IMMOBILIZATION OF VEHICLES IN THE EVENT OF INVASION. Every owner of a motor vehicle should be ready in the event of an invasion to immobilize his car the moment the order is given. Owners of petrol vehicles should remove distributor head and leads, and empty the tank or remove the carburettor. HIDE THE PARTS REMOVED WELL AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE.
The words seem to take on a personal meaning. Am I the invader here? Will Maggie be immobilizing her vehicle? He scratches his head as if to clear it, checks his watch and wishes he hadn’t agreed to this strange double date.
‘Charles!’
He looks up to see Maggie stepping off the back of a still-moving bus. She is wearing her ATS uniform and it becomes her. She is followed by a voluptuous young woman whose breasts bounce against her cotton frock as she jumps down. Even with the white wimple she is wearing over her bunched-up auburn hair, she cannot be mistaken for a nun. The nurse’s cape covering her shoulders confirms her true vocation.
Maggie gives a little wave as she gets closer and then, to his surprise, she kisses him on the cheek. She smells of strawberries and sunshine.
‘This is my friend Gloria,’ she says. ‘Gloria, this is Charles, our latest recruit to the WAAC.’
‘Charmed,’ Gloria says with a West Country lilt, holding out her hand.
‘Thank you for coming all the way out here,’ Charles says. ‘Hardy should be here soon.’
‘Is he really a Spitfire pilot?’ Gloria asks, her eyes widening.
‘Really.’
Maggie brushes dust off Charles’s jacket with flicks of her hand, a motherly gesture. ‘Do you live around here?’ she asks.
‘No, but Biggin Hill isn’t far away. That’s where I was working today. Where Hardy is based.’
‘Did you tell him I was your girl?’ Maggie says with a playful punch.
Charles can feel the colour rising in his cheeks.
She laughs. ‘I’m just teasing. You look very dashing in your new uniform, by the way, Captain.’
‘Thank you. So do you. Pretty, I mean.’ His smile dims momentarily.
Hardy announces his arrival with a honk of his car horn. He is driving a small, red two-seater Alvis. ‘I borrowed it!’ he shouts over the noise of the engine. He parks to the side of the cinema and vaults out of the seat as if dismounting from his plane. Charles looks at Gloria. Her mouth has gone slack. She swallows audibly.
When the film starts and Maggie’s hand feels for his, Charles imagines for a moment that it is Anselm’s hand. But the illusion does not last because this hand feels softer and smaller. His thoughts now on Anselm, he suddenly remembers why they had gone to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that day in the spring of ’39. They had heard about Gone with the Wind and wanted to see it, without realizing it hadn’t been released. Snow White had been considered an ironic compromise. Each had dared the other to go in.
Maggie gives his hand a squeeze. As he realizes he has never held a woman’s hand before, apart from his mother’s, he also realizes how much he has been missing physical contact. He likes Maggie, she has a certain warmth and a sense of fun. But what he likes most about her is how she makes him feel. Wanted.
It strikes him now that in the two years since he last saw Anselm, he has not thought of another. He has been thinking of himself as ‘the man who waits’. But what if his friend isn’t coming back? What if he is dead? They will meet at the Student Union bar on Good Friday, he said. How naïve and empty that promise seems now.
Forty minutes into the film, the screen goes blank and a notice appears announcing that an air raid is in progress. The audience boos. Some get up to leave but others wait to see if the projectionist will put the film back on. When the lights come on instead, there are more boos, less emphatic this time, and patrons start making their way to the exit.
Outside, the four of them can hear the distant sound of air-raid sirens, fire engine bells and ack-ack guns pounding the night sky. Maggie makes Charles laugh with her imitation of Scarlett O’Hara: ‘Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war; this war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring.’
Instead of making their way to the shelters, they enter a pub which has sawdust on the floor and woodworm in its low beams. When Hardy goes to the bar, a man in a patched and rumpled suit registers his uniform and, drunkenly slapping him on the back, offers to buy him a drink. Charles looks around: there are a few other servicemen in, but mostly the regulars are civilians who look tired and lean, their teeth gappy and crooked, their hair greasy. The women are wearing boxy dresses and laddered stockings. One, with horn-rimmed spectacles, is wearing a scarf. Rubbing hair with dry towels has become a substitute for shampoo, he has heard, just as sponging with lukewarm water in the sink has replaced regular baths. Certainly the close, smoke-filled fug of the pub seems to bear this out. Hardy returns with a tray bearing two halves of foaming bitter and two sherries. ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Who wants to hear my story about being rescued by a fisherman from Weymouth who thought I was a Jerry?’
As Charles listens to Hardy entertain his small audience, he takes out his pad and begins sketching the scene. He wonders if it might be possible to have an ordinary relationship with Hardy. A proper friendship with a man. Would that wash away the taint of Anselm, of his court martial? Instead of stealing a plane, he could begin a new, manly life of drinking and gambling and football and chasing girls and telling stories. A life free from rumour, innuendo and blackmail. Free from dirty words shouted by strangers, from conversations that stop when he enters a room.
Even as he is thinking these things he finds himself investing Hardy with Anselm’s beauty. Projecting Anselm’s face and voice on to him. Trying to feel for him what he felt for Anselm. The beast that Anselm has awoken in him, it seems, will never go to sleep again.
No, he tells himself with a nod of determination. He must find his friend. There can be no substitutes.
At 10.20pm, when the barman rings a bell, Charles realizes two things: first, that he has been having so much fun listening to Hardy’s stories he has lost track of time; second, that he is drunk.
Ten minutes later they hear a bicycle bell being rung outside. A policeman wearing a cloak attached around the neck by a chain appears in the doorway and, catching the barman’s eye, taps his watch. The barman gives a thumbs-up signal. Charles finishes his bitter and thumps it down as a signal for the others to do the same. Policemen make him nervous.
As they stumble out past the sandbags into the night air, they gasp with laughter and hold on to each other for support. Hardy has his arm around Gloria’s waist and only when he reaches his borrowed sports car does he recall it is a two-seater.
‘Don’t worry,’ Charles says, ‘we’ll walk.’ When he sees Hardy getting into the passenger seat by mistake, he adds with an indulgent laugh: ‘Might be safer anyway!’
Because of the blackout, the headlights have been all but covered, leaving only two slits of light showing. Hardy revs loudly for a few seconds before putting the car in gear and dropping the clutch. ‘Good to meet you, Maggie!’ he shouts over the noise of the engine. ‘See you tomorrow, Charles!’ The car swerves to avoid a litter bin. Gloria waves goodbye. They disappear into the night.
With Hardy gone, Charles suddenly feels self-conscious. Left alone with Maggie he wonders again why he is here, why he has agreed to this double date. Was he trying to impress Hardy? Was he using Maggie to get closer to him? To befriend him? He tries to put these thoughts from his head as they walk arm in arm, following a kerbstone that has been painted black and white to help pedestrians navigate the darkness.
In the distance, over the London docks, they can make out the shapes of barrage balloons silhouetted against the glow of burning buildings. ‘Looks like the East End caught it again,’ Charles says. ‘Poor devils.’
Maggie tilts her head so that it is resting on his shoulder. ‘Carpe diem, Captain,’ she says. ‘Carpe diem.’
In the absence of street lighting, other pedestrians are reduced to dar
k shapes. They listen to footsteps recede. The moon emerges from behind clouds to reflect on the canal. There is a small iron bridge across it and, leading down, stone steps. Maggie goes first and then, when they are under the bridge, she turns. She is breathing rapidly. As their fingertips touch, she tilts back her head. When he withdraws his lips from hers, he sees her eyes are closed.
Without releasing her hold of him, Maggie takes a couple of steps backwards so that her shoulders are against the wall of the bridge. She unbuttons her coat, hitches up her skirt and wriggles her hips as she tugs down her camiknickers and steps out of them one leg at a time before stuffing them in her pocket.
When she starts to unbutton the flies on his trousers and reaches her hand inside, he stops her. ‘Not here,’ he whispers. ‘How far is your place?’
‘A taxi ride.’
IV
OPENING HIS EYES WITH A SUCCESSION OF BLINKS, CHARLES TRIES to work out through the blurred morning light where he is. There is a smell of cigarette ash and damp carpet. The blackout curtains haven’t been closed properly and are framing a shaft of sunlight. On the floor is a trail of clothes, their shapes and texture unfamiliar to him because of their femininity: a bra, a satin camisole, a khaki shirt with buttons on the wrong side.
With hungover eyes, he follows them backwards to an old and opened Advent calendar and a drawing pad propped against a chair. On the pad there is a female nude with crescent breasts, one slightly bigger than the other, standing with one hand on her hip in a coquettish pose. She is wearing an officer’s cap and her hair is loose underneath it. She is blowing a kiss. She looks like one of the pinups he recalls from his RAF days.
He remembers drawing it now and, without turning round, feels under the sheets with the back of his hand. The shin he encounters is hairless. Half roused from sleep by his touch, Maggie rolls over, taking the sheets with her. They are in two single beds that have been pushed together and, as this movement disturbs the air, Charles smells her flowery scent and is reminded of the night before. His first time with a woman.
True, he had seen them naked in life classes before, and had appreciated their form, their curving lines, their aesthetic qualities, but back then he had thought there was something a little off-putting about the join of their legs, as if they were incomplete down there, deformed. He doesn’t any more.
But when he tries to recall what the act itself felt like, he struggles. He thinks it probably felt … different. He had felt tenderness towards her, but her softness, the pliancy of her flesh, had seemed wrong. It was something to do with the lack of muscle fibre, with her being more yielding.
The memory of their lovemaking induces a stab of guilt. Yet it wasn’t betrayal. Not really. In the darkness, as she lay on her front, he had imagined she was Anselm. He remembers this now. He hadn’t felt guilty during the sweaty abandon of coitus, only afterwards.
Maggie yawns and gathers the sheet around her as she sits up in bed. ‘Morning, handsome,’ she says sleepily. ‘What time is it?’
Charles checks his watch. ‘Almost seven.’
She swings her legs out of the bed, reaches for a dressing gown and, as she walks to the bathroom, reveals the seam of her drawn-on stocking. It has smudged.
When Maggie emerges from the bathroom she is brushing her hair. ‘I had a jolly time last night,’ she says, crawling on to the bed and nibbling his ear. ‘I’d never tried that position before. Where did you learn to do it that way?’
Charles does not answer. Smiles. Again he’s thinking how much easier things would be if he could find it in his heart to fall in love with this woman. He tries to imagine his life with her. A pipe and a newspaper. Sunday roast. Perhaps even children. Would that be so bad?
‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’
Charles remains silent. Closes his eyes. He feels the warmth of her honeyed breath on his face a fraction before the gentle brush of her lips against his closed eyelids.
‘Do you love her?’
He thinks about this for a moment before he finds himself nodding.
‘Then what are you doing here with me? Captain? Mm?’
He opens his eyes, strokes her hair and says: ‘Carpe-ing the diem.’
Maggie laughs and, adopting her southern belle accent, says: ‘Well, fiddle-dee-dee!’
By the time Charles arrives at Biggin Hill and sets up, Hardy has already been up for a sortie over Dover. When the young pilot sees him he ambles over, pulls a silver hip flask from his flying jacket, takes a swig and offers it. ‘Hair of the dog,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’ Charles takes a sip. Wipes his mouth. Brandy.
‘How’s Maggie?’
‘Fine. Gloria?’
‘More than fine. She’s the cat’s meow. Where did you find her?’
‘I didn’t. Maggie did.’
‘Well thank you. I tell you, Charlie, it’s love. Chocks away!’
Charles feels a sudden urge to share his news with Hardy: he is like him now. He too knows the feel of a woman’s belly and hips, the soft wetness of her mouth, the heft of her buttocks. He imagines himself stroking Hardy’s hair as he explains to him that his conduct is no longer unbecoming a gentleman, an RAF officer …
A siren sounds and the airfield becomes alive with mechanics in pale blue overalls – sceneshifters running to remove the camouflage netting from the planes. Hardy grabs his parachute off the tail and shouts: ‘We’ll have to finish this conversation later. I wouldn’t stand too close if I were you.’
Charles fights down an adrenaline-wrought urge to join in. Instead, with a flush of disappointment, he gathers his easel, runs back to a safe distance and turns to watch Hardy, now in his cockpit and wearing his leather helmet, giving a thumbs-up signal to an engineer. Small flames shoot from the engine as it starts and the still afternoon air reverberates with the sound of harnessed energy. The grass behind the aircraft dances in the slipstream. The engineer pulls the chocks clear and the Spitfire quivers for a moment before its plump tyres prowl forward.
Then Charles hears a noise like hailstones on a tin roof and, as he looks up, sees a blue-bellied Junkers 88 dive-bomber, its twin engines bulking enormously, barely a few thousand feet above the hangar, gliding like a giant bat. It seems suspended in space and, for a surreal moment, benign. Then its bomb doors open and half a dozen small dark tubes tumble out, a point at one end, a fin at the other. He watches transfixed as gravity tugs their noses down first. They don’t fall vertically, but on a trajectory, towards him.
Abruptly it feels personal. These small dark objects are filled not with curiosity but with death and hate.
He dives headlong towards some sandbags as the bombs explode behind him, sucking up the air and lifting him from the ground. Time seems to slow down, allowing his brain to shift gears for a few postponed seconds and perceive the world at half speed. Then, realizing his face is pressed against broken glass, he looks up to see the Junkers curving steeply away. A moment later he is shrouded in white dust.
He is on his knees now and, looking up again, sees another Junkers on a course towards the airfield, its bomb doors open. As the black objects tumble from it his eyes dilate and he dives for cover again. There is a screech of tearing metal then smoke plumes from the gutted hangars to his right. The entrance, a spawning cloud of rubble, is more like an abattoir – a foot blown off an airman, an arm torn from a shoulder. Three men lie dead, their torsos a tangle of white tripe rapidly turning red.
Coughing and retching through a fine rain of chalk dust, Charles runs for cover again, this time to a slit trench, but another explosion knocks him off balance before he can reach it. He staggers to his feet, one hand clapped to his head, and gropes his way through the writhing smoke. Once he is clear of it, he sees a Dornier that is trailing a thin ribbon of black from its cowling. For a moment it hangs like a torch in the air before tearing into a tree a few miles away.
His attention is now caught by a Spitfire taxi-ing blindly through the smoke. The cartoon of Do
c on the side reveals it is Hardy’s. His wheels are skidding and scarring the soft turf. The plane takes off briefly then cartwheels across the airfield before slewing round into a hedge. The Spitfire’s back now broken, it catches fire almost as an afterthought. Lazily. Hypnotically. As Hardy struggles to open the canopy, Charles limps over as quickly as he can to help him, levering himself up on to the wing. The flames are licking the cockpit now and, as Charles tries to break the glass with frantic blows from his elbow, he sees the skin melting off Hardy’s face. It looks like molten wax. Hardy’s mouth is open but Charles cannot hear his screams.
Hosing towards him now are heavy jets of liquid. His face feels wet and hot, as if he is being scalded, and when he looks at his hands he sees flames dancing on them. Realizing he is being doused in aviation fuel, he jumps down off the wing and staggers clear of the wreckage.
The next thing he knows he has been knocked to the ground – a rugby tackle – and a blanket is smothering him.
He doesn’t know for how long he is unconscious, perhaps only a few seconds, but when he emerges from under the rug he is on his own. Through his one good eye he sees that heat has cracked the glass of his wristwatch. The strap hangs by a charred thread. On the ground next to him is Hardy’s hip flask, now blackened with soot. All around him are grey-white mounds of chalk and concrete. In his nostrils is the pungent reek of gas and plaster dust. Shadows are gathering over the hayricks. His face is numb. The Spitfire is now a charred skeleton.
When, three weeks later, the gauze and bandages are removed from Charles’s face, he is given an intimation of the extent of his disfigurement by the reaction of the nurse. She hides her horror well, clenching her jaw as she smiles, but her eyes give her away as they widen. The coolness of the air on his skin is a relief and his first instinct is to scratch it, but the nurse gently holds down his hands.
The Road Between Us Page 13