Tuesday's War, page 19
I felt bad about the relief on his face. For him, I think, her going with those dead young men at the airfield was just about bearable . . . but if she had started to bring them home?
Fiver’s tea was strong, and without sugar – they’d blown their ration the week before, she said. She warmed her toes in front of the fire, I talked about cricket before the war, and Doug talked of the first job he’d laboured on – repairing the Byfleet banking at Brooklands. He’d even raced there himself, in club events. Even although there were only the two of them, by the time I slipped away before midnight I felt as if I had had a glimpse of something I hadn’t seen for months: something like a family.
I will admit to a slightly elevated pulse – as one of the RAF docs would say – when I saw Bushes’ car outside the hut on my return. But it wasn’t her. The Boss was sitting on the end of number eight in the dark. His head was resting on his chest, and he had taken his trousers off. You could have smelt the beer from him upwind forty yards away. I think that he was sweating it. He had an unhealthy pallor, but then, most drunks have, and I wasn’t then the expert I have since become. The building was chill. He ignored my arrival, or didn’t sense it, so the first thing I did was bank up the stove. When I walked back to him he stirred and muttered, ‘Where d’ye get all the coal?’
‘The same place you get the tyres for your banger, Boss. Them that asks no questions . . .’
‘Poetry. You must have gone to a good school.’ Then he coughed a deep and liquid cough: I wondered if the MO knew about that. Then I remembered that we’d just lost our doc.
‘I did.’ I told him, ‘Grammar grub. But it was wasted on me, wasn’t it – that’s what you think, anyway. Bloody hated it.’
I moved behind him, and turned the sheet and blankets back. For a moment I smelled Grace – expensive perfume, and sex.
The squadron leader asked, ‘What ye doing now?’
‘Putting you to bed, Boss; you’re as pissed as a fart.’
It was easy to topple him back, push him into the bed, and remove his tie: I didn’t want him to strangle himself in his sleep.
As I pulled the blankets over him he said, ‘Odd expression that. How does a fart get pissed? It just gets farted. Don’ go away: sit there for a moment.’ He gestured vaguely towards the next bed; Fergal’s, as it happens.
‘I’m fagged out, Boss, I want to get my head down.’
‘I wanna tell you something.’
‘OK. What is it, sir?’
‘It’s about the wonderful taste of fish. It’s something I found out.’ He had reached the running-one-word-into-the-other stage, and his eyes were already closed. I wondered how many pints of the watery ruin they were serving in the bar a man needed to drink to get as drunk as he was.
‘I went to a public school, you know: a cheap one, but a good one. All the juniors talked about sex all the time, an’ never got any of course. You listening to me?’
I nodded, but he would have gone on anyway.
‘. . . unless one of the seniors buggered you. There was this fat one called Carrington – got the MC last year; a sapper major would you believe? – I remember him telling me that if you licked fanny it tasted of fish. He was the first one to tell me that.’
‘I was told that when I was a kid, too.’
I lit a Players, and remembered the sweet tobacco smell in Fiver’s front room. Maybe it was time to take up a pipe. Some of the fathers of the squadron smoked them.
‘You don’t follow me, Bassett. The point is, that in my sort of school an awful lot of jacking off went on . . . and if it really made you blind, half the fucking men in the world would be blind by now, wouldn’t they? Well, I soon learned that if you didn’t wash yourself clean afterwards you began to smell. And what is more is that smell was distinctly fishy. You foller? I remembered that again today.’
‘That’s very profound, sir, but I really don’t need this.’
‘You still don’t understand, do you, ape? What that means is the next time you go down on a woman and she tastes of fish, all you’ll be doing is licking out what the man who was there just before you left behind him. See? This “girls taste like fish” crap is just something the women made up in order to get away with murder.’
‘Thank you for that, sir: but I told you; that’s something I didn’t need to know.’
‘You’re a cocky little snot, Bassett, but a handy sparks.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Then I stood up, and said, ‘Goodnight.’
‘G’night Sparks.’
I walked away from him to my own bed. I turned off the light, and undressed unsteadily in the glow of the stove. I’ve told you before that I didn’t like banking the stove: it reminded me each day of my mother and sister. I couldn’t help wondering what they were doing, even though I knew that they were dead. I’d never see them again. Or maybe I would.
Just before I closed my eyes Bushes said quite distinctly, ‘My wife, you know – her name’s Jennifer; sweet Jenny. She is sweet, but she tastes of fish lately.’
I said, ‘You don’t mean that, sir. It’s just the beer doing your thinking for you.’ It was ridiculous, but at that moment I felt older and wiser than him, and added, ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning.’
But we didn’t, because when I awoke he was gone, and the bed so neatly made that I wondered if I’d dreamed it.
Driving the little saloon was almost a restful experience, because driving it anything other than sedately would have been really stupid: with its high centre of gravity it would have overturned if cornered at more than about fifteen miles per hour. That’s why the battered jeep with two Americans in it caught me up so quickly on the run through the trees to Crifton. One of them fired a pistol in the air to attract my attention – at first I thought that they had had a blowout. I stopped, and they pulled in behind. Maybe it was a stick-up.
When the passenger walked forward to me I said, ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me to throw down the money box, and stick up my hands. Sorry to disappoint.’
‘What?’ Then he grinned. ‘Oh. I get that. Stagecoach. Sorry. We couldn’t get past because the road is so narrow, and couldn’t think of another way to signal you – there’s no horn on that thing.’
I held my hand out to him. ‘Charlie Bassett: I’m on Lancs at Bawne. This is my week for meeting Yanks.’
‘I’m Harold Manley, and the stiff driving me is July Johnson. We’re from Thurleigh.’
‘I know a couple of guys from Thurleigh. Dave Thomsett, and a pilot called Peter Wynn. Do you know them?’
Manley groaned, and rubbed his hand over his face. Sackcloth and ashes.
‘Shit. You know Bandit and the Major. You won’t tell them about the shot, will you?
‘Not if you ever get round to telling me why you wanted me to stop in the first place.’
‘OK,’ he said. Then he called back over his shoulder to the jeep. ‘Come ’ere July, an’ hide your fucking piece: this Limey knows the Major.’
They were both navigators from the 306th, and one of their good pals, another nav, had flown into the Long Ride at Crifton in the B-17 which had never come out again. They wanted to know if they’d get permission to see the spot their friend had fried in. The thought of them putting the same question to a frosty Grace stopped me. I got them to park up alongside the cavernous coach house, and agree not to leave their jeep unless I called them forward. I did something right for a change. Grace had come out to greet me, but stopped as soon as she saw the Americans. She was wearing riding pants, a crisp white blouse and an expression which would have dropped an elephant at a hundred paces.
‘They knew the navigator on your B-17,’ I told her, ‘and they just want to see where their pal died. They were driving down to ask permission.’
‘Just tell them yes, and get rid of them.’
‘Do you want to meet them?’
As I turned away she touched my arm and added, ‘Tell them to come back when they’ve finished. For a glass of lemonade, or something.’
I nodded. ‘OK . . . and Grace?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve never looked lovelier.’ I blurted out exactly what I meant. Grace blushed. Bullseye.
She looked up at the crisp blue sky momentarily, then back at me. ‘It’s really autumn,’ she said.
‘“No spring, no summer beauty hath such Grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face.” It is Donne this time.’
‘You will have to stop doing that, Charlie.’
‘Can I stay? If I don’t, they may make me fly.’
‘Stupid. Your bed’s been made up since yesterday.’
They had put a hefty table, with a two-inch marble slab on top, and four heavy old chairs in the stone basement room where I had challenged Grease with his mountains of murdered birds. The room was clean and cool. Mrs Barnes had taken to her bed (‘with an indisposition’ Mr Barnes told us). Consequently one Mrs Coates would serve tea.
‘I take it that Mrs Coates is of the same vintage as he is?’ I asked.
‘No, she’s about twenty years younger than the Barneses . . . say, about fifty. And frisky. Tim came across her with someone in the woods off the Long Ride once.’
‘Who’s Tim?’
She walked away and looked upwards through the long narrow window above our heads. From that angle there was nothing to be seen except sky. Grace gave me the significant pause before she replied, ‘He was co-piloting the B-17 which made the hole those two boys have gone out to see.’
When we heard the high-revving jeep engine Grace asked me to pull hard on an iron hand grip attached to a wire which hung down alongside the door.
‘I take it that I’ve just rung for tea?’ I said to her.
‘Yes, you have. Don’t blush, and don’t think of it as an imperative. You’ve just tipped off Coates when to serve. You’ve saved her a trip: if you hadn’t done that, she would have had to come all the way down here to ask us, return to the kitchens, and then come down here again with the tea. You don’t understand because you weren’t born to service.’
‘You’re definitely not a socialist then?’
‘Nor a prig like you, Charlie Bassett, if that’s what you mean. The only difference between socialists, Liberals and Tories, is that Tories are more likely to stick it up the wrong hole when they’re pissed.’
‘I wish I had your experience of life, Grace.’
Her face fell. ‘No you don’t. Really you don’t.’
She put the bounce back as the two Americans walked in, followed by Barnes, who was serving our tea himself. Perhaps Mrs Coates was having a little lie down. The man named July Johnson looked less at ease than the other, Manley. He didn’t meet Grace’s eye as he spoke to her. ‘Hi, Miss Grace. You won’t remember me.’
‘Yes I will. You’re July Johnson’ – she put the stress on the first syllable of July. ‘You flew with Tim a few times when Roger Graham was sick.’
The boy looked sick with embarrassment. He ducked his head.
‘Do you still carry that damned pistol everywhere with you?’ Grace asked him.
He grinned back. Looking at her this time. Then a shadow passed, and he said, ‘I’m sorry . . . we’re all sorry about what happened to Good Golly . . .’
‘That was Tim’s plane,’ Grace explained for my benefit.
Johnson ploughed on as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘but I’m not going to stand here in front of you and pretend that it wasn’t anything other than plain stupid. Stupid flying.’
I gave Manley a brief warning glance and waited for Grace to explode. The thing about Grace is that she has this infinite capacity to surprise: she moved quickly to Johnson’s side, laid a hand on his arm, and spoke very gently to him. ‘It’s all right, July. I know. It was stupid flying, but they’re all gone now, and now we have got to get on with it. Tim would be pleased to think of you and Harold here; making sure I’m OK.’
‘Yeah; he’d say that was nice.’
Grace said, ‘Are you two ready for tea and a sandwich now? Charlie and I are starving.’
Johnson said, ‘Am I just! Sitting down to tea with the daughter of a Sir, in an ancient English country pile: who’s gonna believe this back home?’
Later that evening Grace and I ate our supper in the kitchen. This made Barnes uncomfortable, but Mrs Barnes bustled around us like a mother hen with her two favourite chicks. She was a heavily built lady who chuckled a lot. I smelled 8711, and the stale wine on her breath, as she bent over me to serve a thick brown spicy soup, which was followed by a cold cut of lamb, heavy with fat, and small, sweet golden potatoes and a steep hill of cabbage. The cabbage tasted so good that it must have still been in the ground that morning. Barnes unbent enough to agree to himself and Mrs Barnes joining us at the table for a mug of tea, and a glass of whisky: Mrs Barnes would have killed him if he had refused. Barnes had laid a fire in the grate in the library, which is where we finished the evening.
At some point I confessed. I told Grace, ‘I fall in and out of love with you every few days. I’m just like a yo-yo.’
‘I know. The trouble is that we aren’t synchronized. You’re on the way down, as I’m moving up. When you’re in love with me I can hardly stand the sight of you: I can’t bear being fussed over. Then as soon as you’ve gone I’m so desperately unhappy. I simply can’t wait until I see you again.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Sometimes I love them too. Do you mind?’
‘Not awfully. It’s a bloody strange war, if it does this sort of thing to you, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What about tonight?’
‘Would you mind terribly if we didn’t, Charlie? It’s not terribly convenient.’
‘I can always ask Mrs Coates.’
Next day Barnes woke me with tea and a wad.
‘Excuse me, sir. There’s a gentleman to see you. Miss Grace asked me to call you, but she said you weren’t to hurry,’ he said.
‘I heard a woman singing: before I went to sleep.’
‘I don’t doubt it, sir. But there’s no one living in this wing now – apart from yourself. Might you have been dreaming?’
‘I might,’ I told him, but I didn’t believe it.
Grace and Bushes were sitting opposite each other in leather chairs in what Barnes had called the smoking room. It was probably because the fireplace smoked. Bushes was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket over service trousers, shirt and tie: he looked too tired to get up, and didn’t. I had automatically stiffened to attention in spite of my natural inclination, and my civvy clothes. Grace was wearing a silk, pink, slinky thing, with a sash tie, which slid over her figure like liquid. She was giving him oodles of leg.
Bushes said, ‘Morning, Bassett. Sorry to break into your leave, but two types in long coats have been stooging around asking for your bloody tail gunner. That Polish pig. Our honourable receiver of stolen property.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Won’t say, but they have ID cards which claim Ministry of Works, and have large open numbers stamped on the face of them, like bus tickets. One of them’s one of us, and the other’s another bloody Pole I think. Don’t believe a bloody word of it, because they’re bloody policemen of some sort, of course.’
‘What do they want?’
‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell the wingco either, so he had them booted off the patch. That is quite literally; but I’m sure that they’ll be back with all the right papers.’
‘Did they search the hut?’
‘Funny thing that. Nobody seemed to remember where Paluchowski was billeted.’ That made me smile. ‘I thought that if you had a telephone number for the Pole you could give him a bell, find out what it’s all about – that sort of thing.’
‘I’m sorry: Pete never leaves me a contact number when he’s away.’
‘Course not. Just a passing thought.’
‘Thank you, sir. Tuesday will appreciate it. What did you have for Miss Baker, or is that private?’
Cab Calloway was belting out ‘The Mermaid Song’ on the radio. Grace stretched out a hand at waist level, and studied her fingernails. She said, ‘Conny’s told me that I won’t be flying any Lancasters for a while. They’re going to deliver the last five in a oner; this week, while I’m away. And he’s apologized for having me grounded.’
‘Grounded, sir?’
‘Yes although it was a bit of a mistake actually. She was flying that ruddy Spit which almost wiped my nose last week. I complained to the War House – they found out that it was an ATA delivery flight: my bad luck was that it was Grace who was flying it. Back to some OTU.’
‘Bravo, Grace. Bravo, sir.’
Bushes squirmed in his chair: he had never looked comfortable in it anyway. ‘Don’t worry: I’ll fix it,’ he said.
Grace said, with a captivating little smile which put the world right, ‘Don’t you worry, too. I already knew, and it’s already fixed; the grounding’s only for eight weeks. I’ve been ATA flying without a proper gap since 1941, so they’ve sent me off on eight weeks compulsory leave. I’m sure that I’ll be back in the sky after that.’ Then Grace told him, ‘Now you’re here, you’ll stay for breakfast, even if you’ve already eaten. Charlie and I are starving.’ That was the second time she had told someone how well she was feeding me.
Afterwards we walked the Boss to the front door, and saw him into his grotesque little tin box. Grace was being a good hostess, whilst I just wanted to see him off the premises. I followed her up the wide dark wood staircase to her room, feeling that I was climbing through history. Her bed was an enormous four poster with black wood posts polished by a thousand hands. It had rich, green brocade drapes.
‘I wish I could have seen his face!’ she said.
‘When?’
‘When I flew the Spit underneath him, and popped up in front. I bet he had to stand on his pedals. Hasn’t much of a sense of humour, has he?’
