The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  He released his hold, and the body fell limp at his feet, twitching a little. “Christ!” he said quietly.

  He stood for a moment irresolute; then he stooped and felt the man’s face. He was still breathing, and the corporal straightened up. He had injured him more than he had meant to, and that was going to mean a bloody row. There were men a hundred yards up the street passing a dim lamp, walking away; they did not seem to have noticed anything. There was nobody else about, but in the near-by public house there were still lights, faint streaks that showed around the edge of the blackout.

  He crossed to the girl, standing in the middle of the road. “Come on,” he said. “We better get out of this. I hurt him bad.”

  She said, “Oh, Duggie! We’d better do something.”

  “Come on out of it,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  He hurried her away and up the New Cross Road until they found a telephone box. In the dim light of his torch he found the number of the Goat and Compasses, and rang them up. A girl’s voice answered him. “One o’ your customers fell down outside on the pavement,” he said. “He’s hurt himself, or something. You’d better go and see if he’s all right.” He slammed down the receiver before she could answer.

  In the close intimacy of the telephone box the girl stirred by his side. “That was ever so clever,” she said in admiration. “I’ve never have thought of that. You are a one.”

  He kissed her in the telephone box for a few minutes in the friendly darkness, the boilermaker all but forgotten. Then he took her home.

  That night Mr Seddon died in the Miller Hospital at Greenwich. Next day Corporal Brent rejoined his unit. Five days later he embarked for an unknown destination, which turned out to be North Africa. The law caught up with him two months later at a place called Blida, led to him by the unwilling evidence of Private Phyllis Styles. The police had a good deal of trouble with her before she would talk.

  He was taken under guard from Blida to Algiers, kept there for a week, and was then sent to England in a Hudson with several other prisoners, amongst them Captain Turner. In the hospital at Penzance he was the first on his feet. All he had suffered were a few flesh wounds from splinters of the same 20mm. shell that had disabled Turner, and a simple fracture of the right arm which he got in the crash landing. By that time Turner had been operated upon and lay inert, with his head swathed in bandages, able to think and understand, and to talk a very little, but with both eyes covered. He never saw Brent at all.

  The ward sister had been told by the surgeon that she must keep her patient interested, so she gave Corporal Brent a book called True Tales of Adventure and set him down to read to Turner for an hour. The corporal disliked reading aloud and did it very badly; moreover, the true tales were thin, watery stuff compared with the adventures that he had been through. Within five minutes his stumbling voice had flagged. He turned a couple of pages, and read a paragraph to himself.

  “I don’t think much o’ this book,” he remarked. “You like me to go on? I will if you say.”

  The swathed figure on the bed moved one hand weakly from side to side.

  “Okeydoke,” said the corporal. “I’ll ask sister if she’s got one with more ginger in it, next time she comes—girls and that. Maybe they’ll have a copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, or one o’ them. I could read you some o’ that,” he said hopefully.

  The figure on the bed elevated a thumb.

  Brent sat in silence for a minute. “When you get in bad With the police, ’n you get charged,” he said at last, “they give you someone to speak for you, don’t they? At the trial, I mean. Someone to take your side, who knows the ropes, like?”

  From the bed there came a whisper, “You get a lawyer given you, a barrister they call him. What you been doing, chum?”

  Confession eases things. Brent said, “I had a sort of fight with a chap, and he died. I didn’t mean to hurt him, not bad like that.” He hesitated, and then said, “They say it’s murder.”

  In the suburban garden the moon was bright. The night was very clear. “I never even see his face,” said Mr Turner, “but I got to know him well enough for all of that. I never heard what happened, or anything.” He paused. “I dunno. Maybe he got hung. But I don’t think they’d hang a chap for a thing like that, do you?”

  His wife stirred beside him. “I don’t know,” she said. “He killed the chap, from what you say.”

  “Oh, he killed him all right. No doubt of that.”

  “Well, if he did, they’d hang him, surely?” She thought for a moment. “If he got off—well then, he’ll be making a living somewhere, I suppose.”

  He said, “I dunno what he could do. The only thing he knew about was how to kill people—he knew plenty about that. He hadn’t got a trade, or anything. Labouring—I suppose he could do that.” He turned to her. “He was a nice chap,” he said, “and we was all there in a mess together.”

  She did not speak.

  “Like to hear about the other two?”

  She snuggled down into her rug, pulling it more closely around her. “Go on,” she said. “I never heard you talk about that time at all.”

  He thought of his own trial and prison sentence. “It’s not the sort of time one talks about,” said Mr Turner, “in the normal way.”

  Flying Officer Phillip Morgan of the R.A.F. was allowed to get up out of bed for the first time two days before Corporal Brent was removed from the ward and taken up to London to be charged. He should not have been put in a detention ward at all, and this fact was to him a permanent grievance. He was taken from the wreckage of the Hudson with a broken leg and three broken ribs and placed with the others in a small ward in the Penzance Hospital. When it became known that the other two survivors were prisoners, a guard was placed on the ward, but there was no other bed for Flying Officer Morgan, so he had to stay there. As an educational experience it was very good for him.

  He was twenty-two years old; his school and the R.A.F. had made him what he was. He had no other experience behind him; he was at a loss when faced with any problem for which he had not been trained at school or in the R.A.F. His father had been a bank manager in Kensington and had died when Phil was a boy; his mother was an invalid, and she and his sister lived in Ladbroke Square on the borders of the well-to-do part of London. He spent his holidays in that stultifying place and took no benefit from it. When war broke out, he joined the R.A.F. as an aircraftsman. In that service he developed a good deal; he was commissioned in the summer of 1940 and sent for training as a fighter pilot. By the spring of 1941 he was flying Spitfires operationally in England. He survived that tour of operations and did three months’ ground duty; in 1942 he did another tour in North Africa and won the D.F.C. After two tours on fighters he had a choice of occupation; he chose Transport Command, with some vague idea of fitting himself for a job in civil aviation after the war. It was in this capacity that he was flying as second pilot of the Hudson.

  He was a callow and ignorant young man, but he could fly an aeroplane very well indeed. He reached the coast of Cornwall on that summer afternoon at an altitude of seven hundred feet, and losing height rapidly with one engine stopped and the other gradually failing. Behind him in the cabin there were dead and dying men; in the seat beside him the captain of the aircraft sat slumped and dead, and falling forward now and then on to the wheel, so that Morgan had to struggle with the body with one hand and fly the aircraft with the other. Beside him flew two Spitfires of the flight that had put down his assailant; they flew with their hoods open, the pilots turned towards the crippled aircraft that they were escorting, powerless to help. And yet, their very presence helped. Phil Morgan was a Spitfire pilot first and last; he loved Spitfires, and their presence was a comfort to him in his difficulties.

  At the point where he crossed the coast the cliffs are nearly three hundred feet high; when he came over the fields he was not much more than four hundred feet above them. There were airstrips in the vicinity, but he had so litt
le altitude and he was losing height so fast that he did not dare to turn towards the nearest one; he knew that he would lose more height on a turn. He would be down in any case within a couple of minutes; he must land straight ahead of him within the next five miles. In that undulating country he had little choice of field; the one he chose was bordered by a stone wall at his end. It was only about two hundred yards long, nothing like long enough for a Hudson even in a belly landing, but the far boundary appeared to be a hedge and beyond that there was another field. The Hudson touched down belly on grass fifty yards before the hedge, which slowed her somewhat before hitting up against the stone wall that the hedge concealed. When Flying Officer Morgan woke up he was in hospital, and in the bed next to him was a Negro soldier of the U. S. forces. He took that as a personal affront.

  He poured out his troubles to Captain Turner when he came to see him for the first time. By that time Turner’s right eye was uncovered and he could see a little with it, though it was very bloodshot and the light hurt it if he kept it open long; for this reason the screen was still kept around his bed. Flying Officer Morgan could talk to Turner in the semblance of privacy; though he knew the Negro could hear every word he said, the screen made it private conversation.

  Almost his first words were about this urgent topic. After exchanging names, he said, “I say, old man, do you know there’s a bloody nigger in the ward with us here?”

  Motionless in his bed, Turner said, “I know. Brent told me. He’s here now, is he?”

  “He’s right in the next bed to me. I think it’s the bloody limit. I’m going to write a letter to the Air Ministry about the way that I’ve been treated here, and put it in through my CO.”

  “They looked after me all right,” said Mr Turner.

  Morgan said, “Well, I know, old man, but it’s a bit different for me.” He hesitated for an instant, and then said, “I mean, after all, there’s no reason why I should be kept under guard. I mean, it’s a bloody insult having a sentry on the door of your ward. And then to put us in a ward with other ranks—it’s a bit thick, even if they are crowded. We ought to be in an Officers’ Ward, we two. And then on top of everything to put a bloody nigger in with us; it’s too bad! I told the sister so, and the doctor too.”

  “What did they say?”

  “The doctor was bloody rude. Said this was a civilian hospital and we were all here on sufferance. Said if he heard any more about it he’d tell the R.A.F. they’d got to come and take me away, whether I was fit to move or not. I wish to God he would. That’s no way to look at it, is it?”

  “Bloody shame,” said Mr Turner mechanically. “What’s the nigger doing here, anyway? He wasn’t with us in the Hudson, was he?”

  “No—he’s stationed somewhere near here, with the American Army. Went into an air-raid shelter and cut his throat, just near the hospital here, because the Military Police were after him for something or other. Now he’s come out all over boils and carbuncles and things, and runs a temperature all the time. Septicaemia, or something. That’s what they say, but I think it’s V.D. All niggers have V.D. You want to watch out, old man—don’t you let them give you a cup or anything he’s used. The mugger oughtn’t to be in this ward at all. He ought to be in a lock hospital.”

  He paused, and then he said, “He offered me a paper the other day that he’d been reading and breathing all over. I soon put him in his place.”

  He, too, was set to read the True Tales of Adventure to Captain Turner and, like Corporal Brent, he found it heavy going. “I wish they’d let us have a copy of ‘The Aeroplane’ or ‘Flight,’” he said. “If we were in a proper R.A.F. hospital instead of this stinking hole we’d have all that, and probably the American ones as well.”

  He went into a long dissertation on the merits of the Spitfire versus the Mustang, which sent Captain Turner into a quiet doze. He had no conversation whatsoever beyond aeroplanes, except a queer hotchpotch of schoolboy prejudices. He referred to all foreigners as Dagoes, and deplored their moral habits with a frankness of speech that was novel to Mr Turner, who had not had the benefit of an English public school education. He affected superiority to these Dagoes on account of their low standards of life, and he affected superiority to the Americans because they made too much money. He thought money grubbing was frightfully bad form, never having had to grub for it himself. He was not a fool, but he was wholly undeveloped, and his commission in the R.A.F., which had conferred on him the status of an officer and a gentleman without much effort on his part, had bred in him a curious snobbishness. He was childlike in his ignorance of many things, and as pathetic as a child in his blunders.

  Once he said, “Are you married?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner. “I got married when the war broke out.”

  “I suppose you knew her before the war?”

  “Worked in the same office, we did,” said Mr Turner. “Then we started going out together, evenings, ’n after a bit we got married. October 1939, that was; just before I joined up.”

  “Really?” The boy stared at him in wonder. “It must have been funny working in the office with her.”

  “I dunno. It was darned distracting.”

  “Most people meet girls at a party, don’t they?” said the pilot. “That’s how I met Joyce. And what a party! At the Bull, in Stevenage, it was. We were all as blind as bloody bats.”

  “Are you married, then?” asked Mr Turner. The boy seemed so young.

  “I’m married,” he replied. “I got married just over a year ago, at the beginning of my second tour.” There was a faint tone of pride in his voice.

  “Fine,” said Mr Turner. “Got any kids yet?”

  “Oh no,” the boy said. “Joyce isn’t one of those. She’s got her work, you see. She’s on the stage. She’s awfully good, really.”

  Mr Turner said, “Got her photograph?”

  Morgan was very pleased. He went hobbling across the ward and fetched his wallet from the drawer of the bed table, and brought it back with him, and showed Mr Turner the photograph beneath a sheet of cellophane. Mr Turner took it in his hand and held it sideways to the light, and looked at it with his sound eye. It showed a very luscious and provocative young woman, with downcast eyes and long hair flowing around her bare shoulders.

  He gave it back to Morgan. “I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he said. “She’s perfectly lovely.”

  The boy was pleased. He took the photograph back and studied it himself. “She is, isn’t she?” he said. “She’s more beautiful than that, really—it doesn’t do her justice. Everybody goes mad about her.” He hesitated, and then said, “Of course, she’s been married before.”

  Mr Turner was amazed. “She has?” The girl seemed so young.

  Morgan nodded. “She was married to an awfully good friend of mine, Jack Stratton. He went for a Burton over France last year. Joyce was frightfully cut up about it, of course—it was terrible for her, poor kid. She was only twenty then, and she’s had an awfully rough deal in her life. Jack was a jolly good friend of mine, and we knew he’d want me to look after her, so we got married two months later before I went out to Egypt.”

  Captain Turner thought enviously that it was grand when duty to a friend turned out like that. “So you’re her second husband,” he said. “Well, I never!”

  The boy seemed a little confused. “Well, as a matter of fact, she was married before that,” he said. “I’m her third husband, really. She was married first of all to a chap in 73 Squadron who bought it when they were operating in France back in 1940. She’s had frightfully bad luck. It’s always the best people get the worst luck, isn’t it? I wonder why that is?”

  He was worried about an illegal package that he had concealed in the rear fuselage of the Hudson. “There’s a stowage rack for parachute flares up in the roof, just above the little hatch in the bulkhead, aft of the gun bay, right in the rear fuselage,” he said. “I put it there. But it’ll be gone by now. Some wretched Ack Emma will have got it. It�
��s too bad.”

  “What was it?”

  “Perfume that I got in Algiers, and some lipsticks, and powder, and four pairs of silk stockings, and some silk.” He hesitated, and then said, “With a girl like Joyce, you’ve got to treat them right, you know. I mean, she’s accustomed to pretty things, and she feels awful if she can’t get them. I mean, she can make herself look so stunning, she’s just got to have the things.” He brooded for a minute, and then said, “I wish I hadn’t told her I was bringing her some stuff. Now I’ve got nothing to bring.”

  “You’re bringing yourself back alive. That’s something.”

  “Oh—yes. But she wanted some Coty.”

  Turner learned that they had only lived together for a fortnight, in the Piccadilly Hotel, before he had been sent out to North Africa on his second tour. Since then they had been together for half-a-dozen week-ends only. “She’s got her work, you see.” Her work was playing the part of the chambermaid in “Smile Sweetly, Lady” at the Grafton Theatre. She had to speak three lines, smile, and exit into the bedroom.

  Flying Officer Morgan wrote a letter to her every day; a long letter, scribbled in pencil in an irregular, unformed hand. But he never seemed to get a reply. He talked about it once. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong or anything like that,” he said, “but she doesn’t like writing. It’s about three months since I got a letter from her. It’s just the way you’re made, you know. When she does write, they’re frightfully nice.” He showed Turner a little dog-eared sheaf of letters in his wallet, very few. “I carry them all around with me everywhere I go, and read them over and over again till they pretty well fall to pieces.” He examined his treasures. “I must get a bit of stamp paper for this one.”

  Turner asked once if she was coming down to see him at Penzance, but he said, “Oh, I don’t expect so. She’s got her work, you see. She couldn’t leave that, could she?”