Lampard raised his glass. “To absent friends.”
“Yes.” She sighed, and he observed her silk dress slip sleekly across her breasts. “Yes. Isn’t it dreadful? There are moments when I can’t remember what he looked like. His face is just a blur.”
“Perfectly normal reaction, my dear.”
“Actually, Gerald was a brandy-and-soda man. He could be frightfully stuffy in some ways. I mean, this wine would have been wasted on him. Utterly wasted.”
“Mustn’t let it get warm, must we?” Lampard refilled their glasses.
He put both hands on her waist when he helped her ashore, and he tipped the boatman quite generously. They took a horse-drawn gharri back to her house in the Garden City. He liked riding in a gharri. Its ironclad wheels made a splendid clatter. If it had to stop in traffic, the driver could be relied upon to use his whip on any hawkers or beggars who tried to bother them. Lampard gave him a good tip, too. She noticed. “You spoil them,” she said.
“You spoil me,” he said. She had taken his arm for the walk to the front door. She gave him the key. Opening doors was a man’s job.
They danced to a stock of records that dropped, one by one, from the arms of her modern American record-player: “Blue Room,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Stardust,” “A Foggy Day in London Town.” She hugged him and asked: “What makes your uniform crackle like that?”
“Light starch,” he said. “Or perhaps static electricity.”
That amused her. “Might one be scorched by you?” she asked.
“You are in terrible peril,” he said gently. “Strike the slightest spark and there will be a colossal explosion.”
The record ended. “Stay,” she said, and went out. She came back dressed in silk pajamas and carrying another pair. “These were too big for Gerald,” she said, “but they should fit you.”
Lampard left the house at dawn. Played two, won two, he thought.
* * *
Strafing continued all next day.
The ground crews had worked throughout the night and Hornet Squadron was fully operational again. Barton had the pilots awoken at four-thirty a.m. Briefing was to be at five, takeoff as soon as possible afterward. The night was still very black at four-thirty. Black and cold. Hick Hooper forced himself out of bed and was immediately shivering. He pulled his uniform over his pajamas and walked around the tent, stamping and slapping to get his body going, and he tripped over a guy-rope. “Holy Moses,” he said. The tent swayed.
“You’re allowed to swear,” Tiny Lush told him. He was giving his chest a good two-handed scratch.
“My own fault,” Hooper mumbled.
“So what? Never sit on your emotions. Gives you terrible piles. Well-known scientific fact.” Lush put on a sweater and pulled a knitted stocking-cap over his ears and headed for the mess. Hooper followed. The sky was thick with icy stars.
By then the two flight commanders had already met Barton in his trailer.
“We’ll hit Fritz before he’s had time to put his teeth in,” he told them. “And we’ll bash the Eye-ties while they’re still looking for their hernia belts.” He was clapping his hands, not for warmth but to release his exuberance.
“You’re bloody chirpy,” Patterson said, “sir.”
“Dawn is a bloody chirpy time,” Barton said. “If you’re a bird, that is.” He spread his arms wide and flapped his hands. “Think of the worms. Wrapped in their blankets. Waiting to be strafed.” He smacked his lips.
“Yesterday, sir, you said breakfast was the best time,” Dalgleish said.
“No, no. Dawn. Daaaaawn.” Barton turned it into a long, theatrical groan. “Worst time of day. Everyone feels rotten. Mouth like an Arab’s armpit. Then, before you can properly wake up, some bastard Englander comes along and blows half your head off.” At times like this, Barton had a cheerful, boyish face. He raised his eyebrows and turned down the corners of his mouth. “Be fair,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“Dawn.” Dalgleish looked at his watch. “We’d better get cracking.”
“Hit ’em low,” Barton said. “Below the belt.”
“I’m not flying a hundred and fifty miles at night at zero feet,” Patterson declared. “I had enough of that insanity over the English Channel.”
“Suit yourself,” Barton told him. He gave them each a list of targets. “Just get over there and make bloody nuisances of yourselves.”
As they were leaving, Patterson stopped. He was reading his list. “This can’t be right, Fanny,” he said. “We hit these yesterday.”
“You’re surprised?” Barton twitched with pleasure. “Good. That means they’ll be astonished.”
The mess tent was filling up with yawning pilots. Pip got his mug of tea and sat next to Dalgleish. “Hell of a gamble, isn’t it?” he said.
“Maybe. Tell you at breakfast.”
“I might not get back for breakfast.”
“Then you’ll know the answer, won’t you?”
“That’s a great comfort.” Pip drank. “Shit,” he said. “There’s sand in this tea.”
“You’re a lucky lad,” Pinky told him. “Usually you get tea in your sand.” He went off to brief his Flight.
The squadron took off in pairs as soon as the first gray tinge in the east gave a hint of the horizon. It was full daylight when they came back and landed, engines crackling and snapping as the power came off and the wheels touched and set off instant streamers of dust. All twelve Tomahawks came back. Only one pair had met a defense that was obviously hotter and stronger than the day before, and that was Barton and Stewart, so everyone felt good. “You wanted me to tell you something,” Pinky Dalgleish said to Patterson. They were standing in line for fried tinned bacon and tinned tomatoes. “Can’t remember what. Can you?”
“Who killed Cock Robin?” Patterson was feeling marvelous. He and Kit Carson had found some trucks that blew up with a gratifying shower of pyrotechnics and they had chased a bunch of infantry like panicking sheep. “How many beans make five? Did your mother come from Ireland? Who were you with last night, out in the pale moonlight?” He was ravenous. The aroma of fried bacon made him salivate.
“I remember now,” Pinky said. “Something about a hell of a gamble.”
“Everything’s a gamble,” Pip said. “Why worry?”
“I’m not worried, Pip. If you go for a Burton today, can I have your bacon tomorrow?”
“Not a funny joke.”
“Who said it was a joke?”
Fanny Barton’s second-guessing of the enemy’s mind gave the squadron a good day. The dawn attacks, with pairs of Tomahawks arriving at high speed from the eye of the sun, achieved surprise everywhere except at Barton’s own target. “Flak as thick as pig shit!” he told Kellaway, who was acting Intelligence Officer. “Billy would have got out and walked on it, but he didn’t like getting his boots dirty. Did you, Billy-boy?” Stewart smiled and nodded. The flak had been terrifying, a sudden storm of hate that flooded the sky, but they had bashed through it all and survived. Billy Stewart had total faith in his CO. Where Fanny went, Billy followed. Their fighters were ripped and slashed by shrapnel, but so what? The Tomahawk was a tough old kite, the troops would slap on some patches. And look at Fanny, pleased as sixpence. Billy smiled. Kellaway smiled. He liked a happy squadron.
They strafed again at midday, swooping through the hot and dusty haze on a different set of targets. And again at sunset, when they circled wide to the west, put themselves between the dazzle and the eyes of the German gunners, and then raced home.
Night fell at six-thirty prompt.
Supper was bully-beef stew with biscuits and tea.
“What d’you make of it so far?” Fido Doggart asked the American politely.
“Good place for a war,” Hooper said. “Nothing but sand and flies, and the flies seem to enjoy the company.”
“It’s a funny thing,” Mick O’Hare said, “but I’ve been in the blue now man and beast
for nigh on forty years come Shrove Tuesday, and I know every fly by name and by face, yet I’ve never seen a fly land on Butcher Bailey. Isn’t that an odd thing?”
“Even flies draw the line somewhere,” Fanny said.
“Flies have got some respect,” Butcher told them. “They recognize Norman blood.”
Kit Carson had been about to eat some stew. Instead he aimed his spoon at Butcher. “You telling us your ancestors came over with William the Conqueror?”
“Don’t point that thing at me,” Butcher said. “It might go off.”
“You should have seen the flies in France in ’40,” the adjutant said. “Big as sparrowhawks.”
“This stuff went off last week,” Kit said, eating it.
“Polish air force was very aristocratic,” Sneezy announced. “My squadron commander, a genuine Polish count, brave as a lion. One day a pilot tries to land, forgets to lower his wheels, nasty prang. My squadron commander takes pilot behind hangar and shoots him. In the head. With a pistol.”
“That’s not very nice,” Pinky Dalgleish observed.
“Did he get court-martialled?” Pip Patterson asked.
Sneezy was amused. “How could he? He was dead! Shot through the head! Besides, no time for court-martial. Germans invade.”
“Well, it’s one way to fight a war, I suppose,” Barton said.
“Aristocrats got no time for peasants,” Sneezy said. “Pilot behaves like peasant, doesn’t deserve to be pilot.”
“Remember that in future, you lot,” Fanny Barton said.
“You can’t shoot me behind the hangar if I prang,” Fido Doggart said. “We haven’t got a hangar.”
“Uncle: order a hangar,” Barton said. “A small portable hangar.”
“What we really need is a portable gramophone,” Kellaway said wistfully.
A vehicle arrived, headlights burned in the blackness, doors slammed. The doctor came in and dumped a couple of cardboard boxes. “Onions,” he said. He looked and sounded very tired. “I hope there’s some grub left.” He found a space to sit at the table and looked around until he found Fanny Barton. “Schofield’s dead,” he told him. “Dead and buried.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Barton said. The adjutant nodded and grunted a sort of confirmation. Nobody else spoke. This interested Hick Hooper. An American squadron would have reacted differently: somebody’s fist would have slammed the table, heads would have swung toward the doctor, there would have been passionate remarks like Jesus, can you believe it? or What a lousy deal. But the RAF didn’t go in for that sort of thing.
“I brought the new IO with me,” the doctor said. A cook put a plate of stew in front of him. “Old pal of yours. Skull Skelton.”
That startled Barton. “Tall bloke? Glasses, big forehead? Always disagreeing with everyone?” The doctor, spooning down stew, nodded. “Well, I’m buggered,” Barton said.
“Baggy Bletchley must have fixed it,” the adjutant said.
“Skull was Intelligence Officer when the squadron was in France,” Barton told the others. “And all through the Battle of Britain. Then he had a row with an air vice-marshal and got posted to the north of Scotland.”
“What was the row about?” Kit Carson asked. To him, arguing with an air vice-marshal was inconceivable.
“Something to do with putting extra-long-range drop tanks on the Spits,” Barton said, “so the kite flew a very very long way, but the trouble was it behaved like a constipated brick. Remember, Pip?”
Patterson shook his head at the memory. “You get jumped by a Focke-Wulf 190, there’s no time to fart about with drop tanks,” he said.
“So the AVM turned out to be wrong,” Barton said. “But Skull had gone north by then. And several good pilots had gone west.”
A few minutes later Skull came in, carrying a portable gramophone and some records. He paused and sniffed appreciatively. “The aroma has something of the barnyard bouquet of a truly fine burgundy,” he said. “And is that Limburger cheese I detect?”
“My stars,” Kellaway said. “You’re a squadron leader now.”
“That’s desert feet you can smell,” Tiny Lush said.
Skull put the gramophone and records down. “They tell me you can’t even get The Times delivered here,” he said to Barton. “They say this is the worst posting in all Africa.”
“Takoradi is far worse,” Barton said happily. “Anyone doesn’t like it here can go to Takoradi.”
“Even the flies hate Takoradi,” Pip Patterson said. “Or so I’m told.”
“What have you got there, Skull?” Kellaway pointed to the gramophone records. “Bloody Beethoven, I expect.”
“No fear,” Skull said. “Lots of Al Bowlly singing ‘Empty Saddles in the Old Corral’ and other classics. Wonderful stuff.” He picked up a record and carefully wiped it on his sleeve. “Al Bowlly is the English answer to Bing Crosby, you know,” he said.
“A crooner,” Kellaway said emptily. “Couldn’t sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to save his life. Sorry I asked.”
* * *
Henry Lester took Ralph Malplacket to see an amiable major who was a press liaison officer at Middle East HQ. “Nothing much on the books at present, I’m afraid,” the major said.
“My editor is convinced I’m goofing off,” Lester said. “He’s been holding the front page so long, his arms ache.”
“War is never continuous. There are lulls. This is a lull.”
“Newspapers can’t lull. Those that do, die.”
“Well, if it’s death you want to cover I can steer you toward several excellent military hospitals. Or military cemeteries, come to that.”
Lester shrugged. He got up and drifted away to the window.
“It’s all a matter of degree, isn’t it?” Malplacket said. “We realize that it would, of course, be premature to expect a full-scale battle as such.” He twirled his Panama hat on the end of his forefinger. “For myself, any item of news would be welcome, provided it put fresh heart into the munitions workers of England as they toil in their factories. Not a swingeing defeat of the Hun, just a refreshing taste of success.” He twirled too hard and his hat spun off his finger.
Lester came and picked it up. “British Commandos use tommy-guns, don’t they?” he asked the major. “Chicago makes tommy-guns. Now there’s a hell of a good story just waiting to be written.”
“Think what it would do to the morale of our gallant American cousins,” Malplacket urged.
The major made a short telephone call.
“I can get you attached to a tank exercise,” he told them. “People like reading about tanks. All that dashing about the desert. Live ammunition, too.”
“It’s not tommy-guns, though, is it?” Lester said.
“It might be. Some infantry will be training alongside the tanks. The odd tommy-gun might appear. You never know your luck.” The major was adjusting the things on his desk, squaring off the blotter, the files, the ink stand.
“So kind of you to chat with us.” Malplacket got his hat back from Lester. “If, by chance, a Commando raid should materialize, you will bear us in mind, won’t you?”
The major almost smiled. “Nobody tells me anything about Commando raids, and if they did I wouldn’t believe them. If you’re looking for a really good scrap, I recommend the Black Cat Club.”
“It’s gone downhill lately,” Lester said. “I’ve seen more blood on the floor at the Chicago Chrysanthemum Show.”
“Best I can do,” the major said.
They went out and sat in a big Buick. Lester had borrowed it from Shapiro, who was in Syria looking for a story.
“I feel sluggish when there’s no news,” Lester said. “I mean, news, that’s what life is all about, right?”
“It’s a point of view,” Malplacket said.
“The way things are now, it just depresses the hell out of me. I was in Spain in ’37 and people from both sides were falling over themselves to give us their news. Most of it was crap, bu
t at least they were willing. In China, for God’s sake, they’d lay on a battle if you promised them ten bucks. Even in Berlin there was always news, provided you knew which stone to turn over. But here . . . It’s like I’m not speaking the same language because I didn’t go to the right school, or something.”
“Funny you should say that,” Malplacket said. “Yesterday I bumped into a chap called Craven, Sticky Craven, hadn’t seen him since Eton. He couldn’t spell to save his life and now he’s an air vice-marshal! With a little squadron leader to carry his briefcase.”
“Did this Craven tell you any military secrets?”
“Um . . . No. I didn’t actually ask him about the war. Forgot, I suppose. We talked about cricket, mainly.”
“Eton,” Lester said thoughtfully. “D’you reckon you might find a few more of your old school pals in high places, if you went around and looked?”
“Oh, dozens. Scores, probably.”
Lester started the car. He was beginning to feel slightly better. “Thank God for privilege,” he said. “Cheaper than corruption, and you meet a better class of person.”
* * *
Jakowski halted the column at noon so that the cooks could make a meal and the fitters could service the trucks. Both tasks proved impossible. The vehicles were too hot to touch and it was idiotic to light a fire in an atmosphere like the breath of a furnace. Jakowski settled for bread, dates and water. The column sat in the middle of the empty desert and fried. The men tried to sleep. The flies cruised from truck to truck, pausing only to refresh themselves with an occasional sip of sweat.
At midafternoon Jakowski reckoned that the heat had relaxed a fraction and he decided to move on. First, everyone was to get a third of a liter of water. That was when the leak was discovered. One of the water-tankers was half empty.
The news shocked him so much that for a few moments he felt ill: his chest hurt and he seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. This feeling of illness came as a second shock. He did not want the sergeant who had reported the leak to suspect anything, so he squatted on his heels and traced meaningless symbols in the sand. His father had died of a heart attack a year ago. Maybe it ran in the family. He forced his lungs to do their job and he felt his heart thudding too fast, too hard; but at least it was thudding.
A Good Clean Fight Page 18