The Protagonists

by James Barlow

  ‘What’s he going to do?’

  ‘He says he’s finished. When he has a longer leave he will see a solicitor.’

  ‘A divorce!’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  In a tired voice, devoid of all sophistication, Myrel asked, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. (I didn’t – I hadn’t had time to think of the implications.) ‘I don’t want to upset my parents.’

  I was about to suggest marriage when I was twenty-one, but Myrel chipped in. ‘He was right,’ she said. ‘You are a coward. Oh, Roy, how damnably right he was! Why is Basil always right? He believes in nothing, cares about nothing …’

  ‘I still love you,’ I said.

  She wasn’t having it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You never loved me. I always doubted it. The first bit of trouble and you bale out.’ She began to walk rapidly across the hall to the front door. ‘Goodbye, Roy.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to somewhere in England,’ she said tersely. ‘If he’ll have me back I’ll never do it again. If not – if not I shall pray very hard and then kill myself.’

  There was no part for me in this neurosis and I said, ‘Don’t let me stop you.’ She left at once. ‘Close it,’ I said as she closed the door, for I never believed she would.

  Two days later Myrel was dead. I heard later about what happened. She went to somewhere in England, but Basil, the officer and gentleman (when it suited him), could not forgive her one adultery. Myrel wept and pleaded, but the scene eventually embarrassed him: other officers were nearby; a barracks is a different place from a flat, and he could not forgive her for becoming emotional inside it. Myrel was found dead in an all-night train as it brought her body back to Birlchester. She had taken thirty of those sleeping tablets. The office sent a lovely wreath, to which I contributed handsomely.

  Chapter Three

  July 29th. There’s a man from Scotland Yard there now. He’s been at Almond Vale since Wednesday morning apparently, but the dear old Gazette didn’t notice. Olwen’s picture is in the London dailies today; but precious little else; my moment in the world is still my own secret. There’s a photograph of the Yard man in the Gazette: he’s a big, fat slob, scowling all over his face. The usual suet-pudding belly these men have, the inevitable bowler hat and belted raincoat: he looks like a plumber: a very good plumber, but nevertheless a plumber. However, let me not underestimate him: he solved the quarry murder last year. The Middleshire Police can’t be up to scratch if they’ve dragged in Whitehall. I bet this Inspector Maddocks has had a rocket from the Chief Constable for calling a Yard man in, and he’ll be scratching his head in a few days when the information he has peters out or proves to be false. This Superintendent MacIndoe sat by the Chief Constable of Middleshire at the inquest, where a coroner decided that Olwen had been murdered. It gave me a frightened moment to read the words in print, but the moment passed.

  I had a busy day today. I didn’t see Brenda last night because I developed a sudden utter tiredness. Delayed exhaustion, I suppose. I telephoned her, saying that unexpected business had to be attended to, and fixed a date for tomorrow afternoon. She was disappointed about the postponement of our game of tennis, but obviously delighted at the idea of an afternoon with me. After the match tomorrow – we’re both in a sort of tournament – she’s agreed to come for a ride in the car and have a drink outside the club. ‘I love riding in cars,’ she said. ‘I’m too lazy to ride a horse.’ I think she mentioned that for its snobbery effect. I don’t see why sitting on a horse should prove tiring to anyone but the horse; heaven knows, Brenda’s backside appears comfortable enough to withstand the jog of a camel.

  I slept like a log in the night, for which sleep I was grateful today. On Friday of each week I have to report to Head Office in town, and it is then I must see Bushell. I was just afraid he might have had something to say about Olwen’s telephone call on Tuesday morning, even though the call was made to a ‘Mr Harrison’. If she had given her address and asked for the traveller I would have needed to account for myself. It was a great relief when Bushell said nothing; just made the usual remarks and jokes and let me depart.

  In my relief I decided to deal with the one other thing which Superintendent MacIndoe will try to find out. I drove my sports car into a dealer’s and part-exchanged it for a saloon. The saloon was second-hand and actually I lost on the deal – I could see the chap grinning all over his face at making fifty quid out of another ‘mug’. But the point is this: the dealer does not know I’m a traveller. It is just possible that Olwen’s friends, although they didn’t see my car, know that it was a red sports and that the man who drove it is a representative.

  Last night I sat down and, after writing, spent the balance of the evening reading because I was so tired. Read the most frightfully amusing book. It was all about a man rather like myself. Women ran after him like wasps after jam. He treated them like dirt, being completely callous and indifferent; if they pleaded very hard he would perhaps condescend to live with them for a while; but only on his terms, which were very odd terms indeed. He does the wicked uncle on a girl of breeding, gives her a child and then leaves her. At the end he reappears, insults her parents, and says in effect, ‘Are you coming? I’ll give you five minutes to pack.’ He makes it quite clear that he has no intention of marrying her and has no use for babies. The girl drops everything – the baby into the laps of her parents! – and rushes madly off with him. It ended there and did not become tedious by describing the girl crawling back to her parents, as she eventually would have done. In reality one is unfortunately a little more trapped than that. The State takes a wearisome and romantic view about babies. So do Commanding Officers. But the story was very reminiscent of Evelyn and myself.

  One thing certainly leads to another. Extraordinary, when one thinks about it, the way it does. If I hadn’t sneezed in Cairo I would not have married Evelyn, met Bushell or encountered Olwen. Olwen can blame some tins of paint for her death, I wrote. Well, she can also blame a Dutch South-African girl named Bertha. I was enjoying the last of several evenings of a leave in Bertha’s flat. I was neither the first nor the last to live with Bertha. She had come up to Cairo from Johannesburg, like many others, to acquire polish and poise and to enjoy herself. But the truth was, the girl was not very bright in the head. She was lumpy; voluptuous at the time, like a furtive drawing by Degas, but likely to put on weight and thus reveal her stupidity later. I wonder what the fool’s doing now? Surrounded by the kids of some Afrikaner farmer, I expect. Good luck to him! He’ll need it!

  Anyway, the point was that Bertha’s flat included a bath. Although I was an officer, a bath was a luxury out there. Shortly before I left Bertha I used the bath, and being refreshed, made love to her afterwards. As a result I was sneezing long before I reached my aerodrome, and after breakfast I felt bad enough to see the Medical Officer.

  My crew were killed that day. The sneezes saved my life. I was lying in the station hospital talking to a nurse when some Wellington bombers took off. The nurse and I were fooling about when the fourth kite came roaring towards the hospital (a typical wartime layout!). Its engines were making a laboured, rasping, unhealthy racket. There came a few startled cries from other wards; the nurse’s eyes went wider and wider open; the kite skimmed over the hospital, and then there was a great slam of noise. Silence for a few seconds, in which the nurse (like Olwen) said, ‘Oh, my God, I beseech You –’ and then the well-known, almightier woof as the petrol blew up. The nurse, making a strange, screaming noise, was galvanized abruptly into action, and I was left alone in the small ward with the obscure certainty that it was my crew who had perished. Laughter swelled in my throat; I wanted to roar with it – the joke being that I had avoided death – and I could scarcely keep a straight face when the Adjutant, pale and trembling, and pitifully polite, although he loathed me, c
ame in to confirm my guess.

  I wrote beautiful letters (another of my talents!) to the parents and widows, and packed small parcels to be sent to England. In the navigator locker was a gold wristwatch. I was damnably in debt – women like Bertha light their fires with pound notes, I think – and felt I should have the watch. If I could flog it I should be in the clear. The boys would understand, and if they didn’t, weren’t alive to argue about it. Not many days later my Commanding Officer said, ‘I’m posting you to England. It seems there’s a battle going on over Germany – I don’t know what the hell they think we are doing – and they want bomber pilots.’ It was a terrific relief. I didn’t need to flog the watch now. In fact, I could run up a few more debts before I departed (I believe I used ‘Harrison’ then); for no one’s going to pursue halfway round the world for a few quid. Then I found someone had posted the parcels, so I kept the watch as a souvenir of those days. It’s still absolutely reliable.

  Back in England, I found that there really was a battle going on over Germany. It was far, far worse than the solitary, isolated sort of raids we’d been making over the Mediterranean. Pilots were getting killed by the hundred. It was painfully obvious that I should be killed, too, but I wasn’t scared. It was good to be back in England, to see girls by the thousand: painted legs, scarves over their heads and a knowing exhaustion under their eyes. I would have died for them willingly if I hadn’t been sent on this Kiel suicide.

  It was for this purpose that I was posted to the aerodrome at Little Over. This was in Lincolnshire, in the flat, wet, foggy bomber country, over which one could see Lincoln Cathedral and the Boston Stump on an immensely distant horizon. There were W.A.A.F.s doing the ground-to-air control, cool and poised officers, efficient as though they’d been in the war for years – they were running it, and I was the stranger, the amateur. A few were sweet, but the majority thought it fine to have casualties; you just couldn’t be killed quickly enough for them; in this crack squadron their vicarious courage was supreme. I didn’t admire their attitude, but I did the usual murderous night operations willingly and efficiently. Over Germany, despite flying in new four-engine jobs at a great altitude, the air would be dotted with bullets; fighters even laid corridors of flares; the searchlights probed the sky in hundreds; the whole night sky for hundreds of miles was like an artificial, illuminated, glaring day. It shook me, I can tell you, after the desert, but I would have continued with it if it hadn’t been for the Kiel business.

  Eighteen kites flew on that raid in broad daylight over ten-tenths defended territory to lay mines – they have to be laid while flying very slowly just above the water. This heroic and futile gesture was made to contain two battleships in Kiel while an important convoy came down from Murmansk. In short, we were expendable. Of the eighteen kites I saw five shot down in the sea and two blow up as flak hit their mines. Another five didn’t come back, so that only six out of eighteen returned; and in those six were a number of wounded and dead. I didn’t like being expendable. This was late enough in the war for the Navy and Fleet Air Arm to look after themselves. I suddenly saw the whole war for what it was. To hell with it, I decided. Patriotism is more than enough. On the way back I had a brainwave. If I crashed on landing, it would add to the impression of glory and sacrifice. It would also offer me an excuse to commence symptoms which would get me out of the suicide of Bomber Command.

  My engineer had been killed, so when I spluttered my two port engines, the rest of the crew presumed we’d been hit in them and stood by to bale out. But I struggled back to base, and as we approached it, said my stuff with brave calm to the poised, efficient, unknowing W.A.A.F.s. They allowed me a run-way to myself. I overshot it deliberately and piled up in a wood beyond. It was a bad, frightening moment, although there was little petrol left to start a serious fire. While my crew were rescuing each other heroically, I kicked a few more lumps out of the fuselage and smashed the instrument boards. We were, in any case, embedded in this wood, and the aircraft would clearly have to be broken up piece by piece to be extricated.

  Everybody was very pleased with me and I understood I was to have a gong (or medal). I shared a room with a flight-lieutenant and for the next few days I did some muttering. I’d ‘wake up’ waving my arms and shouting. When the other officer became anxious and sympathetic, I asked him not to mention my ‘turns’ to anyone, and explained that I’d had them in the Middle East. But naturally he wouldn’t allow a good type such as myself to carry on in a distraught condition and kill myself and a crew. A few days later I found the Medical Officer sitting by me at lunch, apparently by accident. I spilled a glass of water for his benefit, but evaded his inquiries about operational flying and my health. Eventually I allowed him to talk me into an examination, and at the examination, under protest, I admitted the ‘nightmares’, ‘tiredness’, forgetfulness about details and so on. After about an hour I let him talk me into being transferred, following a long leave, to flying training.

  I was transferred to a flying training school not a hundred miles from home. I never volunteered for operations again. The whole ‘crack’ squadron carried on without me, killing its numbers two or three times over. My second crew went on with another pilot and engineer, lasted nearly a year, and then were killed. I never rose higher than flying officer during the remainder of the war; somebody must have smelt a rat, for I never heard any more about the medal. At the training school I was very conscientious: very few of my pupils killed themselves: they all went on eagerly to other commands so that the Germans could do it. I spent my days stooging quietly round in Tiger Moths and Harvards; wandering round the nearby village; or visiting the two pubs and a rather genteel café which were among the few buildings in the village. The local beer and cider were very good; there was a town about seven miles away; my leaves were frequent; the girls proved amiable; oh, I soon learned that the non-operational side of war can be very attractive …

  It was here that I met Bushell. He was a medium-sized man, plump, getting towards middle age even in 1943; cheerful, fond of the beer, shrewd despite his blatant humour. He had been reckless once as a pre-war flying instructor at a club. Apparently, great things had been expected of him early in the war, but he’d had the sense to go into flying training. Nevertheless, it was on his conscience, and if I talked of operational flying he would squirm. Bushell, I found, liked to talk. He regarded the war as already won, and was in his shrewdness making his plans for the peace. I found that by listening to him I got on well, and when I learned what he intended I made my peace plans with him.

  One evening, sipping bitter at a village saloon bar with him, we watched the entry of a young woman who came in with two Army officers. She had a lot to say to them, and the laughter at the other end of the bar was tantalizing; I longed to join in; we tended to be quiet in its presence. ‘Who’s the bag?’ I asked.

  Bushell said, ‘She’s not for you. She’s the vicar’s daughter.’

  It seemed so unlikely that I laughed, but as the girl and the officers went out I observed that one man was a padre, and this seemed to confirm it. The young woman was dressed expensively. She was quite tall, perhaps a little too slim, but it was an attractive slimness, tense, quick and exciting. Her head was small and her face probably too long; but the face, too, with its large, sullen mouth, arrogant blue eyes and her snobbish, pointed nose, was far too much of this world to belong to the quietness of a country vicarage. That young woman did not hear a word I said to Bushell. Because Bushell was with me, I tended not to stare at her. She did not seem to notice me at all, and yet as she went out with her companions her quick glance in the direction of the flying officer in the corner of the bar made a split-second challenge of awareness. No doubt my returning stare, equally instant and as quickly removed, had the same stimulating effect. I knew that outside in the darkness her words would be to others, but her thoughts would be about me, as my thoughts within the bar concerned her. The beginnin
g of each battle is always fascinating. I knew that if I met her in the village on the next day and made an outrageously impertinent remark she would not stare through me and walk on, but would stop to talk as if we’d known each other for years. This awareness, which needs no details or names, is something all the pious textbooks and magistrates’ courts in the world cannot stop: it is beyond parental and moral control: it is something that pertains only to the young and the completely alive. The tedious and the tired and the narrow-minded do not understand it, and therefore condemn it.

  On my afternoon off later that week I borrowed a bicycle and cycled to the other side of the village. Parking the bicycle outside its porch, I walked slowly into the village church.

  It was stale inside with a sweet atmosphere of its own, and unbearably quiet. Nobody was about and I stepped on the graves of the long-dead locals, looking at the pious pictures of such deplorable, sickly taste and the equally sentimental stained-glass windows with their Technicolor glare. All that stuff means nothing to me: I belong to radar and aerodynamics and psychiatry and mathematics and contraceptives: yet it began to affect me as the avoidance of some superstitious act will trouble the supposedly non-superstitious: and I longed to light a cigarette. The dates on the stone – 1647, 1731, 1849, 1890, 1913 – began to annoy me. The dead were dead – they had been the same as myself once and had no right to stare in accusation. It was as if they questioned my intentions regarding the girl when I had not decided the intentions myself. The silence was absolute, spatial and therefore unfamiliar. We are not used to silence and we do not belong to it. Noise is carried by air, and this planet of ours is unique in possessing air. We were not meant for silence: we are animals who talk and make music: the fact that spoken words are the only expression and communication of the humans in this world seems to me another proof that there can be nothing beyond it. I was awed by that silence because it belonged to the dead wastes of the universe, and any man who can stare into the night and not be a little afraid is made of suet. But after an hour I was not awed; I was weary. I was about to move off and cycle into the town, to pick up something real and human and fleshy and noisy, when a priest entered the church. He was about the right age to be the girl’s father: once again my stratagem had succeeded.