Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Katherine V. Forrest

though she had just come for a breath of air.

      She kept her eyes averted from the soldier so as not to give him an excuse to speak to her. The music came from the hall—muted, but reaching them nevertheless. In there, a voice was bellowing “Madelon.”

      Suddenly the soldier said to her, “It’s better out here than inside, don’t you think?” And as soon as she heard his calm voice, tinged with a slight foreign accent, Ursula felt reassured. Now she looked at the soldier. She could scarcely see him in the darkness, but he had a very young air and seemed rather small in stature. She replied, “Yes,” and didn’t know what else to say.

      They remained silent for a long while. Ursula was suddenly quite astonished to hear her own voice break the silence.

      She said, “Have you been in England long?”

      The soldier answered, “I’ve been here three days. Last week I was in Spain, and it’s only about fifteen days since I was in France.”

      Now Ursula looked at him with a kind of awe. He came from France! Only fifteen days ago, he had walked on the earth of France and spoken to the people of France and looked at the trees, the sky of France. It seemed to her that she had been in London for years rather than months.

      She raised her head and watched the searchlights sweeping the sky. It was beautiful to see. The alert had sounded, just as it did every evening, but there had been no sound of aircraft. The German planes must have headed somewhere else instead of coming over London.

      “Aren’t you cold?” the soldier asked. He spoke so nicely, with so much gentleness in his voice, that Ursula said she was touched. She shook her head. He was probably not French. He had an accent, but Ursula couldn’t tell from what country. And yet he spoke perfect French.

      He was silent again for a little while, and then he said, “I admire you for joining the Army. It’s not much fun for the men, but for women it must really be hard.”

      And now Ursula began to speak. Whenever she knew she was to be in the company of young men, she worried her head for days in advance to prepare some conversation, and she confessed that her voice always sounded affected to her own ears. Young men had always seemed members of another race to her, mysterious beings with whom she had no point of contact.

      But this evening in the dim courtyard, Ursula found herself talking freely to the unknown soldier. She told him about her life in Down Street. She described Jacqueline, “absolutely ravishing, but a little bit artificial.” Mickey, “a good comrade, and so funny”; Ann, “everybody thinks she’ll be the first to get her corporal stripes”; Ginette, who “talks nothing but slang, used to be a salesgirl, and can sew her own uniforms to measure.” She spoke of Claude, “very intelligent, very generous,” who was her protectress. Then suddenly she saw it all, all of her comrades as we were in the mornings, tense, badly adapted to this life, ready to find distraction in anything, hungry for love, each hiding her homesickness at the bottom of her heart. Ursula saw the main hall of Down Street, and her little sentry table. And all day long the phonograph that we had just acquired kept playing the same records, “Violetta” and “Mon coeur a besoin d’aimer.” She spoke about our captain, hurried and distant, a smile always on her lips, calling us her “dear girls,” always giving the impression that she was really going to do something, that she was going to help us somehow, that she was going to create an atmosphere of friendship in Down Street. She talked about this at every opportunity, but after each of her speeches one found oneself just as lonesome and empty as before.

      The soldier listened without interrupting her, and when she had finished all he said was, “I understand,” and Ursula felt herself to be truly understood, although she didn’t really know what there was to understand. It seemed to her that this boy comprehended things even before she had grasped them herself. This comforted her, like finding a schoolroom problem solved without having to trouble over it.

      We were all ready to go home, and had been hunting for Ursula. Jacqueline opened the door to the courtyard and called, “Ursula, are you there? Ursula, where are you?”

      Several voices shouted, “Blackout!” But we just had time to make out two forms, like little children clutched together in the dark. They started up, coming toward us.

      “Hurry!” Jacqueline called. “What a relief! At last we can leave,” she said to me.

      Ursula came slipping through the door.

      The truck was waiting outside, and we piled in. This time I suppose the driver was too tired for his game of jolting us against one another. It was far past midnight, and some of the girls slept, leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders. Suddenly I heard Ursula murmur, “Oh. I forgot to tell the soldier good-bye.”

      Just across from us sat Claude; she was holding Mickey’s head on her shoulder. I could feel Ursula stir unhappily. It must have seemed to her that Mickey had stolen her place.

      We jumped from the truck, one after the other, and were swallowed in the barracks hall. The house seemed to come awake, invaded like a beehive. Doors slammed, women ran up the stairway, women called to each other from room to room.

      Mickey, in pajamas, began to dance in the middle our dormitory. Jacqueline was dressed in one of her elegant flowered linen nightgowns. She sat massaging her face with cold cream. Ann, who was already carrying out the duties of a corporal, even before being promoted, came to remind us that the reveille for tomorrow was for six o’clock, as usual, and to put out the lights. One door after another was heard closing, and the night quieted. There were still a few whispers from bed to bed.

      “I was dancing with a sailor, and he’s crazy about me.”

      “He’s a perfect dancer. He wants to take me out someplace where we can have fun. You know.”

      “He’s going to phone me tomorrow.”

      “But honey—it’s amazing—he knows my brother! They went to the same school in Lyons.”

      As for myself, I hadn’t met anyone special. I had given my name to a few of the men, perhaps for one of the evenings when a girl is so lonesome she’ll go out with anyone. I’d seen some of the girls do things they probably wouldn’t do otherwise, out of this loneliness, and I hoped it wouldn’t happen to me.

      The whispering gradually ceased. Ursula slipped through the room in the dark. She had been in the bathroom, as she was still modest about undressing; she had put on her regulation rose-colored pajamas. This was one of the nights when she slept in the switchboard room and she slipped out of the dormitory, going downstairs.

      When Ursula reached the little switchboard room Claude was already stretched out on her narrow camp bed. A storm light stood on the floor. In the feeble light Claude’s bright hair shone. Everything else was in shadow. Outside, the guns began to roar.

      Ursula went to sit on the edge of Claude’s bed. The alternate nights that Ursula was assigned to sleep in this room were impatiently awaited. For on these occasions Claude talked to her at length about her husband, about her lovers, about her life before the war. Claude told about places where opium was smoked, and about her travels, and about her pets. It was always passionately absorbing, and Ursula would listen without saying a word, extremely impressed by the number of important people Claude knew, by her countless adventures, and flattered to be spoken to with such intimacy. No one else had ever been like a real friend to her. Especially a really grown-up mature woman.

      Ursula adored Claude, and was attracted to her in a special way she could not explain to herself. Sometimes it seemed to her that Claude took particular pains to charm her as though she, Ursula, were a man. But that would be absurd, and Ursula rejected so ridiculous an idea.

      That night as she sat on the edge of the cot Claude said to her, “What a whorehouse that dance was! Where did you hide yourself? I drank I don’t know how many glasses of port. Everyone offered me port to drink. I’m sleepy. Kiss me,