‘I was on the point of mentioning her, once or twice.’
‘She is another reason, isn’t she?’
‘Of course she is, my darling.’
‘Call me that again?’
‘Darling?’
She moved against him.
‘I wouldn’t make any claims on you. I promise. Apart from the fact you’re going to marry her, she’s been absolutely wonderful to me, over this flying business.’
‘I know. Typical of her. She’s a very practical sort of girl – doesn’t just say things, she does them… Has she told you we’re getting married in the summer?’
‘No—’
‘According to her, we are. Which probably clinches it. But it’s those other things as well, Suzie darling. The whole situation – you, me, her, Guy, Toby, and the emotional state we’re both… I’d be taking advantage – this is what it comes down to, frankly – of Guy being dead.’
‘But if I tell you I want—’
‘I said – the state we’re both in. But also, Suzie, it’d be what’s known crudely as a one-night stand. In case you don’t know, that’s an Americanism meaning a sexual encounter sort of off the bat, leading nowhere. I don’t want that with you, Suzie. I’d wish I hadn’t, and you’d wish you hadn’t. There’s a bond between us, isn’t there – let’s not make it something we’d be ashamed of later? Suzie, I’ll love you all my life: I do honestly adore you. But I’ll be married to Diana – I’m committed to her – and you’ll be married to someone else – someone who’ll sweep you off your feet like Toby did – and to me you’ll still be Guy’s girl. Can I be godfather to your children?’
‘I can think of something a lot better.’
‘So can I. Easily. And technically speaking I’d make a rotten godfather, I admit. But – practicalities, now. To start with, what shopping I’ll need to do. We’re all right for breakfast – eggs, coffee, bread – but there’s lunch to think of. What about tinned ravioli?’
* * *
‘I must say we were fairly duplicitous.’ Chalk told me, on his Glandore terrace, ‘With Patricia, for instance. Suzie telephoned the cousins’ house and invited herself to stay for the weekend, leaving a message for Patricia that she’d be coming up from Shoreham later, and Patricia ’phoned me at about six, having had that message but also having heard from her mother about Guy. She was as stricken as I’d been. But I was over the real depths of it by then – thanks to Suzie – and so was she. Suzie, I mean. That was all right – as far as Pat was concerned, she knew Suzie had known about it since the previous afternoon, and the sharp edges do wear off. One thing I had in mind was that if anyone had found reason to suspect we’d been together in the flat all that time, they’d never have believed the truth of it.’
‘Did you spend that leave at Glendarragh?’
‘Most of it. Patricia was there for a week. And Suzie, of course – when she wasn’t flying. I remember it as a quiet, pleasant-enough interlude, despite the lingering sadness. Suzie took me up in her Puss Moth, one day. She was showing off to me, so it was fairly frightening. She was going hell for leather for her “B” licence – navigator’s licence too, I think – but she got the “B” anyway before the end of the year and became a flying instructor in the Civil Air Guard. Would you believe it?’
‘Civil Air Guard?’
‘Started towards the end of ’38. The government saw the value of flying clubs, and at that time they were in danger of wasting away. The RAF was expanding, and that plus the RAFVR and the Auxiliary Squadrons was siphoning off virtually all the potential pilots. Government therefore set up this scheme to subsidize pilot-training through the clubs. And of course they needed instructors. By the middle of ’39, I remember Suzie telling me, there were 10,000 civilian pilots in training, and 4,000 had got their “A” licences. And – cutting this short, there was a lot of shilly-shallying en route – in 1939 the ATA, Air Transport Auxiliary, came into being. Providing pools of mostly male but some female ferry pilots, to deliver aircraft from factories to storage depots or even to operational squadrons, and the women’s section was recruited initially from Civil Air Guard instructors. Of whom Suzie was one – with an enormous number of flying hours to her credit, I might tell you. They took her on in 1940.’ He’d paused… ‘Yes?’
‘You’ve skipped two years again.’
‘Well.’ A shrug. Blue seascape behind him, mug of beer in the right hand, pipe in the other. ‘We do need to get on with it, don’t we?’
‘Within reason, yes. But what’s happened to everyone in the meantime? All right, so you’re at sea – but I think we need to know where, and roughly what you’re up to. And Suzie’s flying – but Diana, Patricia, Alastair – Zoe, even?’
‘Needn’t waste time on Zoe.’
‘All right. But the others?’
‘I did mention Patricia just now. And Diana, like Suzie, was in the ATA. I didn’t see as much of her as I’d have liked, one way and another. Alastair – well, by about the end of ’40 he’d have been either in the Western Desert or on his way out to it. Italy had come in against us in June, you’ll remember… Look, I’ll stick to Suzie for the moment, if I may. Early 1940, she was a Second Officer in the ATA – absolutely rotten pay, I think it was about £240 a year, out of which they had to pay for their own lodgings – but the great thing was that she was flying – was therefore happy. As well as doing an essential job. Those girls flew everything – Spitfires, Seafires, Hurricanes, Beaufighters, Wellingtons – even four-engined bombers – Lancasters, Stirlings, Liberators – when they’d qualified. Most of them started with such things as Tiger Moths, and gradually upgraded, were sent on “conversion” courses – at White Waltham, I think. I don’t think more than about a dozen out of perhaps a couple of hundred women pilots got as far as the four-engined jobs. But they had their own flight engineers, too, all-girl crews.
‘I went to an ATA party at White Waltham once. It was in a cottage which three or four girls including Suzie were renting, close to the airfield. The guests were mostly ATA personnel, male and female, and most of us brought bottles of this or that. In my own case, of course, duty free. I was actually Diana’s guest – she was a First Officer, at that time. And the most beautiful girl present, let me tell you.’
‘More so than Suzie?’
He frowned, thinking about it. Perhaps summoning up images of them, from those distant times and scenes. Then he told me, ‘They were opposites, Suzie petite and dark, Diana tall and blonde. Well – in the beholder’s eye, isn’t it? Mine sort of took ’em all in, in those days. And I wasn’t quite as saintly as your impression might be, from that Suzie interlude. Those were very special circumstances: I’d have been a shit, frankly, if I’d taken any other line. Or at any rate weak – stupid… But this party, now. I happened to be on leave – in London, intentionally a very brief visit – Gieves, and my bank – because the all-night bombing raids had started and I didn’t see much point in hanging around. Diana came up, we had a meal and she took me down to White Waltham in her car. It was a Vauxhall Ten Four, I remember, silver-grey with black mudguards. Several of them had their own cars, for getting to and fro. Air Force petrol, I suppose. This must have been – oh, late ’40. It was several months after Dunkirk, anyway. I think… Yes, it was: Patricia had recently done her first disappearing act – she’d joined SIS, you see, Secret Intelligence Service. The Battle of Britain had been fought – and won – and the Germans had given up trying to flatten the fighter bases, turned all the heat on London. Didn’t they, just. September had been bad, but October was worse. Later we bombed their cities, and they seem to think we shouldn’t have, but by God they’d taught us how to set about it, hadn’t they? The Luftwaffe were out to kill and terrorize civilians, too, the idea was to demoralize us, frighten us into surrendering. There was a particularly frightful week of all-night raids just at that time. I left Diana down in Surrey after the party, went back up to London by train, and I got out of the place again damn quick, believe m
e. Spent a few days with Betty – she was heavily pregnant again at that time, old Dick had done his bit and flown the coop again – he was a Gunner – then I collected Tumult and took her out on patrol – from Blockhouse, but we wound up back in Dundee. I was no stranger to the place, having been based there all through the Norwegian fracas. Commanding Slayer then, not Tumult.’ He held up a finger, seeing me on the point of interrupting: ‘This sets the date, you see – late October of 1940. Incidentally, Betty had her second child – a girl – early in December.’
‘I take it you were married to Diana by then?’
‘Of course I was!’
‘All right. But the last mention of it was you were planning to marry in the summer of ’38. We’re now in the autumn of ’40.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll go back in a minute. Although there isn’t a lot that’s particularly relevant. Anyway, I’ll tell you about this ATA party first – which is highly relevant… As I said, I went down with Diana, who’d told me Suzie had asked her to bring me if she possibly could. It was sheer luck – as I’ve said, I wasn’t seeing much of Diana by that time. Never did, in fact, once the war started. Not a lot of leave – a hell of a lot of sea-time – and for her, almost constant flying. They really were kept at it. The excuse for this party, for instance, was that two of Suzie’s house-mates shared a birthday, but the arrangements must have been very hit-or-miss, none of ’em could be certain where they’d be from one day to another. As often as not they’d be what they called “stuck out” – in other words stuck for the night at some way-out place, having delivered a Spitfire to this airfield or a Mosquito to that… I think Suzie was starting a leave-period that day, so she’d known she'd be there. As for me, I was driving Tumult and I’d parked her in the dockyard at Chatham to have an Oerlikon platform built on. She was a Chatham-built boat; and of course all the new T’s were getting Oerlikon platforms as standard by that time. None too soon either. Anyway – there was Suzie, and there as her special guest was my own third hand and navigating officer, Chris Van Sommeren. I’d introduced them. We’d been at Blockhouse earlier in the summer when Suzie’d been based in the ATA ferry pool at Hamble, and she and another girl came over to see us. I’d only had Tumult a few weeks and it rather piqued me that Suzie hadn’t wanted to see over her. Her chum did, I showed her round while Suzie waited on the jetty. With Chris, probably. But we showed them Blockhouse – for as much as that was worth – and had an evening out in Southsea, and I drove them home. Still had my car, kept it at Betty’s mostly… Anyway – the relevance of all this is that young Van Sommeren was there. Suzie had wanted to surprise me, so she’d told him not to let me know he would be.’
‘You say he was your navigator then?’
‘This is the point, really. My Number One was Billy Davenport, but he was going for his COQC – I’d only just heard this – and I’d decided to give his job to Chris Van Sommeren and take on a new pilot. Chris was about due for a first-lieutenancy, and he was a very competent young submariner as well as an extremely nice chap. I didn’t want to lose him – would have, he’d have been pinched for a first lieutenant’s job elsewhere if I hadn’t hung on to him. So – they’d surprised me, but I was able to surprise him, too – made his evening for him in fact, by breaking this news to him there at the party.’
Chalk lit his pipe. Sitting on the wall still, scratching the setter’s ribs with the toe of the kind of boot we used to call brothel-creepers.
‘Before I leave this – at your behest – a word about Suzie and Chris. You’re going to have to rearrange all this anyway, aren’t you? – put it into some kind of sequence… Anyway, she told me – that night – that the last thing she’d have contemplated was ever to have become involved with another submariner. I’d hardly have expected it, either. The Dymock and Trumpeter business wasn’t the sort of experience you’d shrug off, exactly – not in a lifetime. And for a seventeen-year-old girl in the trauma of her first love affair…’
He’d paused again, shaking his head. Then continued, ‘The flying had provided some sort of anodyne to it. And I dare say the further hiatus of Guy’s death had pushed it further into the background. In any case, she’d seen Chris a few times since that first meeting. It was obvious they’d both got it badly, the lengths they’d gone to just to spend an hour or two together here or there. I’d noticed that at sea he was interminably writing letters, and now I knew who to… And there it was – I’d done it again, and here she was with questions that had a strangely familiar ring to them – what did I think of him, etcetera. Did I think she was mad, or what?’
‘You gave him a good reference, I imagine.’
‘The best. He was twenty-two then – or just twenty-three – a couple of years older than her. He certainly wasn’t any kind of Dymock either, he was as sound as a bell, and – well, she couldn’t have fallen for a better man. Fallen for him, she admitted, against her will and “better judgement” – whatever that means. Submarines, she told us – me and Diana – gave her “the heeby-jeebies”. She was putting it lightly, but she wasn’t joking. The Trumpeter affair, plus her imagination – and by this time of course we’d lost a few boats, some of which must have been mentioned in the papers. In the past few months, losses I’d known of personally just here in home waters included Spearfish, Shark, Salmon, Narwhal and Thames. Three others in the brief Norwegian campaign. With all hands, incidentally. She couldn’t have heard of more than one or two – I hoped – but she had this vision of men trapped and drowning, and an impression that the odds were stacked against us. I tried to convince her to the contrary: all right, in wartime submarines were lost, on occasion, but so were surface ships – and tanks – and aircraft fell out of the sky too, sometimes – what about that?
‘She’d answered, “Don’t worry – mine won’t”, and Diana had put a long arm around her: “Damn right, yours won’t!”
‘Before I leave this – here’s another of those snapshots. Suzie and Van Sommeren dancing. He, if you remember, was fairish – brown eyes, though, light-brown hair, I suppose – and only about five-eight, five-nine. He was in uniform, of course – an RNVR lieutenant, two wavy stripes – and she was in a red dress that fitted her – in my perhaps somewhat prurient recall – like a second skin. She looked absolutely marvellous – the rich red of that dress, with her dark hair and summer-tanned complexion. And they looked darned good together – I can’t tell you… We were dancing to gramophone records, of course, another of those old wind-up machines, and the song I remember clearly from that evening – as clearly as if I was hearing it now – was Room Five Hundred and Four. It was meaning something to them, too: you could see it. Well – she and I had had our room 504, hadn’t we; and she’d left it in the same state as when she’d arrived – thanks to my damn principles. But it certainly wouldn’t be like that with those two – anyone could see it wouldn’t, and I thought my God, what a lucky bastard!’
Chapter 16
(The narration recorded in the following pages is a verbatim transcription from the tape. Chalk was speaking mostly from memory but from time to time consulting his own notes, especially on background historical events.)
‘All right. The fill-in, now, Recueillir pour mieux sauter, as the Frogs say. My wedding, all that… But one more word about Suzie first, a point I don’t think I’ve made effectively enough. Basically, why I’d behaved as I had, that night and day in London.
‘The thing was, I knew it was vital to get it into her head that she was not responsible for Guy’s death. You could argue the other way, obviously, but my argument was first the point I’d already made that it was Dymock, not her, who’d made the running and carried her along with him, and second that nobody – neither her nor anyone else – made Guy go to Spain. You can lose a girl or two without rushing off and putting yourself in the firing-line – eh? So for her to take the blame would have been crazy – also very damaging, when she was already having nightmares over her Trumpeter ordeal.’
‘Still havin
g them?’
‘That leave I spent at Glendarragh in March – March of ’38, right? – Patricia told me then that there were still – outcries and sobbing in the night. Not every night, but – often enough. In the flat in London she’d whimpered, asleep in my arms, and I’d put that down to the news of Guy having been killed. It may have been, may not. But to have allowed her to think she’d sent Guy to his death would have been callous in the extreme. And you see, she’d come to me full of this sense of guilt, and whether she knew it or not she might well have been offering herself to me in expiation. D’you see? That was how it felt – at the time, and since… And if I’d accepted it on that basis – even a suspicion of that as the basis – well, my God, what a mess. I doubt we’d ever have been able to look each other in the eye again. I didn’t think it all through like that at the time. I wasn’t in a state, myself, to think so analytically. I merely followed my instinct – as she had, in coming to me.’
‘So – that covers that. Pressing on, now – Diana had originally been due back at the beginning of March, but she didn’t make it until well into April, by which time I was on the perisher course. Her mother had died, and she’d stayed out there to – help her father, keep him company for the first few weeks, I suppose. They wanted her to start right away in the air survey job – which she did – and it turned out to be a lot better than the freelance flying had been. She worked more or less regular hours, and had her weekends free. I didn’t – the COQC included some sea-time – but we got together whenever we could, weekends in London or down in Hampshire, two or three at Betty’s. Oh, Dick Traill took rather a shine to her, that was it – and Betty wasn’t too pleased, so – London or Hampshire, after that. Mostly at a pub in Fareham or the Queens Hotel in Southsea. Meanwhile the Germans had marched into Austria, and we had the first Czech crisis. It was only a matter of time, by then: and thank God we did have a little time; when it eventually came we were at least half ready for it.
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