Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

Cattermole poked his little finger in his ear and studied the findings. “One must keep the peasants in their place,” he murmured.

  Starr got up and looked out of the window. “I was duty officer that day,” he said. “I was in the tower when the CO told you to break off and go home. I heard it on the R/T. I logged the time. And I logged your landing. You were at least fifteen minutes late.”

  “Hello, hello!” Patterson said.

  Cattermole yawned. “What a nosey little boy you are.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” Patterson said. “You stooged around for a quarter of an hour with a red-hot engine?”

  “Certainly not. I investigated a certain bridge over the Moselle at Thionville. I examined it from all sides, including underneath.”

  “Thionville,” Patterson said. “Thionville. Where did I see something about that?”

  “Memo from Area HQ,” Starr said. “Dangerous flying. They blamed it on a French Morane.”

  “Purblind fools,” Cattermole said.

  “I remember. They didn’t like it, did they?” Patterson said.

  “Area HQ disapproves of flying,” Cattermole said. “It wears out the airplane.”

  “Did you really go under that bridge, Moggy?” Patterson asked.

  “Of course. That’s what it’s there for.”

  “If you did,” Starr said thickly, “all I can say is it must be childsplay.”

  “Well, there’s one way to find out, sonny-boy.” Cattermole glanced at him, waited, and got off the windowsill. “As I thought,” he murmured.

  “Listen, I could do it,” Starr said. “I just don’t see the point, that’s all.”

  “Very well, I’ll bet you. Double or quits. If you do it, I pay shares in the horse for both of us. If you don’t do it you owe me double. That’s … what … eight hundred and seventy-five francs.”

  “Done,” Starr said, without thinking.

  Cattermole looked at Patterson. “Feeling brave today?” he asked.

  “Same stakes?” Patterson knew he was playing for time. Cattermole nodded. Time ran out. “Money for old rope,” Patterson said.

  Cattermole ruffled Starr’s hair in passing. “Thionville,” he said. “Dreary little dump.” He sauntered off. Starr smoothed his hair and watched him go. He felt tricked and trapped. He looked at Patterson, but Pip was bouncing his ping-pong ball. No help there.

  Flash Gordon got halfway through unbuttoning his shirt when he remembered the widow Ligier, sitting beside the fire. He had been in the big farmhouse kitchen for so long—three hours, almost—and the meal and the wine and the conversation had been so pleasant, that he had forgotten Nicole’s mother; she never spoke, never moved from her chair; just rested and smiled in the general direction of the two young people. “Are you sure this is okay?” he muttered.

  “She cannot hear us,” Nicole said. “Even if she could, she cannot understand. And she can see very little. To her eyes you are just a shadow.”

  “Goodness. How sad.” He blinked doubtfully at the old lady as Nicole’s fingers undid the last buttons and tugged the shirt over his head. He was wearing a singlet; that came off too. “Now raise your arms,” she said.

  “I feel like a prisoner-of-war.”

  “Do you? That’s interesting.” She slipped her hands across his ribcage, and he inhaled sharply. “Your body is made to be a piece of armor, you see. It expects attack and it guards against that.”

  “Jolly clever.”

  “Your ribs protect your heart and lungs, for example.” She ran a finger along the bottom edge of his ribcage. His chest was very white and almost completely hairless. “Human biology is the most interesting subject in the world,” she said. “At university it fascinated me.”

  “Yes? I’ve never thought about it very much.” She moved behind him and traced the muscles of his back. “You were saying something about arteries,” he said.

  “Arteries are wonderful. They take your blood everywhere but they hide themselves behind your bones for safety.”

  “I say, that’s brilliant.”

  “But sometimes they must approach the surface. These are places where the body is very vulnerable.” She searched with her fingertips until she found the throb of artery in his neck. “Here,” she said. Her fingers moved to the inside of his elbow, his upper arm, his armpit, the hollow of his collarbone. “There … and there … Up there … Down there …”

  “Fancy that,” he said huskily.

  “Next time,” she said, lightly probing his abdominal muscles, “I shall explain the liver and the kidneys. Also the spleen.”

  “Holy smoke.” The firelight played on his torso. Madame Ligier blinked and smiled. Flash Gordon wasn’t sure what the hell was happening to him, but he was more than happy to let it continue.

  A quarter of a mile away, Fitz Fitzgerald knelt by the fire and 164 arranged chestnuts along the top of the grate. Mary Blandin came and sat beside him. “Brandy,” she said.

  “I say, that’s jolly decent of you.”

  “Is it?” She gave him one of the glasses. “I’m not sure I want to be jolly decent. It sounds like going country dancing with three pairs of knickers on.”

  Fitz knocked a chestnut into the fire. “Sorry,” he said. “Hotter than I thought.”

  “Poor Fitz.” She tickled his stockinged feet and made him squirm. “Tell you what: I’ll be jolly decent if you will too.”

  “Ah.” He sucked his finger. “I’m not sure about that. You see, I’ve never worn three pairs of knickers.”

  “There was a time,” she said thoughtfully, “when I refused to wear any knickers at all. Happy days, they were.”

  Fitz sipped his brandy and studied her profile. It was golden in the firelight. “Tell me more. Tell me all, in fact.”

  “I was aged five. After that I got sent to school, thoroughly knickered all year round. They were amazing things, those school knickers. Like twin carrier-bags. Girls used to keep all sorts of things tucked inside them. Pencils, money, apples, handkerchiefs, love letters. Boxes of matches. I used to keep my diary there.”

  “Hot stuff, was it?”

  “Oh, no. Soggy. Moist with tears. Amazing, really, when I think of the days and weeks and months I used to sob and weep my little heart out …”

  “Well, it’s no fun being unhappy.” Fitz almost took her hand. He felt strong and protective.

  “I wasn’t unhappy, I was conceited,” she said. “I thought I was a tragic figure.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “No special reason.” Fitz looked puzzled, so she said: “I was a remarkably stupid child, you see. Now you, I’m sure, had a happy childhood.”

  Fitz shrugged and drank more brandy. His childhood had in fact been very cheerful, but that was an ordinary sort of fact and one he didn’t feel like revealing; not yet, anyway. “Who’s he?” He pointed at a photograph. “Don’t tell me. A cousin. No, it’s your brother.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Same eyes.”

  She tugged at her lower lip while she studied the picture: a waist-upward shot of a young man glancing at the camera as he opened a bottle of wine. “He certainly had nice eyes,” she said. Fitz suddenly felt lost: he’d taken a wrong turning somewhere. “That’s Paul,” she said. “My poor dead husband.”

  The words were spoken so blankly that Fitz wasn’t sure whether she was being candid or facetious. “Ah,” he said. “Yes … Good picture, isn’t it? Did you take it?”

  “No, he did. He had a special gadget on the camera. Paul was mad keen on photography. He took thousands of snaps of me.”

  Discussing the late Paul Blandin made Fitz uncomfortable and he sought an escape. “Still got them?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Lots.”

  “Show me.”

  She fetched a leatherbound album. “You’re taking an awful risk, you know,” she said. “You might be bored to tears.”

  Fitz smiled. He balanced the album on his thighs and opened it at random. Three s
hots of Mary swimming in an outdoor pool. Something lurched softly in the pit of his stomach. “Nice,” he said. He would have liked to look more closely, but instead he turned the page, and his eyes widened. Mary standing at the poolside, drying herself. No costume. Mary stretched out on the towel, face down. Naked. Mary bouncing on a divingboard, caught by the camera in mid-air, arms upflung and knees slightly bent, skin shining with water; totally and magnificently nude. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said. “The work of an expert.” He shut the album and handed it back to her. He cleared his throat, and studied the chestnuts.

  “Are you shocked?” She was leaning back with the album held against her chest and her pleated skirt spread like a seashell.

  “No, of course not.” He glanced sideways, chin up to meet the challenge. They were both being so serious that spontaneously they laughed. “Well, maybe I was a bit shocked at first. Somewhat. Not unpleasantly. Far from it.”

  “You see … I get very fed-up with men who keep looking at me and wondering what I’m like with no clothes on. It’s …” She wrinkled her nose. “Waste of time,” she said.

  “Point taken.” Fitz nodded several times. “So now I know, then.”

  “It’s simple curiosity, after all, isn’t it?”

  “Aren’t you curious, too?” Fitz took a good grip of his ankles and hung on tight. “Don’t you want to know what I look like?”

  “I’m sure you’re beautiful. Meanwhile I’ll take all your sexual machinery on trust.”

  “Very kind of you.”

  They sat and listened to the hiss of the fire.

  “Or perhaps I’m too trusting,” Mary said. “I mean, how do I know you’re all there?” He recoiled slightly. “Well, let’s face it, Fitz, you gave me this back in a bit of a hurry, didn’t you? Two pages were enough for you.” He straightened up and squared his shoulders; his mouth was half-opened. “You didn’t even see the best pictures,” she said, rubbing her chin on the top of the album. “They’re in color, too. I had a lovely tan in those days, and—”

  “Give me that damn book!” Fitz shouted. He lunged for it, lost his balance and fell against her. She kissed him, easily and sweetly, on the lips. Behind them the chestnuts were beginning to smoke.

  “Enjoy yourself?” Flash Gordon asked.

  “Quiet. Very quiet. Family album by the fire, that sort of thing.” Fitz yawned. “You know.”

  Flash changed gear and put on speed.

  “How about you?” Fitz asked. “Good time?”

  “Nicole’s mother was there.”

  “Ah. Tough luck.”

  “We talked about biology. Nicole’s an expert. I learned a lot. If you took all your veins and arteries and things and tied them together, how far d’you think they’d stretch?”

  “Haven’t the faintest.”

  “Twelve thousand miles.”

  “My goodness.”

  “Yes,” Flash said. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  A sheen of frost gave the airfield a fine, furry coating. Every blade of grass was cased in crystals. The wheels of the speeding Hurricane crushed the frost, creating narrow tracks of black-green. Its tail-wheel made a thinner line, just a pencil-stroke across the whiteness, and this line was the first to cease as the nose came down and Pip Patterson saw the horizon.

  That was better; he felt happier when he could see where he was going. The field went past in a silvery rush. His cockpit hood was open and he could smell burned oil coming off the engine. The smell was sharp in this freezing air, and it reminded him of something. What was it? The rumbling bounce of the Hurricane turned to a racing tremble, and the plane took to the air. Patterson eased back the stick, raised the wheels, corrected a dip in the starboard wing, slid the hood shut, and remembered that smell: it was the reek of the fairground, especially the stink coming off the engine that drove the merry-go-round. Hot oil. Greatest thrill in a young lad’s life, riding the galloping horses with that exciting stink in his nostrils. Nothing compared, after that. Not even driving a Hurricane at 300 mph. After all, what was a Hurricane? A bus. The kite was as big as a bus, half as comfortable, ten times as noisy, nowhere to put your luggage, bloody cold in this weather. So what did that make the pilot? A bus driver. Only difference, the scenery was a lot more interesting on the average bus route. The trouble with sky was it went on long after it ran out of anything to say. Especially on a day like today. Nothing but a lot of remote, blank grayness. You might as well go around with your head in a paper bag.

  Patterson turned and flew back over the airfield, waggled his wings, and climbed away. Looking back, he could see the rest of the squadron standing beside Rex outside the pilots’ hut. A couple of them waved; he waggled again in response.

  “Good enough,” Rex said. Evidently Micky Marriott’s drainage ditches had done their job: the ground was firm. “The rest of ‘B’ flight—air-testing this morning, thirty-minute readiness this afternoon. ‘A’ flight at readiness this morning, air-testing after lunch. Let’s have all machines fully operational by tomorrow. Check everything! You’d be surprised how much can go wrong with a Hurricane when it’s been left standing in a drafty hangar all week. Bronchitis and swollen ankles and God knows what. Right, adj, we’ll stroll back, shall we? Where’s Reilly?”

  They walked toward the château, Reilly crisscrossing behind them, hunting scents.

  “Beautiful air,” Kellaway said, inhaling vigorously. “I’ve always liked winter, ever since the last show. You can’t beat a good hard freeze. It solves the mud problem, it kills the bugs and—”

  “Gordon’s a queer fish, isn’t he?” Rex asked.

  “Who? Young Flash?”

  “Yes. Not quite …” Rex wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know. Not quite up to snuff. What’s his background?”

  “Just … ordinary.”

  “Yes …” Rex nodded in time with his pace. “Very ordinary. He picks his nose.”

  Kellaway puffed out his cheeks. “Don’t we all?”

  “Not in public. And he gets unpleasant spots on the back of his neck.”

  “That’s scarcely his fault, sir. He’s only twenty.”

  “Nasty habits, adj, nasty habits. And while we’re on the subject, what’s the matter with Starr?”

  “Oh, Dicky’s a bit moody, that’s all. I expect—”

  “He looks thoroughly constipated. That’s no good. I want all my pilots to be good squadron men. Starr looks like a constipated dwarf. He’s letting the side down, adj.” Rex took a flying kick at a frozen thistle. “Why doesn’t he grow up? Why don’t they both grow up? 1 don’t mind telling you, I’m getting a bit fed-up with some of these chaps. I want a squadron I can be proud of, not a lot of spotty pygmies.”

  They passed the guardroom at the main gate. The sentry presented arms; they returned the salute. Reilly came cantering up and made a detour to sniff the sentry’s legs. The man rapidly shouldered arms but Reilly jetted a sprinkle on his snowy gaiters and got away a second before the rifle hurtled down and its butt crashed to earth. The dog caught up with its master and licked his gloved hand.

  “Time to bring in some new blood, uncle,” Rex said. “Breeding counts, you know.”

  Pip Patterson sat hunched in his cockpit, checked the trim and let the Hurricane fly itself.

  He felt tired and bored. He had done nothing much since he took off, just chucked the kite about to make sure everything worked. One of the rudder-pedals felt a bit sloppy; that was all. The Merlin was in good voice, the controls were responsive; he could go anywhere, do anything. He sat with his limbs slack and watched the gray sky drift by.

  It was a familiar feeling. Patterson was often bored with his own company. He needed other people to stimulate him. He wasn’t stupid; in some subjects—navigation, Morse, radio—he was brighter than average. His trouble was that he cared about nothing very much; not even about himself.

  Patterson’s family owned several coal mines in Midlothian. Pip was the fourth child, third son, and he had been
brought up comfortably, even generously. He’d gone to the school of his choice—Loretto College, near Edinburgh; his brothers were there already, so he didn’t get bullied much. He was sixteen when he heard about a new international college in Geneva where boys and girls mixed and wine-drinking was encouraged. He spent a year there, learned how to meet girls, how to get drunk, how to ski, how to play cards. He was good on skis and bad with cards. He envied his friends’ zest for poker, but there was no gambling instinct in him, no appetite feeding on risk, no sense of the theater of the game. If he made himself gamble he played bluntly and obviously, which was no fun for anyone.

  He was more successful with girls because he was a good listener. One or two fell in love with him, or at least with his freshfaced Scottish looks, the dark lashes over the gray eyes and the straight, clean-lipped mouth. Nothing lasted, neither the poker schools nor the girls nor the snow. Pip came home a month early, bored.

  His father gave him a blue BSA motorcycle, and later a red MG car with a leather strap across the bonnet. Nobody had anything special for him to do. He went off and took flying lessons. Flying came easily—it was a cross between skiing and driving the MG—and when someone suggested joining the RAF he couldn’t think of a reason not to do it.

  That was how he came to be sitting in this Hurricane, twelve thousand feet over eastern France. The land below looked as flat and dead as a sepia photograph. Nothing was happening outside the airplane. Or inside it.

  Patterson tilted his head to his left and watched the blue-green flicker of flames in the exhaust-stubs. They looked like soft feathers, you could almost reach out and stroke them. A wandering gleam drifted into the corner of his eye: a feeble sunbeam, glinting on his canopy. The gleam got stronger. The sun wasn’t on that side. He straightened his head with slow curiosity, and abruptly jerked it to the right. The gleam was a fighter coming at him, small at first but magnifying with astounding speed so that even as his muscles tensed to respond it was too late, the plane was on him, huge as a house, filling the sky, and he gave a shout of terror, flung up an arm. With a brief blast of sound the fighter hopped over his Hurricane like a child playing leapfrog, and vanished. “Bastard!” Patterson screamed. His hands and feet were jumping with fright, his heart was banging, the Hurricane was trying to fly sideways. He shoved all the controls into a corner and sent the machine down in a slanting dive, away from danger. Too slow: another fighter whizzed from behind and boomed over him, so close that the wash rocked his wings. It banked to the right so he turned hard left, ramming the throttle. The Merlin couldn’t be roused that fast and the Hurricane wallowed. Another fighter came from nowhere, zipped under him and rocketed away, screwing itself into the sky. Patterson’s head was like a punchball flung all ways as he tried to dodge and search at once. Then the engine gave him its power and he stuffed the nose hard down and ran for his life.