‘I’ve been thinking,’ I told Dolly. ‘For the last few years all of my life seems to have been about saying goodbye: to people and places and things. I want to change all that.’
‘I’ve been thinking too, Charlie – while I was waiting for you. Maybe you shouldn’t meet Piers tonight. Maybe you should just go away. He’s in a funny mood, and seems really venomous about you.’ I understood venomous: Alice had given me lessons in it. Dolly explained: ‘He will be very vindictive if you let him: mess up your new job or something like that. Give him a few weeks to get over it.’
I said, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’
‘I thought you’d say that.’ She sounded miserable.
The chain guarding the Kenwood driveway was down. We bumped across it.
Rhododendrons brushed against our car. Piers’s big SS was parked alongside the house where I had seen it before. Then so were we. Dolly had a small WD torch which we used to find our way around the building. Our feet thumped hollowly on wooden-board floors in massive empty rooms. There was a single lighted candle stub in the centre of the room in which the musicians had howled their awful songs. In every room we had walked through Dolly had shouted out ‘Piers’ or ‘Piers, where are you?’ What had come back was an ugly echo.
Now I told her, ‘I know where he is. Lend me your torch, and stay here with the candle: it’ll last at least half an hour. If we haven’t come back by then, just go home. And go to work in the morning as if nothing has happened. OK?’
‘OK, Charlie.’ Suddenly we were whispering, but I suppose that’s what people do when they’re wandering about in the dark. Then she leaned towards me, and quickly kissed me. ‘Take care.’ I’ve already told you about kisses like that.
I lost my way on the paths twice. Piers must have heard me blundering through the bushes but he remained silent. Eventually I broke out onto the killing ground. He had hung storm lanterns in two of the taller trees, giving the duelling patch a strangely festive air. He leaned against a tree under one. He was wearing a dinner suit, and smoking a thin cheroot. The air was still. I could smell both his cigar and his cologne on it. Neither insect noises nor the scuffling of small predators disturbed the silence. The stars were beginning to show. I heard an owl hoot a mile away.
I said, ‘Hello, Piers, late for supper?’
‘They’ll keep it for me: nice people. Classy people.’
‘Not like me?’
‘No, not treacherous little slugs like you. That’s right, Charlie.’
‘You’ll have to explain that, Piers.’
‘Will I, Charlie? Explain your betrayal?’ He put a hand into his pocket and produced the pistol I knew that he would have: a small silvered automatic. I’m sure that Les would have called it a proper lady’s gun. ‘Maybe. But not until you’ve stood under the other light; over there.’
He motioned with his pistol: sideways slashing movements. I felt as if I was an actor in a film: Leslie Howard would be in the bushes, waiting to spring to my rescue. No, he wouldn’t: this was Charlie’s world, remember, where everything got buggered up. Anyway, Leslie drowned in a plane in the Bay of Biscay years ago, didn’t he? So I was on my own. I complied, stood where Piers wanted me to, and pushed my hands deep into my jacket pockets. I remembered that Miller had got me the jacket: so she was still with me at the end. Her and Tommo.
I asked him, ‘Who am I supposed to have betrayed?’
‘Me. Everyone. This whole fucking operation went tits-up the moment you joined it. You couldn’t resist warning your old girlfriend, could you? Which meant that the jaws of the trap we’d been promising our dear Prime Minister sprang shut on precisely nothing and nobody. A police operation supposed to put the Commies and the untermenschen back in their places now so botched up that it’s made me an utter laughing stock. The pink papers are full of it, and Scotland Yard suddenly wants damn all to do with me. It’ll take us years to win back their trust.’
‘Do you deserve to? Anyway: how was I to know what they were up to?’
‘You must have known about the ship.’
‘Yes. I visited it with Grace.’
‘You see . . . and you chose not to tell me?’
‘I suppose so. I didn’t ask them where it was going, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t see the connection, so it didn’t seem to be your business: you didn’t need to know.’
It was ridiculous, but even staring, as I was, at his small pistol, I enjoyed using the words. It was like a little payback.
Piers snarled, ‘You little bastard. You told her when we were going to move in.’
‘I might have done; but not in so many words. They were homeless people, anyway, Piers, not the fucking Wehrmacht. Now they’re off your hands; gone away; not our problem. Forget it.’
He could have asked me to try telling our soldiers being murdered in Palestine that it wasn’t our problem. But he didn’t. He smiled without making eye contact – and the smile had a frightening quality. At that moment it occurred to me that he was completely off his fucking trolley. All because of a sly smile. I knew that there was to be no reasoning with him in any meaningful sense of the word.
‘What happens now, Piers?’
‘I warned you what happened to people who went to the bad, didn’t I? I brought you here, and warned you.’
‘I haven’t gone to the bad, Piers, although I rather think you may have done.’ I was thinking about someone else taking the rap for tons of missing stores, and what he might have used the money for. ‘But forget that for a minute – yes, you warned me.’
He frowned and said, ‘Well, you know what happens: we fight a duel; just like the old days, old boy. Always wanted to do that.’ The first old boy of the evening might have been a signal that he was getting himself together again.
‘What kind of a duel?’
‘The kind of duel where I win and kill you; because I have a gun and you don’t.’ He had a moment of doubt, and asked, ‘I say, old man, you don’t happen to have a gun, do you?’
I saw no reason to lie to him. ‘I’ve carried a gun since soon after I met you, Piers.’
Piers looked at me for a long moment. He was making his risk assessment. Finally he smiled and said, ‘No. You haven’t the stomach for that sort of thing, old man. Dropping bombs on kids from twenty thousand feet is more your mark. You were never made for the old mano a mano.’
My dead pal Pete had taught me never to give a bad guy an even chance, so Pete was here at the end as well.
I watched Piers’s pistol, not his face. As soon as it began to move I took my museum piece from my jacket pocket, cocked it as I lifted it, and shot him through the throat. It wasn’t a particularly good shot; I’d aimed a foot lower. His head flopped immediately to one side. The look in his eyes was worth a million. Utter surprise, and then mortification. His arm fell back to his side, and with it the little silver automatic. Then he dropped the pistol, and collapsed gently in the other direction, ending up on his side facing me, with his legs under and behind him – like a man felled in prayer. I could smell the burnt propellant in the air.
I went over and squatted by him. My legs were shaking as much as my voice. I said, ‘Sorry, Piers. You’d already made up your mind. No matter what I said you weren’t going to let me walk away from here, were you?’
He could neither move nor speak. All he had left were his eyes, and from those I knew that he was dying. There was a lot of blood. What was left of his breath was a bubbling sound. I looked very closely at his face: he didn’t panic.
I asked him, ‘Do you want to know why I might get away with this?’ There was a spark left in his eyes, so I carried on. ‘When you’re dead I’m going to remove your trousers and leave them folded very neatly under a tree. I will leave your pistol where it is. With one of your fingers I am going to scratch the words “lovers’ tiff” in the soil close to you. The police will look back into their record of arrests, and draw their own conclusions, won’t they?’
If you’d t
hought that my words might have provoked a last flash of anger in his eyes, you would have been mistaken. If there was a look there at all, it was one of amusement: the dying bastard found it funny. The flickering lantern caught the precise moment that the light flared and died in Piers’s eyes. Just before that I leaned over, held his hand and said, ‘Goodbye, Piers; happy landings.’ Then he was gone.
One of last year’s leaves finally gave up its hold on the tree and spiralled down incredibly slowly to land on his face. I brushed it away. In an odd way the words that I scrawled on the ground alongside him weren’t all that far from the truth.
Dolly had gone. It took me an hour to walk back to Highgate. I was overtaken by a slow wet front coming up the Thames Valley and watched as, one by one, the stars overhead went out. A fine drizzle clung to me before I walked up the front steps. I drank several bottles of Worthington before I went to bed, and I slept without dreaming.
I should have been asked a million questions. I wasn’t asked one. Either no one knew it had been me, or no one cared. I waited two days for the knock on the door, or the telephone call from the flat. I thought about Piers a lot, and a couple of times lifted my hand for the telephone to call the police. But I didn’t. If I hadn’t killed Piers he would certainly have killed me, and Mrs Bassett didn’t raise a stupid son. The knock on the door, or the telephone call: neither came, so I packed up and drove back to Bella. Goodbye, Dolly.
The following Friday Alison stood in the doorway of my room, leaning against its frame. What goes around, comes around. I remembered that Miller used to do that, and I realized that there were already some days when I didn’t think about her. That was sad. Alison’s right hand was stretched up to touch the top of the door frame in a Jane Russell pose. She was dressed in her dark blue school uniform. Alison could give Miller a run for her money any day of the week, but didn’t know it yet. In a few years’ time somebody would tell her. She said, ‘You could always marry me instead, Charlie.’
I laughed, and shook my head. ‘No.’
From the radio downstairs a dance band was swinging out with ‘Skyliner’: someone must have told them I had a new job.
‘Is there still someone else?’
‘No. Not any more. No one at all.’ It was useful to be able to say it.
‘Why not, then?’
‘I just know that it would spoil something.’
‘Something for you, or something for me?’
‘Both; neither. I don’t know that.’
Alison pushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. It was a sudden and endearing gesture. Do you know what you’re missing, Charlie?’
‘Yes, love,’ I told her. ‘I believe I do.’ No harm in telling someone the truth occasionally.
I went to work sometimes. The girls were doing the same goddamned trawlers, and Ronka was teaching the others Polish. They were also beginning to dip into Eastern Zone military traffic as well. Jane was better at being me than I was, and they all still missed Miller. Although nobody said so, they were always glad to see the back of me. Watson poured me a drink whenever I reported to him. I didn’t ask him who was doing the flying: maybe they had stopped for a while.
Eventually I sorted through a number of scraps of paper to find a telephone number that Les had given me. I called him one evening, and told him that I was due some demob leave and didn’t know what to do with it. I asked him, ‘Are you working for the Council the way you told me?’
‘Nah. Working for mesself. Cleaning chimneys. You’ll never be out of a job, cleaning chimneys. I’m also invited to weddings, and paid to kiss the bride for luck. I’ve kissed more married women in the last month than in the rest o’ my life altogether.’ His deep laugh warmed us. Then he said, ‘I can get a few days off next week if you like.’
‘For what?’
‘Drive down to the coast wiv you. Talk about the old days wiv the Major and Maggs. See the kids. You could pick me up on your way . . . I’d like another drive of your car.’
It took me about three seconds. Then I said, ‘Yes. OK.’
I knew a sniper in Germany once. I remember asking him what he felt when he shot someone. His one-word reply was ‘recoil’. He also told me that snipers develop a sixth sense that tells them whenever another sniper has them in their sights. I could have done with that the day little Dieter put one through my heart: my old man used to talk about the bullet that had your name on it.
Bosham: we hadn’t told the Major or Maggs that we were coming down. I got cold feet at the last minute, and went for a beer in a harbour bar, leaving Les to go in to them alone. He didn’t come back for me. After a couple of drinks I walked out and round the muddy, sandy bar of the inlet. This was the beach where Canute had ordered the tide to turn, which seemed appropriate.
The air was soft. I was looking at my feet, and not where I was going so I didn’t see the running boy until he was alongside me, shouting ‘Mein papa! Mein papa!’ at me. Like I told you: the kid should have been a sniper, because I was dead meat from the moment he saw me and opened his mouth.
I scooped him up, and we hugged each other so hard that I thought I would die. There was a leather bootlace around his neck. I fished it out and found my old fibre ID tag still on it: the one I had given him in Germany. He buried his face in my shoulder. I said, ‘You must say Dad, or Daddy. You’re in England now,’ although I thought that reversion to his first language in the heat of the moment was OK. He burrowed in deeper, and asked in careful English, ‘You won’t go away again? Promise me?’
‘Sometimes I’ll have to, but I’ve a new job not far from here. I’ll come back here every time I’m not working. You’ll see me a lot.’
‘Carlo will be so pleased.’
I carried him on my back as we walked and talked. Six months of a boy’s life can be for ever. So he told me he missed me, and I told him I’d missed him. I cried a bit, but I don’t think he noticed. Eventually he pointed me towards a stout old house a few hundred years old, and a few hundred yards away. It had a small restaurant and a bar on the ground floor. White and blue: like the writing and the star on the wall of the room in London. But this was different: it looked a bit like home.
Epilogue
It’s too easy for an old man to fall into fixed habits, which is why each autumn always seems to bring an end to my writing these days. It’s a season I enjoy: it suits my age.
Today was cold: too cold to sit outside to write. The first of the heavy frosts had turned the garden and the meadow beyond it to glinting crystal. The sky was deceptively high, clear and beautiful; ready to ice-up the wings of an unwary flyer, and drop him into the sea. I sat in the study and let the last few words drift through my mind. Piers and Les circled the driveway together, deep in discussion. Neither had met when they were still alive, as far as I know . . . but they’re out there talking now, and although I know that they died I can hear the frozen gravel crunch beneath their feet. Occasionally they glance at me through the window, and smile as if they know something I don’t.
The old lady brought me a living visitor with my afternoon dram. Elaine is a young woman from Rogart, a hamlet not far north of here. She seems to have adopted us, and sometimes sits me down with a tape recorder to tell her about flying over Germany in 1944. There aren’t that many of us left, you see. She has a calming presence which helps us through the bad days when my leg is hurting, or there are burning aircraft inside my head. Today she and the old lady were content to sit in the room behind me, sip their drinks, gossip and watch me write. I don’t think that Elaine sees my other visitors, but the old lady sometimes does. Last week she told me that she had seen Piers inside the house, standing in the corridor by our bedroom door. He’d never been that close before. He wears a grubby bandage around his neck, and is probably still angry with me.
I left them talking about me over their drinks, to walk around the garden myself. The scarf I wrapped around my neck has been knitted by my granddaughter. I also took my rattan cane, which is my a
dmission of age. Looking out towards the old Tain Airfield on the shoreline, I caught a flash of light against the sea, and then heard the eerie whine of Merlin engines at full chat. A Mosquito aircraft preserved from the Forties flew over at about a hundred feet. If you’re one of those new folk who think in metres just divide by three, and you’ll be more or less there. If you’re one of the new new folk who can’t even divide by three, because it’s no longer taught in schools – then complain about it, and find someone who can. I waved my old rattan at the pilot. He came round again and waggled his plane’s wings at me, before flying east.
For a moment it was like falling in love again.
From the corner of my eye I glimpsed Les and Piers: still there. They weren’t looking at me; they were looking up at the Mosquito. It won’t be that long before they’re explaining to me how all this works. I don’t mind: sometimes I tire of waiting.
When the walls came tumbling down . . . just a little history and couple of anecdotes
Charlie’s picture of 1947 is coloured by three historical elements: the organized squatter movement of London’s homeless that was at its height the year before, the commencement of spy flights into Soviet-controlled territories and, peripherally, the establishment of the State of Israel.
The Communist Party-led squatter movement folded quite quickly, although pale imitations still surfaced from time to time, notably in the early 1970s. That first one was eventually almost entirely killed off by the spread of the ubiquitous prefab. What a fate: death by architecture! I smile as I remember those small estates of prefabricated houses – there must still be one or two left somewhere. What interested me about the squatters was a throwaway remark credited to Clement Attlee. He once said that during his time as Prime Minister it was the only event that came close to bringing his government down. I wonder if the hungry, cold and homeless families – huddling in disused Tube stations, or semi-derelict empty offices and houses – ever saw themselves as a threat to the fabric of society? I salute them, anyway. In fact, the big houses in the Bishops Avenue weren’t properly squatted until the 1960s and 1970s. That’s where I met a fire-eating stripper, who slept with an open cut-throat razor beneath her mattress – and I sometimes wonder if she’s still around. But that’s another story.
The Forgotten War Page 39