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The men have gone to war. Somehow, this story is still about them, even when it was never about them.
Jane Barber takes my waist. I am here, in her living room, dropping off extra rations that Jane Barber is to use for our Sunday Church lunch. It is an abysmal selection of potatoes, leeks, and ground beef. I feel embarrassed to have brought it, even though it's nothing to do with me.
Jane Barber is known to be cold and haughty and a little pompous. No one ever mentions how she is always elegant and very, very beautiful. She is severe, in the way a statue is. Like the ones I've seen before, my only time in London.
Jane Barber sees me staring, and invites me round to dinner the next night, where she touches my thigh as if she is merely passing the salt. Jane, Janie, only 8 years my senior, my 19 to her 27, yet a ravine divides our worldliness.
She sort of cuts me off when I speak, to tell me how I'm the prettiest young lady in this town. She leans to me, presses her lips to mine, apparently unafraid, apparently able to see wants in me that I hardly acknowledge myself.
I think a little of her husband, in France, but then I think mostly of her.
*
Janie walks me home from the factory most days. We go into her house and eat together, and lounge in domestic bliss thereafter. She likes to pull my cold feet into her lap and warm them with her cold hands, while we listen to the radio. She will knit and I will darn the towns-children's socks. We are an industrious household.
She knows everything about me, I think she can read my thoughts. I know quite a bit about her now.
When she starts to call me 'wife', I want to ask about her husband. She shrugs flippantly, it's then that I notice she can be quite cruel. He spouse is freezing and starving at the front lines, I want to defend his memory in her mind, but as the days go on, her cruelness imbues me, and I rather hope he dies. Dead, so that we can sit and knit for much longer, Janie and me.
Now we sleep together in their marriage bed. I can't help but feel we are playing house until the adults come.
*
I start to think about what we're doing, and how wrong and wicked it is.
"Our crime is not even legally recognised. The capability of women to love, let alone lust, is contested. We are saved only by our dehumanisation." She says, thoughtlessly.
I bristle at her apathy. My Sunday school drills swell the force of a tsunami and, if they are lucky, may manage to lightly jostle her storm in a teacup.
"Our crime, Jane, is one against God! It is... the bible says its abominable." I think I mispronounce the word, and I find I want to cry.
This gets her looking my way, but still calm, reserved, demure. "Darling, don't tell me you believe in all that rubbish."
My face is already turning red. She always does this. She always makes me feel young, inexperienced, a fool. Or maybe she just sees that that is what I really am. So much so, that now I know to feel stupid before the argument has even started.
Jane gets up to leave, as if I'm not here, tears brimming, I am frozen in the nicer armchair. As if the matter of her being right and me being silly is, as always, not even worth the debate.
She kisses my temple like I am a petulant child and makes for the kitchen, humming.
In the most violent act of rebellion I can muster, I bite my lip so it bleeds, and so when she kisses them later, she will have to kiss an ugly scab.
Later, when she loves me, in between loving me, she will give a better answer. "How can this be abominable? How can this be hated. Isn't it nice, my darling?"
I turn in her arms and face the bedside table. I look at the picture of her husband, and imagine I am him. He, the man who owns her, who rules her. I imagine cutting my hair short, and if he makes it back, killing him, and ordering Janie around the house. Only then, I would be taken seriously.
*
On my twentieth birthday, Jane gives me a ration ticket and a pearly button. I am so happy I could cry, but I nod and smile sweetly, I know she likes me like that.
I love Janie. I think I love her in the way I am to love a husband. I do not think I love her as a mother or a sister or a friend. She takes me by the chin and gets a good look at me, after the factory shift ends and most of the girls have scurried home to their letter sets. Janie is cold, but she melts me.
Janie loves me in such a measured way, and it feels like a performance, and I wonder when she gets the time to write her script.
While I feel I am on fire under her gaze, she conducts herself with surgical precision. On the way to the shops, I think about doing something drastic to get her attention. I imagine throwing myself off of the station platform. Now in God's choir, I finally get to see her love me messily, from heaven.
*
God answers my prayer, when I have a little accident at the factory. I'm in for twenty stitches and a brace. Slipping in and out of consciousness, I get to see Jane's mask slip. Her cold hand shakes as it clutches my limp one. I smile a little, and fall under again.
I heal well, Janie dotes on me. I move into her husband's house officially under the guise of needing help while my body heals. When tissue, bone, corded muscle has mended, I stay a little longer.
*
The war ends. In my selfish puppy love, I barely noticed. But I notice when Mr Barber returns. I don't know his name, Janie never cared to mention. He grabs her roughly and kisses her at the returning parade, and it makes me feel sick. I know, I hope, she hates it. I want Jane to seethe every time her lips are taken by someone other than me.
We catch eyes and she turns away, I do not exchange another word with her until four months after that moment. And when I do, I say "Excuse me", and push past.
*
Jane Barber doesn't look well. After the church committee meetings, she lingers, as if she wants to talk to me. She looks desperate. Isn't this what I wanted? To see her break with need for me?
I am so angry with her, for being married, for being mine and his, for holding my waist that day, for trying to talk to me now. I smile so politely that the skin on my cheeks aches with the stretch.
A man called Tony asks me to marry him, so that's what we do. I move in with his parents on the other side of the county, and they seem very nice.
I never see Jane again, and her image degrades into a blur within my mind. Besides, now I am a wife in more than just nickname.
When he goes to touch my hair I slap his hand away. Janie used to braid it, curl it, brush it. It's hers still. He gets me, my body, but Jane always loved my hair.