Sixty Blades of Grass by Elizabeth Millane

Author:Elizabeth Millane [Millane, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books

Chapter 24

Maxim and Bettina

Maxim

Bettina’s flat is more than just a place of respite for me. She has two boarders who share the attic room, and I often climb those creaking and cracking steps to their well carpeted lair. It is from there, with the help of these two young men, my radio specialists, that I talk to the Queen and get directions for the Resistance from her.

Bettina thinks I am only having a smoke with her boarders and am being considerate of her. She doesn’t like smoke. She doesn’t like cigarettes. I don’t know how she puts up with it in the beer halls.

She requires that I bathe when I enter her flat, a quick affair to get the tobacco off me, before meeting the boys. After I depart her quarters, she takes a bath and rinses the smoke out of her hair. If the Germans are jamming the radio frequencies, I return downstairs and offer to help her.

Sometimes I have a bit of soap to rub into her hair, and I thread my fingers through it, building the suds, massaging her scalp. She purrs with pleasure, and I am gratified to give her this bit of goodness.

To rinse the suds, I use a pitcher, pouring it out as the suds thread through to the ends of her hair and down into the bath water. She sits in the bath, her knees together, arms folded across her chest. When the water runs clear, she stands up, her breasts glistening, her belly dimpled with drops, her dripping bush, her lovely legs with rivulets running down from her thighs, over her knees and calves and ankles. She allows me to help her out of the tub, to stand and not slip on the floor. As I had done for my babies, my girls and my wife, I wrap her in a towel and hold her close until the water seeps through the cotton and begins to soak me.

These days it was, more and more, only cold water that she could bathe with as there was nothing to heat the water with. She would shiver but never forego her bath.

I devised a system where I wrap her in a thick towel and hold her neck at the edge of the tub and rinse her hair. I’d leave her alone then, to dry herself off, to take the remnants of her makeup away, to wring her hair and comb it.

The finest time of the day would start when she emerged in her wrapper, transformed from a barmaid into a luminous beauty, stripped of makeup and her costume, her face relaxed and thoughtful. Sitting across from each other in her tiny kitchen, we share a napkin full of food she’d pilfered from the restaurant. Food is so satisfying in that good woman’s kitchen. The boys join us and eat whatever we do not eat, waiting for our call from their attic lair.

We know they are hungry and always hold back something to share. We all

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