A Fragile Peace

  She turned, smiling.

  ‘There’s a fella outside looking for you. It is Allie Jordan, isn’t it?’

  Happiness lifted. Buzz. It had to be Buzz. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Through the doors. In the foyer.’ The young mechanic opened his mouth as if to add something, then thought better of it. Allie did not notice. ‘Thanks a lot.’ She was away, squeezing through the crowds, pushing her way to the doors, her face alight with expectation. Buzz! Trust him to – the doors swung closed behind her, shutting off sound. The air in the gaudily carpeted, rose-lit foyer was cooler. A slight figure in RAF uniform stood with his back to her. She could see his face in the tall, pink-tinted mirrors which lined the room.

  Tom Robinson.

  She halted, stood stock-still. He saw her in the mirror and turned. His face, that hard, impassive face, was the very picture of pain.

  Allie’s heart was beating, suddenly and sickly, in her throat. She could not – quite simply could not – move. Behind her, faintly, the band started up again: ‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby…’

  Tom looked at her for a fraction of a second with pale, exhausted eyes. Then he moved quickly to her.

  ‘It’s Richard,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What? Crashed? Lost?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what? What?’

  The muscles of his dark face were iron-bound and throbbing. ‘A car crash. This afternoon. It’s bad. Your parents and Libby are on their way to him. I offered to come to tell you. I didn’t want you to hear—’ He stopped.

  She stared at him. ‘A – a car crash? Oh, no.’ She shook her head, dazedly, rejecting the thought, trembling with shock. ‘Oh, no. That’s – that’s ridiculous—’ She spun on him. ‘Why didn’t you telephone? I could have been on my way…’

  He shook his head. ‘I said it’s bad, and it is. But not that bad. His life isn’t in danger—’

  ‘Then – what?’ She watched him, waiting, her breath a choking constriction in her throat.

  ‘It’s his eyes.’

  She made a curious, gasping sound and put a hand to her mouth.

  ‘They’re working to save the sight of one eye,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘The other…’ He shook his head.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ She turned away from him and clung for a moment to the back of a chair. The doors to the dance hall swung open and a couple, hand in hand and laughing, came through them. They cast curious looks in Allie’s direction as they passed, then, their voices lifting again in laughter, they clattered down the stairs and were gone.

  A quiet touch on her shoulder steadied her trembling. ‘I’ve a car outside. I can take you back to Hawkinge if you’d like. They’re going to telephone. From the hospital. As soon as there’s any news.’

  She nodded, dazedly. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ She looked around her vaguely. ‘I need my bag. In there.’ She jerked her head towards the doors. ‘And Sue. I’ll have to tell Sue.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  His hand firmly under her elbow, he guided her through the streamer-tangled, boisterous crowds to where Sue, perched upon a table, was holding laughing court. Allie hardly heard Tom’s brief explanation, hardly took in the concern on Sue’s face. Nervelessly she took the bag that Tom proffered, allowed him to steer her back through the foyer and down the stairs into the street. Once settled in the car, however, her trembling eased a little and her mind began to function again. As they nosed their way through the dim-lit, deserted streets, she glanced at the man beside her. He was staring straight ahead, his profile shadowed. Across the water the enemy guns had started up.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Wait.’ They had left the town. In the faint light from the shaded headlights a small lane wound upwards to the right. Suddenly and unexpectedly Tom swung the wheel and the car was swallowed in the hedge-shadows, nosing upwards towards the downs.

  ‘Where are you going? Tom!’

  ‘Just for a moment. There’s something I have to tell you.’ His voice, she had noticed before, had lost its normal, disciplined lightness. It was raw. Painful. The car rolled to a stop where the ground levelled off at the top of the hill. As the engine died, Tom turned out the lights and for a moment they sat in utter stillness looking out at the strange, darkling landscape, with the sky frost-bright above them and the firefly flicker of guns on the horizon. Tom sat quite still, staring ahead, his hands still on the steering wheel.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘They’ll say he was drunk.’ The words were even. ‘He was acting drunk.’ He took one hand from the wheel and rubbed his forehead with long fingers. Allie could hear his breathing, quick and shallow.

  ‘Acting drunk? What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that.’ He paused for an interminable moment. ‘Allie, I’m sorry. I have to tell you. You were right; someone has to know. Someone he can turn to. Someone he can trust.’

  She was feeling sick again. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’d been spending a few days’ leave in Suffolk with Richard – staying in a pub near where he’s stationed. There are a couple of girls up there…’ He shrugged in the darkness, left the sentence unfinished. ‘Richard and his crew took a hammering last night. The squadron was shot to pieces. Four planes down and a lot of the others badly damaged, including Richard’s. Pretty bloody. They’d scrambled home somehow, God only knows how. The gunner died in Richard’s arms, somewhere over the Channel.’

  The car was deathly quiet. Allie squeezed her eyes shut for a split second.

  ‘Anyway, this lunchtime, we really hung one on – a dozen or so of us. Except Richard.’

  ‘But—?’

  ‘He wasn’t drinking. I noticed it particularly. You forget how well I know him. He was getting them in, paying his whack, but he wasn’t drinking. He just sat there, very quietly. Too quietly.’ Tom’s words were still spaced and even but in his voice trembled something that crept in an awful way along Allie’s nerves. ‘After closing time we took a bottle up to my room. Boozed a bit, talked a bit, started up a card school. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, Richard started to act like an absolute idiot. Horsing about. Singing silly songs. Talking too loudly. As if he were drunk.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  ‘No. I’d stake my life on it. Then the next thing I knew, he’d gone. He was calling to us from outside, in the car park. Playing the fool. Trying his keys in everyone’s car. I shouted to him. He pretended not to hear me – but I noticed that he then went straight to his own car and opened the door. Then he looked up. Waved.’ The guns had fallen silent. The starlit night lapped the car in peaceful waves of darkness. ‘He waved,’ said Tom again, with difficulty, ‘stood for a minute like that, looking up at me. Then he got in his car and roared off as if all the fiends of hell were behind him.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I followed him. On a motorbike belonging to one of the other lads. I saw it happen. He drove into a tree. Deliberately.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was harsh. He turned and grabbed her hands in a hurtful grip. ‘Yes, I tell you – I saw it. It was no accident.’

  ‘But why? And why pretend…?’

  ‘Who the hell knows what was going on in his mind? He probably didn’t know himself. Perhaps he thought it’d make it easier for everyone else – God knows…’

  She could feel his violent trembling through his hands, and even in her own pain she could not bear the depth of his. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ He almost flung her hands from him, turned away from her. ‘Wasn’t it?’ Shockingly, she could hear the tears in his voice that he refused to shed. Uncalled, her own words to him about Richard rose in her mind: ‘I just hope you’re right,’ she had said. And the odd, uncertain flicker in his eyes as he had answered: ‘You think I don’t?’

  He had been wrong.

  ‘You think he tried to kill hi
mself?’ The words were curiously detached.

  ‘I don’t know. I think that all he knew was that he had to stop it somehow. That he couldn’t fly again. Couldn’t go through it all again. And he couldn’t see any way out. I should have seen. I should have stopped him.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if anyone could have done that.’

  He bowed his head to his clenched hands on the steering wheel. Tentatively she touched his shoulder. The fierce tension of his body rejected the gesture. She took her hand away. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

  That surprised him. He lifted his head. ‘I wasn’t going to. Right to the last minute I wasn’t going to. But he has to live with it. You see that, don’t you? And you may be able to help.’ The words were a flat admission of culpability, and they both knew it. He flicked his head in the gesture that she remembered well. The dark hair flew up and away from his forehead. ‘We’d better get back to camp. There may be news.’

  There was. Richard had suffered a broken leg, an arm fractured in several places and three cracked ribs. He had lost the sight of one eye, and was about to undergo an operation to save the sight of the other. His war, at last, was over.

  * * *

  Between that Christmas and the New Year, the City of London burned as it never had before. The intense incendiary raids of the twenty-ninth of December left the massive dome of St Paul’s marooned in a sea of flame-shot smoke, making a picture that Londoners were never to forget, and only a miracle saved the great cathedral itself from destruction. The commercial area of the city had been deserted because of the holiday, and too late it was realized that threatened areas must not be left unwatched and undermanned. Through simple lack of manpower, none of the hard-won experience of the city’s defenders could help London on that night, and the City was devastated. To the Jordans, however, the fiery destruction, awful as it was, was only background to a battle of their own. Richard lay quiet as death in his hospital bed, rarely moving, rarely speaking, docile and despairing. It was as though the bandages that still covered his damaged eyes were the outward sign of a total spiritual withdrawal: from the world, from life, from all who loved him. Myra spent every possible moment at his bedside, and the others came and went as and when they could. Richard thanked them for coming, politely and passively, and lay like a corpse, while in desperation they conversed around him.

  ‘Poor young man,’ said an elderly and well-intentioned nurse to Myra, within earshot of the still figure in the narrow bed. ‘It takes some of them like this, when they realize they’ll never fly again. Knowing that their friends are still up there, doing their bit without them. They’re so dedicated, these young men of ours…’ She did not see the painful twitch of Richard’s mouth as he turned his head away.

  A fortnight after the accident Richard was transferred to a hospital just outside London and it became, from a practical point of view, marginally easier for the family to reach him. But for all of them, the visits became more rather than less difficult as Richard quietly and obdurately refused to recover. Libby, for one, at last flatly refused to visit him alone, and often towed along a reluctant Peter or an, at first, even more reluctant Celia with her. Allie, burdened by the truth – which she mentioned to no one – made the trip to the hospital as often as she could, held her brother’s hand and racked her brains, uselessly, for a way to help him. She of all of them knew, or guessed, the torture for Richard of being in a hospital that was almost entirely full of airmen who had received their injuries in combat, and who were remarkably cheerful. Richard was the only one not to share in the warmth and camaraderie with which these young men supported themselves and each other. On the day that, the operation having been successful, the bandages were removed from his right eye and he saw for the first time faint movement and colour, he turned his head from the light and stared at the blank wall. He was no trouble to anyone. He moved from bed to wheelchair and back again, obediently, as instructed, ignoring all friendly overtures from staff and patients alike, suffering his family’s determined visits with dogged forbearance, living in solitary confinement within that very worst of prisons, his own mind.

  Allie had been on duty throughout the Christmas period, though in fact, under the circumstances, this had not been the misfortune it otherwise might have been, since with Richard still desperately ill, none of the planned family celebrations had taken place anyway. She did manage to have Christmas dinner with the Jessups, who kindly adapted their timetable to suit her, serving the precious roasted chicken at the slightly odd hour of four-thirty in the afternoon. She met the Jessups’ son, Alfred, Stan’s father, for the first time that day, and liked him as much as she liked the rest of his family. He was a big, slow-speaking man very like his father but with Rose’s warm smile and placid temper. He had been out of work for nearly five years before the war had started, and his wife had died from tuberculosis during that time; only his parents’ labour and help had kept him and his son together and in decent comfort and health. Now, however, he confided to Allie, he had high hopes that after the war, with the trade of motor mechanic that he had acquired in the army, things would be better.

  Charlie Jessup shook his head. ‘Don’t bank on it, lad. What will have changed? We might beat the Jerries, but we’ll not beat the Tories. Don’t think it.’

  Allie looked at him in surprise. She had never heard Charlie offer an opinion of even the faintest political nature before and had assumed that he, like so many others, held the scornful view that life was life and politics were politics and no good ever came of mixing the two. He rolled a careful, wispy cigarette, pinched off the ends of the tobacco and stowed them in his pouch, then looked up to find Allie’s eyes upon him.

  ‘Do you really think the war won’t change anything?’ she asked.

  ‘The last one didn’t.’ Peaceably he lit the limp cigarette, half-closing his eyes against the drift of pungent smoke. ‘Don’t see any reason why this one should be any different, do you?’

  ‘But we’ve Labour politicians in the government now. Don’t you think that’ll make a difference? Don’t you think they’ll do something?’

  His eyes twinkled through the wreathing smoke. ‘Oh, I daresay. They’ll do something all right. They’ll see which side their bread’s buttered and jump on the same bandwagon as everyone else. They’d be daft not to. But they won’t do a lot for the common or garden working folk, you mark my words.’ And with this faintly scurrilous pronouncement, he reached for another cup of tea.

  ‘Now, Charlie!’ scolded Rose from behind her knitting. ‘You just watch what you say. Allie doesn’t want to listen to your nonsense.’ And Allie was assaulted by the strong suspicion that Charlie’s slightly cynical political views had been until now restrained in deference to her and her family connections.

  * * *

  Allie did contrive, after her operational Christmas, to get to London for the New Year, which she spent at Rampton Court with Libby. Buzz came up from Biggin Hill for the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Libby’s birthday, and elicited absolute approval from the astonished Libby.

  ‘You wretched dark horse!’ she hissed at Allie in the kitchen. ‘He’s adorable! And what’s all this about your going off together?’

  ‘We aren’t going off together. We’re going away for a few days. To Northamptonshire. At the beginning of February, God, Goering and the RAF willing.’

  Libby curved suggestive eyebrows.

  Allie blushed. ‘You’re impossible, you know that? It’s all very proper. We’re staying in a pub that I think is owned by some old friends of his.’

  Her sister’s smile did not change. Allie refused to be drawn further. ‘And, incidentally, I’ve a bone to pick with you. Why didn’t you warn me that Peter was coming this afternoon? It could have been embarrassing…’

  ‘Peter? Embarrassing? Oh, don’t be silly, darling, Peter couldn’t embarrass a fly. It didn’t occur to me to mention it, that’s all. And since Celia insisted on bringing that awful Stanton to our little tea
party – or perhaps it was she who insisted on coming, I wouldn’t put it past her – I thought we needed the extra man to balance things up a bit. Peter’s a dear. Here – make yourself useful, butter the bread, would you? Or, to be more exact, scrape the margarine on and off again. Ugh! Detestable stuff. I couldn’t say no to Cele,’ she added, after a moment. ‘She’s been so good, coming with me to visit Richard, and everything…’ There was that moment’s odd, awkward silence that often now seemed to follow the mention of Richard’s name.

  After a second, Allie asked, ‘Will it be all right if I stay the night? Buzz has to get back, but I don’t – not till tomorrow.’

  Her sister looked at her, bread knife poised. ‘You aren’t going back to Kensington with Dad? He’s on his own with Mother away.’

  The battle had already been fought and lost. Despite her good resolutions at Ashdown, the sight of Celia and her father in the same room had reawakened old hurts, and she had found herself unable to contemplate even the thought of time alone with her father. Not yet, she told herself, not just yet. And hated herself for it. She ducked her head, brushed the hair from her eyes. ‘I’d rather stay here, if you don’t mind. I have to leave pretty early in the morning and the trip’s easier from here.’

  Libby surveyed her for a moment, frowning. ‘Well of course, if you like. But—’

  ‘The kettle’s boiling,’ Allie said abruptly, and applied herself single-mindedly to the sandwiches.

  When they returned to the drawing room with the food, a good-tempered discussion was in progress as to the effectiveness of a Free French army that seemed more intent upon fighting within itself in the pubs and clubs of London than anything else.

  ‘…the problem is that de Gaulle won’t accept that anyone but he can represent Free France, and he and Churchill hate each other’s guts.’