“No, you won’t,” Rex said. “I’m not having the maintenance of the aircraft turned into a private gamble.”
Marriot chewed at a thumbnail. “In that case, let somebody else fly Cattermole’s plane tomorrow,” he said. “Then we’ll see.”
Rex took a long time to play an ambitious and complicated three-cushion shot that just failed. “Perhaps,” he said.
Marriott turned and went out. Stickwell strolled over to the table.
“Damned mechanics,” Cattermole said. “Just because they know how to change the oil and top-up the battery, they want to rule the world.”
Rex walked to the fireplace and took his tankard of beer from the mantelpiece. “I’m not concerned about his political ambitions,” he said. “I just wish he’d do something about those appalling fingernails of his. They quite put me off my food.”
Stickwell laughed so much he missed the cue-ball. Patterson, however, did not laugh; and it wasn’t only because Cattermole was sitting on him. Come to that, Cattermole was no joke either.
Next morning the trees that fringed the airfield were hidden by the rain. The sky dumped its load so heavily that the spray on the terrace bounced knee-high. The tennis-court was flooded, the driveway became a shallow stream, water trickled under the french windows and soaked the edge of the carpets. The wind boomed in the chimneys, and the air was much colder.
Marriott came back from the field after breakfast, his gas-cape shining with water. “Go back to bed for a week,” he said. “There’s a lake over there you could swim in. I’ve had double covers put on the Hurricanes: those hangars leak like buggery. It’s blowing like a bastard, too.” Rainwater kept dribbling out of his hair and making him blink.
They were all standing in the conservatory, watching the weather wash everything a uniform, blurred gray-green.
“What a shame,” Fitzgerald said. “Just when Moggy was itching to go up and test his engine.”
“No need,” Cattermole said. “Air temperature’s down. Can’t overheat now. Perfectly safe.”
“I think I’ll have a toilet-roll fitted in your cockpit,” Marriott said.
“If you like, old chap. Make it something soft, won’t you? We Cattermoles bruise easily.”
“I’ll make it sandpaper.”
“I say, Marriott, old boy,” said Stickwell. “What d’you think of that?” He held up his little finger.
Marriott stared, suspiciously. “Looks all right. Why?”
“Nothing. It’s just that while you were looking at it, Reilly was pissing over your left foot.”
Marriott glanced down to see the dog uncocking its leg. He stepped back hastily, but Reilly had struck. The conservatory echoed with laughter. Marriott glared at Rex. “For Christ’s sake, sir!” he said.
“If you will go around dressed like a lamppost,” Rex said suavely, “you must expect the consequences.”
Cattermole squatted on his haunches and rubbed Reilly behind the ears. He was feeling very satisfied. Nobody had complained about a Hurricane flying under the bridge at Thionville. It looked as if he’d got away with it.
By midmorning the wind had worked itself up to a gale. Rex telephoned Area HQ at Rheims and then summoned the adjutant. “Even the ducks are grounded,” he said. “Who’s in line for leave?”
Kellaway found the list. “Sticky Stickwell and Flip Moran.”
“Okay, send them home. And we can start making a dent in these invitations.” He fished about in a tray marked FROG BUMF and pulled out a letter. “The local school, village of Pont-St. Pierre. They want a couple of chaps to go down and address the kids.”
“How about Flash Gordon?”
“Flash? He’s awfully young, isn’t he? He looks like a schoolboy.”
“Well, he was a schoolboy not so long ago. Anyway, he’s become very keen lately. He does body-building exercises and takes cold baths and practices with his revolver on the range. He’s determined to be the first to shoot down a Hun.”
“All right. Let’s send Flash and Fitz.”
Kellaway hesitated. “I don’t think Fitz speaks any French.”
“Who cares? He’s got a pretty face. All he has to do is smile a lot and guard his honor.”
It wasn’t a bad description. As a child Jeremy Fitzgerald had been full of impish charm, but adolescence had strengthened his looks: the mouth became wider, the cheekbones firmer, the eyes steadier. He was slim and lithe, an agile and unquenchable games-player as long as size didn’t matter; not brilliant but not stupid; popular because cheerful and cheerful because popular.
His mother adored him; there were photographs all over the house. His father—something of a tycoon in the wholesale electrical supplies business—wasn’t so sure; he’d sent the boy to public school in order to get all that narcissistic nonsense knocked out of him. Girls, his father noticed gloomily, weren’t very keen on young Fitz. The good-looking ones felt upstaged and the plain ones felt humiliated. Fitz himself couldn’t understand this: he’d never considered his face to be anything special; it was so familiar that it was ordinary. Later, when he left school and began to understand, he felt cursed by his looks. One day he was flipping through a magazine when he saw a photograph of an RAF pilot. His head was completely covered by helmet, goggles and oxygen mask. Fitz’s mother was horrified, but he knew what he wanted and his father did nothing to stop him. By the time he got his wings Fitz had lost all self-consciousness. Everyone was equal in Fighter Command. He was just another golden boy.
Pont-St. Pierre wasn’t much of a village: a grocery store, a bar, a blacksmith’s, a church, and a hump-backed bridge over a red, rushing stream. The school was the biggest building.
“God, what a dungeon,” Fitz said.
Flash Gordon parked Sticky’s Buick by the front door and switched off the engine. Rain drummed gloomily on the roof. “Dungeons are underground,” he said. “This looks more like a morgue.”
“Well, whatever it is, let’s do our duty and get back to the mess fast.”
As they ran to the door it was opened by a woman in her late twenties. “Bonjour” she said. “Sorry, I mean hello. Do come in. I’m Mary Blandin. Isn’t this weather frightful?”
She was small, a good six inches shorter than Fitz, with black hair cut in a pageboy bob that just covered her ears, and she wore a blue woolen dress with a red sash that measured the slimness of her waist.
They introduced themselves. “You’re not French, I take it,” Fitz said.
“Yes and no. It’s all rather confusing. Look, why don’t we hang up your wet things and you can meet Mademoiselle Ligier.”
They took off their coats and tramped along a corridor painted chocolate-brown. Mademoiselle Ligier was teaching a class of eight-year-olds. They were utterly silenced by the arrival of the two officers.
“Bonjour” said Flash. “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance.”
“How do you do. This is a great pleasure. Shall we speak in French? Your accent is excellent.”
Flash felt himself begin to blush. He tugged his nose. “Can’t remember any more,” he said.
They smiled. “Let’s use English, then,” Mademoiselle Ligier said. “But you must tell me when I go wrong.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Flash looked to Fitz for help, but Fitz merely raised an eyebrow. “Well … Do my best,” Flash mumbled. He felt clumsy and exposed. He was making a mess of this. He wished it was over.
“The children are always talking about you,” she said. She was younger than Mary Blandin, with glossy chestnut hair tied in a pigtail, large brown eyes that had a certain wariness about them, and a surprisingly wide mouth: surprising because her chin was long and pointed. Not beautiful; not even pretty, but remarkable, all the same. “They talk about your airplanes, I mean,” she said.
“Hurricanes,” Fitz said. The children heard him; they wriggled and whispered. “Can you say ‘Hurricane’?” he asked them. “Say ‘Hurricane.’”
For a moment they were paral
yzed with shyness. Then a few brave boys called out: “Orry-ken … Orry-ken.”
“Not bad,” Fitz said.
“Damn good,” Flash said, and immediately regretted it. Swearing in front of the children: bad form.
“Would you like to meet the other class?” Mary Blandin asked Fitz, and took him away. “You’ll stay for lunch, won’t you?”
In the event they stayed to the end of the afternoon. Flash was always slightly nervous of Mademoiselle Ligier—he was not accustomed to being on close terms with schoolteachers, especially attractive ones—but he enjoyed himself with the children. He drew an enormous Hurricane on the blackboard, with arrows pointing to the various parts: fuel tanks, radio, guns, and so on, and he helped them color it in. Meanwhile he could hear Fitz teaching the other class to sing London Bridge Is Falling Down. Later, they played on opposite sides in a game of football in a covered yard. Fitz was very good at allowing small boys to rob him of the ball and then showing astonishment at their skill. They found that very funny, and sometimes they ended up stumbling over their own feet. Flash could head the ball repeatedly like a seal in a circus. They thought that was very clever.
After school, Mary Blandin boiled a kettle on a gas-ring in the staff room and made some tea. “You were a big hit,” she said.
“Nice kids,” Fitz said.
Total agreement there. Outside, rain was hurrying the day to an end. Sooty drops occasionally fell down the chimney.
“Jolly lucky for us you both speak English,” Flash remarked.
“Not at all,” Mademoiselle Ligier said. “It was why we invited you here. We like to speak English. I studied English at university. I would like to teach it, but these children are too young.”
“Well, you can talk English to me any hour of the day you like,” Flash said, suddenly full of confidence.
She sipped her tea and gave him a calm, contented look, curiously cat-like. “Thank you,” she said. “I also studied anatomy and biology.”
“Ah, that’s different. Not much I can tell you about them, I imagine.”
She sipped her tea again. “One never knows.”
Mary got up to draw the blackout curtains, and Fitz went to help her. “What took you away from England?” he asked.
“Mr. Blandin did. My mother was French so I grew up bilingual, and I married a Frenchman, a doctor. We lived in Metz for five years and then he died.” Fitz tugged the curtain straight and glanced at her, expecting more. “That’s all,” she said. “He just died. It happens sometimes. Even to doctors.” She moved to the next window and stood on tiptoe to get a good grip. Fitz looked at her legs. “You didn’t go home?”
“I couldn’t face being a widow in Harrogate, always scratching my chilblains and dreaming of being seduced by insurance salesmen. It’s different in France. The French treat widowhood more cheerfully.”
“They’ve had more experience.”
“True.”
Blobs of sleet were beginning to dot the windscreen of the Buick as Flash drove back to the château. He had the heat full on. “Funny pair,” he said.
“Yes. Smart, though.”
“Oh, absolutely. Very smart. Too smart for a scruffy little village school.”
“I suppose so.” Fitz stared at the saturated beams of the headlights. Flash had taken off the blackout masks; no enemy pilot could see anything in this weather, even if he were crazy enough to fly. “They must like it here.”
“No, Nicole’s bored. She wanted to teach in the city, in Paris or somewhere, but the year she got her university degree her father died, and now her mother’s an invalid who won’t leave the village. Rough luck, eh?”
“Rough.” Fitz was thinking of Mary Blandin’s superb neck. He had first noticed her neck as he followed her along the corridor when they arrived. It showed white and strong below her pageboy haircut, curving cleanly under the blue dress. His imagination rested his hand on the firm curve … he sniffed suddenly and sat up straight.
“Too hot for you?” Flash asked, and pushed down the lever on the dashboard.
Winter came quickly and early. The leaves were soon stripped from the trees and blown into soggy heaps. The landscape of eastern France became flat and cold. The tall grasses and weeds of summer died back, the fields lay black with rain, and cattle took shelter behind walls and hedges. Often, the only sign of life came from the crows and rooks that whirled aimlessly in the wild gusts, black confetti tossed at the racing sky.
Rolls of steel mesh were delivered to the airfield at Château St. Pierre. Squads of airmen unrolled them across the grass, splashing from puddle to pool. When Micky Marriott drove a 15-hundred-weight truck along the track, mud squirted up through the holes and the mesh sank from sight. Rex decided not to trust a Hurricane to it. Flying was postponed indefinitely. Once or twice there came a break in the weather and a German aircraft flew over, very high. Evidently the Luftwaffe had concrete runways. Few members of Hornet squadron noticed the intruders. The pilots were either on leave, or shopping in Metz, or playing squash, or re-visiting the village school at Pont-St. Pierre.
One day, Air Commodore Bletchley paid the squadron a visit. Rex took him to the library and gave him sherry.
“It’s only a run-of-the-mill amontillado, I’m afraid,” he said, “but I think you’ll find it not lacking in palate.”
Bletchley took a mouthful and rolled it around his mouth as if he were rinsing his teeth. “Bags of palate,” he said. “More palate than you could shake a stick at.”
Rex topped up his glass. They lowered themselves into armchairs, to the gentle hiss of leather cushions. Reilly watched them for a moment, sombrely reckoning the odds against getting a snack. He stretched in front of the fire, and heaved a sigh. A couple of burning logs collapsed.
Rex said: “What’s the gen, sir?”
“The gen, old boy, is wet. Like everything else at the moment. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the French Army is wet, the British Army is wet, and the German Army is, with any luck, soaked to the skin. This entire bloody war is at present covered with a thick layer of mildew.”
“Surely something must be happening, sir.”
“I believe General Ironside is being treated for rust.”
“Dear me.” Rex stretched a leg and rubbed Reilly’s back. “What about the Navy? They like this sort of weather, don’t they?”
“You heard about the Royal Oak?”
“Yes, but that was just German propaganda, wasn’t it? They’re always—”
“Not this time. They sank her. Some crafty U-boat got inside Scapa Flow and let fly. Exit one battleship.”
“Good Lord, that’s bad.” Rex glanced at his watch. “You’ll stay for lunch, sir, won’t you? Splendid. The Admiralty’s a bit cross, I suppose.”
“Thoroughly fed-up, I’m told. It’s not so much the dreadnought as the indignity and the fact that there’s precious little they can do in return. I mean, Hitler’s sitting pretty, isn’t he?” Bletchley heaved himself up and wandered over to a window overlooking the flooded tennis-courts. “Frankly, old boy, I’m very disappointed in this war. It’s not done what I expected, not in the least. I sometimes wonder why we went into it in the first place.”
Rex drank his sherry.
“If you want my opinion,” Bletchley said, “I think the whole thing will fizzle out by Christmas and you’ll be back at Kingsmere by New Year’s Day. Talking of Kingsmere …” He came back and stood by the fire. Reilly sniffed his trouser-leg. Rex refilled his glass. “Thanks. I’ve had a running battle with some twerp at Air Ministry who claims there were all sorts of horrible irregularities and suchlike going on when your lot were stationed there. Fights with local farmers, trouble with accident inquiries, God knows what else. I don’t suppose you personally had time to notice anything?”
“Not a thing, sir.”
“That’s what I keep telling them.”
“I was in and out like a flash.”
“Of course you were.”
> “Mind you, from what I hear, Squadron Leader Ramsay … I never met him, of course, but …”
“Bit of an odd bird, Ramsay. I keep telling them that. If anything went wrong it must have been Ramsay’s fault.”
“The chap was under terrible strain.”
“Oh, frightful. No wonder he went off the rails.”
“Could have happened to anyone.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
Bletchley finished his sherry. Rex reached for the decanter but the air commodore shook his head. “You said something about lunch, I believe.”
“You’ve caught us on a very ordinary day, sir. It’s partridge again. But I’ve had a very drinkable Côte du Rhône breathing overnight.”
As they walked to the dining room, Bletchley said: “The one thing I can’t get them to believe is that Ramsay rose from the dead and pinched a whole load of Hurricane spares one fine night.”
Rex said nothing.
“Trouble is, the silly ass of a flight lieutenant who was in charge of the depot has taken it personally. He’s gone all round the Hurricane squadrons, swearing vengeance. Now he’s applied for a posting to France.”
“A persistent blighter.”
“Protheroe. Flight Lieutenant J. D. Protheroe … Did you say partridge?” Bletchley sniffed appreciatively.
“I got hold of a chap who used to be at the Savoy Grill,” Rex said. “He’s an absolute magician with kidneys, too.” They entered the dining room. The tables had fresh flowers from the château’s hothouse. “Tell me, sir: how’s your boy getting on at Oxford?” Rex asked.
The horses labored up the stony track, placing their feet carefully between the twisted roots of pinetrees. The sky was Mediterranean-blue, and where the pines sheltered some oaks their leaves were a radiant red-gold like reflected firelight. But the air was damn cold. A northeasterly wind whipped all the warmth out of the sunlight and rattled the oakleaves. It made the riders hunch up and hide their ears in the tall collars of their fleecelined jackets. It helped freeze their backsides, which were already bounced and bumped into numbness by the unfamiliar saddles.
Piece of Cake Page 16