by William Boyd
“Smith! I say, come and have a look.”
Reluctantly Temple returned to the aeroplane, now being fussed over by mechanics. Wheech-Browning stood by the side of a very young, blond-haired pilot who looked, to Temple’s eyes, to be about twelve years old.
“Do you know flying officer Drewes? He’s going to fly me over to Salaita. See what Jerry’s up to. Good idea, yes?”
Temple thought. “Say, could you fly over to Smithville? It’s not far. You could—”
“Sorry, old boy,” Wheech-Browning smiled. “Fuel problems. That’s right, Drewes, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you what, I’ll have a squint through the old binocs. See if the place is still standing.” Wheech-Browning tapped the stretched canvas side of the aeroplane. “Amazing machines. Wonderful sensation when you’re up in the sky. Feel like a god. You should try it, Smith.”
“You’ve been up before?” Temple asked.
“Who me? No, No. First time for everything, eh Drewes? No, I read about it in some magazine. Drewes here was going up on a flight so I asked if he’d take—”
There was a farting sound as a mechanic swung the wooden propeller and the engine caught. The aeroplane began to shake and shudder.
“All aboard the Skylark,” piped Drewes in a high voice.
Wheech-Browning pushed his goggled face up to Temple’s. “See Mulberry?” he bellowed above the noise. Temple nodded. “Jolly good,” Wheech-Browning shouted. “He seemed in a bit of a wax about this customs duty business.” It never ceased to astonish Temple how Wheech-Browning failed to see that the customs-duty business might jeopardize their ‘friendship’.
Wheech-Browning gave him a thumbs up sign, pulled his cap down and clambered with difficulty into the small observer’s cockpit behind the pilot. Drewes revved up the engine, throwing up a towering plume of dust behind the aeroplane. Two mechanics at either wing tip pushed and heaved the plane into position for take off.
Temple suppressed his irritation at the news of Mulberry’s ‘wax’ and moved to a sheltered position at the side of a hangar where he could get a good view without being blinded by dust. He saw Drewes look at the limp windsock, then he saw Wheech-Browning stand up in his seat, lick his forefinger and attempt to hold it above the propeller’s back draught. Some decision must have been reached because the biplane then moved very slowly over the uneven ground to the other end of the runway. Wheech-Browning leapt out of his seat, grabbed a wing and dug his heels into the ground to allow Drewes some purchase to pivot the plane round so it was facing the way it had come.
Wheech-Browning resumed his seat in the cockpit and the tinny note of the engine grew angrier as it was accelerated. Then the plane began to run forward, imperceptibly picking up speed, dust billowing behind it, the tail skid kicking up stones and gravel. As it passed the hangars, Temple saw Wheech-Browning give a cheery wave. Suddenly the tail lifted, and with a bump or two the little plane was in the air, three feet, six feet, twenty feet. It climbed with agonizing slowness.
“Too hot,” somebody said in the watching group. “It’s too hot today. They’ll never get up.”
As if in response to his words the plane began to descend, even though the engine seemed to be straining harder. Ten feet, eight feet, two feet. There was a cloud of dust as the trolley undercarriage hit the ground.
“Told you,” the knowledgeable voice said. “They’ll have to wait till the evening.” Nobody seemed concerned.
“Oh my Christ,” someone gasped. “The gully!”
The aeroplane sped merrily along the ground, the tail cheekily lifted until it seemed suddenly to stand on its nose and plunge beneath the level of the earth. There was a crumpling sound, as of a flimsy chair giving way. For an instant the tail plane pointed vertically in the air, then it slowly keeled over.
Temple and the others sprinted over towards the site of the crash, coughing and choking as they ran through the clouds of dust that hung in the air. Because of his girth Temple was soon outpaced by the others. By the time he arrived Drewes’ broken body had already been lifted from the splintered and torn remains of the aircraft, and he had been lain on the floor of the gully. Wheech-Browning, Temple assumed, must be trapped in the mangled wreckage. It served the stupid bastard right! Temple swore. The damned fool. But then he saw a plimsolled foot stamp its way through the canvas side of the fuselage. Willing hands soon tore a larger gap and Wheech-Browning slithered and eeled his long frame out onto the ground. His cap was missing but he still wore his goggles, one lens starred crazily where the glaze had been shattered. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his face from a cut.
“Good God,” he said. “That was hairy. Forgot about the damned gully. Thought we’d made it.”
“Are you all right?” Temple asked.
Wheech-Browning gave an experimental wriggle, as if a cold penny had been dropped down his back. “No bones broken,” he said. “Bit wobbly though. Drewes kept shouting something about it being too hot. How is he, anyway?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh.” Wheech-Browning took off his goggles and rubbed his eyes. “Oh dear. I am sorry. Great shame.” He looked directly at Temple. “What is it about us, Smith?” he said, with a kind of mystified sadness. “Every time you and I get near a machine it seems some poor so-and-so dies.”
Temple looked at him in blank amazement. He was too astonished to reply.
Chapter 13
10 December 1915,
The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
Charis watched Felix swing himself to the side of the bed. The pale expanse of his pyjama jacket glowed in the dark room. She felt the bed vibrate as he shivered. She reached out and pressed the palm of her left hand against his back.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Sorry.” He leant back and kissed her on the cheek. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.” She heard him fumbling for his glasses on the bedside table.
“It’s early,” he said. “Just gone six.” He stood up and put on his dressing gown. He smiled at her. “It’s hardly worth going back to sleep, is it? We have to be at the station in a couple of hours. I’ll just be a minute.” He left the room.
Charis got out of bed and walked over to the window. A pale silvery light shone on the boring winter fields in the distance. Tasteless colours, she thought. Dark brown and green. Like the chocolate sauce and pistachio ice-cream she and Gabriel had one afternoon in Trouville. She noted, with mixed feelings, that the thought of Gabriel made her feel as guilty as ever. She wasn’t any more accustomed to betrayal. Was that good or bad? She tried a hard, grim smile but it felt affected and wrong for her, like too much red lip-salve. She rubbed her arms through her night dress, beginning to sense the chill in the hotel room. She crouched before the ashy fire and poked at the remains of the charred logs with the fire tongs. No embers left.
She went to the dressing table and took some things from her Gladstone bag and placed them on the top. A saucer, a small bottle with a clear liquid inside it, and a tiny piece of sponge—slightly larger than a lump of sugar—to which an eighteen inch length of cotton thread was securely tied.
With a little grunt she lifted up the ewer of water from its basin and splashed a few drops in the saucer. Then she added a little fluid from the bottle. She mixed the two together with her finger, wishing the water was warm. Then she dipped the sponge in the solution, letting it soak there for a while.
She pulled up her night dress and put one foot on the chair, then, wincing from the cold, she pushed the little piece of sponge into her vagina as far as it would go. The thread dangled between her thighs. Felix, she was sure, had never noticed it in the eight times their ‘bodies had mingled’ since that first evening in August.
She replaced the saucer and bottle in her bag and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Aunt Bedelia with her little handbooks and pamphlets and their commonsensical advice. Did Felix ever think of taking precautions, she wondered? Was it something that ever crossed
his mind? Did he ever wonder what would happen if—?
But this train of thought made her feel suddenly weak—almost faint—at the risks they were taking. She shut her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose. Why was she so weak? Why couldn’t she obey the dictates of her reason? She saw everything with utter clarity and understood with no ambiguity the absolute wrongness of what she was doing. That should have been sufficient, she told herself. If these things were so evident, self-restraint should be automatic. But even as she ran through the catalogue of her sins, in her mind some perverse illogic exerted a more powerful impulse. The answer was simple. She wasn’t deluded, she wasn’t out of control: in some sort of way she must want to do what she did.
“The flesh is weak,” she said to herself, in partial expiation. As if to prove her point she slipped off her night dress and stood naked in the cold room for an instant. She felt her body break out in goosepimples. Glancing down she saw her nipples redden and pucker.
“Brrrr!” she exclaimed and jumped into the still warm bed.
Felix came back.
“Nobody stirring,” he said. He saw her night dress on the bedpost and his smile broadened.
“Have I kept you waiting’ long?” he asked facetiously, as he took off his dressing-gown and pyjama jacket. “Ooh, it’s cold,” he said and hurried in beside her. They huddled close to each other.
“I should resist you,” Charis said, half-seriously. “But I’m so weak.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” he said, making a joke of it. “I’m irresistible.” She thought his smile was a little forced. They tried never to talk about Gabriel. She had no real notion of how Felix felt, if he felt as she did or not. By a kind of unspoken agreement they had arrived at a position where they didn’t mention his name if they could help it. It was safer. On the few occasions when some reference was made Charis found the feelings of shame and guilt burnt through her, her mind filled with images of their last days together. She would tremble with the effort of self-control; it seemed almost impossible to breathe. Felix showed nothing as far as she could see; he just became silent for a while. Was he wresting with his feelings? Or just respecting hers? She felt she desperately needed to know sometimes, but she didn’t dare ask for fear of what might be unleashed, of what would be for ever spoiled.
As she lay now in his arms she knew, though, that sometime soon they had to talk about Gabriel. They had to. It seemed to her they only got by because their meetings were so infrequent. When they were together for any length of time the spectre of Gabriel inevitably intruded on them, like Banquo’s ghost.
“Charis?”
“Oh sorry, Felix.”
“You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?” He kissed her neck. She ran her hand down the back of his head, her fingers seeking the top bump of his vertebrae.
“Just dreaming,” she said. She felt his hand on her breast above her heart, taking the nipple between thumb and forefinger.
“Dreaming of your demon lover,” he said.
“Thinking about last summer,” she lied.
“Oh. The ponds.”
Charis reached down and took his cock in her hand, holding it lightly, as if weighing it. It was very soft, like that, surprisingly so, she thought. She squeezed it gently, feeling it slowly thicken and firm, filling out her fist. Felix rolled on top of her. Her hand went back to his shoulders searching for a small mole, rubbery, slightly raised above the surface of his skin, a familiar map reference on his body, like the small scar on his thigh, the baby softness of his underarms.
In the summer of 1915, during fine evenings, Charis often left her cottage and went to a stone seat by the middle fishpond which was obscured from the big house by a large clump of Portuguese laurel and rhododendron.
It was a little classical arbour which had been constructed by Felix’s mother. There was a sizeable piece of broken fluted column set in a border and beside the marble bench was a bust of the Emperor Vitellius on a slim octagonal plinth.
As the evening cooled the water the big carp would come up from the dark and weedy bottom of the pool and nose at flies, or cruise slowly to and fro. Charis began to take some bread crumbs with her to feed them and soon, she fancied, they came to expect her arrival, the first crumbs thrown bringing a dozen or more fish up from the depths.
One evening Felix joined her; he had seen her from his room, he said. They had become more friendly since their meeting after her party when, unaccountably, he’d turned up at her front door in his dripping evening dress. The distrust and caution on his part that had seemed to lie between them disappeared, and consequently, when Felix was at Stackpole, life there became noticeably more enjoyable. The bizarre gloom that emanated constantly from the major had been added to by the return of Nigel Bathe from Mesopotamia. During a bomb-throwing instruction course he’d been attending, a bomb had exploded in his hands and both arms had been amputated at the elbow. He came with Eustacia to convalesce at Stackpole. The air of lugubrious tragedy that permeated the house became almost palpable. Felix’s return from Oxford for the summer vacation brought welcome relief.
The evening meetings by the fishpond began naturally and easily to extend themselves, weather permitting. Some days Charis found him there before her, waiting. He told her about his life in Oxford, how boring it was, and his friend Holland. They argued about pacifism, Charis attacking Felix’s anti-war stance out of a sense of loyalty to Gabriel rather than through any firm conviction of her own. The presence of Nigel Bathe and news of disasters at the Dardanelles and Suvla Bay made her arguments harder to establish, but she persisted, and in talking this way with Felix came to understand something of his hatred for the soldiers in his family, the powerful need he felt to be different from his father and brothers-in-law. But what about Gabriel, she would ask, playing her trump card. Ah, Gabriel was different, the exception that proved the rule. But slowly Gabriel’s name came up less and less frequently. Sometimes they simply sat and looked at the cruising fish, not talking for minutes at a time.
One evening it was unnaturally hot. A dull static heat that seemed to promise thunderstorms a day or so ahead. Clouds of midges dithered above the pool. There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once. Charis wore an old straw hat in which she’d stuck cornflowers and poppies. She took it off and fanned her face, looping damp tendrils of hair back behind her ears. She glanced at Felix but he was staring fixedly at the pond, tapping out a rhythm on his knee. Confident he wasn’t looking at her Charis pulled forward the V of her blouse and fanned air down her sticky front, shutting her eyes and throwing her head back. When she opened her eyes Felix was looking at her. She blushed.
“Phew,” she said. “It’s so hot. Beastly hot. Do you think it’s as hot as this in Africa?”
“Charis,” Felix said, with visible effort and a strained formality, “I have to say. I can’t…” and to her utter astonishment he lurched forward, put his arms around her and tried to kiss her. For a moment she did nothing, stunned, perplexed and amazed to feel the pressure of his hand on her shoulders and his lips squashed against hers. She pushed him away.
“Felix,” she cried. “Really!” She picked up her hat which she had dropped. To her vague discomfort she didn’t feel outraged or disgusted as she had with Sammy Hinshelwood.
Felix then seemed to curl up inside himself on the seat. He covered his face with his hands, then snatched them away and stared up at the hazy evening sky.
“I’m so sorry,” he said fiercely. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know it’s disgraceful. Please forgive me. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Well,” she said. “Well,” noticing that her cheeks were now hot and her heart was thumping noisily in her chest, “let’s forget it. All about it. Too much sun,” she laughed with too much gaiety. “Too much in the sun. Driving you mad.” She threw some bread into the pond and there was swirl and burble of
water as the carp fought for the pieces.
“Look at those fish,” she said a little wildly. “Wouldn’t it be lovely to be a fish today, all cool and wet at the bottom of the pond? Swimming around without a care in the world.”
Charis opened her eyes and looked at the electric light fixture in the ceiling. Felix still lay on top of her, his weight pressing her spread-eagled body down into the soft mattress. The whole of the lower half of her torso seemed to be humming still, a feeling of delicious sensitivity at the base of her spine. She heard Felix’s breathing slowing down. He gave a small groan. Nine times now. With Gabriel it had really only happened twice. But nothing like this. She clenched her fists.
The embarrassment of that first lunge passed away in a day or so. Felix returned, she thought, to his normal self, friendly and amusing. But all the changes had been wrought in her. Try as she might she couldn’t re-consign him to his old role of companion and welcome distraction. Feelings had been unleashed, emotions aired: she found these facts impossible to ignore. In a subtle way everything had changed. The past became different too. All through the summer, she now realized, he had been looking at her in ways she was innocent of: seeing her not, as she thought, as sister-in-law or new friend, but as someone desirable. She started reliving the months of their friendship, going back to that dawn visit in late March, running through her innocuous memories for signs and clues that would explain his amazing outburst. Felix, of all people. How extraordinary! Felix harbouring these thoughts about me through all these months…