.
Marnie spends her days waiting for a telegram -killed in battle. stop. her majesty’s condolences. stop. - she’s seen it enough times to dream of it.
Once, not a long time ago, she dreamt herself a widow, leaving poppies on her husbands grave, and it was only when she woke that she recalled she was not yet married.
She struggles to decide if that’s for better or for worse, until the irony catches.
Hector returns on leave twice a year: once at Easter and again at Christmas. It is his Easter week when she smiles into his embrace. “We should get married,” she says.
He shrugs in his favourite noncommittal way. “We will.” He murmurs, deepens the kiss. He has missed her this time, it would seem.
She breaks off. “No.” She says, “What is a widow if not a wife?”
1944.
RANDALL.
Randall once said, to Lix nonetheless, that war was the making of a man.
As he reports from Russia, he finds he is wrong.
Russia is cold and unforgiving, so the cliché goes. He lives in isolation, in Moscow, far from the Eastern front and part of him is glad for it. He remembers the last time he lived on a battle line, the intensity of emotion and he remembers most of all how he lives with the consequences of that fact.
Most of the time, he feels like a fraud. He can hear her in his ear: you are a reporter, for god's sake, go and report.
His desk is tidier than ever of late.
A Russian soldier offers him a vodka. “It is good for you,” he explains. St Peter’s square shimmers: Moscow does not care for a blackout.
“It isn’t,” he assures the younger man.
He takes the shot anyway. Russia is not forgiving.
A prostitute stands outside the Kremlin walls, a bowler on the floor to collect change. “You look cold.” He says, offers her his coat.
Her hair is brown and curly, cut short and his chest pangs. “Please,” he says, and the wind carries the sound until her eyes meet in his.
He fucks her against the wall there and then, her fingers braced against the back of his neck and the dip in the curve of his spine. His own hands press into the brick either side of her head, staining his fingers red and rubbing the tips of them raw.
Her lips find his earlobe. “What shall I call you, Sir?” She breathes in accented English.
“Call me nothing at all, my dear.”
1945.
EPILOGUE.
To be at peace: to be sure: to be found.
On the Eighth of May the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Forty-Five Germany signed a treaty of unconditional surrender and so a victory in Europe was won.
Hear the wireless crackle -
Advance Britannia.
end.