And was now – presumably – under Spanish earth.
Having died for what, for Christ’s sake?
Don’t start on that. Didn’t get you anywhere last time, and it was no more than academic now.
‘Morning, sir!’
A uniformed pensioner, saluting. Genial, old-sailor’s grin. Chalk put the handle of his umbrella to the rim of his bowler hat, murmured, ‘Morning.’
Inaudible, probably. He cleared his throat loudly – by way of explanation, or apology – as he strode into the gloomy building, passing on his left the waiting-room in which Nelson had met the Duke of Wellington and signally failed to impress him. Error of judgement by his Grace, no reflection at all on Nelson.
Ring Suzie…
Tonight. Inflict it on her tonight.
* * *
She wasn’t there, her mother told him. She was in Leicester. The Puss Moth had been overdue for an overhaul which was best done at some aircraft engineering establishment at Shoreham in Sussex. Of all places, she’d added: couldn’t they have made it Land’s End?
But they’d left yesterday, at about midday.
‘They?’
‘She took another girl with her, from the flying club. Well – we’d hardly have let her go alone. She telephoned from Leicester – oh, an hour and a half ago. To my great relief, as you can imagine. At least she’d had the nous to stop well before dark. But Rufus – they’ll be flying on to this Shoreham place in the morning, and Suzie’s planning to take the train up and spend a day or two with Patricia. Perhaps the weekend – depending on how long the overhaul’s going to take, of course. If I were you I’d telephone Patricia tomorrow – no point now, I spoke to her an hour ago and she didn’t even know Suzie was coming! That girl is so impetuous. Up and off – she said it was because the weather was right for it and might not be next week, but if you ask me getting the “A” licence has gone to her head!’
‘She’s got the “A” already?’
‘Oh, yes! Just the other day – I’m amazed she hasn’t told you! She did it in record time, apparently. And on this trip now you can be sure she’ll be doing all the flying!’
‘Is the other girl a pilot?’
‘Far more experienced than Suzie is. But Suzie won’t give her a look in – for one thing that machine’s her pride and joy, she’s obsessed with it, and for another – according to her – she needs to spend some vast number of hours flying it before she can qualify for her next licence, for heaven’s sake!’
‘The commercial one.’
‘In even more record time, no doubt. The theory is that she’ll then be paying her own way – doing what, don’t ask me – and this makes it all a sound investment – less than it would cost Innes to put her through Varsity, is the reasoning. Her reasoning – and he seems to agree with it. Even though there was never any question of sending her to Varsity. He always has spoilt that child… Rufus, I should have asked – have you had news – I mean, heard from—’
‘Yes.’ He let her hear it in his tone. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Oh… Rufus, what—’
‘The worst kind of news. Letter from a Canadian who’s been with him all the time… I’ve got to break it to Suzie—’
‘Oh. Oh, my God…’ Her breathing was short, suddenly. ‘And I’ve been – rattling on…’
She’d begun to cry.
‘How – did this person say—’
‘It was in the fighting for a place called Teruel, and he was shot in the head. In December. The letter was written two months ago, God knows where it’s been since.’
‘Would you like to come here, Rufus? They’d give you leave, wouldn’t they?’
‘Well – no. Thank you, but—’
‘Are you all right? Are you – eating, sleeping?’
‘I only had the letter this morning. Yes, I’m – eating. After a fashion. Look, I’ll ring Patricia in the morning, and try to see Suzie when she arrives. Easier – to see her, I mean – rather than over the telephone.’
‘Rufus, dear – my heart aches for you.’ She was gasping again. ‘Really – only just sinking in. Can’t believe it. That lovely, lovely boy—’
‘Yes.’ Swallowing, holding himself together – just. ‘Yes. I’ll—’ He’d been going to say he’d be in touch, but he couldn’t manage it. He murmured something like ‘Goodbye’, and hung up – with a flare of anger in his brain: what did you ever do to warn her off Dymock, or to discourage him?
* * *
24 February, this was. A Thursday. He’d marked it in his diary with the name ‘GUY’. Pen-rings round it then, filling the page… He thought of leaving the ’phone off in case Lady C-G should think of calling back – or, more likely, Sir Innes embarrassedly ‘offering condolences’. Or even Patricia, still not knowing how the world had changed, ringing for a chat or to thank him for last night. But he had to chance it, because Suzie might ring. Being comparatively close – Leicester a lot nearer than Glendarragh – it wasn’t unlikely that she would, to ask yet again – routinely, it had become by this time – whether there’d been any news.
He wished there hadn’t been.
His own doing, though, no-one else’s. He’d taken Dymock up there. That was the root of it. If he hadn’t, Guy wouldn’t have gone to Spain. And he’d failed him by not using the right arguments: arguing about politics instead of begging him, ‘Please, please don’t go…’ But introducing Dymock, of whose reputation as a womanizer he’d been aware, was what had culminated in Guy’s death.
* * *
He made himself ring Betty. Luckily Dick Traill answered the ’phone and he was able to warn him that there’d been dreadful news, so Betty had that much time to steel herself, had opened her end of the conversation with a terse ‘About Guy, is it?’
He promised to go down there at the weekend and bring the Canadian’s letter with him. And they agreed that their mother didn’t have to be told. When they’d visited her together a week ago she hadn’t known who they were, but her mental condition fluctuated and she sometimes did remember things for short periods. There was simply no point.
He didn’t expect to sleep. In Diana’s bed with the bedside lamp on and Guy’s snapshot-portrait turned so he could see it, thoughts and memories milling around non-stop. Clutching at memories rather as when you were drowning you were supposed to clutch at straws.
There was a lot of the drowning sensation. Shortness of breath, and a racing heartbeat.
He’d told Betty yes, he’d go to church with her on Sunday. She was devout, believed in all of it: he was not and could not, only went through the motions when he had to. Which in the Royal Navy was – routine… Guy had been like him in that too, though. He wondered whether if they’d shared Betty’s faith – ‘faith’ was the key word with her, she’d argued on occasion, ‘You don’t need logic. Logic’s only the best the human mind can come up with, it doesn’t come into this’ – whether if they’d been able to share that faith Guy might still have been alive, the letter on the doormat this morning from him instead of from his Canadian friend, its message ‘I’m coming home, I’m on my way!’
* * *
Dreams came and went. Waking, having dropped off for a while, it felt as if he’d turned his back on his brother – let go of him, let him slip away…
He heard Big Ben strike midnight. He’d have thought it was more like two or three. He’d probably been sleeping for only a few minutes at a time. And he’d turned in soon after making his call to Betty, which must have been before ten – he wouldn’t have called later, risked waking them all up.
He double-checked the time by his wristwatch, which was on the bedside table beside Guy’s portrait. Guy in his cricket gear, grinning rather goofily at the camera. Happy.
How had he been feeling when the bullet hit him, he wondered. On the point of success – taking Teruel after weeks of fighting – he might have been in that state of mind, more or less – grinning, as he looked round at Oakes?
He’d dozed
off again, and the doorbell rang.
Like an electric shock, startling him out of half-sleep into reacting with – for a split second, his pulses racing – Guy?
Confusion stemming from some dream. It was all dreamlike, disorientating, and he was still only half awake – enough to begin to feel sick again as the long day’s misery closed in around him – crushing, suffocating: the bell’s second peal came as a lifeline to be snatched at.
Hurrying, climbing out of the bed: he lurched barefoot out into the hall and fumbled at the door.
‘Rufus – I’m sorry if—’
‘Suzie?’
This had to be a dream. He’d pulled the door wide open, though. ‘Suzie?'
White face, dark-rimmed eyes, that bruised look he’d seen once before. ‘Mummy ’phoned me. I got on the last train. Then when I finally did get a cab he couldn’t find this place.’ She glanced round the landing behind her, then back to him: exhausted, almost swaying. ‘May I come in – please?’
‘Suzie, of course!’
Bewildering. Guy’s girl – here, in his arms.
* * *
Holding her: holding each other. She in her slip, he in his pyjamas, the lamp still on. Clinging together, dozing intermittently – sometimes one of them asleep, sometimes both, murmuring together in the waking times between.
The other girl would be flying the Puss Moth down to Shoreham in the morning, she’d told him. Suzie wanted to spend the day here, with him.
‘If you don’t mind?’
‘D’you think I’d mind?’
He’d telephone the Operations Division in the morning and tell them he was sick. They wouldn’t doubt it – his boss had asked him yesterday if he was feeling as lousy as he looked. And Suzie would telephone Patricia, sometime tomorrow – later today – telephone her mother too – and go round to Patricia’s in the evening.
‘As from Shoreham, you see.’
‘What about the girl who’s flying the ’plane down?’
‘She’ll be going to her brother, near Maidstone, and we’ll rendezvous at Shoreham when the Moth’s ready. It’s a routine overhaul, nothing special, but all the servicing’s been done there before, so—’
‘How did you work this all out, so – instantly?’
‘All I knew instantly was I had to get to you. Just sort of – instinct.’
‘Thank God for it. You’ve saved my life.’
‘I cost Guy his, though.’
‘No. Not true.’ He used one finger to lift a swathe of soft, dark hair back from her face. ‘He would have gone out there in any case. He’d been dithering a bit, I know – and he told you he’d decided against it – but only for peace and quiet, stop us all from going on at him about it. By the end of the summer he’d have been back to it, I’m certain.’
‘It’s kind of you to say so, anyway.’
‘Listen to me, now. He and I spent a whole night talking about it, with a bottle of Scotch between us, in my digs at Dunbarton. I was trying to persuade him not to go – used all the wrong arguments, incidentally – I’ve realized since that if I’d had a bit more gumption I might have got somewhere…’
He told her about the wrong arguments he’d used: and Guy’s fixed determination to go, reasons he’d given which had nothing at all to do with anything she'd done. He reminded her too, choosing his words carefully, that it had been Toby Dymock who’d swept her off her feet, not the other way about, and that it had been his own rashness that had brought Dymock to Glendarragh in the first place.
She thought about it.
Then: ‘This may sound callous, or selfish, but – in a lot of ways I can’t regret anything – to do with Toby, I mean. Only the hurt to Guy and this ghastly end to it now. Now, if I could I’d undo everything, but—’
‘But let me say this, Suzie. Said it before, some of it – I remember warning you, ages ago – seems ages, anyway – that Toby made a habit of chasing girls. I knew it, and still took him up to Glendarragh with me. Makes me very much to blame – much more than you. You didn’t know anything about it, it just – hit you. However you felt about him eventually, he went for you bull-headed – and he was older, far more experienced – when you had no experience—’
‘Still haven’t.’
‘I mean emotionally. Emotionally, you hadn’t.’
‘Well, that’s true, I hadn’t. Now I have – quite a lot, really. And whatever you say, Rufus, I hurt Guy appallingly – unforgivably. And we’d been so close. Rufus, what I said just now, that I can’t regret having known Toby and loved him – that’s absolutely true. But I didn’t know what I was doing to Guy – didn’t have the least idea. If I had had – or if I could put the clock back and start again, I wouldn’t let myself look at Toby. I’d hang on to Guy, wouldn’t think about Toby or let him talk to me or – I’m gabbling, I’m sorry—’
‘Gabble all you like. I was gabbling to myself, before you came. Thank God you did. You’re a very sweet, kind person, Suzie. It’s true you hurt him, no point denying it, but you didn’t mean to, in a way you were as much a victim as he was. That’s how I see it – and I’ve thought about it a lot, believe me.’
‘If I were you, I’d hate me.’
‘Hate? Hate you?’
‘Fine one to talk about being kind…’
He craned down, to kiss her wet eyes. ‘You have saved my life. Sanity, anyway. I’ve been – maudlin… Really. And I’m supposed to be stern, self-contained—’
‘You?’
‘– pompous, even. Didn’t you ever hear that?’ She shook her head, the dark hair soft and scented. ‘Thought Toby might have mentioned it. But I don’t hate you, Suzie – I love you.’
‘I love you. In the way I loved Guy, to start with – because you’re so alike, I think inside you’re probably identical – but the way I loved Toby too. And—’
‘All that, and there’s still an “and”?’
‘Saying I love you. If you want me—’
‘Suzie, wait. I was thinking about this when you were sleeping. For fairly obvious reasons. Any man would. It’s not a question of wanting. Well – it is. I’m male, you’re an exceptionally attractive female, of course I’d “want”. But first – well, to me you’re Guy’s girl. And – here’s another thing I was thinking about earlier in the night – my feelings for Guy were to some extent paternal, not just brotherly. We lost our father when I was a small boy and Guy was a babe in arms, he never knew a father and there I was – big brother, in Daddy’s shoes. I’m talking about when he was little, of course. But it rubbed off on both of us and it’s probably what makes me see things – well, from an older viewpoint. Hence that reputation I have, probably. And when I look at you – as Guy’s girl – I suppose a good part of my resentment of Toby Dymock sprang from the feeling he’d no damn business stealing girls from kids.’
‘I am not a kid!’
‘Did I say you were?’
‘By implication, yes. And I’d have you know I was eighteen in December – the fourteenth – which incidentally you ignored—’
‘I didn’t know!’
‘I realized that. I’d only thought Patricia might have told you. You see rather a lot of her, don’t you?’
‘Now you sound like Diana.’
‘Really? Is she jealous of Pat?’
He shook his head. ‘Just suspicious. For no reason whatsoever.’
‘No smoke without fire, is there? I suppose I am too young for you… Rufus, listen. What you said about Toby chasing girls and so forth – I knew about it, he admitted it. But with us it wasn’t like that – he was in love with me, and I was with him, and that’s the truth.’
‘All right.’
‘You don’t believe it, do you?’
‘I believe you believe it.’
‘You still don’t.’
‘I know it didn’t start that way. You fell for him while he was just amusing himself. But if that’s how it was by the time – by the end of it – all right, I take your word for
it… How about we try to get some sleep now?’
They were awake in the dawn again: still in each other’s arms, Suzie warm and limp with sleep. Delicious, as well as frustrating – by his own resolve, which he suspected he might one day look back on and regret. Guy being dead was the same, the darkness he woke up into, but there was Suzie’s still slightly astonishing presence as a counterweight. She murmured – as if there hadn’t been a couple of hours’ interval, and surprising him because he hadn’t realized she was awake – ‘There’s another side to this, isn’t there. Diana.’
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