by JH Fletcher
He turned and walked back along the street, head down as though studying the footsteps that he had left five minutes before in the brown dust. No longer aware of the village, its inhabitants or even of himself, he walked in a vacuum of his own non-feeling until he heard the sound of someone calling his name, and looked up with the startled astonishment of a man woken suddenly from sleep.
2
Helena had been in the room, sitting in the dark to save the fragment of tallow candle that was all the widow Gambetta permitted her within the rent she charged for the low-roofed attic room. A shallow window ran below the eaves and overlooked the street. Marija spent hours there before sleep, staring out at a world where for the most part nothing moved. The summer evening dissolved in a deepening purple haze until at last darkness came to hide the houses and distant hills. ‘See! It’s the sergeant from the aerodrome.’
Helena moved to stand behind Marija, staring over her shoulder at the tall figure of the airman passing along the road below them. She saw him nearly every day at the airfield, heard the now-familiar howl of engines as he roared down the field with the rest to take off into the dawn sky. She never looked up when, hours later, the planes came back, yet believed that something in the sound of the engines would have told her had he not returned. She supposed that one day it might happen. If it did, the pain that the war had already caused her would be made that much worse by the loss of a man to whom she had not spoken above a dozen times in her life, but that time was not yet. At the airfield, conscious of him passing her in his fleece-collared jacket, leather helmet and goggles dangling from his fist, she had never looked properly at him, the gap between his world and her own too great for that. Now it was different. By coming into the village he had moved from his world into hers. Watching him walking so aimlessly, she felt a pang of recognition. This man, too, was lost and alone. The gap between them had vanished or might, provided she took the steps needed to make it happen.
Still she did not move, watching with hand to lips as he passed slowly in the almost-vanished light, his steps inaudible behind the window’s smeared glass. After he was gone she felt a pang of regret that she had not gone down into the street and made the approach that instinct told her she would have to make if …
If what?
He was a foreigner. He knew nothing of her life or culture or even herself, as she knew nothing of him. He was a man with whom she could have nothing in common, a man whom she might not even like if they got to know each other better, who might prove not to like her. After that first generous impulse at the time of her arrival, he had shown no sign that he was even aware of her existence. There was something else, too: safety. Her life might be no more than a circle enclosing emptiness but at least the circle was unbroken. Go downstairs, speak to this man she did not know, make the approach that tradition said she must not make, and she, might be safe no longer. She would have given up the security of her non-life for the dangers of the unknown.
Now she told herself she was glad she had not gone down to speak to him in the midst of a village where even in the darkness unseen eyes would have seen, unseen brains judged and condemned.
How could she have contemplated such a thing? To accost a man in the street, a man who for all practical purposes was a stranger, would have been the action of a harlot: she, who had never been with a man, who knew little of such things, who even now did not wish to know but who wanted, so fervently, an escape from loneliness, from a life without meaning or apparent destination.
Too late, now.
Safety, and emptiness.
Marija looked up at her from her place beside the window.
‘He’s coming back.’
Helena flew to the window. She looked down at the slowly pacing figure and was at once moving, without conscious decision or even awareness. The wooden treads of the staircase clattered as she ran down them. She threw open the door that led to the street and stood in the warm darkness, her feet in the dust that still retained something of the day’s heat. In a mingling of disbelief and terror she asked herself what she was doing, knowing it was too late for such a question, that by coming out in this way she had entrusted herself to a stream that from this point would carry her to a destination that she could neither see nor imagine. Too late to stand there and not speak; too late to avoid the eyes that even now would be marking her. Having yielded to the impulse, having taken this first step that even she found incredible, how could she avoid the extra step that was the only reason for her being here at all?
‘Sergeant Fisher …’
A moment of horror as she thought how he might ignore her, continue unspeaking on his pensive and solitary way. Then the rhythm of his stride faltered and she knew that, if only in that, all was well.
She saw him smile.
‘How ya goin’?’ he said.
3
Knowing the lonely terrors of a hundred flights, the giving and observing of death, the savage echo of the voice that he heard before sleep and when he woke, that left him not even for a moment — next time perhaps next time — knowing that things could not go on as they were, that there had to come a time when …
The voice from nowhere, piercing the shell of obsession: ‘Sergeant Fisher …’
He looked up, once again aware of a world that until that instant he had forgotten, recognition returning with the rush of the warm night air, the scent of dust and summer and harvest, and saw the woman smiling tentatively at him in the shadowed street, saw her arms wrapped protectively about her body even as she spoke, and thought What? and Who? before he realised that he knew her. ‘How ya goin’?’
Thinking nothing of it but pleased to see her in the same way that a lonely man might bend to pat the head of a friendly dog.
‘Live here, do you?’
She nodded, still smiling, still nervous.
‘Yes.’
‘Handy, I suppose.’
Smiling cheerfully at her, willing to be friendly but already filled with the lost feeling of not knowing what to say to this woman whom he barely knew, who had sprung from nowhere, who seemed to expect something of him.
‘Ten-minute walk to aerodrome, yes?’
He realised that she, who he remembered as having no English, was now speaking English to him. A sort of English. It was a safe subject, a chink in the wall of awkwardness and incomprehension that separated them. ‘You’ve been learning English?’
‘Giovanni teach me. Little only.’
Her smile formed a protective barrier against him and the world; she, too, did not know what to do with the situation that she had created.
‘Sounds pretty good to me. Better than my Italian, that’s for sure.’
His lips were stiff with smiling. He felt as well as saw her smiling back at him. He thought there might be more to his feeling than just his awareness of her smile yet was uncertain what it could be.
‘Well …’
Wanting to escape from this sense of something he did not understand.
‘I’ll see you, then.’
‘Goodbye.’
For an instant longer they stood smiling at each other, then she turned and vanished through the doorway of the house outside which they were standing, he staring after her for a few seconds before turning to look up and down the empty street.
He headed back to the airfield, following the dusty road without thought, yet knowing that, inexplicably, something in his life had changed.
4
When she saw him next morning, she with bucket and broom in her hands, he heading with the other aircrew towards the planes that stood waiting outside, she did not speak, nor did he acknowledge her, yet she sensed that each was aware of the other as never before. That night, watching through the window at Marija’s side, she waited without admitting to herself what she was doing, but he did not come.
He did not come for three days. She had given him up when …
‘Hullo …’
Standing as before in the deserted yet o
bservant street, feeling the weight of the eyes and gossip that she knew would now follow her for however long she remained here, and not caring. She laughed without knowing why and did not care about that, either.
This time he had not seemed abstracted, nor did he stare at her as he had before, with the startled expression of an awakened sleeper. Now he looked her in the face, first grinning, then laughing back at her so that she thought he had come here to look for her. Again she greeted him.
‘Hullo …’
As though it were the most important word in the world.
He raised a questioning eyebrow.
‘You walkin’?’ She did not understand and stood frowning while he repeated the words more slowly and carefully.
‘Are. You. Walking?’
Her face lit up and she nodded.
5
He had thought she would join him in a stroll down the street between the rows of houses. Instead she turned, vanishing once again through the doorway behind her with all the grace and speed of a startled bird. He thought he must have misunderstood her or that she, perhaps, had misunderstood him. He did not move but stood, perplexed but still waiting, until in what seemed no more than an eye blink she was back with the child’s hand clasped firmly in her own.
Of course. She cannot walk down the street alone with a man, after dark, in full view of all the village.
And thought what a fool he had been not to understand that at once. For that reason he did not take her hand as might have been his earlier intention but walked, slowly and decorously, leaving plenty of space so that the child could walk between them. Like the married couple they were not and had no intention of becoming, they strolled in silence through the darkness, Ted thinking how this moment of peaceful sharing towards which he had been moving since their meeting three days before had somehow assuaged the fear that had been his constant companion.
6
Helena was not thinking at all but had abandoned herself to the stream that once again she sensed flowing ahead of her towards a future still indiscernible yet seemingly less empty than it had been before.
They reached the end of the village street. They stood and watched the lanterns shining in the darkness as the farmers brought the harvest home. One of them passed as they stood with the child between them. From his perch on the piled sheaves the man looked at them no more than did the horse that with bowed neck and harness bright with brass drew the creaking wagon homewards, yet Helena knew he had seen everything there was to see of all three of them, observing them down to the shoes on their feet and the feelings that she did not yet understand but that she could sense forming an aura about them in the warm and cicada-singing night.
Unspeaking, they watched as the wagon passed them, swaying steadily into the darkness.
‘We’d better get back.’
She was conscious of Ted looking down at her as he spoke, mouthing the words slowly and carefully so that she understood the sense if not the individual words. She would have preferred to stay out longer or even go with him into the fields now shrouded by night, but she nodded, knowing he was right.
Again they neither spoke nor touched as they made their way back along the street. Only at the last, glancing up at him in the instant before turning with the child to enter the dark and silent house, she said: ‘You will come again?’
‘Tomorrow.’
7
God willing. The qualification was automatic, like the crossing of fingers to ward off disaster. But he no longer believed in that disaster. Helena had brought an easing not only to loneliness but fear itself. Ted could not imagine why. The Italian girl was a pleasant companion, someone whose presence provided a distraction from the iron realities of war, but no more than that. Yet the fact remained that in her company, for the first time in so long, he was no longer obsessed with the prospect of approaching death.
It was ironical, therefore, that the next day they were attacked by Albatroses that ambushed them out of cloud, coming in a screaming dive upon them before they even knew they were there. There was a rattle of machine gun fire that blew holes in the wings and sides of the fuselage, yet miraculously missed them both. Ted swung the machine gun on its mounting, trying with deliberate fury to blast their attackers out of the sky.
Not now, of all times. Not now. Thinking, What the hell, before the frenzy of the firefight, the aircraft looping and chasing each other about the sky, drove away all thought.
Again the Sopwiths saved them, again the Germans fled, again they returned safely to the airfield. Or almost.
As they landed, the wheel strut that must have been partially severed by a random bullet, the damn strut painted with the boastful emblems of their victories, collapsed. The failure threw the plane violently to one side. It sagged, swerving, to tip forward on its nose with a crash and crunch of rending wood and metal, followed by a silence more threatening than all the uproar that had preceded it.
CHAPTER SIX
1
The plane’s crash earned Ted a crack on the nose. He staggered out, blood everywhere. Helena came running with everyone else. Now she stood just outside the building, alarm turning to relieved laughter.
Ted wiped away blood, cursing, and turned to see her laughing, hand over her mouth.
‘What’s so bloody funny?’
She was sober at once, although her eyes still sparkled. ‘I am sorry.’
And she did a runner, while he watched her go. His nose was sore; by rights he should have been as mad as a cut snake but was not. He felt his heart twist and instead of renewed anger he laughed, too, as far as his swollen and still-bleeding nose would let him.
Later, after everything had been sorted out, he went looking for her, found her working in the deserted and tobacco-smelling room with its half-dozen sagging easy chairs where the aircrews waited between missions. He smiled while she regarded him cautiously. He said: ‘I have four days’ leave.’
It was not clear whether she understood.
‘Leave?’
‘Holiday. While they repair the plane.’
Cheerful and relaxed once more, she laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Your nose …’
Right.
‘I know a bloke who’s got a cabin in the mountains. Got a car, too. And some petrol. Said I could borrow it, if I liked. Be good to get up there for a few days.’
‘The mountains? But that is where the fighting is.’
‘Not those mountains. Further over. Dolomites, I think he called them.’
‘That will be nice for you.’
‘Yairs. I wondered …’ And he hesitated, feeling her eyes watching him. ‘Thought I’d maybe go tomorrow. Sunday. Sunday’s your day off, isn’t it? I wondered if you’d like to come? Just for the day. I’ll bring you back in the evening. Could be fun. Be good for the kid, too. Give her the chance to run about a bit.’
As though the child’s welfare were his sole concern. Her dark eyes watched him with the speculative intensity of one who did not understand or — his thoughts racing, trying to keep up with his changing impressions — who perhaps understood very well but had not decided what she was going to do about it. ‘I must go on with my work.’
And she turned away as though to put distance between herself and what he was saying to her.
‘Leave it. Dammit, I said leave it.’
So that once again she stood motionless, clutching the wooden handle of the broom and staring at him with the same concentration as before.
‘I’m going to have a cup of coffee. Would you like some?’ he said.
‘The tenente may not like that.’
Using the Italian word, presumably because she did not know the English one.
‘The tenente can take a jump.’
He went into the kitchenette that adjoined the room and made the coffee and brought it back, all the time wondering what he was getting into here, unsure whether he really wanted it or was just being crazy.
‘Here.’
Still she stood uncerta
inly, not sure what to do with the broom. He took it from her and propped it in a corner.
‘Sit.’
She did, very cautiously, parking her bum on the edge of the easy chair as though it might bite her.
He grinned at her, feeling a fool. Now he’d got her here he didn’t know what to do with her. He began to talk about anything or nothing, the spikey words tangling his lips awkwardly, not caring whether she understood him or not.
‘Back home I used to live in the Centre. There’s space. Very dry. That’s it, really: very dry and a helluva lot of it. No mountains, nothing like that. A few blackfellas wandering about, a few graziers. Otherwise nothing. Good place, though. Bloke can breathe there.’
Thinking he was making it sound not like a good place at all but dreadful. Not that he cared. He knew what he meant and felt, what the country back home meant to him. She was watching him with the same speculative concentration as before, the mug of coffee forgotten on the scarred table in front of her. As far as his words went he knew they could not possibly mean anything to her, yet was convinced that she understood the sense of what he was saying.
Now it was her turn to struggle for words.
‘When you go home …’
‘After the war?’
‘Will you go back to that dry place?’
He had never thought about it, had until that moment taken it for granted that his life would continue exactly as it had before. Now, listening to her question, he knew it would not. Too much had changed. He could not hope to go back when the man who returned would be so different from the one who had gone away.